Movie Brains

No Escape (1994)
Gagging well: the culture of no culture. Here's a movie with such curious incongruities, it provoked other thinking about the whole phenomenon of the imaginative genre of zero degree society, whether post-apocalyptic, marooned or abandoned, penal colony, prehistoric or otherwordly, whether literary like Lord of the Flies or relentlessly generic like comic books, movies or TV shows. As absurdly pervasive as these are now, with all the streaming series about world catastrophe or zombies, this idea has been commonplace for so long through so many biker gangs and factory ruins and neo-tribal punks and Thunderdomes, through so many eras of B or just bad movies going back to at least the 50s, and including the particular made-for-TV types of each decade -- think particularly of the 70s and 80s. What's strange about this one is that while the production looks sub-Waterworld, and just barely above the level of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fare for sci-fi, it's written, and especially directed and acted with considerable composure. Within the frame of the premise, there's some decently observed and wrought material, and as even an index of comparison, there's Lance Henrikson, who's been in far better versions like Aliens but has also given some extravagantly schlocky performances. Here he's downright restrained. The whole supporting cast are interesting choices that pay off, including Stuart Wilson, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ian McNeice and Michael Lerner. But it's the lead, Ray Liotta, who really sparked the thoughts. Liotta plays with such conviction that even the inconsistencies in the way the character is written work like interesting character study. He certainly looks good in the setting of Goodfellas, but he stands out against this. There are moments of banal candor so striking they jut out, by dint of what we're used to in these movies, a sort of trumped up dramatic din. His menacing stare turns into a soft and thoughtful one (more like the real Liotta seen in rare interviews), and his wincing in pain seems much closer to home than the usual apocalypse. Then comes a reaction to some penal craft alcohol that's about the most evocative, if not realistic, I think I've ever seen in a movie. Liotta is coughing and gagging as if he sucked jet fuel down the wrong pipe. It's not overdone. It quite well suggests the real experience of getting overwhelmed by a stiff belt.

And that's the contrast. When we're imagining the abject, when we deal in imagining the most abject, do we want it to be realistic? So realistic or too realistic? Or not so? But then, what is realistic in this situation where precisely the everyday order has been supposedly wiped away? There's a naivete, to say the least, in this projection, the whole idea of zero degree society, whether dystopian or utopian, the latter like the rather adolescent proposition, if I had my own island and created or determined and ran my own society. It's like the Rousseauan notion of the pure state of nature cleared of any corruption of civilization. As well as the formal or even logical conundrum of what has already been built up to even imagine negating it -- the place you're in from which you come to this imagination, the impetus of it, the culture within which the outside is imagined -- there are the psychological, social, political factors, the uses this serves or the effects of it. It's an idea that can be as reactionary as progressive, that some state of pure survival is privileged over, as Nietzsche put it, all the surfeit and leisure -- and artifice -- of nature itself.

America's Sweethearts (2001)
When John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones playing fictional actors who are co-stars and estranged lovers have to sit for a junket interview battery, we get something of the wit of Billy Crystal, who co-wrote this movie with Peter Tolan, and a hint of the kind of fun to be had from the layers of representation and dissimulation. But this movie is nothing like the sophistication of The Larry Sanders Show, because apart from that scene, it keeps going off on gags that aren't even a good level of zany, let alone screwball. Dog in crotch, Billy?

Paddington (2014)
Though there are breezes of clever Brit humor, there is way too much Disney wild flavor slam with the CG gyrations and the way over-cutesy darling color sets and the "camera" moving around so much you feel motion sick from family racket. Well, I did.

Face/Off (1997)
So many of the reviews of this movie don't touch the tenor of it. It's actually just basically, practically bad in a lot of ways. The editing is really bad, so is continuity. Often the stunt doubles are obvious, but so are things like Travolta's beard growth in successive cuts. The premise and script are obviously so ludicrous, with all sorts of contradictions begging to be seen, as if to provoke reaction. When they're trying to convince Travolta's Archer about the procedure, it's all pitched as a foregone conclusion, and we know it, he's grinning and shaking his head, and says, "This is insane." I imagine him saying, "No, not insane enough yet. More ludicrous, more absurd. Not quite. More insane. Yeah, there it is. I'll do it!" And it's also a flagrant case of: the more they put in to explain it the worse it actually is. If they had made it more allusive, just referred to state of the art procedures or something, then had the characters disappear and come out switched, or even just said it was magic! -- that's all we need for the payoff that we're really getting here, which is simply to imagine that Travolta and Cage have switched bodies, or are simply playing each other. They've switched personae: that's really what this is all about. The bad stunts, the bad boat-off, the doves flying that Woo had to get in somewhere -- and they had to be in a church -- the criking smoke outside the front of the house in the closing scene that's also jarringly gooey -- is there a car on fire in the driveway? -- none of this really matters except as the delivery system for the idea of the switch of personae. And that the movies misses by far. Rather than each play two stock action characters, where is Travolta doing Cage's acting, or Cage playing Travolta?

Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets (2022)
The title says everything but GameStop, but this is about the short squeeze, where the Reddit forum WallStreetBets started a popular movement to save the real-building video game store from a short sell, and succeeded in taking down several Wall Street players instead. The movie is as self-consciously aimed at this new crowd of speculators as about them, gamers, online communards and basement dwellers, dealers in cryptocurrency and memes, as the title demonstrates. What's left out there, if not expressly commented, is that no matter what this meant for GameStop, or the predatory hedge funds, any principles outside the stock market, all this is also speculation subjugating any other value, caught in the same flux of risk and gambling, pitting each particle against the other in the wave of all. The parties all tried their various manipulations, and when the brokerage service app Robinhood, which first jumped on the squeeze, arbitrarily disallowed all buying, the glaring question, how can there be only selling, how can there be selling without buying, isn't even asked in the congressional hearing, at least not what's presented here. It's all just left to: accept the status quo manipulating and exploiting until you get burned (then you can try to cry foul).

The Automat (2021)
The American auto-service restaurants that began in Philadelphia and spread there and to New York City, and their origins in European versions, are given a lively anecdotal treatment by Lisa Hurwitz and Michael Levine in this documentary. There's an interesting range of participants, with Mel Brooks as leadoff, and e.g. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Colin Powell as fond patrons, but also those involved in the business and historians; a nice presentation of delectable items from various media (even Edward Hopper's painting of the same name) giving us a taste of such wonderful features as the ornate dolphin spout for coffee; ample evidence as well as avowal that the automat had a broad appeal, offering cheap food in an elegant setting, with an open door policy, and how this was not either fast food or automated food and in fact had the opposite effect, at least until that model and other factors led to decline.

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Though it's not quite as ambitious cinematically, this biopic along the lines of The Great Ziegfield has a fair amount of spit and polish and of course the James Cagney delivery for dance as well as acting. Michael Curtiz directed and keeps it balanced between stately and spry, so that the thick stuff like meeting FDR, backstage setup pieces, self-sacrifice and even patriotic cant, doesn't stew too much. For American history, the theater, including Vaudeville, is interesting background even for the movies, but it's hard not to think of the Bugs and Elmer play on this kind of thing in What's Up, Doc? -- that is, hard to take too seriously.

Gumby: The Movie (1995)
Also known as Gumby 1 in its opening credits, which the RiffTrax crew point out is calling it straight. This is like The Onion article, "Seven-Year-Old Unable To Maintain Single Cohesive Storyline While Playing With Action Figures." It might be like the hip parody of childish surrealism of Peewee's Playhouse of the 80s, or Adventure Time of the 2010s, and it was made in the 90s. But it was made by the creator of the original 50s Gumby series, Art Clokey, who was then 74 years old! Maybe he was high on something besides age, or maybe he had achieved enlightenment, and, well, if we don't get it . . .

Hustle (2022)
It's enjoyable, done well enough, but ultimately just a warm and fuzzy sports movie that even doubles, triples and quadruples down on training montage. Uncut Gems is still the really interesting Adam Sandler dramatic role, also with a basketball angle.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Fun, good stuff for Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascale. The plot stuff tends to flatten out the parody at times, but they bring it back around to that, such as the climbing over the wall scene, and later the shrine. And it's a big enough deal they had the restraint to not go for the blockbuster proportions, and to keep the action jags within the human scale of the actors, and focus on other effects, like Cage's younger movie persona alter ego. You can see what's coming, but they manage to make their own nice strokes with things nonetheless. The tug of war between parody and melodrama seems to go on with the reflexivity as well, as if they're aware of that problem even in all the Cage fare they're affectionately riffing.

Love and Duty (1931)
This resurrected Chinese silent (a print was found in Uruguay in the 1990s) is notable for some handheld-style shots tracking the main characters walking down a street -- as striking for breaking the proscenium axis -- reflexive interludes of imagination (one of the characters reading a book launches a sequence even more Victorian melodramatic than the silent era frame), and some split screen shots with lead actress Ruan Lingyu playing both mother and daughter (the actress was 20 when she made the film). Apart from that, it's typical silent era stuff, with plenty of seething and self-sacrifice.

Cockfighter (1974)
Director Monte Hellman's debut, Beast from Haunted Cave, was one of those Roger Corman bait-and-switch horror movies, except Hellman and writer Charles B. Griffith made all the other stuff more interesting, at least than the typical switch from the monster decoy. This movie isn't Peckinpaugh or Malick or Milius or even Hellman's own Two-Lane Blacktop, and it is pretty much an exploitation of cockfighting, but it's a fairly affecting bit of 70s Americana, with decent music for the day, Nestor Almendros cinematography, and good performances by Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Richard B. Shull, and other folks turning up like Steve Railsback, Ed Begley Jr. and Robert Earl Jones, father of James.

Gung Ho (1986)
The kind of American concept package in the 80s that confused heartstrings and purse strings, and tried to be uplift, screwball, message topical and Coke commercial. Talk about assembly line, the whole thing is so railroaded, it's all pitch. And that's despite a game effort from a good cast, and a good-natured approach to the clash of cultures. Ron Howard directed.

Owning Mahowny (2003)
Richard Kwietniowski, who also did Love and Death on Long Island with John Hurt, shows again his just about impeccable direction. There's a reserve that is some ways cool, some ways soft, even as it's terse, a mood that's carried through without having to slather it on. It's just that the script, here, by Maurice Chauvet, is not as compelling. The real events are tracked out as the gambling addiction line, which is not the most novel way to go about it for movies, and the details about the bank and personal life manipulations are caught up in that train. There's a moment when Philip Seymour Hoffman as Mahowny makes a comment to someone about the gambling: "Well, you win and lose. Every time you play, there's plus and minus." That's the gambling version of buy low, sell high. Is the movie telling us this man is so laconic, or is the movie that? The bookend scenes of Mahowny talking to a therapist don't contribute anything more about the way the man thought of gambling on the inside, only on the outside as addiction. Nonetheless, Hoffman gives a great performance, as does Hurt as usual, and perhaps the greatest thing about the movie is the music by Richard Grassby-Lewis and The Insects.

Tree of Knowledge (1981)
This Danish movie is the drawing room version of adolescence, literally in some respects since it features so many meetings in drawing rooms where the teens dance to American jazz standards and sometimes turn out the lights while doing so. It's set in the 50s, which may account for the less exploratory behavior at these parties, but the movie is not without its own frankness, sometimes surprising, about other behavior and encounters. It's certainly most frank about the gangly unruliness poking through the manners and careful outfits and hairdos, irrepressible especially with the fussy adults, who are on the perimeter of this teens' eye view. The ellipsis in the story, and its formal effect with the cutting of the movie, gives the obsession with these social moments and the inexorable soap opera gyrations, changes of inclinations and allegiances, that are more painful since this same, smaller group of students goes through two or three years together. The ending gives the most elegant stroke to the whole, leaving off at a particularly climactic outburst, without further epilogue of either wondrous or wistful variety.

The Coca-Cola Kid (1985)
Breezy, flighty 80s style, more farce than social comedy, Australia and the Australian variety of that, Eric Roberts and a big dose of Greta Scacchi -- oh, and Coke. If you like these, you'll want to check this out. It also has a Slavic absurd flavor to it, thanks to director Dusan Makavejev, who did Montenegro before this. Written by Frank Moorhouse and Denny Lawrence, it's too loose and broad to live up to the Local Hero similarity.

X (2022)
Playskool version of 70s made-for-TV movie version of Boogie Nights crossed with Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Northman (2022)
300 version of overtly Oedipal Hamlet meets The Green Knight.

Hatching (2022)
The last shot makes a great allegorical comment for the whole, but getting to it doesn't seem to be making that same thing. It's a gawky, unwieldy, jagged plot, a bit like an adolescent or a weird skeleton bird, following caprices for various effect more like a horror film, though it's also trying to bring that down to earth. If only this had been, all through, for teens living up to their parents what Rosemary's Baby was for pregnant mothers.

Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers (2022)
Assembly line cultural references (a la Family Guy's derivation of The Simpsons, as characterized by South Park), cheeky reflexivity and self-irony, do not guarantee hipness, but when you're using that flak tactic you may still hit some good ones (e.g., Fast and Furious Babies, Batman v. E.T.). The whole bit about rap demonstrates the twists of this, as that level of awareness doesn't make it much funnier in this movie, and Disney's already the fattest company in the world for selling product that is little more than promotion for its product (and for all the waves of shameless pandering with whatever trend). I found myself wondering if Disney now owns every property referred to in this movie.

The Skeleton Twins (2014)
Some of the highs and lows seem manufactured, showy, as do some of the curlicue poignant cinematic moments, especially with the music, but the crisscross of self-destructiveness between brother and sister, with the observation, which bears repeating, of how it's easier to figure out someone else's mess, makes good material for Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader to show their character study abilities with a more dramatic slant.

Ray Liotta, star of Goodfellas and Field of Dreams, dies aged 67

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
Jim Cummings has certainly gotten an act down. What he developed from Thunder Road to here, he refined with The Beta Test. That's not to say the act couldn't grow tiresome, but from Cummings's tragi-comic -- or more like comically disastrous -- character studies, he's come up with a brilliantly simple scheme of throwing this persona into other contexts and basically letting the audience see, catharsis fashion, how a person gets so mired in their own fuck-up they can't contend with what's going around them, which is the rest of the movie. It's a great diversion tactic, even a Brechtian distancing trick without even having to play everything off key. Here it's a horror movie that's snowballing down on the ski resort town, and the police officer played by Cummings, who's already been in AA, seems only bent on any other old trigger. This has another effect, too, perhaps not anticipated but not surprising. It gives a relief to the horror, a contrast, prevents it from just gobbing up all the heavy-handed horror movie cliches. And it actually boils the pot better with something more mundane, the stress mess of Cummings's character. For that, the ending is something of a letdown. It makes sense in a practical way, but I was actually hoping for something more inspired, significant in a parable or surreal way, even if a further disconnection. This was one of Robert Forster's last movies, and has a dedication to him.

Stormy Monday (1988)
This is Mike Figgis's feature film directorial debut, that manages a nice mood, and foreboding in a sidelong way. It's certainly better than Internal Affairs, less shapeless in its ambling, and more like what was developed well for Leaving Las Vegas. American enterprise (Tommy Lee Jones and sorta Melanie Griffith) clashes with locals in Newcastle, UK (Sting letting his native accent hang out and Sean Bean very young) in a contest of intimidation and who's really got the muscle to make it overt. But the sides get crossed in romance (Griffith and Bean) before otherwise. Figgis and Sting show their jazz chops, and the Krakow Jazz Ensemble are lurking around until they give a perfectly scribbly rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. But why did we think Melanie Griffith was a good actress? Did that actually happen?

King Kong (1976)
Even before Superman, there was this attempt in the 70s for another blockbuster, probably to update a la disaster movies, but also into color and location and production design and effects that would modernize the black and white, stop motion classic of 1933. But to think of something as outdated can be just as much in the grip of time or fashion or fad. At the beginning of this movie, there's a whiff of some grander vista adventure, with Jeff Bridges stowing away on a ship and aerial shots of this on the ocean rather than toy boats in water tanks. But Kong has advanced no further than Godzilla in special effects, except for somewhat more sophisticated mechanics to giant gorilla hands. The monkey suit is almost worse for trying to suggest greater scale, poorly integrated, and the face a contraption of bizarrely calibrated expressions: a toy monkey maniacal grin, and a mechanical serious look. Even in its day it didn't live up to the grandeur, but more so now, this suffers much worse in hindsight than Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Willis O'Brien's creation. The 30s King Kong has the charm of its fuzzy photography and O'Brien's animated models, utilizing the basic principle and mechanics of motion pictures, still pictures moving, for a dreamlike, at least storybook quality, a silvery mist jungle of prehistoric dangers for man and ape. The remake's battle with a snake is sad in comparison. Apart from the modern trappings -- it's the World Trade Center this time, instead of the Empire State Building -- the 70s version trumps up the beauty and the beast angle to titillation with Jessica Lange, in her movie debut (a joke that was enough to sustain the movie for Pauline Kael).

Everything Must Go (2010)
A nice quiet little comedy drama written and directed by Dan Rush, from a Raymond Carver story. Rush does well to keep it to the more observational absurdity, and it's a good opportunity for Will Ferrell to have his character comedy reined in (a precursor to the series The Shrink Next Door). Michael Peña and Christopher Jordan Wallace are also really good in this low-key approach, and Rebecca Hall, Stephen Root and Laura Dern fill out the effort.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Sam Raimi's go at Dr. Strange features some referential flourishes, including a Bruce Campbell cameo and a zombie Dr. Strange, but the mechanics of the Marvel universe overrun any significant stylistic distinction like a CG sweep: wipe, blast, wave, spread. And that's even before you get to the multiverse. They got so carried away with this in the comic books that they decided to make stories to collapse it all, bring it back down, but now they're going off on it with the movies, as I've mentioned elsewhere, with all the tie-ins, team-ups, hyperbolic outbidding and exponential extrapolations. As with time travel again in the last Spider-Man movie, it's not so much that the speculation of infinite variations, quantum physical or metaphysical, presents conundrums, as that the use of it is so convenient as to make it pedestrian psychology: infinite variation leaves the right continuity for whatever character you want. Sci-fi turns science to egocentric cosmology, like religion or astrology, except I'm the center of multiple universes.

Chaos (2005)
Competent, efficient, a bit too breakneck a pace for the plot points delivery, especially since it's trying to be more drama and not just action, and the twists for the end, especially the biggest one, are actually good ones for police flicks or action movies.

Tremors (1990)
This runs so squarely between comedy and drama it seems unique or novel, like a new genre. It's not a camp horror film, but it doesn't play like serious horror movies either. The two keep it moving along, the horror elements keeping it from just being a corny comedy (that's some thick Kevin Bacon with that attempt at the accent, especially when Reba McIntyre is there to compare to, and they're in Nevada), and the light approach keeping it from just being another monster movie.

Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
Mike Figgis improved dramatically, as this uses ellipsis much better, a nice, woozy, dreamy flow, with the music, quite Altman-like especially at the beginning with the arrival in Vegas (maybe Short Cuts was an influence). He also wrote the script, which is an adult fairy tale about acceptance. What it lacks in practicality, however, it makes up for as parable and association. The very premise isn't going to get us very far in real relationships of co-dependency, even if they don't involve alcohol and prostitution, and some of the devices Figgis uses, like the monologue of Elizabeth Shue spoken to an unseen interlocutor (is it a confidante, did she get another friend, or is it a therapist, or a documentary maker?), straight out of Klute, or having Bob Rafelson, the real director, play a passerby who tells Nicolas Cage how Shue really feels (I guess that's what directors do), are really cheating and not making for graceful expression. But as with Sid and Nancy the arc of degradation is satisfying merely as an antidote to romantic cliche, as is the tacit acceptance which is also about what is more idiomatic and difficult and pithy, and the whole collision of love is played out in this. It's about alcoholism and prostitution, but those float up so that it's also about what carries us away from people as well as to them, and that in turn to the chance and precariousness of love, recognition, communication, and that in turn to the passing of everything. Nicolas Cage's performance contributes to the rendition of inspired drunkenness, and even dissipation, in a way we haven't quite seen in movies. It's just as important to see, understand, at least take account of, the appeal.

Internal Affairs (1990)
Mike Figgis's early attempt, his first American movie after his directorial debut Stormy Monday which was filmed in the U.K., cuts like a trailer for a series, but is still gappy with pauses, especially for Andy Garcia staring. The whole story, written by Henry Bean, is built on posturing rather than pertinent details, and particularly where it goes off on Garcia's wild jealous jag leaves the realm of any interest in actual procedures of its titular subject, if not plausibility. Richard Gere gives the most compelling performance, despite the capriciousness of the conception, a precursor to Denzel Washington's role and performance in Training Day.

The Beta Test (2021)
Jim Cummings, who co-wrote, co-directed and stars in this with PJ McCabe, did the same triple in Thunder Road. That movie seemed worked up from a character comedy sketch bit (there was a short before the feature length movie). Here, Cummings's character is the prism through which a provocation thriller about the data collection technology world takes on artist provocateur quality, and a tragicomic and surreal tone, as if that were a bit like Twilight Zone and a bit like Warner Brothers cartoons. The whole thing is so manic and shifted up as an arch caricature that in the beginning it's hard to follow, but it settles down so that this play is much more intriguing than the plot device or even the much more typical mores. There's a big scene in a parking garage that is strikingly similar to the forced confessional in Phone Booth, where the yuppie asshole has to regurgitate the comment on his character, but the delivery here is at a different level, much more intriguing than the mere intrigue of that attempt at thriller. Cummings's performance is even more the art of this project than the filmmaking. It's like a medley of movie acting, a lightning round sampler or flip book of stances, commenting on that as well as the character. This Hollywood agent (Colin Farrell was a publicist in Phone Booth) isn't just one stripe of dickishness, but a wad. He's like a channel jumping, video or CG skipping Max Headroom style, shifting into every kind of bullshit stance rapid fire, with no concern for continuity, like the attorneys who use flak tactic arguments even if they contradict each other. It's comic and serious at once, or in such a whizzing rotation it blurs that way. It's also like those affect override people who wear you out because everything has to be about their big reaction. Even at the end, after the big come-clean, in what would be the post era or the epilogue, Cummings's Jordan has a default slump look that's far worse, like existential dejection at the loss of that lifestyle as a sucking asshole.

Writing with Fire (2021)
Nice, interesting, scary, sad. A documentary about India's only newspaper run by women of the Dalit caste, the lowest, the "untouchables," shows the value of journalism for those who are most oppressed. There's the salty veteran, the rising star, and a newbie who can't even figure out how to use her cell phone, and has to learn lessons like what an "angle" is, but transforms into a go-getter because of her spirit. As scared and deferential as you might be in youth or politeness, these women brave confrontation where they know there is danger, where women have been targeted, abused, killed. They stand up to members of a Hindu fundamentalist party with frank questions about the conflict of political and religious interests.

Phone Booth (2002)
Director Joel Schumacher does a decent job with this, relative to his work, honors the premise of being pretty much set around one phone booth, doesn't try to compensate too much with other kinds of snazziness. Again, that's relative to his work. But Larry Cohen got mired in the phone conversation, too much dependent on the perpetrator so that it's almost purely the contrivance of the scriptwriter himself, without there being any such reflexive or surreal angle. There are contradictions and forced catches and the conversation circles around as if trying to justify the plot in both senses. The major moment of confession of Colin Farrell's character thus feels all the more like a message movie setup, despite the drama of the contrast and the satisfaction of the poetic justice. Cut the standoff in half and give that time to the asshole setup, if not trust how things might really play out (might check something like Dog Day Afternoon for that).

The Impossible (2012)
So wrung there's no drama left and no reaction to be had. Is that what the title had in mind?

Uncle Buck (1989)
After Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which had enough of an engine to keep things rolling and pull the comic character portrait -- it's easily John Hughes's best movie, one of the best for Steve Martin and John Candy, and a great American comedy that has even better resonance than the more obvious heartwarming ending -- this falls back to that lurching, gappy style of Hughes. It's as if the movie is waiting for laughs. Uncle Buck is not quite the same character, so it's not entirely like Del Griffith Goes Home Alone.

Wedding Crashers (2005)
Writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher made their own candy store and got lost in it. Everything in the movie is a different gag to follow, and the wedding premise gives way to the Addams Family version of the Beltway, with every family member battling for a subplot. There's no drama or suspense to the heart of gold, which makes the plot mechanics an even thinner line to string the gags on.

Close My Eyes (1991)
Incest provides little more than the eccentric suggestion to a still quite 80s-ish exotic flair, the kind of movie that's pushing the bounds of convention pulling that into trendiness. Lifestyle gets the much heavier emphasis on style, though that means more setting and decor and not so much the actual film-making. Clive Owen, Alan Rickman and Saskia Reeves give good performances, but it's too breezy to be any serious comment or insight about the taboo, too swoony to be any satirical or surreal one.

Killer Elite (2011)
The fact this is based on a book the author claims from time to time is in some way true certainly doesn't keep the movie from convenience that would make James Bond envious. Secret operatives have motorcycles ready at a scene change, apparently a large support staff available from any phone, and some kind of briefing on cities they've never been to, if not maps we never see, so they can steal cars and drive off on their own. You don't want to mess with all those details anyway, because the movie's having to throw down the tangled web of its evil schemes and secret wars and secret societies within secret service at top flight speed because the action is coming so fast. It's somewhere between Bond and Fast and Furious, especially with giant place names hovering in the long shots, despite the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy pretense. Robert De Niro gives it Ronin heft, and there are some lurches worth the interest of a Jason Statham and Clive Owen cross, even some mechanics and a scene at the end that make you wish the whole path there had been more like a modern soldier of fortune version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The Wicker Man (1973)
As a sneaky turn on horror movies in the way it doesn't play like one -- and even when its ghastly conclusion is revealed, the counterpoint is maintained -- it also makes a straw man of objective view. For all the horror stories that reverse science and superstition, this teeters between world views, and strands a member of the prevailing order in a situation where he's the minority and quickly shows his own colors. Neither side seems a good one. Even the sappier 70s quality stuff, the Romper Room version of flower children, Britt Eckland's dance and Christopher Lee's uncharacteristically puffy hair, work as contrasting tone.

Jane Eyre (2011)
There's not really any take here by director Cary Joji Fukunaga that's different from adaptations of Bronte sisters work or even other 19th century novels of Romanticism as period pieces in movies, such as might be suggested from Sin Nombre, Beasts of No Nation, or even No Time to Die, the first real twist to James Bond in a long time, if ever. It's more seething and forestalling in what only looks even more, for this movie coming after it, like the precursor to Rebecca the book was. Perhaps such works as those of Jane Austen or the Brontes have the effect of bringing everything to their level, the moors of Romanticism.

Quai des Orfevres (1947)
Henri-Georges Clouzot's triangle around a murder seems a warm-up for or prefigures his Diabolique, but wanders around so many different characters and threads, it's hard to tell just which of them it's going to take up. The more typically French saltiness about grown-up life is hardly more explicit than in American movies of the same time, but that's also because so much more is taken for understood. For that, there are lots of great details, even of implication: the way the Suzy Delair character leads on the man she professes to be in thrall to; the relationship of the Simone Renant character with the couple; even the child under the care of the inspector, which is the most sentimental stroke of the movie (including an abruptly fluffy ending), but not a typical family situation.

The Glance of Music (2021)
This settles into a great rhythm of its own with Ennio Morricone describing his music with lots of gestures and vocal renditions, and cutting glances at the camera with his gaze that is soft and piercing at once, then in question and answer style, musically that is, or counterpoint, others cut in with their descriptions, comments. The counterpoint other than formal makes a more interesting twist, as most of the other speakers -- friends, colleagues, artistic collaborators, some of them actors in movies he scored, fellow composers -- are effusive in their admiration, and either tell of, or Morricone himself cuts back in to tell himself, his disagreements with their ideas, for or of him. The contradictions so often came back around to Morricone doing something he said he would not, or doing elsewhere something he had renounced. Morricone is perhaps the cross-section of musical influences and paths of the 20th century, and that is covered well, here. He was a classically trained composer, but also got interested in modernist or experimental drifts, incorporation of other sound in music, modern instruments and forms (especially electric guitar), and then somewhat reluctantly took on work doing scores for TV shows and movies, but this became exactly where he was able to bring together all those strands of composition. This account starts up a bit mushy, and then at the end trails into the sort award ceremony hyperbole (especially from Quentin Tarantino) that's redundant, useless after a so much more interesting exchange about his work.

Knives Out (2019)
Prefabricated and unwieldy, and clever, punchy and fun. It's a Columbo (cf., Crime and Punishment and Malice Aforethought) passing as a whodunit, but it's also not a mystery, but then it is. The fun and humor come by playing the mystery straight, not as a spoof (like Murder by Death or Clue), and it makes references to other things like Sleuth. It's lots of fun to see Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson and Chris Evans getting to play nasty, scheming relatives. And there's a great climactic moment that pulls a twist on stage convention and theatrical drama.

Office Space (1999)
The low-key approach with production, whether intended or by necessity, serves in two ways: it's apt for the bland, generic space of apartment complexes and office buildings; it emphasizes the expression from the actors, the script and its execution of mostly parodies of types in job situations, passive aggressive managers, wound-up employees, even writer/director Mike Judge himself playing the officious manager of family restaurant "Chotchkie's" and the concern with pieces of flair. By the time we get to the series Silicon Valley, it looks like a bigger budget to play with, but Office Space has a broader application for its humbler means and setting.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Like L'Avventura, this seems to be feeling its way by what it's trying not to be, though here that's more the point of view of the main character, played by Jack Nicholson, while L'Avventura is doing this more formally. As a teenager watching this, it was easy to identify with what Bobby (Nicholson) is reacting to, and even snicker about it and enjoy the bursting of bubbles of the kind of people you were stuck with in family or other situations. The most famous scene in the diner, about holding the chicken salad, which parallels a scene in The Last Detail but without giving as much context or buildup, became iconic as an expression of frustration with absurdity, but this was open to however that was oriented: rules, convention, provincialism, repression, restriction, authority. It could just as well be self-righteous, malicious or just dickish. The scene was certainly a common reference and citation in my circles well into college years, though that too had its own mocking twists, for Nicholson impressions, too. Even Bobby's attempt at a speech to his father near the end demonstrates the situation indirectly, by his inability to articulate, rather than by providing any direct statement or explanation. And in that scene, it may actually be more cheating that Nicholson cries, for getting across the situation, even if you think it's really sad. Watching it again well down the road, its pinball method, nothing but reactions, seems itself more slack and irresponsible, particularly where it seems, as Pauline Kael says, Bobby's outsider tack comes off as morally superior. The ranting hitchhiker (played by Helena Kallianiotes, and check Toni Basil as her partner, if that got by you) is also reacting to everything she thinks is bonkers, but are Bobby's reactions -- flinging everything off the table in that famous scene, or more significantly the ending -- less bonkers? Looking back on this movie like your own adolescence, you can see why you were reacting that way, but there's also the pang that comes with later realizations, reactions to reactions, that you were still stuck in the narrow framework, the effect of the same cause, sometimes all too kneejerk, sometimes conscientiously reversing it for sheer demonstration. Perhaps Five Easy Pieces is this adolescence of American movies, coming out of the Hollywood that, though it had grown cold in other ways, may have been too distant for all its accomplishment.

The Batman (2022)
Writer and director Matt Reeves, without to my mind any indication from previous work, Planet of the Apes movies and Cloverfield, took Batman in the right direction, or at least a better one, and shows a good hand in significant ways. What's happened already in comics needed to happen in the movies, after the path of the blockbuster superhero movies kicked off by the Batman character itself with Tim Burton in the 90s (Superman's place in the movies is a bit different). Production design and special effects and then computer graphics ramped the movies very quickly into the sort of sci-fi hyperbole DC comics went through in the 50s, and after all the super power, a step back to the basic proportions of a caped crusader is welcome. Right out of the gate, the opening credits, this skips blockbuster fanfare, and gives us a quick flash of a Gotham City as teeming as Times Square with a kind of Blade Runner pall to it. The tone is noirish, somewhat horror thriller in the quieter way, and the emphasis on the detective work builds a better relief, and also provides contrast for more concentrated bursts of action.
What's both cinematic and comic book about it in the best way is the graphic sense. Reeves is much better (than, for example, Christopher Nolan, who's just fancy, even with cinematography) at getting good panel art tableaux, and even when some of the scenes start to puff up in the more typical way, for example the grand entrance of the Batmobile and a chase sequence, it sets up a great shot that even has a bat joke. The music is similarly plotted well, thematic and incidental, though it rings James Bond in the romantic moments and at least once Darth Vader when Batman is kicking ass. The worst part of the soundtrack is the Nirvana song, which goes with the first appearance of Bruce Wayne to make an almost comical emo Batman -- he looks more like The Crow -- and that tips towards Twilight. There's a nice move, after Batman takes a turn as antifa vigilante, to make him and the legacy remember what's supposed to set him apart from self-righteous avengers, psychotics, despots or, well, fascists, but then it's Batman as first responder. Some subtle humorous strokes play through the seriousness (the first anticipation of a kiss, e.g.), but the movie is pitched thicker than typical comic book plots, more involved rather than affected like Nolan's Batman, and like those still built on the same model of Batman Returns, too many villains, too many subplots, too long.
But, geez, wanting to be like The Godfather, Chinatown, The French Connection, the Zodiac killer -- what's wrong with basing it on Batman? And for all the legendary detective stuff, and wealthy playboy who might know opera, how does Batman not get die Fledermaus?

Zombieland (2009)
Zombie movies bore me almost as much as martial arts movies, so it's either because they managed to make some good tropes on zombies, or they minimized them, that I was able to stay interested. Probably both. It's clever enough, fun enough, and -- god forbid -- sweet enough, but it is on the quaint side even for trying to be edgy with the zombies and the humor.

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)
Did you know there was a sequel to Alien before Aliens? Well, at least until they trademarked the title. A study in sheer crass cash-in, how little you can get away with, this Italian movie was rushed to release with this title. It has California locations, so you can see Goodyear and shop signs for American, stock footage of space module splashdowns, for some reason a TV talk show where they actually refer to stock footage, a bowling alley, and a cave-exploring woman with some sort of psychic connection to the vaguely inferred space origins of the indistinct goo attacks that mostly occur in a prolonged cave sequence. Oh, but they do get back to the bowling alley where there's a subjective camera sequence from some unknown alien orifice. There's a decapitation that's worth the watch, if not exactly for any effectiveness.

Q & A (1990)
From the fluorescent lit, echoey, drab police office, where the initial meeting the title refers to takes place, this spirals out into a gritty cluster of cop corruption, transgender sex trade, mob connections and race relations. Sidney Lumet's movie looks and feels different from the cosmetic police stations of 80s movies or from cop thrillers. It has something of that scatter and sweep of Dog Day Afternoon, but it's his own script here at odds with the tone and tempo. The lines sound like they should be read, not spoken, and even the untidy ending has a political thriller air to it. Still interesting work from a good cast, including Lumet's daughter. Based on a novel by former New York State Supreme Court Judge Edwin Torres, who also wrote the novel Carlito's Way which that movie is based on.

Superbad (2007)
Director Greg Mottola's Adventureland, which he also wrote, of two years later, is what this is not, and what his earlier The Daytrippers showed promise for. So it might have been what they were aiming at to get him to direct this, but Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's script is pretty straight up sophomoric. The frank humor, or crudeness, seems even a bit low for high school graduates, and it's just a party night hijinks movie barely disguised as coming of age. The fuzzy moments are broad, and the whole thread about the cops doesn't make much for observation or humor.

Joy Division (2007)
Lush and grotty, slack and hyperbolic, toss-off and overwaxing, majestic yet humble. Bipolar, Mancunian. Directed by Grant Gee, written by Jon Savage, this is in the spirit of those guys and Manchester, and would make a good set with 24 Hour Party People. Peter Hook at one point says it was easy. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was composed in three hours. Ian Curtis spoke of the words writing themselves, though perhaps in a more ominous way. There was a way he could seem to be a channel like one of his influences, William S. Burroughs (though in a different way than Mark E. Smith, who seems more like Burroughs for the word output style). Even in the birthplace of the industrial revolution, at least it doesn't have to be all work ethic crap if it's inspiration, play, or obsession. (Compare also Curtis and Marianne Elliott, see Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche.)

Zodiac (2007)
This came out the same year as No Country for Old Men and both are about the haunting of the law. Though they are different, both have express statements by law enforcement about the problem of prevention, and in the case of Zodiac, how this becomes an obsession because of all the right intentions and inclinations: due process. Both go against the grain of a very prominent strain of American fiction, which is more generally good guys winning over bad guys, but more specifically law enforcement catching criminals, criminals paying or being punished, in movies and TV shows. Zodiac even comments on other fictional movies that were based on the persons or events: Bullitt and Dirty Harry. In following the actual events more closely, it shows how the Zodiac killer was not caught, the effects of this on the careers of police as well as news reporters, and follows the arc into the more generalized obsession with amateur sleuths and followers. Though it doesn't comment directly on the spread of this as hobby, lore, cult, and the explosion of that with the Internet (cf. the case of Michelle McNamara, wife of Patton Oswald, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, websites, podcasts, books, etc.), it does offer a parallel and something of the beginning of all that with the character of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith, whose account this script is based on.
And for being unlike fictional crime movies, it's also unlike anything director David Fincher has done. The story is ultimately the obsession with real crime, and Fincher has honored that. It's dry in the manner of All the President's Men or even Spotlight, but contrary to what purveyors of movie fare perhaps too often presume, but as the popularity of true crime itself attests, that does not mean uninteresting. The relatively dispassionate way Fincher reenacts the crimes also avoids a huge problem in the vast majority of shows about serial killers (right from the top of the heap of the popularity, The Silence of the Lambs): not true to profile, often even when making such a big deal of profiling. Without trumping up, Fincher's movie is sprawling and intricate, across characters and years, and thus attentive. And an excellent cast brings this off as well, headed by Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Shutter Island (2010)
It puffs things up with a storybook and thriller grandeur, along the lines of Cape Fear in Martin Scorsese's work, though not as fun as that or The Departed, which also have wilder lurches formally. Compare to Mulholland Drive, for example, though, where the grandiose, even Hollywood itself, is brought down to the mundane and the uncanny, and you can see how the allegorical effects of the inversion of perspective are limited. After Hours has more resonance. By this point in his career, Leonardo DiCaprio has already done so much intense face scrunching he has grooves notched in his forehead.

Nick of Time (1995)
John Badham keeps this close and conversational, relatively uncluttered like the close-ups spread to the wide screen and close to the real time of the action of the plot. The premise, though, has a strange catch, if not fault. What's the point of making someone else do something if you have to go everywhere they go for the same amount of time, and if it's a crime, where you're in evidence, too? As goofy as that is, it makes for great business with Christopher Walken and Johnny Depp, as if Walken is making Depp go through an acting initiation ceremony.

Fires on the Plain (1959)
I once heard a New York City local news anchor say "lucky to be alive" about a man who fell into the path of a subway train, got his skull crushed and was in a coma. That was not the sort of sentiment of my reaction. Kon Ichikawa's movie, from a script by Natto Wada, serves as a meditation on the idea that one is not necessarily more lucky to avoid being killed during warfare, nor better off for surviving. Set in the Philippines at the end of World War II, this follows the tattered remains of the Japanese army via one soldier who is no longer fit for combat nor medical treatment. It's the disjected of the army itself, of war plans and the war machine, not just the collaterals, a view of the effects of war even beyond or beneath the direct damage. Ichikawa's approach is theatrical more than visually expressionistic, more implied than graphic, but there's a way that distance also has a countereffect: the normalization of the abject. As the character Tamura spirals into this hell of the means of life, actor Eiji Funakoshi's wide-eyed passivity refracts, and empathy is crossed with apprehension, if not revulsion. He's powerless, caught in the current, but can't let go of his civilized reflexes either. Where can we be, here? With him? The few voiceovers begin like exposition, but become a surreal internal monologue, as if the viewer, too, were speaking out loud for some semblance of the reality we want to hold onto (the quarantine experience makes this sharper).

Swordfish (2001)
This movie is so stupid it defeats my will or inspiration to even try to describe or explain it. It made me feel sorry for the actors, John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Don Cheadle, and especially Halle Berry, for just how uselessly low and cheap the material was. Granted they've been in other bad stuff, but not quite like the oafish come-on scene that introduces Berry with Jackman, and then the way she's undercover as an orgy bimbo for Travolta's gang chief, and then Jackman having to literally dance in a hacker montage that outbids any of them for impressing the credulous (computer technology is played in box office movies as if for people who've never even seen them). Travolta's piece of cutesy, self-referential crap at the beginning about Dog Day Afternoon and what's realistic in movies, itself glaringly derivative of Get Shorty, goes right out the window, same scene, which also blows "covert" or "secret" long before they are used.

The Hangover (2009)
This moves along well enough that it's diverting, but really its cleverest stroke of a blackout, and thus formally inferring a bunch of the story skipped over (which also sets up a good end credits gag), and the surprising combo of its three main players, are all that set it apart from the kind of wild ride comedies (the comedy version of the ordeal) it otherwise wants to be. I think Jim Ridley of the Village Voice put it well: "[Director Todd] Phillips can't bring himself to push the material into truly outré territory, or to characterize his growth-impaired guys as degenerate creeps rather than lovable scamps."

The Prestige (2006)
Christopher Nolan's Batman movies struck me as having silent movie plot tactics. This movie bears out the full Victorian melodrama level of his conception. He's got a double, and he's a twin -- if this is a spoiler for you and you can't see it a mile away, I'm sorry -- and there's even a device in the story to make perpetual doubles. I'm not the one making this up, and this even outstripped the spoof exaggerations I was starting to imagine. As Twister for tornadoes, this movie shoots so far over magic shows there's very little to care about them.

Frequency (2000)
Remarkably similar to Deja Vu in premise and what's done with it, this has Jim Caviezel as the hero, who flipped to the heavy for that latter, but is the sappy wonderment version. If you can make it through the rest of this movie, with its gushing music, you may want to quit about ten minutes short to avoid one of the most stretched out -- I mean it, slomo -- maudlin feel-good money shots ever.

Deja Vu (2006)
As slick and shiny as this is, it's relatively subdued compared to the artsy shit splatter of, for example, Man on Fire. So, curiously, director Tony Scott tones this down so that the procedural stuff is more interesting, and there are even flashes of a vernacular affability that are striking, or perhaps just surprising because they poke through thriller patina. But the story gets progressively more preposterous, and it's not even so much the sci-fi leap as the kind of melodramatic manipulations and plot fluffing on top of that, as if that weren't enough. With all that, Paula Patton leaping from the dock to the ferry made me burst out laughing.

The Seventh Seal (1957)
A black farce, this is more like a Midsummer Night's Dream of the Middle Ages, and thus curiously akin to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, rather than a metaphysical drama, though coming at the absurd probably from the other direction. It's thus more in the line and period of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night rather than the later stuff like the trilogy and Persona. Death and the chess match are introduced in stride, and the knight's exchange with that is as matter of fact as the absence of God in the plague and witch burning. Imaginary, symbolic, real: Death is a character even God or the devil can't be.
As Pauline Kael was keen to point out, the reputation of Bergman may come as much from those who didn't want to see his movies as from proponents. "Arthouse" or just "artsy" doesn't necessarily equate with intellectual, philosophical, brooding or ponderous, and in Bergman's case, his films from the 60s and 70s aren't the whole picture. As Kael also notes, Bergman as an artist, theatrical also, was referring to things like fear and death as well desire or elation, and questions that we confront, and representing those confrontations. He wasn't providing answers, certainly not preaching. What he was portraying was as much psychological, and that puts in him in the tradition of Scandinavian realism since the 1900s, as well as broader traditions of literature, theater and film of the 20th century. His art was as much the sensibility of this, in the case of Seventh Seal a counterpoint, a mixture of reaction, affect and tone working like irony or black humor.
Like Tarkovsky, Bergman can be turgid, groping, psychological expressivism or existential reaction as a limit, or even another kind of literal-mindedness. Wild Strawberries of the earlier period is like this, and Cries and Whispers is unbearable, what should be the real source of parody of tortured art. But his greatest work, and one of the greatest of all films, Persona is also his greatest play with all this, form, art, even seriousness and life, in the more serious period, but I also agree with the Cahiers du cinema assessment (of Jean Louis-Comolli more particularly) that this is as much in spite of him or something like the moral view of the artist, and thus as much a happy accident.

Mass (2021)
Written and directed by Fran Kranz, this has the mechanics of a play, especially with the introductory characters at the beginning, but the good sense to not be the kind of movie that speciously opens up a play. It's about a meeting in one room, and Kranz is confident enough to contend with that, and use a few judicious exteriors that even make twists on establishment shots thematically. The strong points are the drama of discovery, where we learn the background as the characters reveal it, and the rendition, by the writing and the performances, of the teetering that goes on between what people want to say and their apprehension of how it will be taken. It gets a bit thick with that as applied, out of reverence for the matter, which sometimes seems more obliging than necessary.

Deep Water (2022)
Director Adrian Lyne seems to have mellowed or at least calmed down so that the pace to this is more assured, concentrated, but even in that, the lurid, in the goofier sense that was such a mark of Lyne's body of work, shows through in this adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. The allegorical extent, of marriage, rivalry or contempt of familiarity, jealousy, gets minimized, if not dropped, with teaser tactics. We get allusion, insinuation, flashes of the husband as obsessive psychopath, or the wife as sadistically manipulative, the latter particularly as an outrageous male view of her, in contrast to a cosmetic domestic life, without much other information or development of this relationship. This might have been intended as a subjective view, exaggeration due to jealousy or worse, and it might have served as that, but the deck is stacked more for suspense than a psychological portrait, and Ana de Armas is so much better at the registers, separate or blended, that it serves the worst effect as well. Ben Affleck comes off better when he's coldly threatening, but so much of his lingering and lurking for reaction is lumpish. And what is "Xenophon" saying? Some comment about the Affleck character -- and what, Spartan ruthlessness beneath erudition? -- or it's just supposed to be a fancy, artsy name?

Made in U.S.A. (1966)
This seems like a drier version of Alphaville more than one of Masculin Féminin or Weekend. While it has the graphic and cut-up style of those latter, it was inspired by the movie version of The Big Sleep, but based on the novel The Jugger by Richard Stark, aka Donald Westlake. Because of legal action over rights by Westlake, the movie was not released in the United States until April 1, 2009, when it had it's U.S. premier at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a new print. Godard had already pulled Brechtian distance (in turn based on Chinese or Russian Formalist ideas) on pop culture before he got to more political material. The way he lifts character or even characterization out of the story is so ironic, especially for melodramatic immersion, it's hard to take statements seriously, but then things like this occur, a chilling sobriety as if it just blew in:

Title: The left, year zero.
Man driving: You shouldn't be scared. Fascism won't happen.
Paula (Anna Karina): On the contrary, it has to happen, and it will, like sailing boats, miniskirts, rock 'n' roll. We've years of fighting ahead of us, often fighting within ourselves. That's why I'm scared, scared of being tired beforehand, scared of abandoning the fight.

Anger Management (2003)
As with so many Adam Sandler vehicles, the heart of gold stuff keeps the lid on, not necessarily from wacky comedy (or just wackiness, since the results for funny are mixed), but from other heights, satirical or formal for example. The arc of the story here is a twist, but precisely so that it isn't Falling Down with the gloves off or even Jack Nicholson real life references for absurdist exaggeration, or the Duck Soup of mandated therapy.

Things (1989)
In the anatomy of bad this raises the question not so much of what constitutes a bad movie as what is the minimal criteria for a movie, to even be considered at all. Does every video shot by teenagers goofing off in the back yard, or anything shot with a cell phone count for consideration? What's the criteria for production, release, or to appear on IMDb? Somehow this 1989 thing, shot very badly on bad video -- and video especially of the 80s also ages very badly -- made some kind of appearance somewhere, saw the light of day. RiffTrax got a hold of it, which actually gives it a new life. Some Canadian goof-offs shot this in tiny rooms, it seems scarcely ever more then three feet away from the subjects and without the barest understanding of framing. With the terrible blur of the bad video, even when they finally have an exterior shot it still feels claustrophobic. But, perhaps just how or why it got produced, released, or distributed -- whatever minimal exchange or viewing -- is also the feature that gives it that special reaching badness: porn star Amber Lynn. Despite the star power they hitched onto (and however they were able to), this shows the limit of classing up, whether what they could bring off or even think of. Lynn's intercut segments have her standing in front of shelves of TV sets, apparently the best way they could come up with to connote reporter, in a goofy glam dress with 80s mane, looking too far to one side to read her cue cards. Nothing she says bears any recognizable relation to the rest of the movie, and they didn't get her for her acting.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Whatever other reasons for this having to be such a lollapalooza -- sending-off or transition or specious topping -- it was already outbidding the villain pile-up that all the superhero movies are still following since Batman Returns, orgy jags like Endgame notwithstanding, but it had a fairly nice little plot at that. Then it goes off sideways -- if that's even possible where all things are sidebars and subplots -- on another multiverse, time-fuck, self-referential gobfest that I can't refer to otherwise because it might be a spoiler for some. One of the things that gets tiresome in all the Spider-Man movies is the Victorian self-sacrifice thing. It gets worked over as badly as the Batman brooding origin shit. Here it's three times that, with scene after scene dragging it out, at one point all of them rehashing it all out and crying, and it's like an SNL skit. Also for not being funny, since repeating the exaggeration without being funny is the SNL style now. The Superman kiss to make forget trick has been a groaner for all these years, and they manage to outbid that, making an even bigger mess of, not just suspension of disbelief, but conundrums you have to ignore but can't. Yet somehow this managed to avoid the level of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 for being overworked to disinterest.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)
David Lynch produced a movie directed by Werner Herzog, with Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny, Udo Kier, Michael Pena, Grace Zabriskie and Brad Dourif. That may be all you need to know. Before Lynch, there was Herzog's uncanny. In Aguirre, Wrath of God, Heart of Glass, Stroszek (the same year as Eraserhead), and Nosferatu (for me the crowning achievement), Herzog presented variations on a minimalist mannerism, with deadpan actors walking through their own dreams, often nightmares. "Actor" is meant technically, like operant, because Herzog used non-actors, underactors or manic overactors, and long before cameras were present with us everywhere we went, the drifting verite camera style that seemed to be part of the scene catching up the action, adding even anachronistic pithiness to cinematic period or costume drama. Herzog's own brand of mordant wit, a sort of slow good humor about the catastrophe that humans have always been denying -- way ahead of apocalyptic -- goes with a persistently low-key counterpoint to the grandness of topic, whether in documentaries like Grizzly Man or Encounters at the End of the World (which might be the title to best express all his work), or a dramatization, Rescue Dawn, of a story he also covered in another documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. His move to Los Angeles coincides with a move towards predominately documentary material, as if he's intentionally living in the shadow of the spectacle. It's as if he lingers in the nooks and crannies or aftermath of events to find things there no one else is seeing or cares about. Little wonder, then, that this 2009 movie, based on an actual incident of a student acting out Orestes in real life, might get overlooked. As even a police procedural, it's not trumped up in conventional ways, and Herzog is more interested in the mental state of the main character, trailing off on anecdotes of his behavior leading up to the incident. It plays small, even meager compared to other Herzog work, but as portrait detail it's interesting, and especially from Shannon.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)
A close-up monologue with Jack Nicholson against a black background that starts off the movie is echoed by a tap dance number in the middle, that begins floating dreamlike in its spotlight surrounded by black. Both of these pull back to reveal another context, and Atlantic City as the location of big dreams and cheap cons is also set beside art as a figure. This is another way to mark off or set off from the tradition of show and spectacle of the Hollywood movie, somewhat like the Miss America pageant of the dance sequence. BBS, the production company of director Bob Rafelson, among others, and its predecessor Raybert Productions, which grew out of those, like Nicholson, also associated with American International Pictures, had already set off from the doddering Hollywood with Easy Rider. This movie was subtler about the cultural comment. The cinematography of László Kovács, who also did Easy Rider, echoes Gordon Willis's of The Godfather, which came out the same year, with the figures against black, and the sparse, blustery, off-season and dying boardwalk with its giant resort hotels of a bygone era foreshadows The Shining with their ghostliness. It's a sneaky art picture, with these images and strokes slouching around in realist Americana, hustlers and their junk notions, the game of Monopoly, and even the pretend beauty pageant and the climax's resonance with Nicholson's opening suggest a reflexive comment, the movie's own con. The play for revelations and big climax, and a scene about a little impromptu con with some old ladies that's never really made clear just how and why it comes about, may betray not so much the bad rap of philosophy, using representation to warn against it, as the one of tragedy, making a big scene.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)
From the Mary Poppins team, writer Bill Walsh, director Robert Stevenson, music by Richard and Robert Sherman and Irwin Kostal, and much the same animation team, also blending live action and animation, and with similar whimsical witchery, but it seems to follow more the plan of a variety show. There's a decent touch of sauciness, especially with the children, but the staging is dry, especially by the standards of today's bendy imagery. The animation sequence, which includes a soccer match with animals, gets cartoon animal wacky, and the climactic battle, despite the puncturing and dousing of the stock Nazis, was clunky enough even then. With certainly nothing close to Mary Poppins numbers, there's an extended sequence about a marketplace that has an interesting assortment of costume dances from throughout the British empire, a sort of theatrical montage, political ripples notwithstanding.

Parallel Mothers (2021)
Then there are directors who are good in a way that it scarcely makes a difference whether their movies are. In Pedro Almodóvar's latest, there are scenes of Penelope Cruz as a photographer doing photo sessions and the rapt way they're carried off is like a mise en abyme of Almodóvar. The photo shoots are miniatures of the movies, we see the same lush but fast approach, offhand, deft, and Cruz is directing her subjects as if she were expressing Almodóvar as much as he is expressing the character and the shoot. Like Satyajit Ray or Claude Chabrol, Amodóvar's touch just seems to be that fascination, and we're drawn into it empathetically, watching what he's watching the same way. It's hard to single out because it's such overall orchestration. It's the staging, but it's also the editing, an overall pacing that's close and intent, but also terse and rolling. It's also as if Almodóvar the director doesn't even have patience for Almodóvar the writer. Here, there is a thread about the literally buried legacy of Franco and it's almost nothing but a framing device, triggering the events that become the main thread the title describes. In the last act, after an eruption and other skeletons have been unearthed, there's a hasty, awkward shift, then the movie ends up back at the Franco graves having skipped over other developments. The ending plays like his melodramatic ones, with characters singing in a car, flighty even with the gravity. As I've noted before (see Volver, Broken Embraces), Almodóvar like Jim Thompson or Fassbinder, or even Hitchcock, seems unconcerned with any other, perhaps conventional, sense of proportion or resolution. Even the idea of some symbol or analogy here, some parallel or poetic equivalence, between the lesson of history and the lives of the characters, which the script is stating outright in a flashback scene and the echo of its credo about truth, seems unwieldy compared to the manner of life's unfolding, unruly and graceful. And perhaps the microcosm of this: a moving shot of a curtain blowing out an upper story window cuts to a scene of people having sex, and then back to the curtain again. It's sensual figure, the opening and passing of evocation, association, and not the clumsy reduction of pat code.

West Side Story (2021)
In case you're wondering why make another movie version of this, instead of Technicolor there's oversaturated undersaturated digital color, Tony Kushner was brought in to rewrite the script and rearrange the musical numbers -- meaning change the order of them -- add a new character Rita Moreno's current age and make Anybodys a badass, and there's lots of lens flare and backlighting. It's the Ready Player One of West Side Stories. Stephen Spielberg certainly didn't make it any less boring than the original. This was the Sunday school or civics lesson version of 50s musicals, in some ways even the reverential ceremony of Schindler's List of its day. Jerome Robbins's choreography and Leonard Bernstein's music were certainly different from typical American musical theater, in some ways more interesting if not just high-toned, but for me the only thing that has any dash or fun to it, even in operatic terms (approaching something like Carmen) is "America." I wouldn't even go as far as Pauline Kael did to mull over the pretense and obviation (of its Shakespeare inspiration, too). It's just boring.

Asphalt (1929)
This German silent starts off great, suggesting The Crowd, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City or even Dziga Vertov with some of the cinematic gyrations. It settles into melodrama more typical of the era, though it has a fairly sophisticated touch, including with close-ups, similar to Machaty (see Extase, Erotikon). Austrian born director Joe May worked in German silent film from early on and even had his own production company, and later emigrated to Hollywood. Also of note here is the film's lead actress, Betty Amann, who was born in Germany to American parents, grew up in the U.S., then was picked for this role after traveling to Germany. In the 1990s, a copy of this film was found in the Gosfilmofond archive in Moscow that was different from release versions. A restoration based on this copy, which was apparently from the original negative, was released on DVD in 2005, with a score by Karl-Ernst Sasse.

The Babysitter (1995)
Despite some decent performances, especially from Lee Garlington and J.T. Walsh, this adaptation of the Robert Coover story by Guy Ferland, who also directed, is too prosaic in a movie way, worst of all with the soundtrack. There's a sort of 80s movie convention suburban lifestyle frame around this, as if to ground or indeed domesticate the shifts in perspective. The story is a shattering of perspective sentence by sentence, and curiously, is more like TV channel surfing. It's already cinematic in the way its disintegrating the story. Coover was being Godard with the literary form. The flashes of alternate imagination, here, do not disrupt, or even play with, form and frame the same way, whether this was a limit of the conception or imposed on it.

Hollywood Bulldogs: The Rise and Falls of the Great British Stuntmen (2021)
This is a documentary about a generation of British men who helped establish, organize and standardize stunt work in the movies (and not just for men), told by them in their own offhand, anecdotal manner. They worked in TV shows like The Avengers and The Saint in the 60s, the Bond films, the Raiders of the Lost Ark films, and into the 90s, and effectively created a union and established regular positions for stunt workers and coordinators. As daring as they were, they were not foolhardy, and the highlights here include not just the more dangerous situations, but how they talk about the importance of fear.

Licorice Pizza (2021)
Once upon a Time in Hollywood meets Dazed and Confused. It might've been interesting as a portrait of those Jack-of-all-trades, fame seeker types (especially in LA) who empty experience as sheer accomplishment, if it didn't seem to be made by one.

Longford (2006)
In the aftermath of the Moors murders around Manchester, England, in the 60s, Lord Longford, an advocate of prison reform and forgiveness in general, took up the cause of one of the convicted, Myra Hindley, whom the press called the most evil woman in Britain. This film, written by Peter Morgan (The Crown, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, among others) and directed by Tom Hooper, focuses on the drama of Longford's principles and that of forgiveness in general, and of reputation and susceptibility in the ambiguity about Hindley's own culpability and intention. Was Longford susceptible in particular, or does forgiveness in general make us so? Without expressing the paradox as Derrida does, that forgiveness is most called for where it is not justified, this certainly presents a case to test views and convictions. Jim Broadbent as Longford is good as usual, Samantha Morton solid, and Andy Serkis gives another compelling creepy performance as the other convicted, Ian Brady.

Rooney (2022)
This documentary, possibly made for British TV, about football (soccer) star Wayne Rooney, is also surprisingly like the Poly Styrene treatment in tone: mopey, planetarium music. One of the documentary soundtrack cliches now is just bare note modulation, one note making a background hum that perhaps changes to another note or two -- convenient atmosphere. The rap sessions with Rooney and his wife don't really cut to the pertinent, and although there are scenes where it seems the director is letting them demonstrate themselves, even those play on well after the point, so it seems as indulgent as some of the sensational press cited in the movie by various parties. This spread-out, plodding manner, is certainly different from a sports resume type documentary, and makes it even hard to follow, also since they jump around for no apparent reason than to just make it spiffier.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche (2021)
This is about Marianne Elliott's life beyond Poly Styrene, too, and has to do with her daughter, Celeste Bell, coming to terms with all of it. Bell made this with Paul Sng and Zoe Howe. It's informative about Elliott and Bell expresses her own reaction to, if not rebellion from, all her mother's life, the X-Ray Spex fame, but also what came after, including mental health issues and religious beliefs. Despite the understandable emotion, the planetarium music and lots of pensive shots of Bell herself, including of horizons from behind her, create more a mopey tone than just reverent. If you take that bluntness as strict negativity, that's another way of getting into the matter here: whether art and affect are a way to cope or play with reality, or whether reality, even via art, is too much a cause of affect. Everything that was liberating, that opened up expression with a rebellious aesthetic, like that of the punk scene, was also playing with sensitivity, in more than one sense. Playing with that provocation could backfire, and especially when someone was only learning about their own sensitivity, if not constitution. In the case of Elliott/Styrene, the ingenuousness that was so great about her, made her a natural, strong, turned out to also be a vulnerability.

The Power of the Dog (2021)
The Piano Goes Out West. (This is more literal than you may think.)

Red Rocket (2021)
By contrast to American Underdog, here's someone who finds banality interesting and manages to make the stories that way, or at least isn't afraid of that. Writer and director Sean Baker did Tangerine and The Florida Project before. This one may be or at least seem more lighthearted, and it certainly doesn't have the dramatic bearing of those or the great stroke of the latter that gives a real world twist to the Magic Kingdom and movies. There's similar material here, a dreamland that's hardly less sullied or compromised, and dreamy flickers of the fabric. I noticed at one point, with a cut, that Baker seems to be expressly avoiding lingering to press effect, but there are other ways he adds an almost comic, if not ironic, tinge to pressing, as with quick zooms. There's a kind of aesthetic distance he gets in moments here that's as offhand as the elegance of the children's play view in The Florida Project.

American Underdog (2021)
A real movie about real people going to real smaller regional colleges and not getting drafted, working in real grocery stores then playing real arena football, then getting a second chance at the real NFL and winning the real Super Bowl. It could happen to any one in 250 million. Shazam plays Kurt Warner, who meets his lifelong love Rogue. My Bodyguard is his U. of Northern Iowa coach, and Day After Tomorrow is his NFL Rams coach, Dick Vermeil. There's lots of nice stuff in Kurt Warner's real story, but as the movie is based on his co-written book, that must be telling the story with a lot of movie melodrama convention and inspirational cant. It doesn't get too heavy-handed, but it's still got that TV-movie mechanical feeling. Despite some predictable football action sequences, they actually do some interesting things matching the re-creations to actual footage.

R.O.T.O.R. (1987)
Enjoyably ridiculous lyrical heights of dufuscular. This is not just a ripoff of Robocop. It's so much more. Including a ripoff off Terminator. A goulash of fearless movie conceit. Why care what the parts do as the whole? Like the long morning establishment poem with the "buttery sunlight" where the cowboy super tech agent makes coffee for his horse. The lead who looks rough enough to be a cowhand or ex-bouncer, and like he's gritting his teeth when he talks, is supposed to be a genius, but an ass-kicker, you know, like a cross between a special ops drill sergeant and a robotics wizard. But wait till his female cohort shows up! She looks like a working bouncer with her own style of skunk Mohawk perm. Their character names are Coldyron (pronounced "cold iron," not "coldy Ron," stupid) and Steele. Uh-huh. Both of them are dubbed over, with the voice actors also getting credits. See them walk, stand, arrive at hotel entrances, or sit at desks, Dallas in all its extravagant 80s banality, with an ultramodern mood piped in from elsewhere as drum machines and synthesizers. The genius of the robotic motorcycle cop design includes karate and a mustache, as well as the sophisticated acronym. Don't miss the burger joint fight, with it's progressively squirrelly goons. Titles keep track of the time as if to give coherence, and because you need to know. And the thrilling climax with a man drawn with exploding rope! This was also a RiffTrax feature.

Effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull dies

Mother, Jugs and Speed (1976)
Frenetic, splenetic, and kinetic. The title and the pitch look like exploitation and hijinks, but this is really the sort of hard-hitting, day-in-the-life occupational episode drama of the 70s, like The New Centurions, no less for the humor. Here it's ambulance drivers rather than cops. And it has similar pedigree with Peter Yates, who also directed Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The interesting mix of a cast includes Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel as the title characters, Allen Garfield, Bruce Davison, L.Q. Jones, Dick Butkus, Severn Darden, Toni Basil (in a surprisingly dramatic sequence), and post-Jeannie, pre-Dallas Larry Hagman in a particularly impressive performance. About the worst 70s feature is the travelogue music for the romance. (For discussion of Cosby, see the recent doc series We Need to Talk About Cosby.)

Gremlins (1984)
The irreverent humor and Christmas counterpoint are affecting, but even for that, it's a puppet show, latex Muppets.

Over the Top (1987)
So strangely squeaky and sappy indulgent, it's like an after school special version of Rocky. It makes The Karate Kid look like a work of art. Perfect for RiffTraxing.

Nightmare Alley (2021)
Nightmare Alley (1947)
Guillermo del Toro made a remake of the 1947 movie and he's made the modern version of that sort of slick thriller of its day, with the Hollywood emphasis on the suspense over comment. This is much more involved and interesting than The Shape of Water, not that sort of confection, but then it's adapted. The source of both movies is a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which is supposed to be grittier, and I wonder if it makes more of the comparison of carny level confidence games with religion, conventional business, and even psychology, what both movie versions fairly cry out for but shunt in different ways. The differences are interesting for lots of reasons, and add to the intrigue of both. The earlier version doesn't have the backstory for the main character, which makes it leaner, and Del Toro's handling of it is the soupiest part, but fills out the character better. The new version also doesn't have the redemptive happy ending that seems quite tacked on in the Hollywood way of the 40s, and that and Bradley Cooper's performance make it much more dramatically ambivalent and chilling. On the other hand, the shotgun wedding of the earlier movie is more in character with the shiftiness of the milieu as well, and Del Toro makes the character's presentation more shifty without it, makes for the melodramatic love from the start. It's with the psychologist character that both movies most soften or smudge the analogy with carney tricks or the spiritualist con, mostly for intrigue. Del Toro's penchant for lush effects is here in more typical set design and photography, though even that looks enhanced (the psychologist's office is far grander than in the original). There's a calmer lurid and looming style that suggests the Coen brothers, but doesn't have their mix of tones.

House of Gucci (2021)
Directed by Ridley Scott, written by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, this doesn't live up, or perhaps down, to much of anything. It plays like fairly bland series dramatization, and while there are things that suggest an attempt at some sort of satiric or at least comic flair -- like everyone's spoofy Italian accents though it's all in English and Jared Leto's nearly clown-suit caricacture -- there's not really any trashy indulgent fun to it. The cast seems like a juicy lineup, but they're not right, whether due to Scott or at all. They're like a screen between portrait and object, like we're getting, e.g., another Jeremy Irons or Al Pacino role, and not really a comment on or look at the subject. Adam Driver's undemonstrative style can deflate dramatic pomp, but here it's hung on a flat character. There's no breadth, as in Marriage Story, that would bring even humor out of the drama. Even his reflex of smiling or laughing at serious things is not connected, given any larger context. Lady Gaga shows here that in between the emotive moments there's a kind of blankness, like she doesn't have that part of the presence.

The Ventures: Stars on Guitars (2020)
Snappy assembly doc about the instrumental band, in two senses of the word, also greatly instrumental, most directly an influence for surf, but on about anyone who plays a guitar, certainly an electric one. There are plenty of interviews with Don Wilson -- it's made by his daughter -- but also archival clips of other members, and then the same for aficionados crossing many strata of culture, let alone music, and the world. Among the many morsels of info: The Ventures have outsold The Beatles 2 to 1 in Japan. There are representatives from 60s and 70s rock, metal, punk, mainstream movies and underground culture, and in Japan as well. (And for you Normanites of my era or California transplants, or armchair surfers, or just those who know, there's The Neptunas, too.)

The Avengers (1998)
In the line of updating (ransacking) previous fare -- make a new, big-budget movie out of something that wasn't, like a TV series or game -- there's this, which strangely revises 60s clothing and decor without making it clear when it's set. There is a great powder blue 60s Jaguar, Sean Connery gets to play supervillain this time, and there are some furry fetish versions of gummy bears. The latter suggests a much more interesting surrealist take, but I don't think anyone -- watching, at least -- knows what they were doing, here, so even the talent of Fiona Shaw, Jim Broadbent and Eddie Izzard is wasted.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
See here.

Godzilla (1998)
See here. This was a RiffTrax spin.

The 13th Man (2019)
A very home team and homespun account of the Texas A&M bonfire disaster in 1999. But there are some frank, sobering comments and accounts, particularly by survivor John Comstock.

The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
This is where Johnny Depp started his career as the type of jittery, flashy sidekick animal character -- monkeys, parrots, meerkats -- Disney uses to get the attention of small children who are dragged to these movies by their parents. And it also has that actress who looks like she's going to sneeze all the time. RiffTrax has a treatment.

The Karate Kid Part III (1989)
It's called "Part III," with Roman numerals, because it's a saga. RiffTrax fodder.

The Hunger Games (2012)
Do the kids who read these books or see these movies learn the lesson about bread and circuses such as books and movies like this? RiffTrax adds to the diversion.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
This is the movie where the CG effect of some great rolling wave chasing everyone is really fast cold. It's too fast for anyone to escape, except some people do. Despite that and digital wolves that can also be outrun, it's really quite slow. RiffTrax can warm you up to it.

Monica Vitti, la muse d'Antonioni, est morte

Brother (1997)
Aleksey Balabanov's scruffy portrait of scruffy times in the early years after the Soviet Union works like the new noir of its day. Everyone is in a thrown state, outside the law, with no real system on the other side, but it's the reluctant hero who will find himself caught in the middle of the gangs. His nobility is as gruff as his fearlessness. He's not even particularly heroic, nor appealing in all respects, for other characters as well as us (how much of this is Balabanov's shrewd observation is ambiguous), and he doesn't bring about the change he wants to the most. He's just managing to keep his nose above it. And he likes music. It's rock and roll to the Russians, though to Americans it might seem more Eurovision with hints of metal and punk. In between scrapes and capers, camping with vagrants or a married woman, he goes to music stores and concerts. This is the combo that apparently struck a chord with a good swath of Russians, because this movie became enough of a hit to spark a sequel. Balabanov has the on the streets, roaming uncertainty similar to Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, but it's on a popular level more than a mystical one. His work is tighter later, or at least in Cargo 200, but even the roughness of the work here is interesting.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)
Another 2021 film by writer/director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose Drive My Car is getting lots of acclaim. Wheel is three parts, like short stories. It's the Japanese version of Hong Sang-Soo, in the sense of the minimal style, a sort of bare theater or pretending, and also like Hong, sometimes an earnestness that seems more than just a preference, like the metaphysical prejudice about the subordination of art to "real" life. The first segment shows the most strain of this kind of earnestness. The second segment goes into a conversation fraught with misgiving, involving sex, that seems impossible for an American movie, let alone in a real college instructor's office. But it's even another scene after this that is the sharpest of the whole movie, a rather bleak, sobering encounter on a streetcar about the broader scope of literary business. The last segment makes more explicit the relay of personae that's a virtue of this approach, where we see the bare minimum of imagination for any art, drama, at work even in life outside it.

Top Gun (1986)
From the title alone you can get to the joke about this being a landmark gay mainstream movie, but that's insulting even to gay porn because of the cornpone straight shit in this. "Hot dog" is apt, not even because of Tony Scott's relentless style crud, like the reddish sky tint to the top third of the image so popular in music videos of the time; or because of Tom Cruise or his character or the fact the entire plot is based on breaking any procedures, rules, decorum, laws of physics, that have anything to do with training, conduct, flying, classification levels, international incidents or plausibility (did the Navy care about that? -- they ate it up, with all the personnel involved in the production, and recruitment shooting up after the movie came out); or not even because of how everything is trumped up to such a huge slice of juvenile melodrama bullshit through and through (the shit-eating sexy smiles, Meg Ryan out-bobbing everyone in the family "Great Balls of Fire" scene); but simply because everyone looks like a hot dog on a grill, with grease oozing or bubbling up on their shiny red faces throughout the movie. If that's not enough, there's RiffTrax to add to it.

Dark at Noon (1992)
When you get tired of the predictability of plots, the antidote can be something that tries not to be plot or conventional narrative at all, or to even tinker or twist or subvert that. Sometimes this goes by terms like "surreal" or "oneiric" (or just "dreamlike"). Sometimes it's parody or pure caprice. Chilean Raul Ruiz, who worked mostly in France and Portugal after fleeing the Pinochet coup, made lots of low-budget movies characterized as experimental, and was influenced by writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Pierre Klossowski. Here is one of the cases where he worked with a bigger budget and more widely known actors such as John Hurt, David Warner, Didier Bourdon and Daniel Prevost. The result is an absurdist wolf in quaint period movie clothing (the French title for the movie translates literally as "the eye which lies"). There's a premise for this: miracles are the norm, at least in one village. The extrapolation is that miracles have become banality. The cast's delivery, the music and the air to it all is conventional light comedy, but what they're saying and what's happening doesn't even have the logic of jokes. That may be frustrating if you're expecting any sort of narrative or thematic causation, but it's interesting as a style exercise if nothing else.

Rancho Deluxe (1975)
Not so much a comic tone as a cavalier one, this seems to be, especially early on, a vehicle for smart-assed delivery. But once it settles down, and introduces others besides Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston -- Elizabeth Ashley, Harry Dean Stanton, Slim Pickens, interesting roles here for all of them, and more besides, even Clifton James -- this has a sneaky little plot to it, though it also seems to shift, if not lose, its perspective of those first two. Part of the nonchalance is to not get too carried away with that sort of thing. It's interesting to see a case, if not a time, when the faults of a movie could be more literary.

Public Enemies (2009)
Director Michael Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti shot this on the HD video of the day and it looks like a movie with the motion smoothing setting on (even when yours is not), or dramatizations on a cable channel show. Adding to that is lots of handheld, and a very scatter-shot script and treatment otherwise. It's hard for me to get past Warren Oates and even Ben Johnson as Dillinger and Melvin Purvis, and what is offered here as more material from the records doesn't seem to be making any more factual, or coherent, statement. Johnny Depp is just warming up for his Whitey Bulger performance.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
Keanu Reeves voice: "Why are you asking me these questions?" There's a RiffTrax for this.

The Wicker Man (2006)
The very idea of a remake of the 1973 movie written by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Robin Hardy seems folly. First off, the cat is out of the bag. But that film was also such a quirky (precisely in the unintentional, un-self-consciously-applied, unsmug sense), happy accident that repeating it is a reverse engineering problem: trying to build backwards from the effect. Neil LaBute, who rewrote and directed this, makes changes as specious and senseless as Tim Burton's for Willy Wonka. It's played straight, actually quite fraught, which means there's no contrast or subterfuge even if you don't know the story, and switching it off to a private cult off the West Coast, even for a turn on patriarchy, eliminates the whole religious clash for the sense of sacrifice, and the skewered balance of worldviews. But you can use it for another Nicolas Cage performance that's so serious it's goofy, accompanied by RiffTrax.

The Grudge (2004)
There's a great idea here to twist horror story and fairy tale type moral with each other, and it's always good to see something go against the grain, and especially the pace of horror movies of the heavy effects variety. But varying pace does not alone a good vibe make. Director Takashi Shimizu sometimes goes too far in the other direction, as the RiffTrax crew is quick to pounce on, where nothing happening doesn't even seem to be particularly setup or suspense.

Bootmen (2000)
Australian curiosity about a family of steel workers and tap dancing, also notable as Sam Worthington's feature debut. This has more of a Stomp influence, and there are some creative dance numbers incorporating industrial surroundings, but the story frame is not so much melodramatic for the let's raise money and put on a show in dad's steel mill to raise money bit, as for the considerable string-yanking trying to pass for tough life of boys fighting boys and brothers fighting over a girl.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
Director Joel Coen gives a great approach to Shakespeare, but it also may be that Shakespeare shows why the Coen approach is so great. The problem with Shakespeare is the way the theatricality clashes with more naturalistic approaches on film, as in Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth. It's mainly the language. Shakespeare was even proto-cinematic in the structure of scenes. He understood the way the stage could be as pliable as the imagination for location and setting, and he used "intercutting" rhetorically and dramatically. But the language was certainly a different kind of flourish, ceremony, formalism. The trick is to not contrast the language or try to make it out to be just speech, dialogue, colloquial, or put it in a setting like that. Coen's treatment is both more theatrical and cinematic. It's storybook, in the manner of Night of the Hunter, the way part of the Coens' True Grit was. Coen's touch gives a graphic depth to the stage, or rather the more artificial, stage-like settings he's using. He can then pull off some nice visual poetry of his own to go along with the language, for example, some simple, elegant dissolves. The black and white helps with this whole storybook contrast, and also suggests Orson Welles's Othello. There are some pushy moments, such as with the witches, but it's kind of hard to be subtle with them.

Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes (1989)
The Movie Brains research team noted in Amityville 3-D a preponderance of light fixtures in sets and shots that seemed a bizarre infatuation, obsession or fetish at the time. Little did we know that it was a presage or setup for the next installment, where the centerpiece of evil is not even the house but -- a lamp! There are plenty more lamps, lights and appliances that are minions of the bwana devil lamp. RiffTrax did a live show for this, which is now available recorded on their website.

Eternals (2021)
There's a few hooks, like the CG recreation of ancient sites (the Ishtar Gate and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon), extending the play on gods as superheroes, some interesting casting choices, Chloe Zhao as director. But at this point, Marvel is a victim of the saturation it has been the biggest cause of. How many other series and groups of heroes does this resemble now, let alone movies and individual characters?

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
They meet the Frenchman and then they meet the keymaker and then the Merovingian and the oracle in there somewhere and then the architect and then the archetype and then the synecdoche and then the sphincter and then the platitudypus. And it's as boring as Dungeons & Dragons, listening to the ridiculous gyrations of narration that the master is far too infatuated with to care if anyone else is. RiffTrax makes the medicine go down.

Clash of the Titans (2010)
The 1981 movie had its own problem with the clash of looks, where Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion special effects were in contrast with a smoother, sometimes blander, studio-lit live action. Harryhausen's figures seemed more at home in the grainier, blushier photography of the 50s and 60s. By contrast, the CG, green-screen era, well, has almost no contrast. Everything is awash in steroidal airbrush tones, the same way the action is washed out when the bulk of the image is a constant cartoony stream. RiffTrax makes up for the story that's a wash, too.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go cars girls butt robots. I wouldn't watch it without RiffTrax.

Last Night in Soho (2021)
Writer, director Edgar Wright's venture into more serious fare is fanfare, long on flourish and effect, but short on the kind of evocation of, for example, The Tenant, which the story suggests, among other things. The idea is interesting, but especially the ending, with its horror film style crescendos on top of all the ballroom and musical ones, and all the twistiness of the plot, undermines the allegory of woman's plight or position, not so much outright as by just making it messy with a lot of noise.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Ghostbusters: Field of Goonies and Gremlins.

Jurassic World (2015)
As always, the return-reset-resequel teaches us about the futility of learning. But that's a paradox, in case you didn't see that, there. The lesson about messing around with nature was not learned and goshdarned if they didn't go and repeat everything exactly and then some. This movie even tries to get cutesy reflexive about it, DNA-engineering super badass dinosaur in the story for making that shit up for the story. Why don't they just open a park for humans to be eaten by dinosaurs, and skip all the family fluffing? That's what we're watching for. Mean guy bad, RiffTrax good.

Cloverfield (2008)
I'll say it here, though it was obvious before, whether Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, and this movie did nothing to avoid or change it. I really hate the pretense, the faux verite thing, but as if the contradiction isn't patent, immediate, from the premise, they do so much to make it worse. Here, they start with a fake Department of Defense video leader that states this was found footage of the incident, which makes the whole beginning, where a guy is filming the girl he slept with, and then the whole party sequence, absurd on top of annoying. Like the defense department is going to keep all that, for anyone to have to watch before the giant monster attacks. And then the really obvious shoddy love story thread through it all. The contrivance is so much more contradictory and ridiculous, not only that you keep shooting while the bridge you're on is collapsing, but you annoyingly, cloyingly, smugly craft a narrative with your first-person pretense. My theory about slasher and boo movies, like fireside ghost stories, is that there is a ritualistic formality that works as a reassurance. It has to be a game, or like an amusement park ride. You want the thrill, the rush, but not anything more insinuating. When you create implications that creep further, mess with the frame more, it becomes disturbing on other levels, and those who want only that thrill generally don't like more profound suggestions. That would mean that the obvious fake-ness of even all the stuff made to act more real with this first-person conceit, the very contradiction, serves that function of reassurance, though not necessarily that it's shrewd. With Cloverfield the beginning of the premise is a good idea, a perspective of a giant monster attack that's not movie omniscient view. But they make it this cheap thrill, even the lazy narrative stuff like talking to the camera. RiffTrax is satisfying for this because of how they go after the yuppie pretense, and they also make a great introductory joke, with a big setup, about the other obvious problem with the handheld: the nausea.

Terminator Salvation (2009)
This is a much better variation on the story than Terminator 3, opening up the future part rather than the past -- er, present -- but there's still the can of worms about all the points to go back to, the loops in the time line, which you might stray off on more because the movie becomes another din of action, or you might not because, oo, guns, planes, explosions, motorcycles, robots! Sam Worthington's character is perhaps the most interesting turn, not because it's so new or unexpected, but because of how it crisscrosses things, and he does a good job, managing to make all the heavy, world-fate brooding look more offhand than Christian Bale does. This has a RiffTrax treatment, too.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
The inevitable version for CG, this has Michael Bay's name on it, as producer, but also Megan Fox in it, i.e. that Transformers smell. So somehow what started as an underground comic parody of comics, including the "teenage" pandering and melodramatic seriousness of superheros, becomes a loud vehicle of steroidal kiddie pop.

Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
After watching a run of other fare, both later than and contemporary with (see below), I rewatched some Star Trek movies because of RiffTrax treatments. It also happened I'd had my booster shot that morning and started getting a fever, so I watched in bed, feeling sick, dozing and waking. It had already struck me how different the Star Trek movies were, and not just as the original series. Something so quaint and smarmy, now in a familiar way, and then the costumes they did for that aging OS crew, and their sculpted 80s hair, or hairpieces in some cases. And then being sick, it struck me: Aunt Star Trek. They're like some nice, old aunt, who always dresses a bit too formally, even taking care of you when you're sick. Tante Shatner. Or even the aunt trying to be hip like Ricardo Montalban's Khan, or being so goofy it's embarrassing, like Nichelle Nichols's fan dance as Uhura. RiffTrax made me laugh right through my miserable feeling, no more so than when they referred to Kurtwood Smith's white-haired and -mustachioed Federation President as President Snow Monkey.

Next (2007)
This movie gives two conundrums, not to say absurdities, to consider. One is Nicolas Cage. I would say his acting, but it may be him in general. Could he really make all these parts so ironic or even plain goofy if he didn't play them so seriously? And to play them so seriously, isn't he being so serious about his acting? He was even a producer of this movie. The other is the premise of seeing just two minutes into the future and the way this movie extrapolates that into a garden of forking paths super power. That itself actually makes an opening for this conundrum, perhaps more scarcely considered: to "see" the future, would you be seeing a constant run of time or action, or just a snapshot? Once you're in the track of following it out, how would you be able to get out of it? (The line or groove idea of time, and the judgment day paradox: replaying.) There's plenty to meditate and riff on, here, especially with the RiffTrax team of Mike Nelson and wife Bridget. There's even Columbo!

I Am Legend (2007)
The Will Smith Omega Man -- this uses the title of the 1954 book both movies are based on -- starts off fine enough, fairly interesting about the solitary existence. Little did they know how this would have much greater resonance: a real pandemic. But despite the fact the novel is one of the original post-apocalypse stories and inspired the zombie craze, from Night of the Living Dead on, (in the book they're called vampires, and that's more how they're played in The Omega Man) this movie is now well in the line of all that since, and especially the overkill of this in the CG era. It's just another big budget, post-apocalypse zombie movie, or even series, and doesn't do anything to distinguish itself against the line or for the sake of the original. The ending, here, an alternative one that was not the theatrical release version, is actually more similar to the book: the tests for a cure and realization about the tables turning, an interesting play on Nietzsche's dictum, be careful if you fight monsters, lest you become one. But this movie gives an entirely different tone to that. It's more like PETA for zombies, rather than the starker irony the book's survivor sees when he's about to be executed: legend indeed.

Highlander (1986)
Stream of conkyness. It's like they were embarrassed by the very idea of a script. Or at least the kind with dialogue or a plot or a premise. Or did they bother to write up: the fall to a floor of factory dance-club windows, every single blow of the indomitable villain until the blow that vanquishes the indomitable villain, and then streams of neon energy, and more streams, and more vaguely lightning effects, and more strangely cartoonish halo-y effects, and then wall-sized factory dance-club windows shattering, music video crescendo after music video crescendo. If you want to know the relationship of 80s parking garages to 16th century Scotland, suffice it to say that parking garages had to do with everything in 80s movies, because you won't get much more from this. Although you can add RiffTrax.

Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)
I don't know how much of this came from the novel, but the script and approach of the movie are drawn in to conversation scale -- even quite literally the opposite of broad, in a physical or shot length way -- and there is a very conscientious tack against outburst, certainly of the climactic kind. Carrie Snodgress's main character is played against one suggestion of the title and certainly lots of other movies by remaining confoundingly restrained against the insufferable options of husband and lover, thus the irony of the title played right through the ending shot. Sometimes this comes off as the railing of the portrait rather than the portrayed, too much an affectation or worked over, in the beginning with Richard Benjamin's character, and then as Frank Langella's is stretched out. But it's still compelling and has some subtler dramatic points.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)
"She's taking a shit." Among more conspicuous things that make this very bad movie great, this may actually be a peak of its conception, as a kind of unconscious reveal. The movie spends its first half in a very juvenile and similarly executed vanity fantasy of software salesman meets fashion model just as both get rich, then after an even more laughably tame makeout scene (in underwear) passing for a sex scene, the world is inexplicably attacked by the most effortless Photoshop-like special effects eagles ever. While the gang of victims is driving around in a beat-up mom van with their automatic weapons, mostly from picnic stop to picnic stop, in one of the endless pull over and park scenes one character asks where another has gone, and that answer is given. Even in previous moments of trying to portray jock-like men being crass, there was not such direct speech, and it's Mr. Goody Solar Panels who says this line. And have no fear, what follows is a real payoff on the same kind of brutal hypo-realism: a trudge to some scrappy brush with a roll of toilet paper, but the shitty eagles save us from actual, or perhaps shitty, shit, with one of their mercifully laughable, shitty acts of gore and violence. As the RiffTrax team points out in their way, "Birdemic" wasn't enough for the title of this movie.

The Super Bob Einstein Film (2021)
Bob Einstein, Super Dave and brother of Albert Brooks, is reflected in the reactions of so many of his folk: family, friends, peers (take a look at the cast). It's remarkable how similar those reactions are, the same expressions coming across the faces, the same laughter bubbling up as each person recalls Einstein's style that -- I think it's Sarah Silverman who puts it this way -- was like he played his own straight man. It begins with a nice composite memorial counterpoint, the various speakers telling of how Einstein would react to this very project. And of course it's another case (like Peter Cook) to bear out that there's so much to being funny beyond even what's captured in writing or even recorded on film or video, the experience of the person live, off the cuff, which we can only get an idea of through testimony or talk shows.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Becuz eue uant moah. Once you've gone back in time to cancel something, why not go back to any other time to cancel that, or something else that renders that moot, or so on. Infinite variation for sequels. Even better, why not use the future to change the past at will: with retroactive continuity! If the same formula didn't hook you, then surely the latest, most futurest robot being hot babe-like will. Why would robots care about gender? Or should I say why would "gynoids"? Obviously to lure the sucker humans into watching movies. Clare Danes helps up the emoting in this one, too. And RiffTrax cuts through it all.

Dragon Wars: D-War (2007)
If you tune in to watch the CG Asian reptilian version of a Middle Earth attack on Los Angeles, you'll surely be interested in the gripping plot about a medallion and some messianic wonder twins. Or something like that. It's mildly diverting and instantly forgettable. But RiffTrax can help with the dragons, snakes, dinosaurs and tadpolephants.

Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Sam Raimi's return to horror after the Spider-Man movies is a mixed result. On the one hand, he's playing it straight, or straighter than the Evil Dead movies, but on the other, during some protracted horror confrontation episodes (rather like the numbers in a musical), there are very abrupt pop-outs of Evil Dead outrageous effects, and one in particular that really bears out the Tex Avery take style. The clunkier plot mechanics of ghost and demon stories, all the contrivances and contradictions involved to prolong their getting you, make for some moments that don't have much spark as drama or humor. But RiffTrax can provide that. The ending is a good one, though.

Beowulf (2007)
Despite the step in development of CG this may have been, and despite whatever hullabaloo over myth, lore, legacy, culture, psychology, philosophy, technology, storytelling methods historic and modern, this looks like bad cut scenes from a video game at its worst and best. From the doll-like eye and movement of the action-captured and rendered actors to the silly capricious vectors of action (Beowulf soaring to the rafters), and the chromium nude version of Angelina Jolie (Grendel's mother as an AOR cover hot babe rather than a beast or monster), this isn't even dignified animation, let alone movie art, storytelling or heritage. RiffTrax is the right speed.

The Last Airbender (2010)
M. Night Shyamalan's version of martial arts superhero Lord of the Rings style DIY myth is as goopy as his horror stuff. Fortunately, there's RiffTrax to lighten the load.

Ghostbusters 2 (1989)
There's a New Year's Eve setting for the climax, if you want to use this movie for the occasion, but as a sequel it's pretty much retreading the formula of the first, throwing in some jokes about popularity that are reflexive of the movie's trendiness, a goofy get-together for the Rick Moranis and Annie Potts characters and, shamelessly, a baby for Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray to mug over. The Statue of Liberty cannot live up to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)
"Reset" is actually useful here, because after the series of Paul W.S. Anderson / Milla Jovovich movies, this tries to provide something more like the original games. So rather than the CG, 3-D, two-cuts-a-second, shot-from-every-angle, underground compound diagram, neon goop, zombie world, superhero shitstorms, we get something more like a nice, quiet little horror film. Quiet unfortunately also means run of the mill. Some of the sets and situations may evoke the game, if you played it, but the movie doesn't create as much effect for the rest of us.

Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
Because it attempts something more poetic with even B-movie stuff, it's more interesting than another action flick, whether post-apocalyptic, self-consciously cheesy, or Nicolas Cage's monthly installment. By poetic I mean not just prosaic, not just plot or action mechanics. It's similar to Mad Max: Fury Road in that respect, though not as integrated, and I imagine the archness will put off those used to pure action movie diet. There's a surreal humor to it, similar to David Lynch's cutting grim with funny, though this isn't Lynch's feel, more bouncy. The script nicely strands the cut-out situation so that it's also dreamlike, and director Sion Sono orchestrates the Kabuki, Gilbert and Sullivan version of the Greek chorus. That goes along with the Buckaroo Banzai East-West thing, a mix of Samurai, the Wild West and Road Warrior.

Man Trouble (1992)
If it were the 70s, it might have been slightly urban surreal soul-searching, a la director Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens. For the 90s, we get a droopy bedroom farce version of The Maltese Falcon. But the plot is akimbo. It plays as jags lumped together. There are even moments where it looks like a shot was cut abruptly on action as if the movie where given a thoughtless cut for time, or just had material chopped out. During an attack in a garage, I kept waiting for the joke, like the dog trying to hump people. If this is supposed to be comedy or drama, neither is coming off. Jack Nicholson has a good character to play, more modest dimensions from so many silver platter for ham roles, but he still works it too much. Ellen Barkin shows the major/minor conundrum for her. She's involved but retiring. She's not the kind of turned-out, brassy contact of pop movie lead roles. It seems she gets cast in roles that are thought different or even eccentric in some way, but she needs a different fabric.

Transformers (2007)
If you want to see all the worst impulses of "pop" culture gobbed together, jiggling and slashing and banging around for attention, I don't know if you could find a better example. Who is this aimed at? Horny 16-year-old cokehead NASCAR fans who still want to play with their kiddie toys? About the time I was thinking that, it was the first scene where the robots present themselves as a group to the humans, and RiffTrax cracks, "It's Radio Shack meets The Village People."

Don't Look Up (2021)
It's a clean takedown, which is just about right, about now, not so much because of how present this whole meditation on the real end of the world is, but because of how apocalypse is overplayed now. The pace is manic but straight, no-nonsense comedy. It's not mugging or trying to wring the comedy. I thought even Leonardo DiCaprio's role was good, made fun of his intense acting, until the movie went all Network and he had another Leonardo moment. The Strangelove vibe is definitely better than the Network vibe. Mark Rylance's reprisal of his Ready Player One role starts out a groaner, but then makes that even more satirically batty.

Jingle Bell Rocks (2013)
A documentary about alternative Christmas music hounds on the trail, letting us in on some priceless obscurities? Sounds like a rare Christmas treat. But this goes sideways into meditations on the psychology of Christmas, the ambivalence that led to this obsession. While that's not an uninteresting subject, and it produces some nice stuff of its own, it's more on the mopey side than the xmas up yours side, comes at the cost of more musical truffles, and is much more digressive than concerted. There's no explanation, for example, for Wayne Coyne's appearance here, no express connection or path or visit, and his particular holding forth on the matter.

Wild Things (1998)
Directed by John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Mad Dog and Glory), this has some good twists on character (similar to Mad Dog's with DeNiro and Murray) that work off movie expectations and iconography, then some more twists for the fun and intrigue of it, then some more twists that make them all not just tiresome but absurd. Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Theresa Russell and Bill Murray are interestingly cast, but the more that falls to Neve Campbell's character, the less she carries it.

Titanic (1997)
I never watched this until I found out there was a RiffTrax treatment. On seeing more than a few minutes of it, I don't know whether I'm more or less surprised. It's patently the most childish thing James Cameron has done, and that's saying a lot. All the effort put into the technical stuff, the diving and research, the reconstruction, physical and digital, are given a story barely worth 40s era sensationalism as delivery vehicle, a ridiculous, fictitious love story that plays out its arc on the voyage and mainly the night of the incident, and gives us shameless melodramatic manipulation in place of historic detail about actual people. This would be Disney for grown-ups, if Disney weren't already vicarious childhood for grown-ups.

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