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.