Movie Brains

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Robert Aldrich gave us the best movie version of Mickey Spillane, though in some respects also by changing the novel, starting with the script by A.I. Bezzerides (cf. Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King). This is cited as a major influence by both Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, thus the French New Wave, as well as others after. The light in the trunk of the car in Repo Man and in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction are also references to this. Cloris Leachman has her film debut and in the opening shots running down a road. Jack Elam and Strother Martin lend their offbeat candor, and Marian Carr gives an unstudied freshness that works particularly well in the climactic scene with the box. What's interesting about Ralph Meeker's performance now, is that it seems so easy and naturalistic compared to other 50s acting, but this must have been the candor that made it seem more savage at the time, with the intent in the eyes, but hardly seeming to change register with his manipulation of his assistant, banging someone's head against a wall or just breaking a rare record. The climactic scene crosses film noir with the science fiction horror of the period to give a fresh punch to both, and, however unrealistic, an expressionistic ghastliness. And how about that opening credits tilted scroll, George Lucas?

Tangerine (2015)
This has the manic, furtive, anxious energy of streetwalker life in Hollywood, on Christmas eve, as if shot from the hip pocket, the sprawl of the day filled with chasing after in the barest economy, and, however well concocted, sometimes the explosive frankness. Like vomiting in a cab. But that sort of detail also cleverly displaces others. Sean Baker's approach is neither condescending nor flinching, and manages not to sensationalize in any cheap way, though with a combination of experienced actors (check out Clu Gulager as another taxi passenger) and newcomers (particularly the two transgender leads), he does tease up little charming moments that show the sweet undercurrent to it all. Particularly nice is when Mya Taylor sings "Toyland," and it's a moment like the ending of The Florida Project with ripples beyond a literal or strictly realist function. Turns out a car wash makes for a nice cinematic passage as well as something else. Put this on your non-conformist Christmas list.

The Beasts (2022)
A patient, almost clinical study of xenophobia, more psychological than thriller, especially well acted, this nonetheless is somewhat confusing in the ordering of scenes early, the way it skips around for introduction of characters or what it's covering about them with other effects of them. Then nearly the latter half is denouement, with for example, a particularly dragged out scene of a discussion with daughter and mother, circling and rehashing in a way that might be more mundane, but shifts the pace and weight.

Emily the Criminal (2022)
Writer and director John Patton Ford's feature debut is confident enough with the drama of more realistic situations, and this is a good role for Aubrey Plaza, where the smart-assed is in the character and not the frame of the whole. Not that other projects haven't been good, just that this is providing variety. Along with her, Theo Rossi's performance complements the composure of the whole. There's a great scene with Gena Gershon interviewing Plaza for an upscale job that turns into almost a fantasy confrontation while still excruciating.

Primeval (2007)
This starts out the worst jiggling, camera-jerking, clamorous, pandering, Fubu-wearing swill, and settles down to merely a drone of jumps and turns with a bad CG gator.

Time After Time (1979)
At the time this came out, in the wake of Star Wars, for example, the charm of it was using less effects and relying more on imagination. Although it has some nice props and optical tricks of its own, it's mostly putting Malcolm McDowell in deerstalker and wrap-around temple spectacles and then into the streets of San Francisco of the day (apparently the location of the time machine in a museum there accounts for the geographical change with the time travel, from H.G. Wells's London, yet another implication left gaping open by time travel fiction). The charm is also seeing McDowell, after A Clockwork Orange and Caligula, play the lost boy look, something Mary Steenburgen says to him in the movie, and the two of them at the beginning of their offscreen relationship. The movie serves as its own time capsule now for that and San Francisco.

Badlands and bad airs

Terence Malick, especially through Badlands, has influenced everyone that became a filmmaker after, in indirect ways when not made express. Often this is more a burden because the ingenuity, what he brought together and how, can make something seem derivative that doesn't belong to just Malick: fugitive couples, road movies, voiceover and montage plan, cutaways to nature (his are distinctly lyrical and distant at the same time), or even just Carl Orff or Eric Satie music. Directors who deliberately borrow from or echo or transpose Malick risk the worst of comparison because of failing the whole for the gesture. There have been fugitive couple movies that are nothing more than fawning wishes to repeat Badlands, and thus don't repeat what it's doing, an observation about romanticism that is not simple. There are three recent movies that ring Badlands however intended or not, but are better the more different the story, and perhaps not coincidentally, the more figurative they are, or the more room they allow for the figurative.

Bones and All (2022) is most directly about a couple, though even fugitive is part of the contrivance. The idea worked as a band name, Fine Young Cannibals, but at this length it's not just stretched thin but beaten flat. It's like they're having to come up with more things for them to do, and ticking the states off with great superimposed titles, using postal abbreviations for our convenience, only adds to the contrived air of the whole thing. If director Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love was the Bertolucci version of American Beauty, this is like the Stephen King version of Malick. At least Guadagnino didn't write the scripts. This idea was done much better by Let the Right One In (2008 movie, Alfredson), without the pretense to other artsiness, that is, presuming this is even trying to do something like that. It's so clumsy about plot or parable that the loops of empathy are absurd, like when we see mom with no hands who then lunges at the daughter, and then moments later the daughter protesting, "I'm not going to eat her." We've all been there.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) approaches, perhaps surprisingly, similar grisly extent, but even the absurdity is part of the conception, and the way friendship consumes the parties is much more cleverly figured. Writer and director Martin McDonagh, who also did In Bruges with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, risks quaintness at times, but the better edge is towards Beckett, and it actually achieves a kind of song of plainspoken entreaty. A Carl Orff piece echoes Badlands, and goes nicely with music Brendan Gleeson composed himself, but it's also the shots of the horizon with the clouds that suggest Malick more. The Field also comes to mind, with the three levels of fools.

Most grotesque but also detached, and fascinating, is Mad God (2021), which uses for the end credits Gassenhauer nach Hans Neusiedler (1536) of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman, the music most associated with Badlands, and made famous by it. This Dantesque dystopia created by special effects artist Phil Tippett is the spiritual descendant of Jan Svankmajer and the brothers Quay (who also used great music by Lech Jankowski and other composers, mostly Eastern European), as much as Tippett's own idols, Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, and in that way sublimates an apocalyptic nightmare with the remnants of toy boxes and bureau drawers as much as body parts and industrial waste and other nondescript effluvia. It's play with how everything is cannibalized, even as dream and art, Saturn devouring his children, or to twist a Monty Python joke, decomposing composers.

Naked (1993)
Of Mike Leigh's work, this perhaps more than anything took kitchen-sink realism into more expressionistic character study, with Leigh's methods of working up from improvisations with his actors, although it's also the later work that most resembles his debut, Bleak Moments, and it's overtly decentered characterization. As opposed to those earlier characters who were at pains to express themselves verbally, this is about verbal riot, though hardly less for reasons of social unease, offensive as much because defensive, and the particularly savage convolutions of Mancunian gadfly Johnny, played by David Thewlis. It was the breakout performance for Thewlis, who had played similarly conflicted in Leigh's The Sweet Life, and a springboard for Katrin Cartlidge who would take the lead in Career Girls. The mixed results of the process, here, are that some of the characters, the preening yuppie and the roommate who can't finish a sentence, seem so stylized they have a different formal register, surreal, and the former is introduced with such an abrupt jump it seems rhetorical, an imaginary aside or interpolation.

The Godfather (1972)
This is the 50th anniversary year of the movie, and as well as comments on the occasion of another holiday viewing, see also comments about this as holiday viewing on the lists page.

Along with everything else about it, The Godfather is significant for breaking the Hollywood Hays code rule that all crime be punished. More shrewd than that, the punishment and even justice and the law are all shown to be in the closed system of the mafia families dispute itself. The Godfather enacts the ritual of triumphant recompense and revenge that the Hays code actually enables, but it's also like the villain play of Richard III where Richard is also the good guy who wins. It became archetypal in even twisting archetypes, and especially with the baptism scene. Francis Ford Coppola gave this epic form, he made sumptuous movies evocative, a big movie with fine detail.
But this is what is interesting about archetype also: the trick of whether it's innate or devolves on the larger matter of the belatedness of consciousness. The ring of familiarity works like the ghosts of ourselves, in our homes or places, what we think some mysterious other has done because we weren't aware we did it or forgot. What is it about these images, these scenes, that could have occurred to us before? Timebound, details -- it's safe to say many people are eliminated from having something in common by the time you get to a mafia family, let alone in ethnic or time period factors. But the spread of it attaches not to just fame, the sinister -- evil is an art form, and the desire for exception, whether noble or simply despotic, is as common, as at hand, as desire itself, not fixed, but a sort of structural blind spot when not a more direct drive. In this way, Coppola's ingenuity is not just posing capitalism or business in terms of the mafia, but the family itself, nicely confused by the two uses of the term. The fact this has such an appeal to people, in a potboiler, faddish, identifying way, is drawing on all this, a symptom of it, not the cause. What's epic about it is the tableau vivant hand of Coppola. However sweeping the story (and Part II gets into precisely some of the problems of that), it's the mise en scene aspect of even that, as if the narrative form's movement and the static sweep of painting or drawing have been rendered in theatrical assemblage. All this sounds fancy, but it's precisely Coppola's keenness, deftness in how there is this offhand, mundane current to all the pageant. Perhaps no one knew just so that Francis Ford Coppola would be the person, the intersection (not even Robert Evans, see The Kid Stays in the Picture ), this moment where all the grandeur of the big screen would actually catch the sinister projection of the familial, the evil of banality.

The Godfather Part II (1974)
Michael Corleone is a portrait of the way refinement, focus, a kind of perfection, are also bad. It's not just that it's to a fault, but be careful of your strength because that is also your weakness. He has no vices, and that is his vice. We see how he's not interested in women, drink, gambling, all the vices he peddles. He's like the ultimate pimp (Don Vito's slight of Tattaglia notwithstanding), and his remaining strong, "clear"-headed, shrewd becomes just as much obsessive. As the script and direction give us this kind of incidental detail of him (the way he tells Fredo to get rid of the women, already at the end of The Godfather, or drinks club soda while others have liquor), showing him to have a curiously ascetic restraint, it's as if this is also the sacrifice of exactly the sort of humanity that is exploited by the gangster enterprise. Al Pacino (Coppola directing him) gives us hints of some humanity in other ways. When he's rocking himself slightly in his chair, squinting in the sunlight, or sucking himself in while others try to patronize him, it's a suggestion of the boyishness we see in the final flashback, as if provoking the relation as kid brother. It's flashes of the boy in the man, to go along with the epic, Intolerance-like plan, the parallax of the sewing and reaping for all this, this family, this enterprise. The noble, Robin Hood version of Don Corleone, elegantly played by Robert De Niro -- the amazing production design recreation of the teeming, early century Little Italy, Gordon Willis's stunning addition to the high contrast palette of The Godfather and elsewhere here with the sunny and sepia tones that are more crisp at the same time as suggesting the distance of the photo record of that era -- fulfills the vendetta curse as his own assumption even before Michael realizes it ab absurdum for the entire family. Chronologically, that is, but here it happens parallel. All this, however, fulfills the sinister glory of the The Godfather, rather as the bill come due.
But the self-contained system, and the perfection of the parable of that in the first movie, are thus cheated, if not necessarily spoiled in the second. Writer Mario Puzo and Coppola also inject the commentary into the story. Kaye's inexplicably bold move against Michael if she has acquiesced all this time seems like the conscience outside this world, not in it. Michael talking to his mother allows the very expression of inner turmoil that has been killed off by the gangster executive ascetic. Even the scene in the senate hearing, otherwise so cunningly imitating the humdrum that muffles the drama, contrives to explain to us the man brought in with Michael, though we can certainly get the idea, and it would've worked better just when Kaye asks about him later.

The Fabelmans (2022)
The boy genius filmmaker makes a movie about his own life, his childhood developing into a filmmaker, and it's -- overwritten? This struck me as the same problem as with Lincoln (Tony Kushner was a writer for both), in many scenes that drag out with speechifying, making points for us that are already there, or sifting them between bald self-aggrandizement and humbling counterstrokes, as if Spielberg is more concerned with a literary air, or as if that were what conferred the proper grandeur. The little epilogue scene with David Lynch as John Ford, where Spielberg also adopts a more Lynch tone and manner, gives a flash of flavor the rest of the movie doesn't have, and it's the ending. And what's gone before contradicts Ford's point: stop telling what it's all about.

She Said (2022)
Despite everything noble about the cause, the participation of Ashley Judd, the significance of the information and of the role of media and freedom of the press (in principle) to provide such information, this doesn't have the deference, modesty or facility of Spotlight, or even the model for that, too, All the President's Men, and not least because The New York Times features so prominently from the beginning: even if just the name, it's big enough. With the sort of credibility issues the Times has had elsewhere, amounting collectively to the matter of subordinating journalism to profitability, what kind of news, or really more interest, will sell moving from print to Internet media, it's hard not to take this as branding on this movie. But more to the matter of this story, Rose McGowan herself has expressed how she feels about the way the Times has taken credit: "I was kind of grossed out." (See the article in The Guardian.)

Bullet Train (2022)
Good-natured violence in the quirky action thriller vein, i.e. cliche, this does take a hint from Burn After Reading, and maybe a little The Big Lebowski, for Brad Pitt's character, and it's the best stroke of the movie, his non-violent, self-help, consciousness-raising dude still swimming with the sharks. But the gyrations of both the appliqué witty dialogue, and the intersections and turnabouts of this band of fools' errand, feel more like spinning wheels than moving along, even for the main premise, not to say gimmick, of the title.

Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen (2022)
This contains lots of interesting and illuminating material about the process of making this movie that was as significant in movie history ways -- in particular as one example, the push towards natural light in cinematography -- as it was for stage musicals and everything this musical, Fiddler on the Roof is about. And it's not lost on the makers of this documentary that what Fiddler director Norman Jewison says about how the theme of tradition and change in Fiddler reflected on so much outside it, like Yugoslavia where it was largely filmed, also goes for what the movie Fiddler itself was doing, carrying tradition through change. Besides interviews with Jewison, Rosalind Harris, Michele Marsh, Neva Small and John Williams, there is a nice archival interview with Topol. In indulging the good feeling about the project by those involved, it does wade into the self-congratulatory a bit much.

Suspicion (1941)
Between the melodramatic formality of Rebecca and the camp effect of Notorious, there's this, where the tension is between the drawing room drama and, on the one hand, greater suspense spectacle, and on the other, the kind of realism that would counter if not puncture that veneer and allow for the ambiguity of Cary Grant's character. The movie makes an interesting reflexive part for Grant himself, with his vaudeville background before the suave sophisticate movie roles. This would be a prime parable for the ambiguity of character itself, the flicker of personality in different contexts and our own projections, but for the script fitting it too much to the nuts and bolts of plot. Hitchcock didn't bother at the script level any more than he did with the actors' process. So it's also interesting that it's Joan Fontaine's composure that tones down the way the pendulum swings manipulate -- us, the viewer, if not her character.

Space Amoeba (1970)
The title sequence has a nice bubbly space music and sinister music montage form that the rest of the movie doesn't quite live up to. Ishiro Honda of Godzilla fame is the director, but the kaiju and their arena of attack are scaled down, a couple of stories high rather than skyscraper size, and on a single small island. There's interesting variation and detail in these rubber suit creations, based on a cuttlefish, a crab and a turtle, the latter greatly reversing the retraction of neck and head.

I Am a Camera (1955)
How much the cold, objective camera did not document. The 50s version of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories, via a Broadway play, makes a light-hearted if social comedy out of being down and out in Weimar Berlin just as the Nazis are coming to power, but as Ishwerwood himself said nothing of the homosexuality in his source books, it's not exactly the same thing as Breakfast at Tiffany's, here. Isherwood reversed this himself in his 1976 memoir, Christopher and His Kind, but particularly the movie version of Cabaret had already suggested bisexuality. Interesting as it is in this progression, in particular now the scene stands out where the character Fritz (played by Anton Diffring) talks about no longer hiding the fact he's Jewish. Julie Harris was lauded in her day for her rendition of Sally Bowles, though it also now seems tame compared to Liza Minelli's -- certainly her cabaret act -- and Laurence Harvey has his own place in all the curiosity, as a Lithuanian born Jew and, by the accounts of others, bisexual if not strictly homosexual.

Serie Noire (1979)
Jim Thompson appeals to the French, and they do him justice with their droll sang froid (see Coup de torchon). Based on his A Hell of a Woman, this screenplay by Georges Perec and Alain Corneau, directed by the latter, and with the performance of Patrick DeWaere, focuses on the character Franck Poupart, part knave, part drama queen, and his run of bad luck, what the French title refers to. There may not be a more complete character study in all the forms for kneejerk denial, distraction, displacement and tergiversation, and it's exceptional for that anyway.

Playground (2021)
The tactic by writer and director Laura Wandel to keep everything around the character of Nora is crucial to showing her position, the situation from her perspective, and conveying the mess of repercussions. It's also a little Passion of Joan of Arc, playing the ordeal mostly on Nora's face, and has a particularly nice stroke when leaving other implications of her thoughts to figure out, about swimming and deep water, for example. But forcing that even more at times by putting the background out of focus, or even the way the scene is framed or what it does or doesn't follow, feels like the director thinks we're not going to get it, or at least like an imposed affect.

I, the Jury (1953)
The first movie version of Mickey Spillane's first novel has been toned down and, well, spiffed up. It's not so much gritty and tough as rambunctious, with Mike Hammer played by an actor named Biff who looks like a wide-eyed varsity linebacker in an Andy Hardy movie. Sometimes they make him like the Mr. Hyde version of that for tougher or meaner. The strip at gunpoint scene is so strangely unseductive it's confusing, like she's trying to change and go to bed without him noticing. Title cards in between scenes are Christmas card drawings for New York City neighborhoods, a clashing quaint tone, and L.A.'s famous Bradbury building (see Blade Runner) is supposed to be part of NYC, either that or Hammer has a long commute to and from his office.

Airplane 2: The Sequel (1982)
A bigger budget and a new team were brought in to make a sequel, the business handling of property, so even the self-conscious humor of the title couldn't avoid the flatter statement of it. So it looks a little better and has maybe tighter delivery in some places. But the very fact it's copying the formula of the first means it's not that first experience, and all the manic, unpolished energy. There are some laughs here, but despite the shuttle craft and space twist, following the formula of the first becomes especially tedious in the talking-down parts, this time with William Shatner. Ken Finkleman, who had been hired to write a similar sequel, Grease 2, was also given the direction role on this one. The experience, and of Hollywood in general, was not wasted. It influenced the Canadian Finkleman in the development of future projects, making something far better by satirizing that sort of commercial solipsism, most notably The Newsroom in the 90s, which, if you don't know about it, is one of the greatest shows ever (and this is not the American series of that name, which came much later and doesn't approach it).

Airplane! (1980)
This is the Mad magazine of the movies, though its team tried to start it with Kentucky Fried Movie. Today it can seem even flat and airy, as much by the lineage it created directly as by so much else it opened the door to. Directed by the same class clown buddies that wrote it -- or rather riffed it, hung jokes on it, see Zero Hour! -- the preference is gag and joke setup over any artistic flair. But this was also its stroke. As much as the movies of the 70s, it was the TV shows that were the setup, and thus the casting of Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack, who served as, more than lower rent all-stars like the disaster movies, the starched delivery for the comic burst, an exaggeration to outbid the silly, juvenile or just absurd of so much TV drama going back to the 50s, and even to the kind of B movie fare from then that had made its way to TV production by the 70s. The burst of laughter this movie provided when it first came out had to do with that diet. The creators' next project was Police Squad, a TV show, which led to The Naked Gun.

Zero Hour! (1957)
If this movie starts to remind you of Airplane!, and then scenes in the cockpit remind you even more, and then everyone getting sick on fish even more, then it's not just you, and it's not merely one airplane disaster movie among others. While Airplane! was aiming at Airport and other disaster movies of the 70s, it found this 50s movie an already outrageous enough template, and used the dialogue wholesale. They even bought the rights to do so! (Here's a video comparing them side by side.) The 1980 spoof had some of its best setups straight from this, like, "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking," and "afterwards, how we'd watch until the sun came up," which even in the original raises eyebrows. And some lines just seemed funny already, like this one that's pretty much the whole concept: "The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner." Besides Dana Andrews as the star, and its own athlete, Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch, as co-pilot, this also has Sterling Hayden combining most of the stuff for Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges. Even with those two, it's pretty tough to top General Jack D. Ripper.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1987)
Michael Caine takes the Kuleshov effect to another level, demonstrating that even when the context of surrounding segments contains Muppets rather than other actors, his reaction shots can still suggest more meaning. With as many versions of the Dickens story as you're liable to see, having it trotted out every year (see Spirited), you might as well have it with a twist, a spice, a sprinkle, a spike of Muppets.

Nuts (1987)
The play by Tom Topor provides the basis for most of this: a noble endeavor to give us a pre-trial hearing that isn't just a show trial, and bear out the main issue, the behavior of a woman judged as crazy by mostly men in positions of power, who don't want any other picture, perhaps even the truth, presented. Crazy means more specifically not competent, in this case to stand trial, but the broader significance is not lost. The play, and the screenplay adaptation by Darryl Ponicsan and Alvin Sargent, struggle mightily with their own darlings, courtroom drama tailoring and setup, message-movie speechifying, theatrical and meaning very stagey revelations, all of this meaning, also, no matter how real -- factual or pertinent -- the story. In a great cast, particularly James Whitmore and Richard Dreyfuss do the best job of actually letting in the fresh air of banality, which is somewhat against the grain for Dreyfuss, if only for all the snappy roles on his toes. It's Barbra Streisand, and perhaps more so, the presentation of her by director Martin Ritt, that creates the fuzziest line. Even in her performance there are lurches between distracting and effective, grandiose and trenchant, which is apt for the character, but by analogy. But the lighting, the hair, the framing, even the Snake Pit splendor: no matter what gets through to the make the point, it's still a showboat.

Sour Grapes (1998)
A warmup for Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David wrote and directed this quaint little movie about irresolvable indignations. Without too much production frills, it's nonetheless businesslike in the movie way, lacking the full charm of the off-the-cuff approach of his later series. But the dispatch also has the characteristic glib flight of serious matters.

Rat Race (2001)
Directed by Jerry Zucker of Airplane fame, among others, and written by Andy Breckman of Saturday Night Live fame, this updating of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, in spirit, not directly, has the merit of being slicker and quicker than either the madcap race or the dumb-joke disaster movie. The comment of this is even in the movie itself, when John Cleese's character is saying "go" without further ado and the other characters aren't getting it. However un-funny some of the dumb action gags may be, the whole thing has a pace that keeps it close enough to surreal or at least cartoonish.

Sr. (2022)
Robert Downey Jr.'s tribute to his father is worthwhile because of the way, just as he proclaims in it, Sr. has become the footnote to Jr., so if you don't know about his work, this will introduce you to Putney Swope, Up the Academy, Too Much Sun, and even more you may not know about, like Greaser's Palace, Hugo Pool, or of course the introduction of Jr. in the movies, Pound, as well as to Robert Downey Sr., the man. Downey Jr. pays tribute to the relationship and to Sr. the director with the affectionate battle for the direction of this movie, but it's also a statement about simply being with, as discussed with other cases, and becomes less about info and public persona and more about personal feeling.

Emergency Declaration (2021)
Hmm, pilot has trouble flying because of past incident and he's on a flight with his child where there's an outbreak of illness -- do Korean audiences know about Airplane? But that in turn leads to: Zero Hour! Since it's played straight, it's an update of the latter, but it's really hard not to laugh at this because of the former and because this has such a bizarre rush-job manner, like jump cuts in the story even if not in the editing, and a pile-on pace and buildup as sensational as Snakes on a Plane. They piled onto the original concept, too, by making the outbreak bio-terror. Song Kang-ho, known for his movies with director Bong Joon Ho (Parasite, The Host, etc.) is a tireless -- and wreck-less in a whole other way, he can't be slowed by car wrecks -- detective.

A Christmas Tale [Un conte de Noël] (2008)
It's a grab bag of artistic whimsy. The characters already talk like sketch notes about themselves in the dialogue, but apparently that's not enough, so at times they just talk to the camera, because Arnaud Desplechin (writer, director) and Emmanuel Bourdieu (writer) don't want us to miss anything of the conception. Even the musical score wanders all over the world, from Irish pipes to Asian strings, and I kept wondering if they were trying to evoke anything or just everything. There's a really nice dissolve technique Desplechin uses within scenes rather than between them, floating focus to some detail, like what the character's reading. But he doesn't stick to that, it's one flourish among others, and even if, as director, he got out of the way of the characters and performances and story, that's also a heap. And the skeletons just keep coming out of the closet. I get it that there are real things to deal with and problems the holiday covers up, and I get the big serious matter of gift and giving made a nice precious turn on the Christmas kind, but it all becomes such a portentous din of one family's indulgence, that when they're showing a surgical procedure, I'm thinking, geez, where's the eggnog?

The Good House (2021)
Written and directed by Maya Forbes (The Larry Sanders Show, Infinitely Polar Bear) and Wallace Wolodarsky (The Simpsons), this has enough salt to keep it from a literary cuteness (it's from a novel by Ann Leary), using the latter also -- Sigourney Weaver talks to the camera -- for a clever setup of what our narrator is missing. It's a good role for Weaver, for frankness through the well-appointed veneer, and Kevin Kline is good in a low-key role and way.

Moonage Daydream (2022)
Director Brett Morgan is trying for something artsy with assemblage and fly-on-the-wall at the same time, no overview narration, only Bowie himself from some other recorded interviews, or the sound from the clips. But he also fixes on certain songs at points, wanting to play all or most of them, while continuing the montage or surfing, and this combination is scattered rather than perceptive, not really doing either and especially since it's not clear what the songs are signifying otherwise. This does collect and present material we may not see otherwise, but the way it's presented, assembled, doesn't give us any further insight into Bowie. It's like trying to watch when someone else has control of the remote and is jumping around, and makes Bowie seem flighty. The interview clips here are predominately Bowie obliging the sort of vapid presumptions that media -- certainly in those days -- represented as the pervasive if not normal view, but was often the media's own or that they felt it necessary to cater or pander to. Prejudices thrust at you are defiance more than honest or innocent questions, and Bowie's unflagging diplomacy didn't redress this, didn't counter that underlying scheme, challenge or displace it (for example, "why do you have to be that way" presuming the one asking the question is not). This movie, then, adds nothing more frank that breaks out of that frame.

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
Right before West Side Story, Robert Wise directed this, much more interesting along some of the same lines, even musically. Wise produced along with star Harry Belafonte, who also chose Abraham Polonsky, though blacklisted, to do the screenplay. John O. Killens, a black novelist, was the front for Polonsky, until the latter had his credit restored in 1996. The music score is by John Lewis and The Modern Jazz Quartet, as part of a larger orchestra for the film, but who also made an album from the score and incorporated some of it into their repertoire. A year after Shadows and The Defiant Ones, this is a grittier, franker crime drama with white and black shackled together in a caper, due to their economic situations, but at odds because of the racism of the white. Shelley Winters, Ed Begley and Gloria Graham round out a good cast with Belafonte and Robert Ryan.

Black Adam (2022)
OK, we know from the comics that Black Adam is -- related? -- is that the word? -- to Captain Marvel by the somehow cosmic wizards, the lightning bolt symbol and similar uniform, and of course "shazam," even though the movie tells us nothing about that, and rather sets up a meeting with Superman, but somehow this is also like the X-Men, with a huge estate that has an even hugher and ridiculouser specious technology underground hover-jet-craft port, and The Avengers, with the pent-up meeting in the hover-jet-craft (with detachable pod that somehow doesn't need wings and is also a submarine) and the arc shot, repeating a scene in Justice League which itself was repeating one in The Avengers (and good grief, how many other movies and shows, this making a Lazy Susan of the scene and characters one of the biggest cliches of the last couple of decades). The attempt at humor is a welcome move away from DC's heavier bent, but it's just not as well done as Shazam or Marvel movies. And the clash with a second string of heroes -- Hawkman, Dr. Fate, and two others that seem to have as their powers getting real big and swirling colors -- thins out their story and Black Adam's and the mere mortals' in the fake Egypt-like country.

Die Hard 2 (1988)
Pure sequel fat. This takes the first movie as formula and just bloats all the selling points.

Die Hard (1988)
What it's become as an alternative Christmas movie, that itself already a cliché, was primed not even so much in the incidental Christmas time setting, as in a whole other kind of ritualization of warm and fuzzy values. The family stuff is obvious, the way a beleaguered husband and wife just happen to be tied into this terrorist plot that's also the action spectacle plot. It's in the conversations between McClane (Bruce Willis) and Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) and the contrast to the hi-tech German terrorists, who resemble a Bond villain outfit more than the Baader-Meinhoff gang. While this is a welcome displacement of the Asian and especially Japanese scapegoating about purchasing of American property of this period (it would get even worse into the 90s) -- the Nakatomi tower in the movie, played by the Fox Plaza, is built and run by a Japanese multinational, but their director of American operations was raised in the U.S. and was even in the internment camps, the script makes sure to let us know -- the Euro-boogies are still a scheme of other to regular folk: an elitist bigger fish to the white-collar one.

Spirited (2022)
Not Elf v. Deadpool, tempting as that is, but in fact A Christmas Carol done as The Good Place. There are so many laborious gyrations of Christmas miracle variety, including the musical conceit, to get to a few good gags and quips and turns. Still, it makes for good background din while you're talking over egg nog or cleaning up Scotch tape.

Armageddon Time (2022)
What's being passed as Bildungsroman by writer and director James Gray, or at least packaged with it, is not so much commentary on, as expressing the discomfort and dismay at the rise of fascism in the United States, or it's normalization. See also Amsterdam. It's more a snapshot of life, a segment in 1980 of a Jewish boy's growing pains with public school and private school, conformity of any kind, authority and creativity, a black friend and double standards as well as outright racism. The crucial marker here is the election of Ronald Reagan. If Gray is shrewd about the passing references to that, while having the education matter, public, private and learning your own way, so prevalent, the personal drama played patiently otherwise makes some fluctuations that, if not quite wild, seem pressed for dramatic effect.

Sounder (1972)
This is significant and admirable for being a portrait of a black family, as straight or drama, that is, without being the sort of specialty relegation or caricature of so much American movie history. It received lots of critical acclaim and even Oscar attention. Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson were both nominated for lead performance awards. Still for me, if not exactly stiff or timorous, it's somehow too reverent, in the manner of The Waltons if not that much. Director Martin Ritt plays it sensitively, but in a straight way that lacks something, perhaps the effortless sweep and pathos of something like Pather Panchali. When I was going through my dog phase of literature -- The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Old Yeller -- around fifth and sixth grade, I read the book, and then saw the movie the first time and thought, why is this not about the dog? In some ways, that's what it lacks, an anchor of the portrait and sentiment, a perspective that was not shifted or treated or prepared, the wrinkles ironed out. At the least, the title no longer really makes sense.

Caught (1996)
There's eight million stories in the naked city, says The Naked City, and Mark E. Smith said, somewhere, there's only about eight types that everyone can be reduced to (I forget what number he actually said, so I'll pretend the symmetry, here). Here's one of those scads of films that fly under the radar, even before digital video and streaming service production days, and remind you of all the different backgrounds of places and people you can have for noirish love triangles. Directed by Robert M. Young, this keeps to the feeling of tight New York apartments and hemmed in shops, and has good performances by Edward James Olmos and Maria Conchito Alonso, an aptly hazy one by Arie Verveen, and a more interesting creepy one by Steven Schub.

Vengeance (2022)
A setup scene at the beginning makes this look like it's going to be cutesy, smug, overworked satire about smug, selfish status seekers, the kind of writing where the characters are speaking the commentary about them, like of lot of The Office, which B.J. Novak wrote some episodes for (the American one). But once Novak, the writer and director of this, as the character in it leaves New York for Texas, this changes and so did my impression of Novak even from The Office. That opening scene makes a bookend with a plot-twist ending that, well, OK, is set up, but still feels more standard and tinhorn. In between, you get to know the characters in a more interesting and salty way, just like B.J.'s character gets to. The parts are all played well, and particularly nice is the tradeoff of Boyd Holbrook as not so badass and somewhat superficial and Ashton Kutcher as vice versa.

Men (2022)
In the modern Twilight Zone vein, this is somewhere between Black Mirror and Inside No. 9. It's tending towards the broader satiric and allegorical stripe of the latter, especially the suitably cringeworthy characterizations of Rory Kinnear (who was also in an episode of Inside No. 9), most of all his landlord anorak (not strictly referring to his jacket, though he wears similar, but to the type of person associated with that, what Americans might call a nerd), but not as savvy. Writer and director Alex Garland, who also did Ex Machina and Annihilation, progresses in a way that's more effect and plot than metaphorical, and even in a climactic scene where it would be all-out horror effect, it seems to be all about special effects fetish.

The Landlord (1970)
The flighty and excursive character sketches seem more grounded, despite the oxymoron, in the environment especially as shot by Gordon Willis. It's fine at the scene level, but loose in the overall plan. Hal Ashby made his directorial debut at the urging of Norman Jewison, who produced this and for whom Ashby served as editor for The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and In the Heat of the Night, among others. The loose but lush style favors cozy, candid performances, most notably from Diana Sands and Lee Grant.

The 2022 Sight & Sound poll

See my take here.

Kusama Infinity (2018)
Documentary, directed by Heather Lenz and written by her and Keita Ideno, about artist Yayoi Kusama, another case of a woman who was passed over, neglected even as influence or art history. See also Hilma af Klint. And in this case, as presented here, who had ideas stolen by Oldenberg, Warhol and Samaras. The movie does a good job of covering the whole arc of Kusama's life and work, and the interworking of those, which bears out not only the psychological background pertinent to her, but even the greater figuration of her motifs and obsessions. The "infinity net," matrix and dot patterns, and Kusama's field of flowers moment, bring to mind Roger Caillois's temptation of space, and the matter of perception, a living conundrum, of both containing and being contained by surroundings, the environment, space. What this film also shows, though not it's point or bearing, is how the drive of Kusama not simply to make her art but be recognized, even make it big -- what got her aptly considered a publicity hound during her happening phase, but was still wrongly used to dismiss her -- is the inversion of this immersion of the self, like the narcissistic assertion (her work involves conscious statements of this, like her mirror balls), but also the larger scale of this, when she becomes so popular, like Keith Haring, that her work starts to literally take over the environment. The ego as revenge on the field of flowers, the larger formations. This is also where the matter of the frame comes back in.

Weekend (1967)
The pinnacle of Jean-Luc Godard's intellectual collision montage. In the Nietzschean sense of play, as well as the Derridean one, Godard has taken thought through his experience of movies, all ground up with bourgeois chestnuts and propaganda. Gallows humor has become the height of Brechtian distancing. Those who can play with things the most in their mind are the ones who confound categories, and Godard is too sober for the strictly artsy, too surreal for pragmatists. The destruction of civilization as routine weekend is the apparent content, or pretext, in the form of often monotonous scrolling or oval tracking shots emphasizing the flatness of cinema, while the dialogue plunders other territory: Georges Bataille, Friedrich Engels and Lewis Morgan, Lewis Carroll. The latter gives us the way to see the whole thing as those logical exercises in incongruous garb, and this is an Alice in Wonderland for grownups, but bent for dressing down.

Z (1969)
At the height of protest movements, after 1968 in Paris and during the Vietnam war, events that led to a right-wing coup in Greece were the basis for a book, and that in turn for this movie directed by Costa-Gavras. The turn here was a documentary style elaboration with the air and pace of a thriller, but it's what each did to the other: an almost insouciant style of political exposé. It's carried by the great soundtrack, too. Despite the melodramatic orientation, especially with the wife of the murdered politician, played by Irene Pampas and Yves Montand, respectively, the tone is not melodramatic gravitas or sentimentality. In a good cast, this is brought off best by Jean-Louis Trintignant as the examining magistrate. The casual disclosure of the workings of right-wing despotism, fascist underground organizations in league with corrupt government, military and police officials, and the use of repression and terrorist tactics, especially with the naive neutrality of the magistrate, now seems surprising, for post-WWII, the 60s, countless military coups and dictatorships around the world since, and after Watergate and everything else up to now when Republicans use this stuff as campaign platform, slogans and talking points. Lessons that are obvious but we keep having to learn.

Supercop (1992)
Jackie Chan deflates the machismo of serious action movies and his general winning manner and tongue-in-cheek approach to martial arts make it more in the spirit of play. That drunken master tack is used here, so that the title is ironic, as everywhere they use the term in the story when not just dubious. Still, the gangster melodrama and plot mechanics are at the level of hide-and-seek farce choreography, which makes it tedious before you even get to the stunt-filled climactic action sequence which has inspired numerous imitations, as well as hyperbolic effusions from Quentin Tarantino. The Michelle Yeoh part of this, red Chinese agent and motorcycle stunts, was lifted by Tomorrow Never Dies.

A Wedding (1978)
The rolling, gliding, sprawling plan from Nashville unfolds the ensemble of a wedding heading to the reception, where it turns out the ensemble itself isn't as big as some hoped. The fun is all there of picking up bits and pieces and building the bigger picture of these two families just as they're doing so, and of Robert Altman's conducting and the acting of another interesting assemblage (Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley pre-Popeye, he and Dennis Christopher pre-Breaking Away, and check out Mia Farrow's role, among others), but the script, by Altman and three others, loses that snooping suspense when it goes for big tragic turns played as broad comedy.

Is That Black Enough for You? (2021)
Film critic Elvis Mitchell surveys black American cinema, particularly of the 60s and 70s, with his own voiceover excogitation, clips, and interviewees that provide a cross-section of actors, actresses, writers and directors (see the cast on IMDb). If the broad view rushes, skims, seems to slight things, even some of Mitchell's darlings, it serves other interesting points he's making about the emergence of blacks in the "new Hollywood" period, most notably the influence of the protagonist swagger and music soundtracks on movies in general. See the side-by-side comparison of the openings of Shaft and Saturday Night Fever. Mitchell fleshes out the ambivalence of "blaxploitation," with different responses from his subjects, and how that's already a matter of any larger context of pop culture, not a relegation. But he also zeros in on the significance of what doesn't get the attention of box office or Oscars, Killer of Sheep. That movie's director Charles Burnett is an interviewee here.

The Big Clock (1948)
Although No Way Out, the 1987 movie version of the book, updated this for the Cold War, this version, adapted by Jonathan Latimer from the book by Kenneth Fearing and directed by John Farrow, as well as keeping the general pertinence about ownership of time and labor -- the big clock cleverly figures in more than one way -- has a perhaps surprising resonance with today for media giants and their moguls. By contrast also to the 1987 movie, this one allows for the man caught in the trap of hunting himself to dangle the matter before the perpetrators and play them, also extending the earlier colloquial banter and social tangles. Ray Milland adds some Lost Weekend echoes, Charles Laughton plays another of his heavies with relish, there's a clever cross of the culprits, and there's one of those conclusions characteristic of the period that's as abrupt for resolution, and retribution, as it is for grim effect. More than that, there's the great set design of the sprawling offices of the swank media empire building, and the cinematography of John Seitz showing it off, along with his great lighting treatment to suit it, a softer, closer look of the kind of ceiling lights of such office building.

Amsterdam (2022)
David O. Russell's latest -- he wrote and directed -- eventually looks like a social and political comment, and a historical reminder, with plenty of stuff that bears repeating if not encountering the first time, interesting if not necessary, but it's pitched in such a strange way. Perhaps he didn't want to play this straight, have it blend in with period dramas and message movies for perfunctory earnestness or concern, but it's like a Coen brothers movie, with its leering dialogue plan -- about half the movie looks like it was shot from a go-cart -- a slower version of Miller's Crossing or with the arch manner of The Hudsucker Proxy.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Ultimately it's a romance and a melodrama, and even a preposterous one -- the rest of the lives of two bipolar people becoming a couple isn't the part we want to see -- but it's so well wrought by all involved, the portrait from writer to performers, and gets plenty of digs in on peachy romance and optimism, and on how normal behavior is often just an undiagnosed version (the father and son). There are payoffs that are hard to resist despite the contrivance (a show-up of superstitious logic), and despite the dance contest being the biggest slice of romance contrivance, the result has a fun twist on triumphal climaxes, similar to a joke from Saturday Night Live about great moments in betting history, when one football team didn't win but beat the spread. Something like this, by contrast to director David O. Russell's own I Heart Huckabees or Spanking the Monkey, battened down, streamlined into even something more formulaic, actually works better as social comedy because it's not as pointed, and approaches Alexander Payne.

No Way Out (1987)
From the trend of somewhat, as in trying to be, adult thrillers of the 80s and 90s (see The Fugitive) that can be interesting and daft at the same time, there is this entry directed by Roger Donaldson from a screenplay by Robert Garland. The interesting idea comes from the book by Kenneth Fearing, which had an earlier movie version of the same title, The Big Clock, made in 1948: a man is tasked with hunting himself as a suspect in a murder that the real murderer is trying to frame him for. This version changes things to Cold War era politics and intelligence, trying to muscle up the significance, but it thus loses the real reach of the book and earlier movie, allegorical as well as direct about time and labor, the more general implication of having your time divided by a boss and being made to work against yourself. The updated setting also makes the plot mechanics more far-fetched. Kevin Costner was making his big move to stardom, this coming out the same year as The Untouchables, but this shows the stiffness and flatness that make him not the right lead for just anything. Sean Young's role is the contrast to that and her stark presentation in Blade Runner, but the attempt at romantic playfulness, as much by the director, comes off flighty. Gene Hackman's role actually makes for a nice twist on so many heavies he plays elsewhere, because the evil is delegated.

The Fugitive (1993)
As for the object of the parody (see Wrongfully Accused), is it more straight that these thrillers, no matter how full they may seem -- how interesting the premise or how relatively well made, like this one -- contain so much air? Like false front buildings, they can seem more impressive if you ignore the gaps. Here it's where is the money coming from, that the fugitive protagonist (played by Harrison Ford) is using even for his meager underground existence in Chicago. Since the movie is based on a TV series, I guess they figured the audience would assume all that was cut out of it. For all the puffed up suspense and action -- running from trains and jumping off dams -- it doesn't seem quite confident in the intrigue of the basic situation (cf. Frantic).

Wrongfully Accused (1998)
Leslie Nielsen was trotted out again for another self-consciously cornball spoof, written and directed by Pat Proft, who worked with Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker on Police Squad and The Naked Gun, and wrote and directed Hot Shots. Old and tired is part of the territory, here, so either you never liked this stuff or you'll still find something to laugh at. What's new is that a supposedly more serious thriller, The Fugitive, is added to the shooting gallery as object of parody, alongside 70s cop shows and disaster movies, and Top Gun. There was a wave of these thrillers in the 80s and 90s trying to be more adult, sexy and provocative, Hitchcock-like, but still more like the action and blockbuster stuff that was ruling the market. It's interesting, then, that gags here are also on Casablanca, North by Northwest, Braveheart, Titanic and Field of Dreams, alongside those on Anaconda, Charlie's Angels and Mission: Impossible.

See How They Run (2022)
"Meta" is a common feature of mysteries, especially whodunits, even as just the self-consciously artificial quality, so a meta-mystery is nothing new or unique. See Sleuth, Deathtrap. What this movie reflexively doubles and comments is the world's longest running play, Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, with affectionate ribbing like an insider's appreciation for an outsider's scoffing. There's even a layer of movie reflexivity thrown on the lasagna (no one has succeeded at bringing off a movie version of the play, which serves its purpose of asking its audience at the end of each performance not to spoil it for other audiences): a brassy, noirish American movie director (played by Adrian Brody), who hates whodunits and wants to transfer its annoying cliches into annoying American movie cliches, narrates the whole thing, Sunset Boulevard style. Agathie Christie and Richard Attenborough, who first played the Mousetrap's D.S. Trotter, become characters here (with, another signal of the artifice, actor Harris Dickinson a head taller than just about everyone in the cast, by contrast to the shorter Attenborough), there are references to other movie and real crime history, such as Rillington Place (see 10 Rillington Place for more about that). It's fun in the vein of Knives Out, without being quite as much, and it returns the favor of Daniel Craig as American detective with Sam Rockwell as British inspector.

Spin Me Round (2022)
What makes this movie more fun and interesting is all the bubbles it's bursting: romcoms, even non-com romances, specifically the cliched Tuscany ones, and the cliche of Tuscany itself; foodie pretense and shitty food pretense; shitty corporate culture and how it's like a cult because of business heads who are narcisstic creeps and also masher creeps. Directed by Jeff Baena, and co-written by him and lead Alison Brie, it has enough bite not to get too cute, but is sober enough with the character comedy and even the perverse twists.

The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday (1976)
Boy, you aren't livin' if you haven't experienced the 70s theme-park style nostalgia for the Old West. And for grown-ups there were movies that promised a bawdier version. This one is dunk-a-lunk wa-wa in TV movie fashion, though it has whores and liquor so it can be at the big movies. Still, Lee Marvin, Oliver Reed and Strother Martin give spirited performances, as does even Kay Lenz, a new darling from TV just about then (she married David Cassidy).

The Abominable Snowman (1957)
The expeditious style of director Val Guest doesn't always let you stop and smell the flowers, but it certainly keeps things from dragging, even when it's basically conceptual and expository, like this. The movie goes so far in the direction of not showing, the monster movie striptease, it may seem a joke, but it's actually making an interesting twist on the whole lore and psychology of the idea of monsters, similar to Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Millions Years to Earth), which was also written by Nigel Kneale. In it's movie version of theatrical staging way, it's fairly effective.

The Naked City (1948)
Considered one of the earliest police procedural movies, or at least a forerunner of them, this is actually longer on soap opera than investigation minutiae. What distinguishes it is the location shooting in New York City, and for this alone it's a worthy record. In the same way director Jules Dassin's Rififi had some showbiz fluff to go along with a grittier heist, here his off-the-cuff feeling with the streets and offices of the day goes along with some pretty stagy presentation, including the voiceover narration, which is more like a folksy travelogue than the noirish feel the series would come to have.

You're Next (2011)
Did somebody combine Kind Hearts and Coronets and Straw Dogs as the idea for this? Though it's not exactly a comedy, its tack is more like satire than horror, the observation of characters and wit more than fright for the action. The turns keep coming about what's going on, the suspense from the situation, so it doesn't do too much stretching out. The Movie Brains Special Research Team found the connections between this and Creature from the Black Lagoon for your double bill and trivia needs: characters named "Zee," and arrowheaded harpoons and crossbows.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
The gill man marks a step in the evolution of movie monsters, not just Universal ones, from superstition to science. Think vampires and werewolves on one end, "xenomorphs" on the other. Mary Shelley got us on the path of science creating its own monsters that goes through the atomic mutations of the 50s. But here, in that same post-war era of the idealization of technological control, evolution, paleontology and zoology spark the imagination of monsters from nature that wasn't tampered with, like the actual discoveries of creatures thought extinct, the coelacanth or, referred to in the movie, the kamongo, a lungfish. As rubber suit technology for monsters, this was the top of the line, and also as 3D technology this was one of the best, particularly because of the underwater scenes. The 3D wave was already on the ebb when this came out in 1954, so it had a limited 3D release and a wider release as a regular movie. As a kid I saw it on TV and didn't even know it had been a 3D movie until there was a revival showing at the Castro Theater in San Francisco in 2006. The original polarization method with black and white enhances the stereoscopic effect, and underwater provides the best environment for overall 3D effect, even better than outer space. Fish, bubbles, whatever swimming or submerged appears to float out into the room, or over the audience in the theater. (See further comments here.)

Hack-o-Lantern (1988)
This came out -- if direct to video counts -- the same year as Hobgoblins, and it's a similarly embarrassing mishmash of 80s conceits: teen sex comedies and horror; bad clothing and all sorts of pandering with props and gewgaws and stuff on the wall; and perhaps somewhat uniquely, lurching into a standup routine that's supposed to have broken out spontaneously at the already tacky and hacky Halloween party, with hackish 80s movie gyrations poorly portraying that it's as hilarious as somebody -- the director? -- actually thought. It -- boasts? -- two performers of some greater renown: Hy Pyke who had a small part in Blade Runner, here doing some bizarre Elizabeth Ashley drag shtick; and Jeanna Fine, star of the already fairly established direct-to-video porn trade. Surely they intended all this with "hack." RiffTrax recycles it for you.

Snowtown (2011)
Kitchen sink with a twist of Malick, this turns the real events of the Snowtown murders, which led to one of the longest trials in Australian history, into a study of toxic, not to say homicidal, masculinity and pathological bigotry. Despite some grisly details, it mostly portrays the slower anxiety of the social pressure exerted on one boy to conform to this behavior, and it might even be tilted a bit too precious. Did the real-life accomplice who turned into a state witness provide such a model for the conflict and anguish used demonstratively here? Nonetheless, the scenes, especially of group conversations, are done well and effectively, as is the scheme of social environment and the trade-off of suffering and causing it.

The Dreamers (2003)
Back to something more intimate than parade floats like The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, but involved in some more interesting ways than Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci directed this memoire evocation of 68 Paris written by Gilbert Adair that's like In the Realm of the Senses despite the inspiration of Cocteau's Les enfants terribles for the book and the explicit references to other movies Bertolucci added. It's engaging, Bertolucci's handling of it, until the part with the virgin blood in the kitchen scene. This is just like the literal bullshit in 1900. I don't know if Bertolucci added this -- he took out the explicit homosexual parts -- but it's the sort of embellishment bullshit that's supposed to be more expressive. Like the old-timer who wants to tell us how much fuller life was, imposing the embellishment, the romanticism of the characters is tainting the whole conception, I think Bertolucci's head.

Jigsaw (1962)
Based on a novel by American Hilary Waugh who pioneered the police procedural subgenre with Last Seen Wearing, still considered one of the best, this British movie was written and directed by Val Guest, of earlier Hammer fame. The dispatch that made his sci-fi Quatermass II less a thriller here works well for understatement to emphasize the investigative approach, even with its local quirks, the story reset to the Brighton area (from Connecticut in the novel). As with some parts of Hitchcock's Frenzy, which may have followed suit of this and others, the lurid stuff is implied, played off the casual manner of D.I. Fellows and his more mundane details: dieting, trying to quit smoking, frets about the football club. That and the ending, cutting off without epilogue once its been cinched, prefigure Columbo.

Rancho Notorious (1952)
Fritz Lang directed this frolic in the Wild West, written by Daniel Taradash (From Here to Eternity, Picnic), where the bad guys all congenially pitch in for a collective hideout -- an honest 10% of any take! -- to saloon maven Marlene Dietrich. Intended or not, it's a reprise of Destry Rides Again for her (interesting that Mel Ferrer's character is named "Frenchy" which was Dietrich's name in Destry). Lang accentuates the yarn spinning: a character in pursuit of information gets stories with flashbacks told by others sitting around the porch or the cozy hideout, and a ballad through the whole thing refrains "hate, murder and revenge" in such a brazen tone drop -- like the Grinch song -- it's hard not to take it comically. But the script has some perfunctory shoot 'em up mechanics and then such automatic nobility at the end, it seems any more interesting implication, with the tone of, for example, M, even for honor among thieves, has been quashed. But while we're on this, here's a case of two Germans, Lang and Dietrich, who became American citizens, the former having fled the Nazis and the latter who gave so much to the effort against them, to remind us just how commonplace and American and patriotic -- the Greatest Generation -- the whole idea of anti-fascist used to be.

Persona (1966)
A story about two women, an actress who stops talking and a nurse who attends her, becomes the figure par excellence, in movies if that's not also anything, of identity and reaction to the other, identity which is reaction to the other. Different people or different parts of personality, likeness and difference, affinity and agony, intimacy and betrayal, ego as defense, wanting to have and wanting to be, envy and incorporation, public and private, extrovert and introvert, hot and cold, id and superego, gender across the divide of even the same, woman as other or as more exemplary of this identification as the other, the mother relationship as even sharing a body and carrying another, representation and duplicity, analysis and resistance, vampirism real or surreal, and the real or surreal -- all this and even other ways to put it are there but as such a deft stroke of movie-making from Ingmar Bergman, who tended to be more theatrical. Perhaps it was his own illness (he came up with the idea while recovering from pneumonia in a hospital) or perhaps the subject matter, but the reflection about the form and medium itself -- it's only fitting that the self-consciousness include the means of conveying it -- made this not just more, but indissociably cinematic. Autological. The framing arc lamp of the projector, the floating images as in a prologue montage that cite symbols or nightmares even from cinema history, the movie playing its own breakdown at a similar moment for a character, a shot and reverse dialogue process scene that is not typically intercut but repeated, draw the position of the viewer into the reflection by making express the means of the representation.

The nurse is played by Bibi Andersson and the images here are from the movie.

Creature (2011)
It's almost comical how uncomical this becomes, how seriously they take it, get into it. The slasher movie style self-conscious attempt at humor at the beginning and the B-movie trappings, with swamp and gators and depraved locals and Sid Haig (whose character's name is "Chopper"), seem like the tongue is in cheek, but then the gatorized Bigfoot legend (the creature looks like they stole the plans for Spider-Man villain The Lizard, which came out a year later) turns into this protracted tangle of incest Swamp Thing sacrifice, the cosmetic fodder actors start getting very serious looks and the music gets real serious, and you want to laugh at even that, but the laughs don't come out, which leaves you with your jaw dropped. The climactic mud wrestling is one of the worst cases of dragging out repetition trying to pass for suspense ever.

Illeana Douglas movie pitch from Search and Destroy.

The Machinist (2004)
Christian, my dear boy, why don't you just try acting? This approaches torture porn, watching Christian Bale, who reportedly dropped 60 pounds for the role, and just before he had to beef up again for Batman. There's some interesting work here by director Brad Anderson and his cast, but the script by Scott Kosar doesn't really tie things to the past it's supposed to be tracking -- or rather, all the tying it does seems out of proportion to the cryptic event. Are there supposed to be other relations here? Like Bale's preparation for it, the movie may be doing way more than needed for suffering.

Drive My Car (2021)
As with Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, this movie by Ryusuke Hamaguchi sprawls across story lines, but rather than separate ones, vignettes, this has them all in one. Despite the uniform delivery, a plain, composed style that is more like read-through (within the story there is an explanation, perhaps endorsement, for this), it varies in tone or aspect, from sophisticated to earnest. All of this can make it seem elaborate, complex as life itself, or contrived. There's the frank discussion of sex, including the involvement of discussion, conversation and even story making and telling, in sex itself, erotic relay and vicariousness similar to French literature, along with the major part that Western theater, particularly Chekhov plays. Hamaguchi has interesting construction, as script, for example the way the relationship of story-telling and sex is at first mysterious and then later explained. But abjuring cinematic style, a la Bresson, often comes across as just lacking it, for example with some very prosaic long shots of the car that look like they could be in a business promotional film or news program. The Persona-like thread of the actor finding Chekhov to be too truthful to bear props up the sort of solemnity that produces the opposite of the dynamic in Chekhov's plays, where characters are often not confronting the truth in ways that seem anticlimactic.

Masking Threshold (2021)
The Internet has had surprisingly little effect on the form of movies. Not that it has had no effect, just that it hasn't created a major change in form, but that's also because the movies have continued to be a standard of idealization carried over to the digital media, like the way video games try to be movie-like. Here is a movie, by a group of mostly Austrians -- director and co-writer Johannes Grenzfurthner -- that weaves together subjective camera, macro photography, DIY videos (as on YouTube), the rabbit holes of Internet searching that can fuel any conceit of independent research no matter how modest or advanced, socialization and isolation, psychological profiling, nerd culture and movie genre for a form that is refreshingly not like conventional movies. The detail montage with voiceover acts more like a documentary form, but gives the sense of subjective absorption in a world that is both expanded by information and drastically narrowed to physical location. Perhaps the biggest and best difference, it's not dummied down. Grenzfurthner and company present a view of nerd culture that is both involved and critical, which goes further towards confronting a larger technocratic problem that existed before the Internet but is more pervasive because of it. There are lurches of sophistication and amateurishness that nonetheless serve the depiction, some of the detail can seem like gross-out or torture porn though that's also apt for the portrait, and it finally falls into a patness with what occurs that makes it predictable. The ending is not as effective, for being too much like genre. We can get where it's going, and it might've been better to show the progression also from an opposite orientation, the subjective transcendence of even consequence.

Chance Bill:
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Film (1965)
La Jetée (1962)
However great the feature length The General, the 45-minute Sherlock Jr. shows the ingenuity of Buster Keaton along other axes, including reflexive gags about movies and movie watching, and I think it's his best. The double exposure where his dream version splits astrally from the sleeping Buster is echoed, even if inadvertently, in the 1965 Film with the mysterious splitting that occurs with points of view. The movie is a 20-minute short concocted by Samuel Beckett who made his only visit to the U.S. to work with Keaton. (In The Lovable Cheat of 1949, Keaton plays a character who, owed money, is told to wait for a man named Godeau who never shows. More direct inspiration for Beckett?) As the Movie Brains Michigan branch discovered, it turns out these make a great bill with another famous short that's also one of the greatest movies, Chris Marker's La Jetée. Film is essentially silent save for one "shhh," and La Jetee is made up of still photos except for one brief sequence of moving image (where of course the individual frames that are themselves stills create the illusion of movement). La Jetée carries on the thread of splitting, perceiver and perceived, in its own protagonist's memory projections into his past and future.

You can watch all these, even as the same bill, on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/silent-sherlock-jr-

https://archive.org/details/film-by-samuel-becket-w-buster-keaton-sunan-reed-and-james-karen-8-hti-tvn-pu-4

https://archive.org/details/la-jetee-1962
(Use cc controls for English subtitles for La Jetée.)

Fletch (1985)
I don't know if Gregory McDonald's novel was like this, but as adapted by Andrew Bergman and Phil Alden, and directed by Michael Ritchie, the convolutions of the mystery plot don't really make sense, and have capricious or arbitrary turns or resolutions. It's really nothing but background for Chevy Chase showboating. There are scenes like the one with the airplane mechanics, which has perhaps the funniest Chase caricature, that leave behind even plausible bullshitting for a nearly Bugs Bunny level of disguise shenanigans.

Black Bear (2020)
Lawrence Michael Levine's script, which he also directed, involves variations, but there's an imbalance. A scene with a guest at a couple's secluded lake house builds suspense with the awkwardness of conversation when we're even unsure of the relationships, also because it's played well by the three actors, Aubrey Plaza, Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbot. But the variation is longer and reflexive, and though there's the suggestion of others, having only these two makes it more uneven. Suspense about the relationships is not built, here, but rather hammered and dragged out. They gilded their lily.

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)
On the heels of Pennies from Heaven, Steve Martin teamed up with Carl Reiner again (see The Jerk) and they did their own Gordon Willis act (see also Zelig). A spoof of film noir or gumshoe movies included editing in clips from the 40s so that Martin would seem to interact with Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, for example. Rather than an intricate case or mystery plot, this is mostly played for the same kind of turns as Martin gags, so beating a path to find someone to pose as a blonde in a setup proves to be a MacGuffin when Martin just decides to do it himself in drag, the further joke being it's right in front of Rachel Ward. Mostly just dopey fun (see the title), it's nonetheless also interesting as work of cinematographer Michael Chapman and the last movie for both costume designer Edith Head and composer Miklos Rozsa.

World of Apu (1959)
The final chapter in the Apu trilogy presents the main character as a young man trying to find a living after studies, though his main interest is writing a novel. Apu lacks the taste for labor, at least as it is in some cases in the big city, and stumbles into marriage, only to encounter again the circles of life that echo for us as well from the other stages, in Pather Panchali and Aparajito. In the same deft strokes, as with his sister and mother in the previous movies, Satyajit Ray gives us the relationship with the wife, but there is also a moment of pathos that gathers up the whole train as a complex twist of real life and representation, involving the pages of the character's novel. Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novels, that Ray adapted, gave this moment as much implication for Ray's own life. It's a reflexive conundrum but with folds and folds of feelings, the ambivalence of memory and forgetting, life as its representation -- and even this account of that.

Confess Fletch (2022)
As unambitious as it might seem, whether you know or remember the 80s Chevy Chase vehicle, this not exactly a remake (it's based on another novel in the series) actually improves on the 1985 Fletch by drawing things down to the drollery of dialogue, the madcap if not surreal puzzles of the crimes, the misconceptions of the police and Fletch's own conceits. Greg Mottola, who showed this kind of touch in Adventureland and The Daytrippers, makes it play more like social comedy than wacky mystery, and it suits Jon Hamm for something more understated than Chase's mugging. The rest of the casting are also interesting choices who follow suit: Marcia Gay Harden, Kyle MacLachlan, Roberto Picardo, and even fellow Mad Men alum John Slattery.

The Stepfather (1987)
The slasher movie had already become a host of cliches, every Spielberg-influenced fanboy wanting to make a horror film as their entry to movie-making (in Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's roundup of the worst films of 1985, Ebert said as preface that they weren't considering every teen sex comedy and slasher movie). Just as Predator, of the same year as this, looked like Commando and similar action movies before it, and that served the turnabout in the story where commando badasses become the easy prey of something superior in every way, The Stepfather was modest enough to seem barely above TV movie as even a horror film. But that served its own subversive purposes. Terry O'Quinn, who'd been mostly a TV actor himself (but long before he was known for Lost), had the look and delivery of real estate ads of the day -- in the film his character is a real estate agent -- or similar lifestyle pitches of a quainter variety. Shelly Hack also helped with the flavor of TV of the day. The mechanics of the plot are pretty basic horror movie stuff, especially the climax, and there are some obvious derivative moments (from The Shining notably), but the emphasis here is on the characterization, all that overloaded family crap from commercials and TV and Hallmark, neighborhoods and homes and family values, this at the height of it, the Reagan era, that even horror movies set up and pitch. All that is here the basis of the twisted, murderous pathology, and played up as the creepy specter itself, especially well by O'Quinn. It's similar to Hitchcock's Frenzy in having a more curious cultural flavor in subtler ways, as opposed to letting it all out as in Psycho, which this movie also primes at least once for a slight twist.

Breathless [À bout de souffle] (1960)
For my money, this doesn't match the heights of Alphaville or Weekend (and I'm also partial to The 400 Blows [Les quatre cents coups] of the first French New Wave movies) but there's no doubt about the significance of this, Godard's entrance in movies (he'd already been a writer for Cahiers du cinéma along with Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette). Peeled back, pushed out, movies become like the détournement of billboards of themselves, another kind of declamatory, as if under the skin, characters expressing their own hesitation and suspension that hinges any "real" existence to their formal one. The opposition to quality and status in favor of innovation with any means was proto-punk; the distancing techniques, including humor and formal irony, were similar to Brecht; and even before Godard became more expressly political, there was a disruptive and subversive tack, agitpop before agitprop.

L.A. Story (1991)
In many ways the most ambitious Steve Martin screenplay, directed by Mick Jackson, an ode to L.A. that's both a movie fairy tale and a modern comedy of manners. The shimmering montage delivery, with the sparkling music, sets off the glib satire of kitschy conundrums, and even makes some of the more darling conceits part of the fabric (cf. Roxanne). This movie gives the feeling of L.A. like no other. (The spoof too-exclusive restaurant is called L'Idiot, see comments for The Jerk.)

Pennies from Heaven (1981)
Another example of where art, and especially the movies, can be a happy accident. An American movie version of Dennis Potter's 1978 British mini-series was it itself unlikely enough. Potter created a kind of subversion of the musical, and the darker, post-war perspective of depression-era escapism, the British version heavily influenced by American culture -- music and movies -- was against the grain of even 1980s American mainstream, despite everything "counterculture" that was supposed to be exploitable at that time. Potter did the screenplay himself, compressing his own material, Herbert Ross directed, and Gordon Willis was cinematographer. Marvin Hamlisch and Billy May added extra arrangement to the Hollywood music numbers that were otherwise lip-synced as part of the ironic citation stroke, and the artistic direction, production design, set, costume, and wardrobe -- too many names to list here, check the credits -- were all amazing contributions of the parallax view of retro glitz and modern lush undertone. And then topping it off: Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters, the off-screen pair whose last onscreen stint was The Jerk. Despite everything different about this project, there is a way it echoes that previous movie with their personae, what happens with the couple, and even the bitter fortune turns and surreal optimism of the Martin character. One is a burlesque of melodramatic biopic tragedy, the other a burlesque of melodramatic musical uplift. The only problem was that Martin's wider audience, built up from his comedy act with shows and records, didn't get it, expected the same kind of comedy, and the movie flopped at the box office. What they didn't get was a twist on the musical, Broadway or Hollywood, in the vein of Cabaret, even for the dark strokes as inventive as Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire, Singin' in the Rain or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, even more Americana than Potter might have intended, with bigger musical numbers matching and troping the movie grandeur; modern dance flourishes and comments, similar to the musical extensions, executed by Vernel Bagneris and Christopher Walken among others; Potter's own brand of frank observation of the mixed, contradictory strands at work in each person, often creating wild swings of ambivalence; and all of it brought together as the photography of Willis -- making it also a great American movie.

The Jerk (1979)
The film vehicle apotheosis of Steve Martin's reflexive idiot humor, this is a sort of sophistication of idiocy. (Steve Martin says that the title was inspired by Dostoevsky's The Idiot.) Directed by Carl Reiner, the production is at the service of the delivery, mostly of Martin's broader physical expression, something also from his act, which we could call stand-up, but it became such a large-venue phenomenon it was hardly stand-up club circuit fare. The movie is efficient, though in places it looks like studio stuff shot for TV. Martin's instinct for gags, to turn anything to comic incongruity, short circuits even the formality of jokes, and is sharpest -- though that may seem contradictory -- here in perhaps all of his movies, working at the story arc level as well as within it.

And the Ship Sails On (1983)
The movie starts with a fine mockup of silent film, a tableau vivant of moving pictures, history in the historical form of the image, Fellini projected as that mode and vice versa. But once it fades into color and sound and sets off on the voyage, it becomes a parlor farce with a strange assortment of characters drawn from pre-WWI material with a fairy-tale whimsical quaintness, Freddie Jones doing most of the storytelling to the camera. The ship set, the ocean and the model for the gunship all have a nice theatrical surreal effect, and then Fellini pulls a reflexive trick to expose it all, which feels at this point as quaint as the rest -- no longer even as involved as 8 1/2.

The Death of Stalin (2017)
Written and directed by Armando Iannucci, from a comic book by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, this is a straight takedown in blistering black comedy of Stalin and the Soviet succession, but passing that off as if the parable object of bumbling despotism, the general currency. Its dispatch, running through the mechanics of events even as dramatic compression, makes it sharper, leaner, holding that up as farce, and keeps it from the sort of self-consciousness even self-irony has obtained, as in other things Iannucci has worked on like Veep and In the Loop. In a good cast with distinguished satirical performances from Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin and Jason Isaacs, Steve Buscemi makes a surprising turn as Khrushchev also a great one.

Beast (2022)
While it tries to draw things to a narrower line of more plausible action and psychological drama, this still cheats to extend the encounters with a CG lion, especially the climactic one, beyond what even other events in the story have led us to expect.

FP3: Escape from Bako (2021)
With the problems of revenue and fundraising (writer, director and star Jason Trost said he and the investors received no money for The FP), it's small wonder it comes to this: only one location scene, the rest done on what looks like home computer. Really gloppy graphics like bad Photoshop may have been part of the gag of making it like a computer game itself. The slang just gets silly.

FP2: Beats of Rage (2018)
The FP extended to Escape from L.A. or Thunderdome proportions -- uh, not literally as far as budget. The one adjustment they made to the global joke of the gangsta slang fad was use of the word "ninja." The joke's out of the bag, so the Beat Beat (= Dance Dance) contest ("beat-off," they also call it) doesn't have the same absurdity to certain effects.

A*P*E (1976)
Designed to cash in on the fame of the 1976 King Kong, this Korean and American co-production knockoff actually jumped it in release, July in South Korea (where it was released as King Kong's Great Counterattack) and October in the U.S., while Dino De Laurentiis's didn't release till December in the U.S. In the cash-in bid, to minimize cost, about the only thing this production spent money on was the 3D process, not worrying how terrible everything would look anyway, and even the 3D process itself is shoddy. The opening shot's toy boat, the ridiculously scroungy monkey suit, the fight with an apparently dead shark -- cash-in on Jaws while you're at it, and M.A.S.H., fercrissakes, with the title (nothing in the movie explains the acronym, of course) -- the sub-Godzilla model buildings that burst into flames like a Pinto with one punch, the 3D trick repetition that includes left-right problems with focus and even debris and a crack on one lens (and for some reason kissing scenes extended as if somehow that's special in 3D, though some of the noses are impressive), from cheap scriptwriting 101 the running office scene (in this case an army colonel's) in which the entire plot is done as exposition on phone calls -- this movie says what it thinks of its audience in just about every way, and if it's still not clear, there's the flip-off shot.

Barbarian (2022)
As with Jordan Peele, and the folks responsible for Inside No. 9 and League of Gentlemen, here is another cross of comic and horror sensibilities. Zach Cregger, who wrote and directed, uses a comic perspective -- not necessarily that it's a comedy, though that too makes a better twist -- odd angles, incongruities, ironic observations -- for a subtler development of even creepy atmosphere. An example, and perhaps the best stroke, is getting a scarier implication from broad daylight and after the fact. Ambiguity, uncertainty stretch as far as possible, Cregger favoring that over lots of lurid scare tactics, and he also cuts to other lines of action to extend this and even add suspense with change of tone. As with Peele's stuff, there's also undercurrents of social issues that give another dimension to the horror angst, and that play with horror conventions as well.

Hold Your Fire (2021)
Stefan Forbes presents the story of the 1973 Brooklyn sporting goods store hostage crisis where police practice changed from tactical response to negotiation. "Snappy" might not be apt for the serious subject, but Stefan assembles a lively exchange of participants on all sides, with clips from coverage at the time, moving and still pictures, and audio, that gives even the New York feel of diverse voices, mixed opinion, fractious or healthy dispute. It includes the perpetrators, police, negotiation pioneer Harvey Schlossberg, and the store owner and main hostage Jerry Riccio, who in another New York style of salty twist, often seems the canniest one of all. Stefan's touch is also in attention to his subjects, knowing well enough to let them speak, and his pacing follows that.

Maid in Manhattan (2002)
So predigested it's uneventful and even at that it manages to be anticlimactic.

Bait (2012)
In this Australian 3D thriller, a tidal wave strands people in a grocery store and parking garage with -- sharks. And as if sharks swimming around, often unseen, in shallow water weren't enough of a matter -- of plausibility as much as danger -- these are great white sharks. And why have a shark movie for 3D but then make it shallow water so you don't have as many nice underwater effects? The acting and basic direction are decent, if the level of perhaps competent TV shows, but some of the conception as well as the stunts and CG is pure bottom-feeder.

Nope (2022)
Jordan Peele comes at horror from different angles, with different cross routes and perspectives, and it makes his movies more interesting and compelling, because they're not pure carnival ride effects. "Horror" is probably not even the right term. His model is the kind of fantasy mystery blend of The Twilight Zone, with the allegorical upshot, or at least drift, as he made express in his updating of the series. He's even filled that old bottle with new wine. By necessity and invention, the doubling of meaning has a whole other punch to it when it's not just the pastime of the comfortable white middle or overclass. Allegory, symbol, the cryptic, can be the Janus face of realpolitik. His movies have actually done well at expanding this play rather than simply padding out episode-length ideas or revelation arcs, and in the case of Us, my favorite, even twisting the allegory game by making one metaphor literal for a very uncanny effect, making a point with a surreal exaggeration. So now his story about UFOs is also about black horse ranchers; Hollywood; the black man obscured, in name if not image, at the beginning of the history of mechanical moving images; pandering in TV shows and more direct spectacle; a documentary cameraman whose desire to reveal reality is a brutal obsession, if not death wish; a curious suggestion from the switch-off of machine and animal, and the mechanistic in the organic; and reconciliation with others even if not with reality.

Like really any good drama, not just mystery, Nope is at its best when the room for the play of meaning is expanding, when we're being compelled by the mystery, ambiguity, even uncertainty. Where allegory in particular cuts this off, and can get clumsy, brittle or overbearing as moral, is when everything becomes too matched up, like a code, a 1-to-1 symbolic scheme. And after some of Peele's own comments, about how he delved into UFOs and that in turn led him to a path about our compulsion for seeing and spectacle itself, the discussion about this movie, even in reviews, has broken down into just that: the effect of a class full of naive undergraduates arguing over "interpretations," what some or other part stands for and then how to line up the rest. What Peele has working is even the ambivalence about spectacle, as even more reflex, the compulsion to see, and this would be about even a double effect of truth, as with the value of memory and forgetting. The hornet's nest of using spectacle as only a moral or cautionary tale about spectacle goes at least as far back as Plato with writing, and involves the conundrum, as it was Derrida's keenness to elaborate, of depending on something we want to think we control for that very sense of control. Opening up the discussion is great; closing it, reducing it, is not.

Shark Side of the Moon (2022)
If shark and space crew movies are going to be derivative and dumb and intentionally cheap and dumb, they might as well be as absurd as this. It was built on the premise of contradiction and discontinuity, as if following a manual of bad movies. Russian is spoken with subtitles and then that is dropped for speaking English. Sharks are engineered in secret Soviet labs in pools, but then are humanoid with arms and legs -- and are really cheap CG as if to show off about it. Because then there are external shots of the facility and a shuttle craft -- yes, U.S., style -- launch rocket that are far too impressive for the Soviet era. The sharks are shanghaied to the moon where they and their Russian pilot live for 40 years and, never mind about breathing, food, little things like that, the sharks learn Russian and the Russian learns English. The sharks "swim" through moon rock just like water, Tremors style, with their humanoid limbs and all -- you wanted to know. Characters grimace and shake their heads at each other's feeble attempts at sarcasm and corny jokes, one of them repeatedly like a bobblehead. Out of nowhere, there's a guy on a racing bike with stud music -- he's arriving fashionably late for the moon mission launch.

The Funhouse (1981)
When Tobe Hooper made Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, he redid this as well as the first one. This has the same material as both, the creepy family and the amusement park setting, so it's the sort of fixations that become boring enough in one horror movie, when they're protracted, obvious presentation, like the laughing fat lady mechanical figure and all the other carnival effects. It's just lingering and drawing out, without really doing anything to create an atmosphere.

The Sentinel (1977)
If you're going to mash up Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen, why not cut and dice and mix like a possessed blender? Directed by Michael Winner, who also did Death Wish, this moves like it's too embarrassing to stop. But while it's flashing by, watch for people in early background parts (besides the star-studded cast including older ones), like Beverly D'Angelo, Jeff Goldblum, Jerry Orbach, Christopher Walken, Nana Visitor and Tom Berenger.

Election (1999)
After Citizen Ruth, which was a little too express about the social part of social comedy, writer/director Alexander Payne showed he had great stuff besides the fastball. Payne delivers a change-up on teen comedies and adult message movies alike. What looks like a high school, coming-of-age comedy doesn't even have to be allegory or microcosm, because it's about the implication of very adult "values" as well as adults at that level. Opposed to any easy morality, whether of subjects in the frame, like the typically flat-footed principle or the main case study Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), or any outside view to settle it all, there's a kind of round robin of peccadilloes that catches everyone as human, all too human, and dramatizes the hypocrisy of crying foul as a special privilege. It's got a Sturges cut with grainier sensibility for its day.

Creature from Black Lake (1976)
In the line of bigfootsploitation of the 70s (does anyone remember Sunn International Pictures?), and in particular The Legend of Boggy Creek, there were successively more, well, fluffy variations. And this one's leeching off another famous monster with that title. Jack Elam, Dub Taylor and Bill Thurman were brought in to lend some sort of prestige to this, but even they couldn't change the nearly Disney tone to John David Carson and Dennis Fimple bouncing around the rednecks and camp fires, picking up girls and having run-ins with a pretty lame monkey suit. There are flashes of intrigue, humor and scary atmosphere, but just flashes, scant seconds.

Jean-Luc Godard died.
English.

Kansas City Confidential (1952)
How about Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand for a rogues' gallery? That rivals the Liberty Valance gang of Van Cleef, Lee Marvin and Strother Martin of ten years later. Those three make for the most interesting part of this, which is more about confrontation twists and turns than about atmosphere. I also don't think I ever noticed before the resemblance between Brand and Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club fame.

Outsourced (2006)
Played down the middle between cutesy romcom and smart-assed satire, this has a kind of comfortable plainness in that it's not too much either of those, similar to Mike Judge's Office Space in that respect, though not as figurative or surreal with its humor.

Swim (2021)
I guess they were going for the shark version of Crawl, or maybe just expanding a few scenes from Sharknado movies, but the only thing notable about this n-illionth shark movie is that in putting a shark in a basement, and then having it rise through each floor of a house as the flood waters do, this makes a premise out of a now standard contradiction: sharks that are supposed to be abnormally large swimming around in water that comes up to the waist of humans. By the time the family is climbing on all the furniture to avoid the bad CG water and roaming shark fin, it's even more ridiculous because of how serious they're trying to make it. Like playing the Jaws version of the floor is lava. Oh, and it even has Joey Lawrence.

Maneater (2022)
Worse than the stupid bad attempts at intentionally stupid bad shark movies, or the attempts at serious shark movies that are stupid bad no matter what kind of budget, there is this: the worst kind of pandering with every move it makes. Sharks and T&A are the obvious part, but after that pushy kind of movie music that tells you how to feel, it cuts to compilation soundtrack music jiggling various pop tunes for whatever tone -- beach bar, beach party, indiscriminate hang-out beach jock hipness -- capriciously, then cutting from that to shark attack or back. There's even a country music star, Trace Adkins, playing a -- resident? -- badass. He says, "I've lived on the water most of my life," so I guess he's a sea creature, too. And they were apparently pandering to the Samurai Cop crowd, because his hair switches form long to short and back again.

The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968)
A presentation of 20s Americana but as the bang and flash of the 60s. Norman Lear, who also produced, co-wrote this with Arnold Schulman and Sidney Michaels, and William Friedkin directed, and the rapid-fire editing of the opening credits, montaging clips of the past with the recreation of it, carries into a similar jumpy delivery of the Vaudeville and burlesque acts. The crux of it all is the invention of the striptease (the real historical progression was from nudity without movement to nudity with), which according to this account was a sort of protracted accident. Even that point gets lost in the pizzazz and flim flam. What does hold interest are the performances of Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom. Friedkin would do much better Americana with The Brink's Job ten years later.

Razorback (1984)
While this has some great photographic work and effects, even that gets lost in the din of the hyperbolic, post-Spielberg, horror movie overworking of sequences. The rhino-sized boar that can knock down houses and industrial plant platforms is almost a parody of how much suggestion and not showing can be used in the visual medium, the ambiguity of "appearance." Making a template of Jaws as this obviously does, you could use anything as the implied monster, inferred off screen or with subjective shots, the effects of its battering or trail of its havoc. It could be indeed a rhino, or a demon koala bear, or a monster doorknob. It doesn't even have to appear at all, as in Forbidden Planet or Lost.

Dark Age (1987)
Before playing the killer in Greg McClean's Wolf Creek and appearing in McClean's own crocodile movie Rogue, John Jarratt was the lead in this 80s croc thriller, closer on the heels of Jaws, Alligator, Razorback, and The Last Wave for the aboriginal thread -- David Gulpilil is in both of these movies -- and even the events of "Sweetheart," the real saltwater crocodile that attacked boats in the Northern Territory of Australia in the 70s. There's a mechanical croc that at times is more obvious than Jaws, and much more of the plot is concerned with wrangling over the situation with aborigines, for whom the crocodile is sacred, as well as the authorities and law-loose locals. It's got some snap to it -- har har -- but unfortunately that's mostly scenes without the croc.

Inland Empire (2006)
See comments here.

Lord Love a Duck (1966)
Quite a flippy spectacle now, this starts off like student movement or youth exploitation (Richard Lester derivative), proves to be an attempt at satire more along the lines of The Loved One, but is too manic and shrill in the manner of the established showbiz comedy of the era or even the bikini movies it's trying to lampoon. It falls into seriousness as thick. Written by George Axelrod of The Seven Year Itch and The Manchurian Candidate fame. Besides stars Roddy McDowell and Tuesday Weld, there are spirited performances from Lola Albright and Martin West, and some extra zest from Ruth Gordon and Harvey Korman.

Mulholland Drive (2001)
At first glance a variation on and refinement of The Lost Highway and even retreading of much of his other work, this presents not just David Lynch's leitmotifs or hobbyhorses, but the recurring material of his dreams: the dreamlike sparse room with curtains and Michael J. Anderson from Twin Peaks; the gangsters from Lost Highway; the cutaways to the sinister network from Wild at Heart; the naive adventure investigation from Blue Velvet; the Betty character like Laura Dern in those two latter; even things like the blue box, the woman singing in the theater and the old couple suggesting Eraserhead. In both films, Lynch has devised a figure eight of the causal relationship of apparently different orders of reality, an ingenious scheme of the fantastic, as the term is used by Tzvetan Todorov to describe a type of literature or story, or even a state or moment in it, suspended between symbolic and real, or fantasy and reality, or any kind of reduction or explanation in any internal logic of the story, even if that's the magical rules of a fairy tale. For example, there is no waking scene to tell us the rest was a dream, no one frame for all the rest, no ground. Lynch achieves this with a kind of figure eight, a transformation that occurs at a kind of hinge, and then the two versions loop into each other, in a way that makes if very difficult, if not impossible, to decide which version subtends or would be the final frame for the other. As Eraserhead is significant for being the most uncompromising dream in the movies, certainly in American movies, here Lynch has given us a movie that suspends even movie dream and plot, and makes this more explicitly about that by also being about Hollywood and movie making. For it's also a meditation on play, playing, as pretending and acting, which allows you to slip through a wormhole into another life, but also the other sense of play as being played, as with jealousy, emotional manipulation, and even the manipulation of actors by the director, and the director by executives or others who would even more despotically control the creative process, and by extension imagination. And, here, too, is where it falls in the line of Persona and Three Women for being about women, but about the matter of representation and women, of specific passing for general view, even if as implicit as the problem is often made to be. The representational glove turns inside out. We see people playing people who are in Hollywood trying to be actors, and we see this "real" life they have to lead, but all that in a surreal way. Betty is starry eyed arriving as a newcomer to L.A., but then we see Diane in a dreary banality there. We see those sides to life, but in L.A., the industry dreamland. There are even wormholes in the wormhole, another character somehow caught in the framing confusion, but de-centered, and Hitchcockian tricks calling attention to the movie-watching itself, confounding subjective view, to implicate even the movie viewer position, another frame involved in the play.
As Heraclitus said of the god whose oracle is at Delphi, Lynch neither reveals nor conceals, but gives signs. That's why Lynch is so good with the dreamlike. He's not pronouncing something, he doesn't have a meaning in some pat symbolic way. Everything is significant, but in a perpetual way. It's evocative, expansive not reductive. Mulholland Drive compels the way dreams do, which makes it then curiously not what the dream factory peddles to us as the narrower connotation, a brazen object of aspiration or wish-fulfillment, and it also extends mystery and seduction, rather than extinguishing them with conclusion, however reassuring that would be, or simply as a lure. This may be the peak of his work, certainly a cross-section, at once a shimmering ghost of the movies, and more of a movie, for being so much more absorbed in the play of their material. Inland Empire extends so much of this, but is a harder watch in ways.

Shadow Dancer (2012)
Affected seriousness, lots of intense looks (Clive Owen) and pouty looks (Andrea Risborough) and intense pouty looks (Gillian Anderson, Aidan Gillen), along with an artsy dusky look.

The FP (2011)
You come for the dance video game, you stay for the hard-hitting portrait of small California mountain community, white trash wannabe gangstas. Or leave. I'm not sure whether the joke is more on Dance Dance Revolution or on the latter phenomenon, but Jason Trost, who co-wrote and co-directed with brother Brandon, imagined the former as too serious in terms of the latter, which itself is too white to be black, too mixed to be white, too suburban or plain non-urban to be hood, too broke to be boozh, too muddled to be pure anything. The joke is even in the title, which stands for Frazier Park: think "The OC." Strain that further as a grab-bag costume version of The Warriors through 80s movies. Training montages, a video dance-off in a cage, a rainbow afro and the closing shot will help if you have problems with irony.

Jurassic Shark (2012)
Testing the minimum requirements for any kind of movie, good or bad, or offering what the title suggests, this group of Canadians were apparently so pressed for locations, or so slack about it, they figured a large pond, a hallway, a stairway and a commercial shed were all they needed to suggest megalodon. They added some stuff in the dialogue about oil rigs and art theft to drum up the idea, but not with the help of acting or CG, which apparently were only used as the mark of true crappiness. RiffTrax smells the fake blood and circles.

The Requin (2022)
I can't imagine they paid Alicia Silverstone and James Tupper well enough to try so hard for this. The attempt at, at least, serious acting, with a production value an order of magnitude higher than, e.g., Jurassic Shark, doesn't mitigate the cheapness of conception, with tsunami and Open Water themes piled onto the obvious bait of the shark one, but stretching it well past the halfway mark before a shark appears, and there's actually a shark jumping scene (de rigueur now in the shark-movie infested waters, so that "jump the shark" now means the shark's jumping over usually the humans). For all it's effort and pretense, it doesn't pass Jurassic Shark for that one. I guess the French word for shark in the title was to make it more chic, too, but that only makes "the" more inexplicable.

It Came from Outer Space (1953)
Not the bad of It Conquered the World, nor the good of Creature from the Black Lagoon, which this same team of writer Harry Essex, director Jack Arnold and star Richard Carlson would go on to do, nor of more similar sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, this has a decent production and also 3D treatment (though again not matching the underwater highlights of Creature). Though there are a few in-your-face tricks, there's actually more interesting basic shot composition with camera angle for the stereoscopic effect, for example with ladder trucks, electrical wires and background clouds. And there's an interesting use of a doorway frame shot motif that precedes John Ford's The Searchers. The alien replication of the humans also preceded Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and there's another interesting alien-eye-view effect, a sort of bubble vision. I think the black and white 3D process tends to work better than color.

Wolf Creek (2005)
Greg McLean's feature length debut received lots of attention, after the Cannes and Sundance film festivals, but for me it's neither as good nor as bad as the responses. I think he did much better with Rogue. It's not as gratuitously horrific as some made it, but it's also not as crafty as either case study or just horror film. The reasons are somewhat the same. The jumps and turnabouts in the plot relieve it from meticulous depiction of the torture, and make it more action adventure, but this also makes it less a case study of a couple of real-life models, such as the backpacker murderer of the early 90s, though the movie treats this as real events with closing epigraphs about what happened to the characters. The approach to the characters is also slack, which seems partly intended and partly not. The handheld video gives it a more amateurish feel and the setup scenes have as much fidgety detachment and ambivalence for the subjects. It's not that we need to have the stance toward them spelled out, but that it doesn't avoid other horror movie lurching characterizations of fun and hip wild or wildly irresponsible. In general, there's an Australian manner that can seem a bit drifty in movies. While that may be at work, here, too, as a general manner, it comes across as whimsical or sporadic for the tone, so that it's never quite any: ironic or cathartic or clinical, or even just plain thrill ride.

Secret Headquarters (2022)
This has a nice shift from the superhero as central, and there's some decent comic delivery when it settles down, and especially one really good twist on a climactic mano a mano with Owen Wilson and Michael Pena, but it's still the sort of obvious kid audience pandering that the comic books did with sidekick or cutesy animal characters. The setup scenes of the school kids and the obligatory split family drama are just -- come on, grownups, basic.

The Return of Swamp Thing (1988)
This sequel to Wes Craven's 1982 movie features the same actor in the swamp suit, but takes it up -- or is that down -- a notch in B-movie vibe. Most notable in that regard are the makeup and costumes, featuring, as just some examples, a weird mishmash of fishing and paramilitary garb, and the most unappealing, tepid orange, sleeveless jumpsuits. But the real attraction here is Heather Locklear, giving a supremely bad, chipper and clanging performance, with her simultaneously overdone and unkempt hair and bizarre doll face lighting up the place with that TV glaze so that nothing gets too tangy. RiffTrax featured this for a special 16th anniversary live show -- they were on stage in Nashville riffing next to a movie screen for a live audience -- that was also broadcast to more than 700 movie theaters around the country. You can visit their website for more info: rifftrax.com

Lake Placid (1999)
This might be in a genre with Tremors, or at least trying to follow suit, but it's turned out more for the comedy, which also means that doesn't always work as well. The surprising cast -- if you didn't know or forgot -- includes Bridget Fonda, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Pullman, Oliver Platt and pretty much stealing the show with her couple of moments, especially the last one of the movie, Betty White.

Day Shift (2022)
Punchy, abrupt humor even in the gore and violence from first-time director J.J. Perry, who did stunt work for John Wick movies. Perry emphasizes the twists to the blows, although some of the sequences do start to stretch out to Wick extent. It's not the wry take of What We Do in the Shadows, vampires are more like zombies for its purposes, and it starts to glaze over into that din of commotion for the finale, but it keeps a rolling pace to be mostly fun.

Rampage (2018)
Like a Disney version of kaiju -- it's based on a video game -- this has flashes of affecting detail in a sillier whole. That goes for the CG as well as the script and performances. There's some impressive detail with the gorilla, but the wolf in particular gets airy, and while they go to great pains to render the destruction of a good chunk of Chicago with the buildings, the monsters fly about with cartoonish abandon. Jeffrey Dean Morgan's beaming smart-ass act is caked on so thick it's like an SNL skit, the unfunny dumb repetition kind. Jake Lacy actually manages to come off better with a similarly overdone character.

Black Water (2007)
The same year as Rogue, there was another Australian crocodile movie. This has more of the amateurish indie feel to it, like the scores of even serious shark movies, but it's notable for two things which add up to an interesting touch. It portrays the matter of being stranded, rather like Open Water, and there is an almost ironic, grim lyricism about the procession of nature, not just as the unsympathetic banality (bodies in the water), but cutaways to, e.g., ants marching with their plunder.

Rogue Agent (2022)
While this is based on actual events in the story of Robert Hendy-Freegard (there is also a Netflix doc series just out about it, The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, and the compelling point is that he was released from prison to do the same kind of thing again), writers and directors Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson take liberties, particularly with one victim, to turn this into a kind of morale (if not moral) tale for women. Not as careful in its study and redress as something like the series Unbelievable, it's more slick and dressed up as a thriller, and given the sort of poshness that may have been the idealization that served to drive perpetrator and prey alike in real life. Gemma Arterton has a steely reserve that actually makes an interesting contrast to other characters in this movie and in other ones, and James Norton does well at shifting registers from appealing to sordid. Julian Barratt has an interesting turn at a serious role.

Rogue (2007)
This modest little Australian crocodile horror adventure, treading the path of the more serious shark and outdoor adventure indie productions, is actually quite well done, without a lot of fuss in execution just as in promotion. Writer and director Greg McLean was already known for Wolf Creek, somewhat controversial as some considered it groundbreaking while others thought it torture porn. If McLean was trying to be more straightforward in his depiction of violence (like, e.g., Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), that tack certainly comes off here. The early sequences on the boat have a nice, patient, gathering method to them, overlapping the reactions of the various cruise members, and not being pushy with the kind of overworked and often moralizing IDing (even, or especially, when ironic) of so much horror fare. The climactic sequence has a chilling bluntness to the mechanics of the beast and its lair. For its matter-of-factness, it's better than Crawl. It's helped by a good cast that includes Michael Vartan, Radha Mitchell, Sam Worthington and Mia Wasikowska early in her career.

The Final Countdown (1980)
It's kind of a nice change, a relief from movie -- especially big movie -- showiness, that this is such modest, bare play-acting on a nuclear aircraft carrier, almost like a training film or doc-style dramatization, the stars fronting actual navy crew. (Compare this kind of absurdity to the lurid absurdity of Top Gun.) It doesn't change the fact that it's a cheap pretense at blockbuster, and that it cheats on its main premise, to set a nuclear carrier and fighter jets of its day against WWII era Japanese craft. That's also an interesting turn, an exception to climactic convention, but it makes it more obvious that Martin Sheen's character serves no function but to set up a final twist.

The Nelson Affair (1973)
Despite opening up for the movie, Terence Rattigan's play still conveys historical matter as blustery drawing room drama, and even all the fuss about Emma Hamilton's common, slutty background bombastically. Glenda Jackson is hard pressed to keep the sauciness going through the ranting. The climactic battle begins with an interesting setting for the movie's day, a gun deck, and the introductory track through does nicely enough, especially since the battle that follows is very clumsily executed, with almost comical editing of shot targets.

Hear My Song (1991)
Playing it all cheeky is the right idea, and it's a great role for Ned Beatty, but it's pitched a bit too madcap.

Badlands (1973)
See here.

Prey (2022)
This is a good idea (closer to the one I wanted to see, see remarks here), and if you don't know about the availability of a Comanche language version, check that out, but unfortunately it's not doing anything essentially different from the other movies and the CG animals are even sloppy. Dressing up the Predator idea in modern attire, mainly the photography and graphics, doesn't by itself make it's melodramatic seriousness any more sophisticated, and in fact it doesn't have the cheeky charm of the original (which, as I also discussed before, see above, didn't come from being the fanciest or artsiest). The idea of making the Predator equivalently earlier in development of technology is a bit silly, and specious, like that whole idea in the Alien franchise of having a parasite take on characteristics of its host. And I have a suspicion there's a lot more information about tracking and hunting and Comanche culture that various people decided I wouldn't be interested in, at least in this kind of movie.

Hit the Road (2021)
What's great about Satyajit Ray, Zhong Yimou, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (there are shots in this movie that particularly resemble Ceylan's Once upon a Time in Anatolia), Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi is the mixed emotions. Emotions, and certainly situations, are not monadic, but complex. To call this even counterpoint as a dramatic approach is in some ways inapt, because it's not just volition, style or application. In fact what seems the really great stroke of these directors is what they don't do, the restraint relative to other choices that allows the play of tones. Sometimes this can strike as irony, a scheme of one sense against another. In the case of Panah Panahi's movie, this becomes the point. As much as indirection can be a point. Panah Panahi is the son of director Jafar, who has been imprisoned a second time in Iran and forbidden from making movies, because his previous ones have been deemed propaganda against the system. Panah here dramatizes the way reaction is doubled, the way one kind of mood or even banality, whether griping or teasing or singing and dancing, covers for a larger distress (Panah's sister also fled the country), and this also stands for or expresses a larger frame of a closed society (in case you need another demonstration of theocratic society, why it is contrary to democratic principles in practice and theory, why suppression is also diversion of the real question, which is why devotion, more generally conduct, must be enforced). Panah is well in the tradition of Kiarostami (e.g., Where Is My Friend's House) and his father (The White Balloon, etc.), but he also makes his own contributions. Imaginary flourishes play out the poignant contrast, also citing movies in another way besides the incidental references to them or songs. And the very scheme and necessity of implication and the covert works as and along with the drama of discovery.

Metroland (1997)
There's an interesting attempt at depicting the naivete of the characters, particularly Christian Bale's main one, probably mostly from the source novel by Julian Barnes and the script by Adrian Hodges. Director Philip Saville makes this sometimes chipper and sometimes awkwardly broad, as if the movie itself were an ungainly adolescent. In a love-making scene, Bale acts too literally like a dog, so that even his partner's underwhelmed tolerance seems way off, of being chased out of the room. The material is somewhat in the territory of Withnail and I, covering the debauchery and folly of young adulthood, but the treatment is like an after school special. Still through this we get to see better breadth for Bale (than, e.g. American Psycho) and Emily Watson (than Breaking the Wind -- er, Waves), and a good performance from Elsa Zylberstein.

Corrective Measures (2022)
And then there's this, more the standard of these B Willis movies. Despite other good performers like Michael Rooker (again, see White Elephant), Celia Aloma and Tom Cavanagh (of WB DC fame with The Flash etc.), this is derivative, pretext in typical cheap cash-in style. Post-disaster mutants have been put in a special prison where they can be controlled. If you think that sounds like X-men as well as all the other derivative superpower shows, just wait till you see the mutations / powers. And you will have to wait. Because the small budget was not used on many or long special effects sequences, so there's lots of spinning, the yarn and the wheels, build-up and posturing and yammering and jabbering, a scintillating subplot about who will succeed warden Rooker (who likes to be called "overseer"), and going back and forth between offices, when not cells. It's kind of like being in prison. This may be one of the most painful for watching Willis, now that we know. Some sequences are quite drawn out, but then awkwardly edited, as also the audio for him, which sometimes sounds way too forced, or even like a different actor. And to top it off, his character is called The Lobe.

White Elephant (2022)
In the strange world of Bruce Willisploitation, the spate of movies released over the last couple of years that were being made up until the announcement of Willis's aphasia, this one is surprisingly not so bad. Granted that's compared to some rank stuff, not really even enjoyably bad so much as curiously so. This one also features Michael Rooker, Jon Malkovich and Olga Kurylenko, so you can draw your own conclusions about who's hard up. Is it by accident that this one isn't so bad? Writer / director Jesse V. Johnson was formerly a stunt man, and worked with Willis before as such. In a Los Angeles Times article, Johnson told of how they discovered Willis was not himself, and felt bad about it, so much so Johnson turned down another project with Willis. This was before the announcement.

The Lady Eve (1941)
The setup for a card scam and even a second fleecing of the irresistible target played by Henry Fonda is really a ruse on us, because the real business is the screwball setup of him and Barbara Stanwyck's character. The heartfelt moment is a forced confrontation when they're at odds, and the romantic confessional moments are goofed on, literally horsed around the second time, and Fonda's strange combination of pitch, poem and panegyric is shown up even more by the repetition. In fact, the whole first half of the movie is played much straighter, and when Stanwyck's Jean/Eve decides she's mad, it's all fun and games. Perhaps love is the scam and should not be taken straight.

The Gray Man (2022)
An attempt at a CIA version of Bond, but that feels more like something between Bourne and superheroes, contributes nothing new or particularly interesting, except maybe a smile or two from Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in Audrey Hepburn's pants. They try their darnedest to have good spirits, in the Marvel offhand way, and with Evans playing another fun scoundrel like he did in Knives Out, but the story not only fails to deliver on expectations from general fare, it doesn't follow through on its own terms: the super elite skills of the central character, a Pink Panther Strikes Again subplot of all-star assassins, a Tamil super-agent bad guy with a conscience, even a hedge maze.

Gatlopp (2022)
A lead-in and setup of character establishment scenes, comic rants, split screen, and romcom mixed signals are cutesy self-conscious, but it's more streamlined when it gets to the comedy horror board game that's the main premise. Would've been better to start with that. Writer and lead Jim Mahoney has a supporting role in the series The Orville, so the habit of dropping references that actually call out derivation seems like something he picked up from Seth MacFarlane.

Coneheads (1993)
A bit late for this recurring skit from the 70s SNL, they got just about everyone from the 90s SNL cast to join in, plus Jason Alexander and Michael Richards plus Sinbad plus SCTV's Dave Thomas. It's like the Faerie Tale Theater of the 90s (actually The Larry Sanders Show is the Faerie Tale Theater of the 90s). The surprisingly crisp delivery at the beginning gives way to the sort of buzz and clatter of hijinks and plot that dissipates the sharpness of not just SNL vehicles but most American movie comedy.

The Sleeping Car Murders (1965)
The opening salvo of Costa-Gavras could seem like a warmup for Z, but this is in many ways more tres bavard and tres cool. It's like a farce, a satire and a thriller all rolled up, or maybe trying to outpace each other. The cross-section of French cinema cast even in the small roles, the surf style music, the whodunnit spilling into film de flic, the interrogation subject diatribes -- they give the police worse than they get -- spilling into crime subject study voiceover monologues (kind of a funny forerunner of Terrence Malick) make for as wild a ride formally as it is as plot.

Price Check (2012)
If you want a big dose of Parker Posey, check this out. This indie social satire written and directed by Michael Walker is modest on production in favor of performance, and the whole cast are the sort of sturdy undercard actors -- not big stars, although Amy Schumer and Edward Herrman pop up on either end of their greater fame -- who make for subtler execution. But the script strays from the real engine, Posey's character, into something much more prosaic as plot, ending with an oddly romcom vibe.

The Duke (2020)
This is about the theft of Goya's painting of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London in 1961, but it's really a portrait of the man at the center of the affair, played by Jim Broadbent, with Helen Mirren as his wife. These two, and Matthew Goode, give typically solid performances, but director Roger Michell hurries the thing so much at the beginning it's hard to follow. It's not until a trial sequence that it settles down and gives us a sense of the man as more clever than the daffy gadfly -- Quixote-like he's described at one point -- he'd been prior to that, and an expression of his own homespun version of a virtually Derridean notion of identity: "I am you and you are me."

Street Fighter (1994)
When you have to take your medicine of other pop cultural artifacts turned into movie plots, RiffTrax can make it go down easier. Raul Julia's last film (making a terminally ill man swing on a rope is the RiffTrax comment, but that may not be the worst of it, here); useless gimcrack background and setup for your favorite arcade fighting characters with very little showdown fighting and no tournament; Jean-Claude Van Damme, as part of a UN-like, blue-hat, ass-kicking peacekeeping force, with a U.S. flag on his sleeve and when no sleeve on his bare shoulder, apparently to convey, past the accent, he's American -- it's the next best thing to banging buttons.

Death Watch (1980)
An interesting combo: Bertrand Tavernier directed a script by him and David Rayfiel from a novel by David Compton, with Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider leading a cast that includes Harry Dean Stanton, Max von Sydow and Robbie Coltrane. The story anticipates our later techno world of cameras watching everything, as an unscrupulous media company wants to film the last days of a dying woman. Keitel has had camera technology implanted in his eyes and can't close them. There are flashes of La Jetee style parable metaphor, but there are also moments of stiff, overwrought sci-fi style pronouncement. Schneider's line, "We're interested in everything but nothing matters," overlaps those, but it also seems quite prescient now. Not that we weren't already well along the path, and there's always the naivete and speciousness about current technology, pro and con, that overlooks how it was a result of earlier conception. There's some more deft dialogue at the beginning, good business between Keitel and Stanton, but it ends up with obvious dramatic irony. It doesn't have even the inspired off-key quality of Fassbinder's World on a Wire.

Bernard and Doris (2006)
The intriguing stuff is already there, in the life of tobacco heiress Doris Duke and the butler she left her fortune to, so perhaps it comes easily. Susan Sarandon certainly plays it with the right toss-off flair, but I was more surprised by Ralph Fiennes. It's one of the best performances I've seen from him. Bob Balaban, also of acting fame, directed, and certainly learned his Robert Altman lessons (they worked together on Gosford Park). He's got the meandering camera on the jumble mise en scene, but this makes a good fit with the material. Hugh Costello's script is more compact, so there's not the ambitious sprawl of lots of Altman projects that can go astray, and there are even nice touches with the camera movement echoing the perspective of the hovering servant, and how that changes with the relationship.

Citizen Kane (1941)
See here.

Punk the Capital: Building a Sound Movement (2019)
Well-clustered story of the punk movement in Washington D.C., the sort of unlikely place that made it all the more likely, from which came, e.g., Bad Brains and Henry Rollins. There are more than passing similarities with another documentary, Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk, not just in the telling but how it came about.

Paddington 2 (2017)
I'm not sure the lengths this had to go for a parable about intolerance and diversity are meant to be for the children or the adults, but nun drag and prison breakouts are pretty unwieldy.

Faceless (1987)
The prolific cheapy horror filmmaker Jesus Franco, who was born in Spain but worked all over Europe, here managed to assemble in Paris a cast including Helmut Berger, Telly Savalas, Christopher Mitchum (son of Robert), Caroline Munro, Jean Rollin regular Brigitte Lahaie, and perhaps most notably if not surprisingly, Stephane Audran. But by far the most notable thing about this movie are the gore effects, more likely to cause bursts of laughter: severed mannequin arms and mechanical googly-eyed heads and faces. Though inspired by the more chic French thriller Eyes Without a Face, this has a face removal more laughable than anything in Face/Off.

Ascension (2021)
At first the Koyaanisqatsi air seems cosmetic, but the cumulative effect across subjects and places becomes interesting even before other things, like a sex doll factory, become more so, and imagining how it was brought off has as much to do with it. This is an elegantly straight, fly-on-the-wall day in the life of China, surreptitious if not covert, and it attains the sort of mesmerizing fascination of people-watching, or just the din of activity as a bystander. Compare to Man with a Movie Camera. There's still plenty for a social and political portrait, all the contradictions of state capitalism, managed and managerial classism, official cant and workplace banality.

The UFO Incident (1975)
If you like Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones you should see this, although it's almost like some kind of actors' porn for them. It's showboat performances, and it's hard to avoid describing it as overdone, though that has as much to do with the conception and direction. But it's certainly an interesting story, based on a true one, about a couple who claim they were abducted by a UFO. They underwent analysis, including hypnotism (the analyst is played here by another stage and screen veteran of the day, Bernard Hughes), but this also involves so much else in their complicated psychology, including what they dealt with as an interracial couple, and their own fears and weaknesses. This was originally a TV movie.

Dungeons and Dragons (2000)
Even if you don't want to see this for one of the silliest examples ever of packaging some other thing -- medium, property, concept -- as a pop movie plot -- what dice do you roll to get a couple of bros as your thief protagonist and chum, love interest, an even more specifically J.R.R. Tolkien ripoff to your indiscriminate Renaissance fair style fantasy, glossy sci-fi style skyscraper-sized spire thingies for castles, purple or gold electrical power rays, a Wayans brother -- and even if you don't want to see the terrible CG, that really awful, early bubble-looking applique stuff that wasn't even good video game graphics, or the general awful look of this whole thing with some inexplicable combination of bad studio lighting, video and film combo of grainy and fuzzy, washed out bad contrast yellow and bronzed color that looks like some poor post-production process in some cases, you should check this out for the most over-the-top performance by Jeremy Irons. For someone so uniformly restrained as an actor, it's quite amazing and fun to see him oblige the director with an all-out vein-bulging, hambone villain performance.

Alien (1979)
RiffTrax did a treatment of this, one of their attempts to pick on something bigger than the blatant runts, i.e. easy targets, of movie fare. They also riffed Casablanca, a movie they claim to acknowledge as good ("the greatest movie ever made" -- if you didn't think these guys were off before, that should give you an indication), but at least this is a movie safely better than any they've done before with "Alien" in the title. And it's certainly a movie I think is good: see here. It's just Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, also MST3K veterans, but they went to town, especially with all those long moody sequences without dialogue.

The Phantom (1996)
Granted it's the Burton Batman era, with things like Dick Tracy and The Shadow making a kind of adult juvenile adventure, and this movie is also trying for a Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pirates of the Caribbean (before the fact of the movies) vibe, it's actually not as bad as you might expect from its flopping or disappearance. There's decent production design and cinematography, it's written by Jeffrey Boam and directed by Simon Wincer in a jovial gait that's neither too serious nor silly, it has an interesting, somewhat surprising, solid cast and even Billy Zane isn't bad. I mean, if you don't mind him riding around the jungle in a purple bodysuit on a white horse, or dropping from a plane onto the horse, and other typical absurdities.

Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969)
For all the historical detail alluded to, this gets bogged down in the contemporary movie version of soap opera, with the sexual dynamics especially between Susan Clark and Robert Redford that are more a projection of the movie's time than the era portrayed. Accounts of the actual events of 1909 or even photos have a sense this movie does not reproduce. Robert Redford's character might have been a more ambivalent scoundrel than the Sundance Kid, and thus a more interesting role for him, but writer and director Abraham Polonsky kept things a bit too honorably plain, if that wasn't imposed on him (he'd been blacklisted and this was his first project since 1948's Force of Evil), a timidity for the production also evidenced by Robert Blake in the title role of a Paiute Native American. Blake does fine in the role, even has the sort of edginess Redford lacks, but Native Americans are still only in the supporting roles if any. Katharine Ross is an even bigger stretch.

Spotlight (2015)
Co-writer and director Tom McCarthy, who played the fraudulent reporter in the fifth season of The Wire, kept this in the vein of that as well as All the President's Men, sober, lean, to the point, the drama of newsrooms and meetings, information and discovery through connections. The movie, like good reporting, trusts the story to hold interest, and all the other stuff, character and drama, comes along with that. It doesn't need doctoring all that up, and in this case it's about finding out how much larger the issue was than was generally known. When you see this whole ensemble performance, Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, et al., contributing to the composed execution, it's hard to believe how much overplaying is the standard in movies, and even gets rewarded. Compare this to other Oscar Best Picture winners. There's also another connection to All the President's Men: the character of Ben Bradlee Jr., played here by John Slattery, is the son of Ben Bradlee of Washington Post fame, played by Jason Robards in the Watergate movie. And the further connection, a disturbing progression, makes even discussing it like this seem complacent. The Boston Globe and particularly its special section Spotlight maintained the standards of investigative reporting required just to get to facts, and the political weight of this as the principle of free press is measured precisely against what was uncovered, how much more institutionalized is the problem of status which makes morality nothing but an alibi. Not just the government, but the Church and any business or institution (cf. Penn State) presents this not just as fact, but as a tendency. Walter Benjamin said that civilization is always also a document of barbarism, and this is a matter of naivete about the past as well as the present.

Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger (2014)
If you've seen The Departed or Black Mass, this is a documentary by Joe Berlinger (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost and its sequels) about the actual figure, Boston racketeer James "Whitey" Bulger. But that's deceptive, because it's also about Bulger's involvement with the FBI, particularly with agent John Connolly, who was also convicted for racketeering-related offenses, and implications of wider corruption within that agency and other law enforcement. The documentary presents the case that Bulger's informant role with the FBI was falsified, though others maintain he was an informant, and some have even accused Berlinger of ignoring evidence. But the FBI declined any part in the documentary in an official capacity.

An Honest Liar (2014)
Though not fancy, more of a journal compilation style, it has the virtue of avoiding some of the contemporary flourishes, not to say cliches, of documentary in favor of its subject, which is certainly interesting enough. And it has enough interesting material from other sources to assemble, as well. It's about James Randi, the Amazing Randi, the magician and escape artist who also set about exposing psychics and faith healers, and then some more twists and turns and exposures in his own life, as well.

Girl in the Picture (2022)
This documentary starts off seeming pretty squalid, TV provincial, but then starts unfolding and the real story itself is too crazy not to be compelling. It gets wider and weirder. Some similarities to Lolita are striking, though there are also significant differences, but I don't recall any mention of Nabokov's book. Director Skye Borgman certainly knows how to map out the story so that you go through the amazing discoveries the right way, but he sometimes focuses on an interviewee for some reason that's not apparent, as if for another effect that doesn't seem quite pertinent at that point of the story.

Bitter Lake (2015)
As with the other works by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, Hypernormalization, this is an attempt to do more than merely document. It's an attempt to analyze and make connections and to make manifest again what is covered over, repressed or suppressed if not merely forgotten, by history. In this case, it's tracing the lines connected through Afghanistan, and how all the interest and investment in the Muslim world by mainly the UK and the U.S. helped bring about the very fundamentalist forces now opposed to them. I'm interested in the info, and Curtis's use of unused journalist footage is interesting, but I'm not sure it really works as some brave new form of the doc, so much as just mishmash that often postpones or drags out the point. I think that the means used to characterize all this with sinister undertones has the same effect as the interests Curtis is often trying to expose, another kind of sensationalism or luridness.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Playing with gods. In the late 70s and early 80s underground comics created parodic and reflexive sophistications such as The Flaming Carrot, Cutey Bunny and Cerebus. Taika Waititi has made the superhero movie something different again. It's come around again to cartoon-like, malleable and plastic with the kind of spoof play of What's Opera, Doc?, and that's what this resembles most in treatment and tone. A surprising turn from Russell Crowe as Zeus with his camp homey Greek accent and his toy prop lightning bolt even suggests the Wagnerian Elmer Fudd with the breastplate. Just as the burlesque there traces itself to those tragic contours, the comedy here works as counterpoint to set up other things, like a bunch of kids wielding Thor powers, a much craftier way of incorporating empathetic involvement than the usual clunky pandering. Christian Bale also offers comparison for this as big issues of love and death are handled much more deftly than in the strained heaviness of the Dark Knight movies. Bale switches sides, not only from DC to Marvel, but to the villain side, and his character is a destroyer of gods. But the sides aren't so neat, as we've seen in the Marvel universe before as well as mythology. Sometimes the movie spins its wheels with the humor, as if it's going to stall out in silliness for its own sake, but the turn of the climactic moment is surprisingly effective.

Gods are play with ancestors, wishes, fears, the personification of forces. They are abstractions and symbols for anything. Nietzsche wrote of the pre-Socratics that for them the cosmos was an object of art, an aesthetic phenomenon, not a moral one, and Bergson said the universe is a machine for making gods, which humans can take part in. For more discussion of gods and superheros and the inevitable conundrums of imagination for them and more generally, and even of What's Opera, Doc?, see Monster: Division of Power.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
If only movies didn't have to have all this jibber-jabber, all these ridiculous bones required to be tossed to humans, situations, schemes, plots and stories. Who let the dinosaur in the house?

Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)
Jurassic orgy. Setup: The dinosaurs are out, all over the world. Cut to: locusts. New bio-tech evil overlord ("Biosyn" -- spoken plenty for the bad pun). Genetically engineered empathy bait. A perfect premise -- dinosaurs just running around eating the humans -- ruined again. It would've been fitting for the dinosaurs to finish off all the characters and bad subplots from the whole franchise. Jurassic franchise extinction.

The Food of the Gods (1976)
Tired of CG special effects? Check out this 70s AFI gem of an effort. If your greatest fear is being eaten alive by giant rats, this may help you see how unrealistic it is.

The Great McGinty (1940)
The bang that started off Preston Sturges, directing his own movies as well as writing them, shows the swath of his fabric: the collision of high and low, the punchy and rolling delivery, the screwball approach to sentiment, the thin line between scoundrel and respectability that circumstance makes anyone cross and not just one way or time. It's interesting to compare this to All the King's Men, even the book, which came out in 1946, the similarities with the outsider to the order of the law, either side. The turns and jumps of the plot make it go a bit sideways, and Christmas in July, which came out the same year, is for me the peak of Sturges for this reason, the cleanest stroke even for all the ricochets, where all the business carries the satiric thrust.

Sundown (2021)
It's admirable when someone moves in the opposite direction of the telegraphing, spoonfeeding and general loudness of dramatization in movies, but here writer and director Michael Franco goes so far it seems another kind of affectation or problem. The tone of the movie and the main character, played by Tim Roth, are so remote and impassive, it's easy to miss basic information, which can make it difficult to know just where the ambiguity or ambivalence is situated, or any significance at all.

The Sunset Limited (2011)
Cormac McCarthy adapted his play for film, Tommy Lee Jones produced and directed, and Jones performs it with Samuel L. Jackson, in a program originally shown on HBO. Two men have a conversation about life and death in one's apartment, spurred by circumstance. The occupational hazard of this sort of thing is that, even though there are discussions like this that go on all the time and last even longer than two hours, it's hard to avoid moments where it feels the conversation is being artificially prolonged or jump-started. In other words, no matter how realistic, it's hard for it not to feel contrived as a theatrical presentation. This has such moments, more or less due to McCarthy, but he gets in his good licks, too, and of course has the gumption to go for this at all. Jones and Jackson certainly help with the delivery. I'm not sure whether it's an indication of McCarthy himself -- I have reason to suspect beyond just the obvious, see The Counselor and Blood Meridian -- or just the portrait or the character played by Jones (what would make him antithetical like Hazel Motes of Wise Blood), but the disposition presented as non-Christian, or anti-afterlife, or not idealist is very gloomy, in fact the Christian's idea of what the lack of their view would amount to. It's not the disposition of, for example, Nietzsche, who thought that eternity was the revenge on time, born of resentment about life, if not denial of it, Idealism and Christianity the true nihilism.

Chan Is Missing (1982)
Made for a reported $22,000, this was a breakthrough for Asian-American movies as well as its director Wayne Wang. It's as deceptive for its amateurish declamatory style as it is sly with movie and narrative expectations. Self-conscious scenes about perceptions of Asians and spiels of theory (the main characters giving dismayed and bored reactions) turn into a banal excursion that shadows gumshoe fare, whodunit becomes who is, spiraling out into implications, projections, stereotypes and missing character, and finally giving a paradoxically Chinese twist to the very notion of identity. For those of you who don't remember or know, this was one of the best cases of what Chicago newspaper reviewers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert could do for movies with their TV shows that were first on PBS (Sneak Previews), then syndicated (At the Movies with Siskel and Ebert), from the 70s into the 90s. Chan Is Missing only had exposure at film festivals until Siskel and Ebert touted it on their show. They helped make the career of Wang, who went on to direct The Joy Luck Club, Smoke, and Maid in Manhattan, among others.

All the King's Men (1949)
I'm not sure the eloquent jumble of Robert Penn Warren's book is translated by this, but it makes its own rumpled, blustery bustle of biopics or message movies of its day. It's got enough noirish wrinkles to make it feel not too starchy, even through speechifying and moral turns, and the kind of compression that makes a life saga out of a scenic tour.

TRON: Legacy (2010)
The sequel/update of the 1982 Tron goes so much further in the direction of personification, plot machinations, and chic design with specious sci-fi movie references, it loses even the errant charm of the original, certainly the retro charm. The production design and direction vogue Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey and even the milk bar in A Cockwork Orange, and the slimline uplift looks good in its own way here and there, even for 3D, but along with the bad video-game CG job on Jeff Bridges, what does all that mean for arcade game circuitry or cyberspace minions? At the end of the movie, I wanted to see the vast army march out, and then a pull-back show them nearly microscopic on a single computer case.

Mikey (1992)
A nice family movie about a kid who likes to throw appliances at people who are bathing turns out to be the foster child version of The Stepfather, though not anything like the clever subversion of that. This one is fun, perhaps more inadvertently, because of the after school special approach to stalking. Apart from the wannabe Chucky star, it also features the kid who gets terrorized by Sam Neill and Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park, which was also well commented by RiffTrax.

Heartland (1979)
From the memoir of a woman homesteader published in 1914, writer Beth Ferris and director Richard Pearce give us a view of a more humble and meager existence in the wild west, but unfortunately the means for this portrait are a bit meager, too. Rip Torn's Scottish accent isn't quite filled out, and same for the acting of Conchata Ferrell. Her frankness counters polished movie production style, but, paradox of acting, she doesn't have all the presence to bring off the naturalism. This aims to show the hardness of the west in other frank ways, so if you're squeamish about livestock, steer clear.

All the President's Men (1976)
The movie about the Watergate break-in is really about uncovering the story, and thus about the job of reporting in all its lack of glory, the plodding detail, the cross-checking and corroboration, the balancing act of sucking up and pressing hard, the risk and recrimination, the lifeblood of bare fact in the face of power, and thus what free press means, at least as an ideal. Script writer William Goldman and director Alan Pakula may have been working simply from reverence for the situation, but as a dramatization, and drama, it may be the best likeness of the reporter's work up to that time in American movies (things like the fifth season of The Wire, Zodiac and Spotlight follow in its footsteps). Perhaps they trusted the import of the events, or the contrast of how the discovery unfolded to present long single-shot sequences of Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman with a phone. One scene in particular demonstrates the deftness with this: an editor's meeting in which they're deliberating about what stories they have to run and how to prioritize them, what gets page one, etc., and they happen onto the discussion about the Watergate story in the works and the implications of it. It's jumbled and clumsy, like the sporadic discussion, but thus giving the relief, the fabric of the day and the task, the events unfolding through it. Gordon Willis is cinematographer and David Shire did the music, though there's a low-key approach to that, too.

Special items

Links

Pages

About