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.