A Woman Under The Influence - 1974 - 5 Stars

Actors: Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands

Director: John Cassavetes

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

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

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

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

Comedian - 2002 - 2½ Stars

Subjects: Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams

Director: Christian Charles

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

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

Standard Operating Procedure - 2008 - 3 Stars

Director: Errol Morris

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

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

Notorious - 1946 - 4 Stars

Actors: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

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

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

Slumdog Millionaire - 2008 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto

Director: Danny Boyle

Note: Spoilers below

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

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

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

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

Raiders Of The Lost Ark - 1981 - 4 Stars

Actors: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen

Director: Steven Spielberg

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

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

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