Sleep Walk With Me - 2012 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Mike Birbiglia, Lauren Ambrose
Director:  Mike Birbiglia

Note:  Some Spoilers Ahead

Comedy used to be about exposing the foibles of the world around us, but as our culture has gotten more inwardly focused, so too has comedy.  It's not enough to just tell jokes for a living - a comedian has to have a personal narrative, he or she has to expose himself or herself to the world too.  Sleep Walk With Me is such a story - a struggling comedian deals with a flagging relationship and his sleepwalking problem.  It's an honest examination of how to not tell the truth to another human being - to instead expose it to everyone else but that person.  Such are our times, I suppose.

I wanted to give this less credit than I ultimately did - I felt it deflected the question of how success in comedy and lack of success in other parts of life may be correlated, even as the film centered around that thorny fulcrum.  The main character subsists as a result of his anxieties - it's left up to the audience to decide whether or not that's good for him.

Black Narcissus - 1947 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Deborah Kerr, Flora Robson
Director:  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Location shoots have become more and more prevalent in the film world.  While ultimately that has helped films appear more 'real', it still calls into question their versimilitude - sure, you might be in India or Brazil or wherever, or you might make your movie look like the 1860s Old West, but everyone looks like they've just showered and their teeth are remarkably clean.  Without the imperfections of the set to focus on, other imperfections come into focus.  Black Narcissus is an incredible accomplishment of set design - while purportedly set at a remote Indian mountain castle, at the end (spoiler alert) it says it was shot at a London studio. While it never doesn't feel like a film set, the directors use every trick - light, camera, sound, etc. - to make this set feel lived in.  I imagine the effect is more real than if weaker directors had found an actual mountain castle to shoot at.

I'm pretty sure Black Narcissus is faithfully adapted from a book, and as such it lacks the narrative drive of more recent fare.  It's a movie where things unfold - while the conflicts that come to the fore by the end are being built, it's a gentle building.  The film can at times feel weightless and unimportant as a result, but I don't think it's either thing.

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi - 2011 - No Rating

Subject:  Sushi chef Jiro Ono and his award-winning restaurant
Director:  David Gelb

Note:  Minor spoilers ahead

Woody Allen's characters would watch and likely love his films.  Noah Baumbach's too.  John McClane, before he was beset by German thieves holding his wife hostage, would probably have enjoyed Die Hard.  Mr. Brown's favorite film would be Reservoir Dogs.  To me, whoever interviewed chef Jiro Ono left out the most interesting question - why would he consent to having a documentary made about himself and his restaurant?  Jiro is portrayed as a tireless worker - his then 5 year old son asked his mother catching Jiro napping at home: 'why is this strange man sleeping in our house?', about which Jiro laughs now.  It's hard to imagine him sitting down to watch this film, or indeed any film.  I suppose it's the same reason why anyone would - to get your life story out there.

As a documentary, Jiro... manages to raise questions about the universal problem of work/life balance while showing a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a high-end sushi restaurant operation.  Furthermore, it asserts the importance of techne - I don't know a better English word, as the word 'craft' has been corrupted  - the idea that by doing one thing over and over again, a person can continually improve at it.  However, he or she may not be able to express this improvement through words - it just is, through feeling and muscle memory.  It's a notion that's growing dimmer and dimmer in this data-driven society.

Submarine - 2011 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige
Director:  Richard Ayoade

The memoir has become especially popular in recent years - lacking other subjects, it's pretty easy to just start talking about yourself.  I don't know if Submarine is actually a memoir, but it's written like one, so I'll treat that way.  Regardless, it's easy to see Submarine as a precious, W. Anderson-soaked look at middle-class British adolescence replete with snarky voiceover narration.  And true enough, Submarine's protagonist is somewhat Max Fischer-esque in his various pursuits and insights.  Still, trapped under the layers of irony are a pretty sweet story about an only child pursuing a girl while trying to keep his parents' marriage together.  The direction is inspired but sometimes overly showy - the film is love with cuts to the point where it becomes gimmicky.

Skyfall - 2012 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Daniel Craig, Judi Dench
Director:  Sam Mendes

James Bond has an identity problem - the world has not only has less tolerance for camp, it's broadened the definition of the word.  I don't know if I want to call old James Bond films campy, but Diamonds Are Forever features:  two female security guards named Bambi and Thumper, two seemingly homosexual assassins who work together and call each other by their last name, a woman named Plenty O'Toole, and an ersatz Howard Hughes.  It's at the very least goofy, and risible in the way that film executives and modern audiences don't go in for now.

This is the other problem with James Bond films - they are critiqued not as their own thing, but as an ongoing series.  As an action film without the Bond baggage, Skyfall succeeds tremendously.  Director Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins bring an artistic touch to a genre too often lacking in that area - it's not that action films aren't well-crafted, but they're made with what I see as the wrong craft.  There's silliness of course - the film's understanding of computer hacking portrays it almost as a divine gift - but what would James Bond be without silliness?  Daniel Craig's humorless Guy-Ritchie-tough stares can't keep the sillies out of this series, even as the film relentlessly argues that James Bond has no place in pop culture anymore.

On Why People Should Be Watching The HBO Series Treme

(Note:  very minor spoilers for The Wire)

I haven't been in the mood lately to watch movies, but I have been taking in my usual complement of television shows.  One show that I have stuck by despite being alternately frustrated and bored with is David Simon's Treme.  And it has absolutely paid off in Season 3.  I feel comfortable saying that Treme is the best show on television right now, as it has no rival in storytelling scope.  Mad Men is an outstanding show, but it only covers a limited band of disaffected NYC oh-god-poor-me-i'm-too-rich-and-successful types.  At the fringes of Mad Men are other social classes, but the show revolves, for better or worse, around Don Draper.  This past season did an excellent job of widening the scope, but still, we're following mostly ad execs.  While Mad Men functions as a series of short stories that orbit Don Draper's world, Treme functions as a full novel of epic scope.  Its characters began largely apart and have begun to intersect, and this intersection is not forced - it comes out of who we know the characters to be.  David Simon and company have built a fully functional TV city in a way that I just can't imagine another show attempting.

Now one can imagine me writing the same post about The Wire in 2005, had I been visionary enough to watch that show while it was airing.  However, The Wire had something going for it that Treme absolutely does not:  cool. The criminal characters in The Wire were decidedly cool, and the show didn't baby us by defining their slang for us.  We sat as D'Angelo Barksdale's acolytes did, learning the drug trade at his knee like his teenage workers.  Assuming 'we' are not poor blacks, this brings a voyeuristic thrill - we could never be present for these conversations and never know this world.  The Wire trusted us to learn the drug world, it thought we were cool enough to get the lingo and be in on The Game.  We learned about large police investigations from McNulty and Rawls and all the rest in the same fashion.  Season 2 brought us the dockworkers, and many viewers did not like this season.  Why?  Because it wasn't cool.  It's just about a bunch of middle-class white people who are transitioning into being poor people.  Who wants to learn about a failing institution like the shipping trade when they can be seeing ultra-cool dudes like Stringer Bell explaining the drug trade via Adam Smith?  'Missteps' like this aside, fans stuck by the show (as they caught up with it on DVD), and by Season 5, David Simon and company had really begun to turn The Wire's Baltimore into a fully-fledged city - we saw the larger public institutions of the city (mayor's office, police department, school system) as well as private (longshoremen, newspaper) and how they were failing people.  We had done so through their day to day lives - sure there was significant drama, and people were murdered and went to prison and so forth.  But Simon and company never lost the sense that what people actually need to see are the parts around the drama - the waiting of being a police officer, the Fritos for breakfast diet of the urban poor, the sister's basement where salvation lies for a heroin addict.  And around it was the sharp dialogue, and characters that we simply had not seen on television - three-dimensional criminals, three-dimensional poor people - who talked to us like we were part of their world.

So coming off The Wire and the promises it had for the stubborn viewer, why did no one stick with Treme?  First, I have to take issue with the name, because you can't pronounce it correctly unless you've heard it or are from New Orleans.  It's already inside baseball, and it's part of where Treme fails - whereas characters on The Wire were cool and quotable, New Orleans is very much uncool.  It's a city of strange, old traditions and a language on its own.  Instead of slowly dipping us into this, the writing staff plunged us in head-first.  David Simon and company were no longer doing a show about Baltimore, a city he lived in and knew for decades.  To ward off charges of interlopery, Season 1 is packed to the gills with New Orleans local flavor and musician cameos, like a neon sign that says NEW ORLEANS IS DIFFERENT.  There's a scene where tourists are being taken through the Ninth Ward, New Orleans's most flooded district after Katrina.  The show wants us to believe that these tourists are scum of the earth, voyeurs of human suffering.  But how is this different than Treme itself?  It's a charge that dogged the show's first season.

Regardless, Treme could have been written as a novel, although who makes money doing that?  Instead, it's a television show, and it takes full advantage of something novels from Point Counter Point to Atlas Shrugged have struggled with - the depiction of music.  Music in novels is the most boring nonsense ever; if you were deaf and you only knew about music only from reading novels, you would wonder why anyone bothers with it.  Music in Treme is alive.  Mind you, I don't like New Orleans music.  At all.  The show has trotted out New Orleans musicians and called them magic - it just does nothing for me.  But I didn't have to like the music in Altman's Nashville to love Nashville.  And music binds the characters on the show together, it's not what everyone loves dearest, it's not a show exclusively about musicians, but it's what reminds everyone where their home is.  Simon and company have topped The Wire in terms of scope - I've never been to New Orleans, but I feel like it lives in this show.  I don't know how much the staff feels for New Orleans, but it comes across as loving.  I don't know if I'll ever visit New Orleans, but thanks to Treme, I can love it safely from afar.  I can dislike its music and think that the traditions are not for me, but watching the characters participate in them gives me joy unlike anything I've seen on TV to date.  Most of the best TV is about how alone you, the viewer, truly are, featuring protagonists that seem totally fine with loneliness - Treme is about the opposite.

Treme is ending soon - there's going to be a 5 episode 4th season and that's it.  In total, there will be 36 episodes of the show.  It will never be beloved like The Wire - no one will make brackets of their favorite Treme characters.  Maybe instead of discovering it a year after it had ended, people will discover Treme 5 or 10 years after its conclusion.  I fear, however, that it will be lost in the face of more dramatic and bombastic shows.  People say they love this new era of serialized television, but Treme proves they don't love it if it's not cool.

Argo - 2012 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston
Director:  Ben Affleck

Argo is a film that accomplishes most all of what it sets out to do.  It has a compelling story, a solid script, and capable direction.  So why don't I like it more?  I suppose it's because it takes very few chances with its story or direction.  It's easy to call what happens in Argo cliche, but much of it is likely true-to-life; movies have contorted our grasp of common humanity - we're all trite when put into life-threatening circumstances.

Argo does have problems with tone - it doesn't trust its peripheral characters to be interesting, so it loads them up with pithy one-liners.  Every character, in addition to being good at their job, is apparently auditioning to be a guest on Pardon My Zinger.  The constant pith becomes distracting, but thankfully it subsides as the film reaches its final act.

Three Days Of The Condor - 1975 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway
Director:  Sydney Pollack

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

Three Days Of The Condor is an Unwilling Participant film - by which I mean someone is taken hostage, yet somehow within the space of a day or so, is willing to risk her life and freedom for the person who's taken her hostage.  I'm blanking on the best examples of this genre - Commando comes to mind right away, but that film is a mountain of cheese whereas this one is a mere hillock.  Still, it's an exemplar of the genre - MacGuffins abound, people in clandestine organizations gnash their teeth about this lone, rogue, wolf, unaccounted for operative, and the film has a 70s bent that simply couldn't be replicated today.

The Master - 2012 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Note:  Spoilers below

For as much respect as I give Paul Thomas Anderson, I realize as I sit down to write this that the only one of his films that I both really liked and understood upon first watch was There Will Be Blood.  Hard Eight was entertaining but (as I recall) a trifle. Boogie Nights I saw well after the hype had died down, and while I now recognize that as an amazing accomplishment, I didn't quite get it then.  I hated Magnolia, and mistrusted Punch Drunk Love.  I'm not a P.T. Anderson fanboy, even though he is on my very short list of directors whose films I will see in the theaters without qualification.

The Master has the problem, at least upon first watch, of both of its main characters being inscrutable.  Having one's motivations or goals be unclear is fine, but neither seems to quite know what they want.  The Master is a charlatan, attempting parlor tricks to woo potential donors to his newfound religion, the Cause.  His favorite subject, Freddie Quill, is exactly what The Master rails against - pure animal instinct.  If Freddie isn't fighting or fucking, he's drinking so that he will end up doing one or the other.  He's anger and sex mashed together, with a tinge of regret.  What I at least never quite ended up understanding is what The Master wanted out of Freddie.  The easy answer is that in seeing Freddie as a man like himself, maybe he can get Freddie to move away from his impulses.  But where in the film have we seen that some sort of nobility is the goal of this religion?  Indeed, The Master's religion is not even do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do.  We don't hear a lot about moral codes.  Perhaps that's the goal of the new religion - self-actualization rather than moral refinement.  We need to become a better person through a greater understanding of ourselves, not through the perception of a God or of his teachings.

I suppose the conclusion of the film is that Freddie realizes that the Master cannot cure him of his regrets.  The Master himself can't be cured of the things he finds necessary - popular music and American cigarettes.  Freddie remembers lying down next to the false woman he's constructed, an avatar of womanhood, inscrutable and implacable.  Does he ultimately choose that?  I don't know.  I guess I need to see it again.

Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade - 2007 - 3 Stars

Subject:  Early arcade video games and the people who mastered them
Director:  Lincoln Ruchti

It's hard what to make of this documentary - on the one hand, it seems awfully trifling.  Lacking the drama of its bigger brother The King of Kong, Chasing Ghosts instead settles for an overview of what happened to the video gamers who converged on Ottumwa, Iowa in 1982 for the first video game championship.  It spends far too much time on a recollection of this event, but on the other hand, it feels like a life-altering meeting for all who attended.  The documentary captures the feeling of being young and being great at *something* and being recognized for it, in spite of what other flaws you (probably) have.  It's also a fascinating look at a dead world - not only is the arcade almost gone, but so too are the days when a person could be recognized for having been in a big-time magazine.  Both fame and video games have undergone radical alteration in the last 30 years.

Slacker - 1991 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Who Cares
Director:  Richard Linklater

Slacker is like a strange time-and-place capsule film - the content of the movie is not all that important, and indeed I've already forgotten most of the dialogue even though it's a talk-heavy film.  Concerning an interconnected group of underemployed twentysomethings in Austin, the film doesn't have an overarching plot - in fact, usually once a character's journey gets interesting, it gets shunted off screen.  I mentioned 'dialogue', but the film seems more like a series of monologues - no one seems to listen to anyone else here, they're too busy trying to be themselves.  I suppose the film makes the point that watching 90 minutes of different people trying their damnedest to be interesting can at times be quite exhausting.  Regardless, we get philosophy, conspiracy theories, pop culture commentary, and the sense that these people actually existed.

M - 1931 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann
Director:  Fritz Lang

'We have it down to a science' is something that gets said a lot of times, and that's a desirable thing.  It  means that if we follow certain steps, we'll end up at our desired result every time.  Filmmaking is to a large degree a science now, especially with larger budget movies.  Scripts are split into acts, conflicts arise at certain points, they get resolved, and it's all very clean - audiences are rarely upset with this sort of film if it's well-made, well-acted, and plausible within its own logic.

M is not a film like this.  It wasn't made when filmmaking was a science - it's an art picture.  There are long stretches of silence.  There are scenes that go on too long.  There are loose threads.  Regardless, it's a stunning achievement in film, one that manages to engage the viewer philosophically while still managing to tell a story visually.

Thief - 1981 - 3 Stars

Actors:  James Caan, Tuesday Weld
Director:  Michael Mann

I really wanted to like this more.  Opening with one of the best action setpieces I've seen - not in terms of exhilaration but in terms of sheer cool, both on the confidence of Caan and the director - Thief rumbles through a bunch of character beats over the course of its bloated 120 minutes to arrive at a perfunctory conclusion.  Mann does not seem entirely sure whether his main character lives in the real world or MovieWorld, but by the time he decides, I've decided that I don't really care about the character.  There's some great shots in this, it's just a shame that it doesn't add up to something better.

Old Joy - 2006 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Daniel London, Will Oldham
Director:  Kelly Reichardt

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

Old Joy might be considered mumblecore - or maybe mumblecore is one of those genres where everyone who makes films supposedly in it loathes the name and applies some even more ghastly word to it.  Whatever the case - Old Joy is a film in which not much happens - two guys take a trip to a spring and get lost on the way there.  It's tough for me to recommend a movie like this highly - it's well-made and clearly with a puny budget, but it's not that memorable, which is part of the point.  It depicts an experience that people who've attended college and have since moved on can relate to, that sometimes the only momentous thing that might occur on such a trip between two friends is that the distance between people grows with time and circumstance.

Another Earth - 2011 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Brit Marling, William Mapother
Director:  Mike Cahill

There are some people who enjoy science-fiction in part because of the technical aspects - how a man or woman might imagine future technology to look and function.  I'm more interested in the philosophical aspects, seeing instead how we as people change as a result of technological advances.  Another Earth was billed as a science-fiction film, but to a large degree it isn't - it's more about remorse and penance and all that icky human stuff.  Still, while this film has some visual touches I don't much care for (sorry filmmakers, zooms during dramatic moments are really hard to pull off due to overuse), it's audacious - it's ballsy enough to introduce the titular conceit and then back away from it when necessary.

Broadway Danny Rose - 1984 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Woody Allen, Mia Farrow
Director:  Woody Allen

Allen really puts the 'broad' in 'Broadway Danny Rose'.  A story about a down-on-his-luck talent agent who has to bring his best client's mistress to the culmination of his comeback and the absurdities that arise from that adventure, Rose is tonally inconsistent but perhaps that's one of its charms.  The story is, after all, mostly told by someone else - perhaps we can see the broader elements of the plot being the narrator's inventions rather than elements of the original story.  The film is strongest when it's waxing nostalgic about show business; the weakest elements come when we turn away from that world.  Still, I feel like this could've been a great film instead of just a good one.

God Bless America - 2011 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Joel Murray, Tara Lynne Barr
Director:  Bobcat Goldthwait

Bobcat Goldthwait has carved out a little niche for himself making small, dark comedies, and God Bless America certainly continues that tradition.  Attacking the inanity of mass culture, God Bless America could be viewed as a revenge fantasy, but I take it more as one man's journey to express himself.  It's not that reality television, shock jocks, and celebrity culture are eo ipso bad - it's that they stifle thought in favor of regurgitation.

I don't know about the characterization in this film, and it's often far too 'tell-not-show', but there should be more movies like this.

Senna - 2010 - 3½ Stars

Subject:  Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna's race to the top
Director:  Asif Kapadia

Race car driving is a strange sport.  On the one hand, a machine is absolutely essential to the competition - if your machine is not as good as the other drivers, it is not likely that your driving skill will compensate.  This makes me think of it as less of a sport - the machine's doing a lot of the work.  On the other hand, it's the one sport whose activity I routinely do, except on a much lower level and (presumably) non-competitively - I still drive a car.  I just don't do it at 200 km/h.

Senna, with its tremendous racing footage, shows us a glimpse of what it would take, mentally, to drive a car competitively for a living.  It doesn't look so hard, really, except that you don't just go once around the track, you go 70 times.  It's an endurance competition - whoever blinks first falls behind or crashes.  While it's easy to think of this repetitive action as blissful nothing - I think of the Repo Man quote that the more you drive, the dumber you are - Senna and this film help cast it as a spiritual moment.  The car is merely the vessel by which he experiences the divine.

Dogtooth - 2009 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Christos Stergioglou, Michele Valley
Director:  Giorgos Lanthimos

Sometimes art is intentionally shocking for its own sake, but other times, it uses a completely unrealistic and shocking situation to show us something about the way we live.  I don't want to spoil any of what Dogtooth is about - it takes a bit to figure out what's going on, but once we do, it's a fascinating look at what might happen if this situation were ever to come about.  The truths we know can be controlled, but that control has to go all the way.

Similarly, I'm impressed by movies that don't use a lot of space - this movie should've cost almost nothing to make, but its message is universal and powerful.

To Live And Die In L.A. - 1986 - 2½ Stars, 4 Stars

Actors:  William Peterson, Willem Dafoe
Director:  William Friedkin

To Live And Die in L.A. almost seems like an antidote to the big, dumb cop film like Commando and Cobra, where might makes right, revenge is a virtue, and body counts are envied instead of feared.  Trouble is, it's just as asinine* as what it might be reacting against.  Typically I'd forgive the director for such a film, but he co-wrote the script.

What is great about this film is the camera and location work - 'L.A.' in this film isn't Woody Allen's montage from Annie Hall, it's more focused on the unglamorous side of the city.  Friedkin also knows how to shoot a car chase.  Thus the two ratings - with a better and more thoughtful script, this could've been a darn good movie.

* The DVD skipped in two places so I missed about seven minutes of the movie - I may have missed some key exposition.  But since almost all the exposition here was stupid, I doubt it.

Fela Kuti: Music Is The Weapon - 1982 - No Rating

Subject:  Musician Fela Kuti and and his struggles with the Nigerian government
Directors:  Jean Jaques Flori, Stephane Tchalgadjieff

There are people in history who, if they hadn't actually existed, we would've felt the need to invent them.  Sure, their actions are singular in this world, but they happened to be in the right time and place to capitalize on it.  In other possible worlds, their existence is unknown to us.

Fela Kuti is not historically necessary, which is what makes him so interesting.  Defying the Nigerian government, he plays his music all night at a club while living in an ill-constructed compound with many wives.  As talented a musician as he is, it would have been easy for him to merely play music that people liked, but he chose to sing about the wrongs that he and other Africans face on a daily basis.


The documentary gets some great behind-the-scenes stuff, but lags in places - thankfully it's only an hour long. 

Palindromes - 2004 - 2½ Stars

Actors:  Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur
Director:  Todd Solondz

I mistrust Todd Solondz.  I feel there's a class of director that has no sympathy for the characters they put on screen - they're private jokes, or strawmen to be knocked over.  The director puts them through extremely unpleasant things and says to the audience 'This is what life is!'  Von Trier's Dogville and Godard's Week-End are examples of this sort of film - films seemingly made in a misanthropic rage, and with the sole aim of alternately shocking and annoying the audience.  Even directors that I like such as Werner Herzog, the Coen Brothers, and David Lynch are susceptible to making this kind of movie.

Palindromes is a confusing auteur mess - there's the elements for a good film here, but they simply didn't coalesce for me.  There were funny scenes in the movie but I didn't laugh once.  There's a point to all this, I think, but it's just grim and awkward and sad.  Sometimes it's good to spend time in that place with art in order to be challenged, but I find this film entirely unchallenging to precisely the audience that would seek it out.

Early Spring - 1956 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Daisuke Kato, Haruko Sugimura
Director:  Yasujiro Ozu

There will never be another Ozu.  Early Spring details a young Japanese salaryman and his wife, his relationship to their friends, and possible marital troubles.  It's stunningly banal in its treatment of its subjects -  the men do office grunt work by day and indulge in rudimentary pastimes at night.  They visit their relatives.  They complain about commutes.  No one's making a film like this - sure, there are directors who deal with these subjects, but not in the matter-of-fact way this movie does.  And honestly, why would any Japanese salaryman or his wife want to watch this film?  It's almost like it's for us in today's 'I-need-my-cellphone-and-TV' times - showing us the minutia of a way of life that no longer exists.

Ozu manages some brilliantly composed shots along the way - his plots seem to match up so well with his shooting style.  The camera is unwavering (although there are actually several pan shots), but if you really look at some of the scenes, there's something incredible going on.

 

Kansas City Confidential - 1952 - 2½ Stars

Actors:  John Payne, Coleen Gray
Director:  Phil Karlson

Film noir is supposed to be low-budget.  I think any fan of noir accepts how poorly staged and shot many noir films are - what's supposed to separate them from regular movies are plot and character.  Kansas City Confidential begins with an interesting premise - man unwittingly framed for bank robbery seeks out his framers - but gets stuck wanting for tension in the middle.  In fairness, I missed one of the major premises of the film that might've increased the tension, but even so, it runs long at 97 minutes and none of the characters are even sketched interestingly.

I love naming a B-picture something like 'Kansas City Confidential' - naturally within the first five minutes while we're supposedly in Kansas City, there's a shot with mountains in the background and we know we're in Los Angeles (as always).

Rescue Dawn - 2006 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Christian Bale, Steve Zahn
Director:  Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog has gone all over the world making movies, but even so, his films tend to have a very similar protagonist and pattern: they're about a solitary man, with a dream or goal, being confronted by forces of chaos which oppose his goal, both from within his own heart, but especially from the natural world.  It's hard not to read the director's heart into his protagonist - his crazed leading men have dreams seemingly beyond grasp, but so too must the director, making movies in the harshest environments in the world.  Yet again in Rescue Dawn, we're in an inhospitable jungle, and it's an environment Herzog knows how to shoot well.

Herzog had already made a film about this incident, a documentary called Little Dieter Needs to Fly, which I haven't seen, but even so, he infuses the movie with characteristic weirdness that a regular Hollywood director would've exorcised.  The narrative suffers, but who cares - Rescue Dawn is a stock film plot regardless.  It should be watched for the extra touches.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated - 2006 - No Rating

Subject:  The whims and secrecy of the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America
Director:  Kirby Dick

Ever wonder who rates movies G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17?  The director of This Film Is Not Yet Rated wondered, and this film is the result. MPAA members names are not disclosed publicly, and so there's some surveillance and research to track down the men and women who decide what the public can and cannot see.  Furthermore, it shows just how important a rating can be - many theaters refuse to show NC-17 films, meaning that movies that straddle the line between R and NC-17 can be significantly impacted by the MPAA's decision.

Ultimately the topic is slight - it's only of interest if one gets one's self into high dudgeon about Art and Society and the like.  Still, it makes for a good story even if the result isn't that important.

Melvin Goes To Dinner - 2003 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Michael Blieden, Matt Price
Director:  Bob Odenkirk

Melvin Goes To Dinner is what I call a low-stakes/high-stakes film - low-stakes, in that it doesn't involve car chases, terminally ill people's lists, or the end of the world, but high-stakes in that it asks questions about love, career, and family that tend to be the most momentous decisions First Worlders make.  Adapted from a play (and it's pretty obvious that it must've first existed in this form), it goes overboard on cinema verite techniques, but there are still a lot of good choices.  The best thing about the film is that all four main characters appear to have actual lives, not Hollywood or Woody Allen/Noah Baumbach-y lives - everything that happens in the story feels like it actually happened to someone we might know.

Too Late For Tears (Killer Bait) - 1949 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Lizabeth Scott, Dan Duryea
Director:  Byron Haskin

There's something exhilarating about watching obscure older films - everyone involved in the making is either dead or at least eighty years old.  It's entirely possible that they forgot working on the film.  The movie isn't exactly anything special either, but someone's watching it more than sixty years later.  And that someone is me.  I feel like I'm making someone's day by watching this.

The film is a capably plotted noir - although the story doesn't quite hold up, all the pieces are there for an entertaining 90 minutes.  The film's direction and print leaves something to be desired - the film clearly shot night-for-night.  Most of the action is terribly dimly lit.  But hey, it's a B-picture, not everything about it can be perfect.

Floored - 2009 - No Rating

Subject:  Futures traders in Chicago and the death of the 'open outcry' market
Director:  James Allen Smith

We live in radically changing times - just go outside your virtua-house this evening and look upon the beautiful green sunset - and the world is becoming a more impersonal place.  80s movie buffs will recall Ferris Bueller and friends attending the options market on his eponymous Day Off - thanks to the computer, the frenzy of men shouting buy and sell at one another has largely gone away.  So too has the money stream with which shrewd traders would line their pockets.

Floored provides a solid portrait of men who don't realize when the world is changing around them - one day they're essential, the next day they're replaced.  How much responsibility do they place on themselves for being obsolete, and how much belongs to the world?

The Third Generation - 1979 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Hanna Schygulla, Udo Kier
Director:  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

This is a film where one is definitely better served knowing what it's about before going in.  I, on the other hand, did not know.  Concerning a group of West German revolutionaries, unclear what they're fighting against, my perception of the film was totally changed when I read it described as a 'black comedy' on Wikipedia.  'Ohhh, I get it!', I said.  Satire doesn't always come across in foreign languages, especially satirizing an attitude that I could see the filmmaker agreeing with (and maybe he does).  Perhaps I should've picked up on the fact that the film is in six parts and each part begins with an epigram supposedly lifted from a bathroom stall.

The film is visually interesting - Fassbinder loves his camera movements - and it's also full of ideas, name-dropping philosophers galore, but the characters are mere playthings and the plot is a shambles.  This film was likely revolutionary in 1980, but the central idea of the film is so central to the way we now live that we take it for granted.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - 2011 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes
Director:  T. Sean Durkin

I have a feeling that Martha Marcy May Marlene is either a better or worse film than I think right now.  Covering what happens to a woman of indeterminate age (early 20s?  mid 20s?) after she runs away from home and when she returns, the film wrestles with the notion of faulty memories.  If we can't accurately remember what's happened to us in our lives, how can we move forward?  When we're not sure of what we are or were, how can we put ourselves where we want to be?

Where the film runs awry, it's because it's putting too much responsibility on the viewer to construct the story.  Still, it's far from dogmatic, and that's a relief given the impulses of most writers/filmmakers.

Cul-De-Sac - 1966 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Donald Pleasance, Francoise Dorleac
Director:  Roman Polanski

For the first fifteen minutes of Cul-De-Sac, I thought I was watching a great 'small' film.  These I consider films with low stakes and low budgets that might have other flaws, but the direction/cinematography/acting is all excellent and the movie is fun.  However, it transitions into something else entirely - it's more of an absurdist farce.  Once the plot gets set up, the film becomes a shaggy-dog story with layers of absurdity piled on more and more.  I guess this is one of those times where it would've helped me to know what the hell this movie was about before going in, as it's more of a comedy than anything, but I didn't find it particularly funny.

Meek's Cutoff - 2011 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood
Director:  Kelly Reichardt

Meek's Cutoff is clearly a film dreamed up by a postmodern author - a film about pioneer life that's so 'lifelike' that it's ostensibly dull and plotless.  In Thomas Pynchon's world, this film would be unimaginably popular for presenting a world that's totally unlike our own.  However, while this movie is not a smashing success at the box office, it is successful at just about everything it sets out to do.  It manages to evoke pioneer life (or at least, how I might imagine pioneer life) without being tedious or overexplanatory.  I might just be inured to it - after sitting through The Man From London, this movie is a breeze.

A minor thing that bothered me is the need to, in the words of sports columnist Joe Posnanski, volumate.  Volumating is the act of adjusting the volume up or down for a tv show or movie (usually a movie) because the volume level is so inconsistent.  This film was one of the worst for it - I guess it just tells me that I have to see more films in the theater, where they're meant to be seen.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth - 2011 - 3 Stars

Subject:  The history of notoriously ill-fated public housing project Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis
Director:  Chad Freidrichs

The destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe project is a climactic event in the film Koyaanisqatsi, but I'd always wanted to know more about it.  If people lived there, what happened to them?  How could things get so bad that public services refused to go there?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth combines archival footage with five or six interviews with former residents, most of whom grew up there.  It's a little light on footage however, and several of the shots are repeated.  There's not really a great format in which to present this material, but the director does create a moving montage at the end.    I'm still left with questions, but unfortunately most of them have been answered the same way that these things go:  institutional racism, neglect, wishcasting, and the assurance that everyone involved would benefit except for the actual residents.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - 2011 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Gary Oldman, Colin Firth
Director:  Tomas Alfredson

I might be being generous, but I have a love of espionage films, even if I am rarely able to follow them well.  The best espionage films play with our own perception of filmic reality - a person tells a story, and as he or she does, we see his story being acted out.  Now what if that person is lying - either changing details or inventing the story out of whole cloth?  And what if the story being told by the director is also a fabrication - it's also a story within a story that we don't yet know about?

Double agents, moles, plants, misinformation, information intentionally leaked, a super-British cast, people looking at one another ominously - it's all great fun.  The thing that's remarkable about films like this is that one misstep and they can fall into being an incoherent mess, but this one manages to give you a lot of the answers if you're willing to go along with it.

30 For 30: Silly Little Game - 2010 - No Rating

Subject:  The beginning of Rotisserie Baseball
Director:  Lucas Jansen

I love sports, I love games, and I love thinking about what particular pro players will accomplish in a given season.  So why do I no longer love fantasy sports?  This documentary does a good job of explaining that to me, as well as giving me a vicarious thrill to experience the beginnings of fantasy baseball.  Imagine how it must've felt before computerized box scores, before Baseball America updated its top 50 prospects every day, before PECOTA and CHONE, tabulating the week's scores by hand.  Calling someone on the phone to offer them a trade.  To a large degree, the 'fantasy' is gone, but the magic is still there for most.

The documentary is jazzed up by some extremely dramatized reenactments, some of which are humorous and some of which fall flat.

Midnight In Paris - 2011 - 2½ Stars

Actors:  Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams
Director:  Woody Allen

Midnight In Paris is the apotheosis of worn-out, late-period Woody Allen - I don't mean apotheosis as the culmination of mediocrity, but it strikes me that perhaps this is the Best He Can Do.  I talk a lot on here about directors in their later years, and while this might be one of Allen's most visually striking films, the story and stakes are set in a land of material and emotional comfort.

Note:  Spoilers Ahead

I'm not going to re-watch this film, but I think if I did, I might see some sort of commentary on the nature of Owen Wilson's character's vision of 1920s Paris - could it be just self-generated hackery?  Are the 20s characters we meet so archetypical because they're coming out of the head of a comfortable Hollywood screenwriter, who has no grasp of subtlety or restraint?  I don't think that's there.  Ultimately the film is imaginative but in the end, it's just another restaging of Woody Allen's constant battle between the woman who flatters all his tastes and the shrew who detests them.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes - 2011 - 4 Stars

Actors:  James Franco, Freida Pinto
Director:  Rupert Wyatt

Take off your intellect.  No, not all of it, I don't want to see that - just some of it.  You know what I want to see gone, that part that deduces plot holes, incongruities, the part that says 'That would never happen!', the 21st century sad equivalent to Archimedes' 'Eureka!'  I can't tell you how many times in Brooklyn I saw people running down the street naked yelling 'I've successfully deconstructed this film!'.

So that's off, right?  Okay, then settle in for an excellent action film, one which goes far away from the original concepts of the Planet of the Apes, depicting the 'Rise' of said planet.

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

There's a sequence in an ape holding facility that either does a marvelous job with CGI depicting the difficulty animals have with freeing themselves from the captor/captive relationship, or re-imagines the entire history of Prison Film tropes from Rules of the Game to The Shawshank Redemption, putting them in the wordless faces of CGI-generated apes.

Diner - 1982 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Steve Gutenberg, Mickey Rourke
Director:  Barry Levinson

I've watched far, far too many talky films lately - a mistake I realized ten minutes into this one.  I'll call Diner a should-have-come-of-age story - it's about early 20s men making the decisions that will shape their lives, both stuck in childhood and reaching out towards adulthood.  And also endlessly talking.  The style has been aped by all sorts of films since and owes debts to formless films that come before, but the ensemble is solid and the story manages to stay interesting.

Touching The Void - 2003 - No Rating

Subject:  A mountain climbing expedition gone awry
Director:  Kevin MacDonald

As a lazy, uncoordinated person, I've always resented things like mountain climbing - sure, it's an amazing testament to the human will for (mostly) men to stand atop the world's tallest peaks, with both their own singular strength and dexterity and the rest of mankind's ingenuity at their back with hooks, ropes, and boots and the like to aid in their feat.  However, it's also a giant waste of that ingenuity - there's no point other than to just climb up a big rock, while risking one's own life and limb in doing so.

Touching The Void's value as a film is in its reenactment of this harrowing tale - the film capably puts us into the situation via reenactment, letting us imagine what it might be like to be stuck in the same situation.  Yet there's really no imagining it - it's simply amazing that someone who survived it could actually describe what they went through.

Heart Of Glass - 1976 - 2 Stars

Actors:  Josef Bierbilcher, Clemens Schietz
Director:  Werner Herzog

I've seen ten Werner Herzog films now, and one element that runs through all of them is chaos.  Disorder.  The world is inexplicable, the universe a complete accident, and at any moment, something can happen that will change one's reality entirely.

Herzog films succeed when they put this chaos into central characters - Kinski's Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, or Nicolas Cage's Bad Lieutenant, or even Bruno S's Kaspar Hauser.  They fail when they don't really have any action besides people getting heaped miseries and indignities on them.  Heart of Glass is not one of these films, but it is incredibly strange, nonetheless - the entire cast was hypnotized before performing their scenes, or so the story goes.  Some of their actions are fascinating, but in large part, the film is two people standing in a room, neither really talking to the other, and both speaking nonsense.  It's an interesting curiosity, and there are some fascinating images, but the themes explored here are explored in other, better Herzog films.

The Last Picture Show - 1971 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges
Director:  Peter Bogdanovich

The Last Picture Show perfectly demonstrates the novella form of storytelling - there's too much material in here for it to be a short story, but this could be a novel of 200 pages.  I know it's adapted from a novel, but that isn't the point - the film manages the scope of a short novel.  Concerning two graduating high-school seniors and where life may or may not take them, The Last Picture Show is confident in all its choices.  It's well-told visually and the soundtrack, which seems to be diegetic, either coming out of car radios, jukeboxes, or home radios, is an unforgettable part of the tapestry of the film.  This is how film can be more powerful than a novel - it's one thing to say 'Song X' is playing during a particular scene in a novel, but it's nearly impossible to evoke that throughout without it becoming distracting.

Margot At The Wedding - 2007 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Director:  Noah Baumbach

For the experienced film viewer, there's a kind of ease to watching films like Margot At The Wedding.  Even as they tend to have no plot and conversations where what's unsaid is just as important as what's said, the film offers little more beyond that.  Once one gets the characters down, what's on the screen can be difficult to watch, but it's not necessarily difficult to follow.

Negative reactions to films like this are usually ad hominems - yes, it's true, no one in this film seems to struggle with poverty even though a lot of them don't appear to have regular employment.  As a result, whatever problems the characters have might seem invented or illusory.  I happen to think that's part of the point.

Red Rock West - 1993 - 4 Stars

Actors: Nicolas Cage, Dennis Hopper

Director: John Dahl

'Neo-noir' is a strange genre - people like to refer to something like L.A. Confidential with a 'neo-noir' tag. L.A. Confidential has a lot of the trappings of noir - femmes fatales, corruption, people talking smart and fast - but doesn't have a true noir heart. I think neo-noir more applies to something like Red Rock West, a story about a man passing through town who gets himself into a difficult situation.

4 stars is perhaps too effusive praise, but the film has a strong sense of itself and manages to fulfill everything it sets out to do. Nicolas Cage is not an ultra-ham, but Dennis Hopper is, and it's awesome.

The Man From London - 2007 - 3 Stars

Actors: Miroslav Krobot, Tilda Swinton

Director: Bela Tarr

The Man From London is exactly the sort of movie that will amaze critics, while being precisely the kind of movie that will irritate me. Critics are forced to watch mediocre-t0-bad fare day in and day out; I usually watch good-to-great movies, Die Hard 2 aside. Visually, The Man From London is incredible - it features Tarr's typical style of very long takes - we will often follow a character when he or she is walking, either ahead of them or behind them. The scene at the beginning of the film appears to be one very long take shot from a window - it's an incredible piece of filmmaking.

The plot of the film, however, is a very basic one, and unless I missed its allegorical meaning, there's not much to this. I suspect that the film will burrow into my brain and I will spend the next month recalling some of the brilliant and striking shots, but despite being given lots of time within the film to ruminate on all the meaning, I'm largely coming up empty.

Project Nim - 2011 - 4 Stars

Subject: A chimpanzee being taught sign language

Director: James Marsh

Is it a good idea to teach a chimpanzee sign language? Is it a good scientific test to raise one in a house, living with other humans, sleeping in a bed, dressing in clothes? I can't really say after watching Project Nim, a fascinating look at a curious 70s scientific experiment. It takes on even greater relevance remembering that woman who was nearly killed by her pet chimpanzee.

One thing this documentary drives home is the ways in which chimps and humans are not that far from one another - how they often enjoy doing the same sorts of things. Yet always lurking behind the chimpanzee is animal savageness - I don't know if we can say the same about people.

The Stranger - 1946 - 3 Stars

Actors: Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles

Director: Orson Welles

Note: Spoilers for Vertigo below

A downfall of many great directors is, surprisingly, plot. Some directors just can't be all that bothered with it. Hitchcock's plots are often totally preposterous - Chuck Klosterman said of the murder scheme concocted in Vertigo, 'It would've been easier for the [actual killer] to simply kill every man he'd ever met.' I feel this is a problem too with Orson Welles, who fills The Stranger with some phenomenal camera shots, but gets stuck with a second-rate script.

Another complaint I have about old films in general is the use of music, which even to this point had not fully evolved away from silent movie style music. A character might be walking along and the music is blaring, unnecessarily. Regardless, this film contains an Orson Welles speech almost as good as his famously diabolical rant in The Third Man, but I still can't consider this a classic.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder - 1990 - 2 Stars

Actors: Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia

Director: Renny Harlin

An action sequel can be difficult to pull off, especially if it's quite similar to the first film. There's a point in the movie where any reasonable person would ask, if they were in the same circumstances, "How is this happening to me again?" The writer has a choice about whether to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation or to just ignore it. Die Hard 2 chooses to acknowledge it. I don't think either is a good choice, but then again, a lot about Die Hard 2 is a poor choice, a film that appears to have been constructed via heavy focus group work on the first film. Want Reginald VelJohnson's affable desk-bound cop to return? He's here. Want William Atherton to reprise his slimy journalist routine and let anyone who's thinking about the irony of the film's insistence that people who stick cameras in people's faces during tragedies are wrongheaded while creating false tragedies into which a camera is stuck?

The film really slips up with its villain, who does not have the rogueishness of Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber. In all, all of the elements of Die Hard 1 are here in Die Hard 2, and that's precisely the problem with the film.

The Panic In Needle Park - 1971 - 3 Stars

Actors: Al Pacino, Kitty Winn

Director: Jerry Schatzberg

I probably shouldn't've watched this film so close on the heels of Trainspotting. Concerning small-time hustlers and heroin addicts in New York City, The Panic in Needle Park is one of those 70s films without a real plot that makes for a good character study. Problem is, neither of our main characters have much character. All in all, that's probably the point - the addicts in the film don't have much to them, they're just looking for their next score. I'd probably like this much better had other films not stolen its beats so well. It's worth seeing perhaps for the Al Pacino performance.

30 Minutes Or Less - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors: Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari

Director: Ruben Fleischer

The more recent comedy films I see, the more I realize their success upon me are totally dependent on my mood. If I don't want to enjoy the movie, that's pretty easy, but if I want to enjoy it, that's up to me too.

30 Minutes or Less isn't particularly memorable - I think at some parts it's reaching for Coen Brothers screwiness, which it doesn't quite reach - but the actors throw themselves into the material. Like most comedies these days, it's aiming for the middle of the road at most points, and at most points, it doesn't miss too often.

The Tree Of Life - 2011 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn

Director: Terence Malick

Film is a visual art, and the list of directors who truly understand what that means is very small. Terence Malick is one of those visual artists - some of his films fail for me on fundamental levels despite the fact that he never loses sight of the fact that film is a visual art.

It's easy to dismiss this film as solipsistic, pretentious twaddle - the film's insistence on showing a hyper-specific story against the backdrop of the creation of the universe and the entire span of life on Earth feels awfully grandiose. Still, I don't think Malick's point is to trumpet his film's story as the culmination of existence, but as tied to existence as all other things are, sharing in unity, and not discord. Malick is one of our last pre-ironic directors, and while it's easy to beat down his films with irony, I have a feeling this one will stand the test of snickering critics.

Joint Security Area - 2002 - 4¼ Stars

Actors: Kang-ho Song, Byung Heon Lee

Director: Chan-wook Park

Think of Joint Security Area as a kind of Korean Grand Illusion. Maybe that's not the right movie, but the film covers a similar theme - the treatment of one's supposed enemies. How do soldiers forced to guard a border treat one another upon meeting, especially when they share the same language and a common heritage? Joint Security Area gets off to a lumbering, confusing beginning, but quickly turns into a fascinating examination of North and South Korean relations. I wouldn't be shocked if some elements of the film are cliche - but I'm not Korean, so it's new to me.

Hampering the film are some English-speaking characters who are distractingly poorly dubbed. In fact, the DVD defaults to the entire film being dubbed - c'mon, people, who are these people who prefer dubbed movies?

Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project - 2007 - No Rating

Subject: Comedian and actor Don Rickles and his life

Director: John Landis

Don Rickles is an American comedy legend, and no doubt his life and career needs a chronicle. The problem with a documentary of Rickles' career is that his comedy act has been very similar for 50 years. This basically means cutting out his entire career post-1975. People may not remember that he was an actor in the 50s and 60s, but he was largely a supporting player.

The documentary ties Rickles' rise to Vegas stardom with a look at old Vegas itself, before it became the home to the faceless gambling palaces that now dot the Strip. It is easy to miss that entertainment world where it felt like all the top entertainers were friends with one another - our media universe is too saturated to ever let something like the Rat Pack happen again. Still, this documentary remains right at the surface - Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is far superior.

Bob Le Flambeur - 1956 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Film noir really doesn't work in another language, I've decided. Not that Bob Le Flambeur is strictly a noir, but it has noir elements - narration, a look at a seedy gambling underworld, and so forth - and those elements don't quite get translated through subtitles. I know enough French to know that what's being said is loaded with slang. That's part of the fun of noir.

There are some wonderful parts of this film, but as I said, I really felt like I was missing out on the full picture. Knowing the full rules to baccarat would've helped a little. Also, I saw Tommy Wiseau's The Room over the weekend and my head is still reeling.

The Interrupters - 2011 - No Rating

Subject: Former gang members who now attempt to stop violence in inner-city Chicago

Director: Steve James

Remorse doesn't just lead to depression about what could have been - it can spur people on to make significant life changes. Such are The Interrupters, who spend much of their time attempting to assist in their community after spending their early life involved in criminal activity.

One wonders if there isn't some Heisenberg uncertainty principle (of a sort) at play here, given that we see some violence interruptions where there's clearly a camera present. Still, it's a powerful documentary that gives us a look at a side of America we don't often see.

Barcelona - 1994 - 4 Stars

Actors: Taylor Nichols, Chris Eigeman

Director: Whit Stillman

Now that's more like it. Barcelona is in the spirit of Woody Allen's best romantic comedies, but has an interesting political undercurrent. Gone are the travails of the UHB from Metropolitan, but Nichols and Eigeman might as well be reprising their roles from that film. This film, however, is much more ambitious and less talky, and succeeds in a big way. It's Wes Anderson without all the aesthetic obsessions and forced quirk - even as Nichols' and Eigeman's characters seem like caricatures, they manage to press some humanity into them.

Husbands - 1970 - 2 Stars

Actors: Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, John Cassavetes

Director: John Cassavetes

People are often split into two distinct camps when it comes to an artist's intent - either an artist can fully account for everything that goes into his art, or else he's basically spurred into action by the Muses - he knows not what he paints, sculpts, writes, or in this case directs. I think no director gives a better argument for the latter than John Cassavetes, who seems to care very little about whether or not an audience will find a particular scene interesting. He finds it interesting, and if you don't, well, that's life.

Husbands starts off intriguing, but quickly becomes mired in a 30 minute scene at a bar with people around a table singing songs. While this scene very accurately replicates the feeling of being sober around a bunch of drunks, that feeling is incredibly agitating. I haven't felt this annoyed in a film since Godard's 'Traffic Jam' scene in Week End. Too many of the scenes seem like performances only - 'In this scene, what if you acted this way?' - and our protagonists are merely sketches.

Husbands is, somehow, 141 minutes long - this film could've easily been much better at 100 minutes. Cassavetes seems to be an actor's director, and he can't bear to waste a good performance; unfortunately, that's all this movie is good for.

Cedar Rapids - 2011 - 2 Stars

Actors: Ed Helms, John C. Reilly

Director: Miguel Arteta

The state of film comedy today is decidedly a sad one. Why does a film like Cedar Rapids feel so heavily focus-grouped? It's a small movie with Ed Helms as its star. The performances in this film are excellent, and it's a who's who of solid character actors, but nothing that happens in this movie makes sense in a comedy or really otherwise. Things happen because they have to.

Cedar Rapids could've been an actual character study of a man from a small town blown away by the 'bright lights' of the eponymous city, or it could have been a very broad comedy about the same. Instead the film tries to be both and ends up being neither. It's totally dead on arrival until John C. Reilly shows up playing a smaller, insurance-selling version of his character from Walk Hard.

The worst part is that there seems to have been some sort of religious satire in this movie, but it's been so defanged and watered down that it becomes a red herring. I'm sure this film got a lot of people walking out of the theater at the end saying 'Yeah, that was okay', but unfortunately too often that's what the film industry is shooting for these days.

Drive - 2011 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan

Director: Nicholas Winding Refn

I was tempted to do this review in the style of the protagonist from Drive: 'I liked it. Good movie. I liked the cars.' But that would be pretty boring. I've been watching so many overly talky movies lately that it's difficult to adjust to Drive's incredibly laconic protagonist.

It's also tempting for me to downgrade Drive because it borrows so liberally from The Driver and Le Samourai, among other films. I don't like this attitude, however - no one but film buffs are going to expose themselves to those movies, and repurposing unseen movies for a wider audience is one of the great cinematic traditions. Drive is, at heart, an exercise in style, but sometimes those can be massive fun - especially when it's as well-shot and well-plotted as this one.

Certified Copy - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Certified Copy is a look at the genuine - a difficult thing to do through the lens of film, which is already artificial, and arguably more artificial than say, a novel. What's more genuine - our memories of the past, which are ostensibly fixed, or our experience of the present, which features changes of all sorts, changes which we may be only truly aware of when we examine the past?

In short, I can't spoil this film's plot at all, but it's heady stuff. There are recent films which have a similar theme, but compared to this they're inorganic, ungenuine, and artificial.

Limitless - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors: Bradley Cooper, Robert DeNiro

Director: Neil Burger

How many high-concept films become total letdowns in the final 20 minutes? I don't know, but add Limitless to that list. Limitless feels like a film that had a different ending until some studio or focus group or something nixed the original. Still, it's (somewhat) visually inventive, has a solid hook, and decent performances - it's worth seeing if you want a movie that, ironically enough, turns most of your brain off.

The Puffy Chair - 2005 - 3 Stars

Actors: Mark Duplass, Katheryn Asleton

Director: Jay Duplass

The Puffy Chair seems to be a throwback to 70s films like The Last Detail or The King of Marvin Gardens - characters loosely drawn by what they do, adrift in a post-something state. There's emotional discussions, discussions where characters reveal more by what they don't say, and the like. There's also a fair amount of humor, but not humor in the arch Wes Anderson style that one might expect. Hardly essential viewing, but The Puffy Chair has a nice handmade aesthetic and avoids becoming a shaggy-dog story.

Masculin Feminin - 1966 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Ah, now that's much better. My last foray into Godard was his terrifically annoying Week End, which seemed to be a giant middle finger to everything. Masculin Feminin is like a quick middle finger - blink and you might miss it. It's prankish rather than openly hostile.

Masculin Feminin is made up of 15 vignettes that largely revolve around a left-wing journalist and his interactions with his girlfriend and her friends. It's chock-full of 60s talk - Socialism, birth control, music, advertising, the 'bourgeois' - but Godard doesn't let this sort of thing overwhelm the picture. The central vignettes are (to me) three conversations between a man and a woman. Godard lets the camera stay on one participant in these conversations for a long time - it's a very intimate thing to get to look at a close-up of someone's face when they're listening instead of when they're talking. He makes it clear that generally each person in these conversations is looking at the other, heightening the sense of intimacy, even though the two are not romantically involved.

Videodrome - 1983 - 4 Stars

Actors: James Woods, Sonja Smits

Director: David Cronenberg

There's not much separating Videodrome from a film ripe for Mystery Science Theater 3000. In fact, maybe there's nothing at all, except that Videodrome is fascinating and the movies shown on MST3K are terrible. Still, Videodrome has many of the hallmarks of the B-picture - homemade special effects, outlandish sci-fi, and a loose grip on the way people actually think and act. Regardless, David Cronenberg has total confidence in his vision of a paranoid cable TV executive who sees potential profit in an underground movie, and the consequences that follow therefrom. It's difficult not to respect an auteur's vision when he's clearly made exactly what he set out to do.

Elephant - 2003 - 4½ Stars, 2½ Stars

Actors: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen

Director: Gus Van Sant

I decided to give Elephant two ratings - its cinematography and direction is unbelievable. However, I do have to confess that I am a giant fan of Van Sant's aesthetic, even if I'm not sure he does all that much with it. A single tragic day at a high school is a perfect place for his Satantango-style examination of crossing paths and sad confluences.

The second rating is for shallowness in character - Elephant almost expects you to invest its characters with your own memories or perceptions of high school, because whatever work it does is largely image-based. This works in some instances, but falls terribly short in others.

Trainspotting - 1996 - 3 Stars

Actors: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner

Director: Danny Boyle

Trainspotting gets filed under the list of 'Films I Should've Seen 10 Years Ago", a style-over-substance film that launched Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor's careers. It's provocative and creates some unforgettable images, but does so at the expense of any character development or sense of plot. There's also the seemingly standard mid 90s post-Tarantino deconstruction of some pop culture item - is this still a thing in movies now? It might blend in seamlessly in newer movies, but here it feels self-conscious and largely uninteresting. There's also that late 90s English movie thing where someone speaks with such a deep accent that it's impossible to understand half of what they say - I'm glad I don't see any movies like that anymore.

Before Sunset - 2004 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Director: Richard Linklater

Note: Very Minor Spoilers

It can be difficult to make a film about memory. We've seen lots of 'great' films about it - Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Inception - but it's not easy to capture the feeling of a person being in one place and time while thinking (and feeling) about another. The characters in Before Sunset are in two places - in the film's present, and nine years ago, during the events of Before Sunrise. Other than a brief montage of the earlier film, we don't see images from there - the film brilliantly manages to rely on our memory of the previous movie, and I think it succeeds no matter how much of the original film the viewer actually remembers.

The film also manages to turn on the fact that what we say, how we act, and what we're thinking can be three different things - the tension is created by the fact that one character may or may not betray what they're thinking either by how they act or what they say.

Moneyball - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill

Director: Bennett Miller

I've read Moneyball, and reading books before seeing the filmed adaptation of the book is usually a way to dislike the movie. I'm not aggrieved at what was cut out of the film - in fact, this is a rather excellent adaptation of the work. I think the writing was strong. I think the performances throughout were strong. I'm just not sure that a film could've gotten to the heart of Moneyball and its central character Oakland GM Billy Beane.

Beane is driven to win, and that's a difficult thing to portray on screen - yes, there are some thrown chairs, smashed stereos, and angry speeches made at a losing team. Yes, he's incapable of watching his own team play, because he gets too worked up about it. But the film has a hard time letting us into Beane's head - perhaps it never really wanted to go there, but it never ends up there. Well-made, worth seeing, but ultimately forgettable.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore - 1974 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson

Director: Martin Scorsese

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a classic '70s' film - it's a slow-moving character study about a largely regular person. Do we even have movies about poor people anymore, or just movies about poor people who become rich? Alice struggles to find employment after her husband's death, as she goes on the road with her 12 year old son with the hope of eventually returning to her hometown to live.

Knowing what I knew about this movie going in (very little), I joked to myself that Scorsese would have all sorts of fast camera zooms and 'Sympathy For the Devil' on the soundtrack. Not quite - but the film is laid out with the vision of a master. A lot of these 70s talkfests stick the camera in one place, or they'll start a scene in an interesting place but not finish anywhere interesting. This film is clearly made by someone who thinks visually first and foremost.

Crank 2: High Voltage - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Jason Statham, Amy Smart

Directors: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Is there anything sillier than the Crank movies? Probably not. Anything more awesome? Probably lots of things. Still, the lengths to which the Crank films go to entertain is quite something - no act is too foul or too violent, and no camera movement is too stylized.

Crank 2 revolves around a protagonist whose artificial heart has only an internal battery - the only way it can be charged is if Jason Statham exposes himself to electricity. This video-game style premise permeates the entire film. The only downside is that this video game gets slightly repetitive - even at 85 minutes, a film this constantly amped up gets tiresome, especially when we know our protagonist is in no real danger. I'm not sure I would watch a Crank 3.

Southern Comfort - 1981 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe

Director: Walter Hill

Thanks, A.V. Club and the death of Walter Hill, for making me aware of this film. A chilling look at what happens when a routine military exercise goes awry for National Guardsmen, this movie is both suspenseful and meaningful. Hill manages some amazing shots and coaxes great performances out of a who's who of 'that guys' - Powers Boothe is particularly great as 'the new guy'.

The movie invites obvious comparisons to Deliverance, but eschews Deliverance's shock value for a subtler aesthetic. It's a shame this movie is not even available on DVD - it should be much more widely known.

The Red And The White - 1970 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jozsef Madaras, Tibor Molnar

Director: Miklos Jansco

The Red and the White is about the battle between the upstart Bolshevik forces and the tsarist White forces. In retrospect it's obvious who's who, but I spent the entire first half of The Red And The White trying to figure out who were the Red and who were the White. I suspect this is part of the point - ultimately it's not that important, as war tears apart towns, cities, and nations.

The Red and the White features a number of stunning long takes, which help keep the viewer in the moment - the camera pans around during a climactic scene, unsure what to focus on, trying to take in the entirety of the moment and failing. At one point, we see a person about to be executed, the camera moves away, and when it moves back, he's no longer there. Such must be the horrors of war.

Saboteur - 1942 - 3 Stars

Actors: Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Saboteur is the weakest effort I've seen from Hitchcock. Most of Hitchcock's plots don't make a damn bit of sense when you stop and think about them for 2 seconds, but Saboteur's is especially convoluted. Throw in strange characterizations, propagandizing, and an awkward scene with circus freaks, and it's a mess. The film, like North by Northwest, manages to breeze from a factory in California to a climactic confrontation at the Statue of Liberty with surprising ease, but aside from an interesting, albeit mustache-twirling, villain, there's not much here that's must-see.

The Two Escobars - 2010 - 4 Stars

Subject: The relationship between Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and murdered soccer star Andres Escobar

Director: Jeff Zimbalist, Michael Zimbalist

Athletes have it nice in the United States - their benefactors are usually corporations or the owners of corporations. But what about poorer countries? What supports big-time sports there? The answer is typically a mix of shady money or a fierce nationalistic government. Even in Russia, it's the petrochemical oligarchs and Mafia leaders who run the Russian hockey league. The Two Escobars examines what can happen when sports, nationalism, and a complete disregard for humanity collide.

The Two Escobars scores some great interviews with Pablo's and Andres's relatives, as well as Andres's teammates. It's a sports documentary in name only, as it really examines how criminals and governments interact with one another in a corrupt country, with the Andres Escobar story as the backdrop. One can only imagine how terrifying it was to live in the early 1990s version of Colombia.

Lifespan - 1974 - 2 Stars

Actors: Hiram Keller, Tina Aumont

Director: Sandy Whitelaw

None of you will ever see Lifespan, which is just fine; you probably shouldn't. Somehow a film with Klaus Kinski performing simulated cunnilingus in a Faust mask, grave robbery, Anne Frank's house, a Terry Riley soundtrack, and a conspiracy involving a method to stop the aging process adds up to way less than the sum of its parts. The film is ruined by an absurd amount of narration and the poor performance of the lead actor, not to mention the awkwardness of the writing and staging. There's a lot of elements here for a low-budget sci-fi/horror type deal like Scanners, and there's even some good Hitchcockian elements to the film (I was reminded of Rebecca), but overall it's a mess.

Kinski is supposed to have rejected a part in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark by calling the script a piece of shit - I'm not sure how he accepted this one.

Harlan County U.S.A. - 1976 - No Rating

Subject: A strike by coal miners in Eastern Kentucky

Director: Barbara Kopple

Harlan County U.S.A. could have devolved into either poverty porn or agit-prop. It barely touches on the former - we briefly see that the subjects live without power or running water - but it veers awfully close to the latter. We're treated to conflicts between picketing workers and replacement workers. We're shown how striking union laborers are able to organize even in the face of real violence. We're shown how management can lie and deceive in order to maintain the status quo. It's not exactly a two sided film, but regardless, Harlan County U.S.A. is a powerful examination of the brutality that can exist and persist between labor and management. One wonders how these people and their children live today.

In The Company Of Men - 1997 - 4 Stars

Actors: Aaron Eckhart, Stacy Edwards

Director: Neil LaBute

Red herrings and embarrassing music choices aside, In The Company of Men is a powerful film. It's not hard to see why Neil LaBute was considered talented, and also not hard to see how he ended up remaking The Wicker Man several years later, to disastrous results. I'm too lazy to look this up, but I suspect this was a play first, as it has several monologues and the camera stays static for most of the film. It leads to little things like line misreadings being left in the film because there are very long takes - I find those things can make a film more realistic.

I suspect this was Aaron Eckhart's career making performance - he absolutely nails it. Everyone knows someone like Eckhart's Chad - he's an outsized version of a certain type of person that any suburban-raised American knows. It's a brutal look at the corporate mentality and how that mindset can warp interpersonal relations.