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.