Movies Reviewed in 2012

I've reviewed 1,673 movies this century. All but what I saw this year and last are among the alphabet links above. The recent ones are down this page. In 2006, I reviewed 89 movies; 127 in 2007; 106 2008; 121 2009; not sure I really need to break my all-time record of 174 in 2010 and 149 in 2011. So far this year I've seen and reviewed 31 movies. Watching and thinking about movies restarts my creativity — or escapes me from it, and lets my mind wander. I write these quickly and go back and change them often

2012

I remember Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth 20 years ago. How life was affecting people all over the worl, if I remember correctly, and I often do not. This one is Last Night***/, which proved remarkable in its own quirkish ways. The world is ending, everybody knows it's ending, and they're all planning for it in their own very peculiar ways. We, of course, S O P in these sorts of things, follow a smaller group of people through to the end. People being people in so many different ways. Often very funny ways, or are we just identifying and laughing along as people deal with it, don't deal with it, go crazy, fall in love, or have sex with one of every kind and color of woman in every place and under interesting conditions, as one character does, and that seems so empty. At first. Then, oh, hell, why not?

This movie seems to think it's so damned cool it can get away with senseless violence, upper frontal female nudity, and the music telling what's going on in case we hadn't figured it out yet. It is cool in a warm and oozy sort of way, and stylish as hell, and it's even about love, and so much less than it should have been about fast cars, but it's really really slow. Driver*** 2011

Elvis is the mortician's son and Anabelle is the beauty queen. When she seems to die after winning the pageant, he's about to replace her blood with mortician's fluid, he kisses her. And she comes back to life. After that they have their differences and their sames and they get along, and they escaps her beauty pageant life together, and they like each other, and they fight, and … Well it gets more complicated, but except for one stupid jail scene when they won't tell each other stuff they need to tell (typical Hollywood tripe, even though this one was made at the University of Texas), it's a lilting love story with many of the same ups and downs and some different ones, too. Elvis & Anabelle***/ is a charmer.

The best part of The Source***/ were the performances of Beat Poetry by lots of different people famous and not, poets and others. And the editing into an order that seemed right, at every moment through talking heads who said something important and I'm glad to know it, and the pictures, moving pictures, pictures of Allen Ginsberg taking pictures of notions that got into his mind. Solid documentary about the Beats who started a lot of things rolling that are still rolling. Out there, in here. And everywhere.

Troubled Water**** is a deeply rending film about loss and guilt and retribution, good and evil and even forgiveness. Dark and oddly edited to get at the truth the characters don't want to admit, but finally have to. Creepy in moments that need it, a few joys scattered in, and then an end I didn't see coming, but for a change I wanted to have been happy … Brilliantly acted and deeply felt. I'm still shaken. In Swedish with subtitles.

I don't like this movie, and I don't trust it. It feels like the director or the producers found an interesting book and screwed it royally to make this too-Hollywood movie about an angry man, the long lost son of the author of a children's fable. Too much anger for the sake of anger, too much reaction and not near enough character. Or something stupidly concocted like that. I'm sure it'll end happily ever after, but I'm still upset with it, because it's so stupidly Hollywoodianly overwrought. This guy's acting is overwrought, and this movie is, too. Neverwas*** It's just too bad, so sad, that Aaron Eckhart can't act. But we're lucky beyond reason that Ian McKellen still can.

Happy Happy*** is anything but some of the time and utterly joyous in its enriching infidelities and dark human humor. It moved me in many ways, good, bad and ugly, and it's all tied together with down-home glory a cappella gospel. Amazing mix of cultures.

Now here's a spy hero with depth and truthfulness, something we don't get much of anymore. A cool character who is wiser and older than all the studmuffins usually inhabiting such roles. Masterpiece Contemporary & PBS' Page Eight***/ is deeply intelligent, truly of this century, and willing to have actual emotions, and we get them, too. I like the elder hero and — in the well-tread way of one-off productions — want to see more of him, and that wont is all the more delicious knowing it probably won't happen.

I didn't think I was going to like it. Way too much senseless violence, but on the far side of it, the violence started making sense in this Kaiser Söze kind of roundabout logic and overwhelmingly violent movie that, oddly enough, is about love and honor and wallpaper. With Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kinsley, Stanley Tucci and Josh Hartnett, it's called Lucky # Slevin***/

The Unknown Woman***/ is the soul-shredding story of a woman who escapes from the sex trade, but it keeps coming back to get her — actually as well as figuratively. Heart-rending, a thriller in many dark ways, while in everything visual, it is beautiful. Gorgeous. Careful delicate editing that shimmers and sparks; amazing dark when that needs showing; bright with luscious colors when that needs to show; sparkkling clean and filth — so many opposites compressed into this movie. Joy, viciousness, misery, evil and love — sliding in and out of reality and memory and horror, and transcendance; guilt and forgiveness. Superb. Deeply intelligent.

I'm out of movies, except the ones I bought in the last century, and since I never watched any of those — except Waking Life once — this century it seems stupid to buy any more, so when I watched my last Netflix flick late last night, I watched The Truth About Cats & Dogs*** online because Janeane Garofalo was in it. Turned out the whole goofy Hollywood plot turned on, not just mistaken identity, but purposely obfuscating Garofalo and Uma Thurman's identities, inevitably setting up the dichotomy of pretty vs. smart, although I always thought Garofalo was cute or I wouldn't have seen this mostly silly flick. A little heart-warming at the end, but I expected that from one of these misdirection romantic comedies, and really nothing ever happened that I didn't already know was gonna happen, but I watched it anyway.

The characters are all black & white, and I don't mean grayscale. The extreme stylization only involves a few areas of gray well into this movie. Towards the end there's even one scene in color, but everything else is bright & dark. It's a seeming kidnapping by a world corporation intent on selling a protocol that give eternal life. There's a big brave detective, some beautiful women and a buncha cops. Once I got used to the extreme white-black, getting into the characters and plot was easier, but never easy, because it's so different. Renaissance***/ 2006

I wasn't expecting a great movie, but it'd been atop my movie queue for so long, I would not have cared, but it turns out, this story, and the movie of it is quite strange, somewhat different and often enough shocking that it's grand fun when it's not horribly tragic. The Libertine**** with Johnny Depp for all you lovers of period pieces. 2004

A lot of Hanna*** is superb, but certain incredulities intercept the "meaning" of this film at inopportune moments. Yeah, yeah, the United States Government as ultimate Satan is real enough, but in this too-often over-the-top film even that becomes unbelievable. A more deft screenplay might have rendered it outstanding, lots of action, hero is a growing little girl who is beautiful and very talented. The filming is very nice, and many of the characters are superb. Even Cate Blanchett is pretty good as the Wicked Witch of the West (CIA boss), but she's too evil seeming for this usually kinder, gentler movie that could have been a contender.

Life in a Day***/ is some of what got videoed on July 24 2010 all over the world superbly edited with world music and taste and joy and all humanity's other emotions, personal and universal. It might have been better with other videos, but this is what they had to choose from, and they did pretty well.

I've seen all the episodes now, and I enjoyed them thoroughly (So thoroughly I'm reading one of the novels it was adapted from, but they are very different beasts. The TV show is better), because they're unique and funny in a very dark way as well as mysterious, and our hero bumbles through it all as if he were the master detective, and we're never quite sure he's not — and it's all set in Italy about Italian cops, so it's as corrupt as anything could possibly be (except maybe Mexico), and all that just adds to the mystery.

My rules for this page are that I count TV shows for only one movie, no matter how many episodes I watch. At the moment, that doesn't seem fair, but they're my rules, and with no one else to follow them, I guess I'm stuck. It's called Zen****; it's from the BBC; and it's about a rough and tumble Italian detective with a reputation for being honest, which probably makes him remarkable, and he seems so.

What I'm not watching is the second two-thirds of Pandorum**, which is long, stupid, tedious and keeps introducing little ghouls that scrap about and attempt to kill our hero who is more or less lost inside a giant space ship full of zombies, while his boss (Dennis Quaid) gives him orders from somewhere inside the spaceship. Or something unpleasant like that. Maybe to balance out not being able to count all of Zen's episodes, I'm counting this insipidly unthrilling sci-fi thriller, even though I already dislike it so intensely I likely will never finish. I thought because it is sci-fi, that would outweigh its low score. Wrong again.

All drama, including movies, TV, stage plays, fiction and even comic books, requires the audience to submit to a willful suspension of disbelief. This movie takes the notion to the next dimension. It's dark and bloody funny, in great part, because it makes fun of itself and many of the idioms of movie-making, but it's more than s a little mean-spirited. About a tire that learns to be a destroyer, so it destroys, usually blowing the heads off people. Rubber***

Whip It*** is about a teenager who joins an all-girl roller derby team in Austin and her trials and tribulations. It's mostly upbeat, amusing, sometimes even rises to fun, then is all but dashed with a straight-out-of-the-Hollywood-book ending that kinda wrecks the quirkiness developed through the movie. Almost touches actual smarm. Still is fun and even funny but well short of a great flick.

I tried to watch The Seven Year Itch**/ with Marilyn Monroe, hoping to see her as she was, instead of what stupid, sexist Hollywood made of her, and I was vastly disappointed in this dated and inept movie, but now I see what she meant by demeaning. With those guys, she never had a chance.

Then I watched the sci-fi-inept and similarly elderly Forbidden Planet** and saw that same old Hollywood, tell-not-show sexist, species-ist idiocy.

I saw this movie because An Education was so good, and during the Special Features, they kept mentioning this one as if it was a real charmer, and it is. Italian for Beginners***

After all those really good movies, I thought I'd dip down into the B movie section, but instead I came up with another decent flick. Not a great movie, but fun and funny with a little serious thrown in when all that fun got a little much. It's called Easy A*** and it's about virtue and promotion and, well, see the movie, because it's about too many things to list here, and if I did, you wouldn't believe it anyway. Might actually be better if you're a teenager or in your twenties, but since I'm not I can't be sure. The presentation is somewhat unorthadox, but a lot of it is pure teen-flick story.

I never quite got baseball. I played it as a little kid but was never very good at it. Maybe because I was afraid of the ball and had serious depth of field issues. If I shut my eyes after the ball was hit or released, I could catch it, but coaches insisted I keep my eye on the ball, which always did not work. I don't really understand baseball or baseball movies, but this one makes some sense. A lot more than I expected. Not sure what I expected from something called Moneyball***, but I was impressed, very nearly enchanted and certainly entertained.

Mix a really good story by people who actually know how to write a screenplay, with some outstanding actors, throw in every cliché about cowboys, Indians, law persons, bad guys and good so we feel comfortable about what we are seeing, and shake a little with some interesting make-it-up-as-you-go-along warfare, and you might be lucky enough to pull Cowboys & Aliens***/ out of a wet ten-gallon hat. Fun, exciting, fairly intelligent after the first half hour or so, and well crafted.

The Burning Plain***/ is an odd name for this bittersweet little topsy-turvy tale that takes about half the movie to figure out who the players are and how they all fit together in this purposely disjointed and edge-frayed story of love and self-hatred. But then it makes all the sense in the world. Charize Theron and Kim Basinger and probably one guy you'll recognize and several that we should, but mostly it's the women who carry this superb, deeply affecting, smart story of dense characterizations. Nice.

Another Earth**** is only very subtly science fiction. Much more it is close-up personal between two people with a terrible moment shared in their histories. We can call it love, but it is also awful, and he cannot let her back into his life once she tells him their story — until she wins a ticket to go to the second Earth that we see ever coming closer to the otherwise ordinary scenes of life around them. A simple story told in close-ups of faces and impeccable never quite abstract but seeming-so cinematography that's as elusive and remote as our characters sometimes are. Unlike anything else I have seen, and I've rated more than two thousand movies on Netflix and sixteen hundred here, although the name Adam Egoyan comes to mind. . Beautiful. Ethereal. Of guilt and setting themselves free.

I get this eerie feeling around schizophrenics, and I've known too many this life. I kept that feeling through the strange and disturbing Peacock***/ — The heebies and the jeebies. Startlingly good cast. Scary acting. Shakes my mind and memories to think on it. I couldn't stop watching, but always with a certain dread. There are scary movies. Lars Von Trier's Antichrist comes to mind there, but so dos this one.

Incendies***/ tells the long and violent and beautifully and horrible and twisting and winding and hateful and loving and evil and kind story of a family in search of itself through the history and internecine warfare of the Lebanese civil war.

Nothing exceeds like excess, and no film director is ever as excessive as Terry Gilliam, who ought by now, to be used to stars dying in the big middle of his major extravaganzas, and I thought that was, for awhile there at least, Heath Ledger, with his other fasces — of Jude Law and Collin Farrell and Johnny Depp (wow, that's a movie-full). [Wasn't all this inter-charactal gimmickry in another, earlier, wild extravaganza of Gilliam's movies?], and then there's Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits. Oof, wonderfully, well, they're all in there in Dr. Parnasus' wildly imaginative imagination. Running amok as only Gilliam can push them. Wild and wooly, and holy fantabulous. I'll have to admit I'm a huge Gilliam fan. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus**** is amazing.

An Education***/ is just that. Cute young, otherwise intelligent high-school girl falls for fast, loose, charming older man and nearly gives up her dreams. Smart, odd in just the right places, quirkish, never smarmy, a little unreal at the end of course probably too pat an ending, but it had to stop somewhere, and the end seems about right for that.

First movie of the new year, which means I'll have to start thinking about alphabetizing all those below, but what the hey, it never takes as long to do it as I have spent worrying about it, so I won't.

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris**** is enchanting. Time-travel and thick with nostalgia and real people from time gone by, a young man in Paris falls in love with the city and out of love with his fiancé, all the while traveling back and back to the golden years, which always receed further into the past, till he accepts the present. Former Dallasite Owen Wilson is marvelous, instead of his usual stupid, and the movie is a marvelous step into this current future.

2011

Audrey Tautou is amazing. I learn that again every time I see her in a movie. This one has scope and grandeur. It's wildly romantic, yet deeply feminist. A heart-breaker and deeply affecting portrayal of a unique individual, an independent woman at a time when there weren't such things. Smart, superb and enchanting. Coco Before Channel****

Heaven**** is a simple love story, intricate escape plot and moral dilemma set in beautiful, corrupt Italy and starring Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. Gorgeous, intelligent, and wildly romantic yet the passion is held tautly serene. And the Special Features add to the depth without scuttling the film.

The sad, sick, sordid story of Ivy (Drew Barrymore as a unloved slut), Sylvie (Sara Gilbert), Tom Skerritt and Cheryl Ladd and even some Guy called Leonardo Di Caprio) as near total disaster of a dysfunctional family. Full of unresolved almosts and truly idiotic lusts. Poison Ivy**

The Rape of Europa***/ documents compellingly and with many contemporary photographs the colossal robery of European art and culture by the Nazis, the Russians and the Americans during World War II. It's a fascinating story with many heroes and villans, including a truly mediocre painter named Adolf Hitler.

Exam*** purports to be a thriller. What it is instead, is a psycho-drama. A big corporation needs a director. The exam looks like a blank piece of paper. The six candidates have 80 minutes to answer. It reminds me a lot of The Cube. Essentially, not enough to hang a movie on, certainly not that important a plot.

First, we see Sarah with her family, taken by the French — not the Nazis, but the French collaborators, from whose camp she escapes. The rest of Sarah's Key*** is a long, sad story, told incrementally through the people who knew her at different times of her life. Interesting and intricate, explaining much, but never all, the movie explores a life of sadness with but little joy.

I love me some time-travel movies. Next*** was much better than I expected until I saw that Julianne Moore and Peter Falk were in there with Nicholas Cage being his usual save-the-world action adventure hero. Remarkably well done. High production V. Good enough acting. Smart story all the way to the end. Action, adventure, premonition and romance. Fun flick.

One of these two movies was based on yet another Philip K. Dick novel.

The Fourth Kind**/ purports to be a documentary about alien abduction, but from very near the beginning, we know it ain't true. The premise fails. Then it hammers and hammers away repeating stuff till we either believe, or chuck the stupid thing. Some good (Milla Jovovitch), some really bad (Will Patton, but what do you expect?) acting. Some fear induced. A lot of anger perpetrated against the stupid cop (Now there's a new concept …) Not dreary dreck, often intense, but not a great enough movie that we believe, although we may want to. Lotta tricks being played here. From the Blair Witch Project School of cinema verite. Not saying alien abduction is not real, just that this movie isn't, despite its high production values.

For distraction while I worked up some photographs — birds and bears — tonight, I switched on the TV for a movie for awhile. Then I stuck through it. Funny several times, laugh out loud so. Snickers, too. Cute movie, and just absorbing enough to watch through the end. The Wedding Date*** with a cute guy and a cute girl, and her family.

Either it makes not nearly enough sense or it makes way too much sense, The Tree of Life**** is stunningly visual, often relying on amazing earth, nature, industrial and everything else visuals to represent human emotions, and it pulls off that film abstraction pretty well, but it's not in service to a happy story. Mom lets Dad do what he wants, and he's deep-down wicked, obscured by evil, and his kids suffer for it.

If The Help***/ had come out sooner than 55 years after the events portrayed, we could more honestly pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that we are not utterly racist to the core, just like most of the White ladies in this movie. It reads like a feel-good fairy tale. Very well acted, and probably close to dead-on accurate for 1955 in Jackson, Mississippi, which we want to have been long ago and far away, but of course it is still very much with us.

We may think we know all about The Science of Sex Appeal***/, but prepare to be proved wrong in this educational and entertaining movie that matches and mismatches such traits as: adornment, age, attachment, body shape, breasts, cars, chemistry, children, children, copulence, craving, desire, dopamine, elation, elation, estrogen, euphoria, evolution, excitement, face, hormones, infidelity, kissing, love, lust, marriage, mental chemistry, monogamy, ovulation, oxytocin, pair bonding, passion, physical attraction, physique, preferences, resources, scent, scent, sexiness, skin exposure, social class, social cues, status, status, straying, symetry, taste, testosterone, cars and voice.

Burma VJ**** is riveting. The repressive government of Burma versus the Democratic Voice of Burma (VJ), a small cadre of dedicated journalists who videotaped the 2007 popular protests against the government, led by the Bhudist monks and joined by the public till the army started shooting, arresting, torturing and murdering the monks, the people and especially the VJ. Amazing video from the forefront of a democratic uprising, once again smashed.

I'm sure I saw The Trouble with Harry*** decades ago, but it didn't feel at all familiar. Billed as Alfred Hitchcock's second American comdey, it's a classic farce. Amusing, rather than outright funny. More like goofy with outstanding characterizations — every one is a true individual. Harry's issue was that he couldn't stay buried, though when we first see him, he's dead, and he stays dead throughout. The one other hallmark of this silly truffle is that it was Shirley MaclLain's film debut, and she's as goofy as the rest of them.

Beginners***/ trying to fall in love, unlike his parents — his dad was gay, and his mother wanted more, but never got it, so they never taught him that love was even possible, so he kept running off girlfriends. Then his dad came out and spent the rest of his life finding love, died, and son had to do something. Sad little tale of love of the family kind and of the boy/girl kind. Very well done, beautiful, deep in a slow and sad yet hopeful way. A hack with soul.

Bitter and sweet, but Water for Elephants*** has the most to do with cruelty, mostly human cruelty, but there's animal cruelty, too. So be warned. An evil man runs a circus, and our hero hops a train, joins the circus and falls in love with the cruel man's wife. Guess what?

Yeah, it's exciting, and the kids are done very well indeed. But all the subplots are stupid, and we've seen them too many times already, and Steven Spielberg, who invented a lot of them, is the producer. Our hero's father is mean and stupid. His young girlfrien's father is mean and stupid. The Air Force is … well, you know, mean and stupid. I understand that we should never believe the army or the air force or any of the services. That's a given, but dramatizing it makes everybody — well, you guessed it — mean and stupid. They're rampaging (Air Force?) tanks through the town, and all their weapons are misfiring, bombs going the wrong way, but they just keep shooting. Not unlike, Afghanastan and Iraq, I bet. This is still exciting, but almost too stupid to be a movie. Super 8***

Once I learned, in the Special Features, that the movie I'd just seen came from Performance Art, the little sense it so slowly made, made much more sense. Performance, when done particularly well, does that. It pulls everything in and makes a visual sense out of it, if not an everything else sense. This movie is unique in that. After the end, I began to like it more and more. Before it finally stopped, I got up and did other things. But I always came back. I saw every second of it. In order. Early on, however, I began not expecting a lot of the usual movie sense in it. An ocean of it, may be there, ebbing and flowing. Like tides. Creating a certain rhythm that mocks a story. Maybe not. The Future****

Netflix tried to warn me, giving it only 2.5 stars, instead of my minimal 3, but I got it anyway, because I mean how bad could a movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Kenneth Branagh possibly be? Then I watched some. Then some more, and finally, I had to take it out of the slot and stick it back in its red envelope and send it back. I couldn't watch it anymore. Branagh's character was stupid prim politician who wants to stamp out Britain's Pirate Radio*, even if it's not illegal. And mostly everything else is over all the good tops, and I just couldn't watch any more of it.

Three couples, or not couples, depending on who's having the moments when they're either terrified or not of having a relationship. And the guy in one of them find a little Black kid who's been abandoned on the subway. So it's about finding love and being friends, even if it's scary or the cops put you in jail for being good. Bittersweet, humanely funny, lots of little sad tugs as we watch grownups being incredibly afraid and so not doing what we all know they should be doing, and lots of other moments when joy is abundant enough to keep at it. HappyThankYouMorePlease***?

He might as well be on the moon, this castaway's chances of getting off the island in the first half of this sweet and bittersweet and nearly direct-dialog-free movie, is slim. The island this Korean finds himself on is in the middle of the Han river in the middle of his city, but otherwise inescapable. It's about being alone, trusting self, learning self-sufficiency and communication. A reclusive young woman with a super super telephoto lens sees and photographs him, beginning something that is bigger than the movie. One of those rare few one-of-a-kind movies that will be remembered. Castaway on the Moon****. All that and it's still pretty goofy.

This vision amazed me. Truly visually arresting, it presents us with the odd amalgam of a realistic and animated comix universe. French, so it does not devolve utterly into stupidity as our own often do, yet foreign enough in creation and characterizations that we stay tuned. Graphically weird, somewhere beyond the setting of The Fifth Element, out into manifestations of Philip K. Dick's dystopia. If there's much wrong, it's the bad-guy plots that stutter the story, although the red hammerhead-seeker and Horus Himself, are superbly accomplished. Fierce movie. Immortal***/

For a movie that calls itself Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself***/, this is a gentle, bittersweet, kind and beautiful movie. Poignant, intelligent, deeply humanly funny with several, sometimes contrasting and intelligent themes that play and play back upon themselves, and us.

I've begun 5ive Days till Midnight**/, and am loving it. Disk Two now tops my Netflix queue, and I'm sorry I didn't trust it enough to have already got it here, so I can devour it. I am ever fond of sci-fi movies that even hint at time travel, and to that, fold in a thoroughly thriller plot. Delicious, remarkably well acted and exciting. Can't wait. I even like the typo shenanigan with the spelling. Then, the second/last disc started well enough, but the final episode just got stupid. And stupider. Too bad.

Van Gogh: Brush with Genius***/ has him speaking English with a thick French accent and using contemporary idioms, but this movie is mostly about the paintings, and they are gorgeous.

John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature*** is one of the better public TV biographies. Plenty of infomation, chronologically follows his life through ups and downs to his dying words, "Billy, let's get our guns and go down to Long Pond and shoot some ducks."

Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death***/ is as good as they get, and short. But Wallace didn't mention a single cheese, and I rely on his recommendations.

Dean Spanley***/, with of all people, a very elderly yet still superb actor Peter O'Toole with Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill was an unexpected delight. A faciful tale of the reincarnation of a much-loved dog, once the joyed pet of who is begins our story as a crotchedy old man who is in dire need character development — and gets it when his long-lost and much-loved dog, who has since reincarnated as a human lover of a particular Hungarian wine joins the Thursday evening festivities. Bitter and sweet, comedic in the human condition and lofty as the transmigration of souls.

Cars 2***/ was almost as great as Cars 1. Like the first one, the characters are depthy, the action fast and the plot thick. Best of all, Pixar + Disney (even if it an all-out commercial entity) = soul.

At first I thought Green Lantern*** was going to be just another super-gallactic hero, then he was. No puny earth-bound bad guys (well, maybe a couple), he's got galactic scope. It was better than I expected, but then I didn't expect much. All the cosmic stuff was a big (not just a little) goofy. For awhile I thought it was just an elaborate setup for a dozen or so sequels, but I don't know where they'd go from here. I'd give it a lot of so-what?

With nary a nod to full dimensionality and soft fur of contemporary cartooning, Winnie The Poo***/ was a delight. A little old school mixed with a lot of new school annimation, it felt like a righteous re-introduction to the characters I first fell in love with in my childhood. I still have my first, black ink on browning acidish paper, lPooh book, marred by errant crayoning though it may be. And I've always been a major Pooh Bear fan, and I loved this new version.

We saw Margin Call***/ in a real theater without much talking, one of those minor miracles, even at the Angelika. Lotta really good, big-name actors and mucho tension, partially because we almost wanted them to get away with it, but the other part because we knew they had. It's about Bear Stearns or someplace like that just before the meltdown when they were dumping all those dubious assets, nearly destroying our economy. Executive-level crimes that would never be persecuted.

The Speed of Thought**/ is a less-than flick about people working for the government who can read others' minds, but they all die by age thirty, or so they believe. The government uses them as secret powers agents, though we only see a few card games. Thieatric mind-read "special effects" and cheap film tricks marr the production and the plot, but I love a good mind-read movie, so so-what?

The Yellow Handkerchief*** is a sweet little movie that's a remake of the Japanese movie of the same name. It's a road trip after the William Hurt character gets out of jail and meets a young woman and a young man. For the last two it's a coming of age flick, for Hurt it's character development. We get to see what he did and why he left the love of his life when he want off to prison for doing, well, you gotta see the movie. It'll be worth your while.

I saw a movie in a theater recently, and I don't remember a thing about it. It was outside of my usual, watch it, write about it routine, and now I've forgot everything about it, except it was in a movie theater, and we got there just as the opening credits were over. What was that flick?

They talk about the French, as if the movies they made were the greatest ever, and yeah, they are, sometimes, superb, but I'm watching Five Days**** the Brits did that's amazing good, and I've only done the first disc of two of. A swirl of characters, grand scale in a minor key, novelistic. All about when a woman disappears after buying flowers at a roadside, then some of the children she left in the car on the other side of the road, then her family, and then. Well, ripples spread as the story contracts, and we have no more idea than everybody else what happened, but everybody on both sides (cops and humans) think they may know or are busy wrongly identifying others of those caught up in this deed's motives and guilts. A five-hour-long movie about five days in all this rush to judgement, fear and all those other human motives so well packaged in this made-for-TV movie I can't wait to see the rest of.

I like Jesse Stone movies. They're all pretty much the same. Same issues, lot of the same characters. Part of why I like them, I guess. And I'll watch every one I can. This one was Innocents Lost***. He's a small-town police chief, or was just fired from being one, or becomes one after being fired in LA for being a drunk. The issues don't change much. Hell, even the bad-guy issues don't change all that much. It's dependable.

Inside Out***/ is a character-driven story. Arlo is just getting out of jail for 13 years, and he just wants to make pickles. His buddy meets him at the bus. They used to be criminals together, and it's more involved than that. Deep friends. Trouble is the friend is an idiot. There are several really stupid people in this film, but every one is a true individual. Most of the way through this I didn't think I was going to like it, but I watched it all the way through, and I'm charmed by it. Maybe should call it a study in responsibility, but it's character-driven, and most the flicks that are that don't qualify. This does. It's got loads of character and loads of characters.

Been a long time since I saw a new (to me) Walter Matthau movie. I doubt I've seen many Matthau movies this century but in the last one I saw as many as I could find. Made in 1980 with a remarkable cast — Glenda Jackson, Ned Beaty, Sam Waterston and some other faces I recognize without (as usual) knowing the names. It's fun and funny about Walter getting fired from the CIA, so he writes a book, send early chapters to all the world's intelligence agencies to perk up a little interest, then he goes a hoscotching around that world with all those guys on his tail, and then … well, you know, adventure and amusement ensues. I loved Hopsctoch***/.

Whether it's on the street in New York or on the runway in Paris, watching Bill Cunningham work is a joy, and lucky for us, that's what Bill Cunningham New York***/ is all about. The joy of working the work he wants to. What his life is all about. Photographing clothes.

Strand: Under Dark Cloth*** is your typical documentary about a famous photographer, Paul Strand, who, among other things, started the 20th Century trend to photograph abstract images. There's some annoying noises like a woman crying behind black & white photographs we know had no soundtracks and way too many talking heads, but some of them were important. Best of all a chance to hear Paul Strand, major photographer of the early 20th Century talk talk about his work, but never long enough, although we get to watch, briefly, him make photographs with a camera that does not use a dark cloth.

I love Science Fiction even if they make fun of it, so Paul***/, though goofy and crude, was good fun, funny and did I say goofy? Goofy fun. If I knew who Steven Spielburgh looked like I'd watch it again to track him down, but luckily I don't. Lotta good actors in there, though, and the story actually makes sense, and I probably only caught half the references.

Limitless***/ was fun. I love plays, books and movies about somebody who's way smarter than the rest of us. I identify in some peculiar and envious way. This time Algernon's flowers are a drug, and everybody wants it. Our hero has it and gets more, so lots of criminals are after it and wouldn't mind killing him for it. So it's a race and an unfolding and even character development, so it's got a lot going for it. The zoom-and-move-and-zoom again trip scenes manage an eye-delighting visual arrest. It stays pretty smart, mostly logical and somewhat credible throughout. Even Robert Dinero isn't as stupid as he has been in most of his movies as of late.

I loved Carrie Fisher's first tell-all from 1990, Postcards from the Edge, though I don't remember it much. It was a movie. This, Wishful Drinking*** 2011 starts off funny, then is not quite as funny, then slowy gets less and less funny, even though it's still about her life, so there a deeper humor there.

I usually screen my flicks pretty well, so no telling what the movies I just yesterday sent back were like, but I hadn't watched them — or this — in a couple weeks, I figured it was time to do a redraw. Not sure why I kept this one, but it could easily be one of those Netflix (yeah, them, still. A.k.a. nitwits.) calls "visually arresting." This one's got some spiritual going on, too. Beautiful. The trip scenes are amazing — time passing, or space. Obviously the director (some guy named Wim Wenders) and the cinnematographer were having great fun. In several important parts, it's even semi-mystical. A couple even all the way. A wowzer. I don't feel really movied very often, but this one did it. Don't Come Knocking.****

I'm a huge Wenders fan, and just searched through Netflix site to find and order more. He pronounces the Ws as Vs.

Silly to have named this very well-told tale I've just seen, Flirting***/, but that's the name it's got, and there's a playfullnes about calling that, I suppose. A very different sort of growing up movie from 1991, with a very young Nicole Kidman, but not in a major role. Boarding schools, guys on one side, girls on the other side of a rowable river. All very Brit proper, plenty corporial punnishment. Stupid rules and the lot, and two kids, really, on the verge of learning something important. Unlike most that sound like that, though, this one's intelligent and very close to real.

I could have seen Win Win*** for free in a theater, which means seeing it at home was far better. Far far better. I could back it up when I missed a line. This one's fairly simple, and everything turns on being honest, which nearly nobody is at first, then some of them are, and that's what they call character development. It's a smarmy little flick with, I suppose, some good, but I'd rather everything turned on character, which of course, it did.

The Debt*** was confuing all the way through, at least partly because they change actors from their strident youth to their anxious age. Everything changes, personalities, looks, character. I was mostly confused, though by the end I figured out who everybody was supposed to be, even though I knew they weren't. An intricate retrieval of a Nazi war chriminal by Mossad, after which Mirren marries the wrong guy and that's compounded and complexified by numerous other idiocies. From unlikely to just plain dumb. Lotta drama, and that part's okay, but the characterizations and characters are most of the way to stupid. Not all the way to tedius, but lame enough to be close.

Picasso and Braque goe to the Movies*** is yet another talking heads production trying to explain something somewhat beyond them. Movie guys talkking about Cubism. Ho the hum. Interesting but hardly earth-shaking.

I didn't like her all that much at the beginning. Too full of herself, despite those huge blue eyes and chemical stains on her fingers, I slowly came to appreciate her, her oeuvre. I liked her family from the get go, but it took some learning and some understanding and a lot of seeing her photographs to begin to accept her as an art star. What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann is exquisite in the details and moments. There's the briefest of rain scene that is perfect. Many poignant and meaningful moments in this film. Her cutting her husband's hair outside on their farm. Animals acting and reacting with her. Lovely.

Blood Ties***, also about photographs by Sally Mann was one of the special features that came with the other film. It's good enough to stand on its own, and like every member of the family photographed for that intimate family series, they do. If all I'd seen was this short one, I'd probably given it a higher score. But compared to the feature length one above. What Remains is substantially better.

Wow! I've been movied again. And I loved it. International**** intrigue. Clive Owen. Intelligent and intricate plot. Spy-like but it's cops doing the right thing in the face of the, yeah, international banking conspiracy. They're all in cahoots in reality and fiction. Beautiful but I hardly noticed, the story was so engaging. Even the Special Features were.

It was mildly amusing at first, but then it just got stupider and stupider. I thought I could deal with it for the Kato scenes, even if The Green Hornet was an idiot, and maybe later on in the movie they deal with all that in some insipid way, but it's so dumb, I just cannot deal with it. The Green Hornet.** What a load a.

All my life, so far, I've loved healing stories and movies, sci-fi or straight, and Resurrection***/ with Ellen Burstyn is a joyous one of those. It's got its bad guys (aplenty) and good folks and nay-sayers and evil-doers, but it doesn't dip down into Holly Rollers, it just is. And it's good, and very close to real. 1980

Away from Her***/ is an exquisitely filmed sad and poignant story about Alzheimers, love and change.

Inside Job**** tells the story of the international financial meltdown compellingly and concisely. It names names and counts up figures. It's the best indictment yet of Wall Street and the Banking Industry and, of course, the U.S. Government. And most likely nothing will ever be done about all the criminals who are running all three. Narrated by Matt Damon, it is a beautiful film, apparently honest, but in the face of so incredibly much criminality, just kinda TS.

I never expected this one to be that good. Wasn't sure I wanted to deal with subtitles from Spanish all the way through, but once Cell 211**** started, I was hooked. It's a prison riot movie in which most of the good guys are corrupt and evil. Some of the bad guys are deep-down good and some rotten to the core. Never quite sure who was which till the end. One of the best character development flicks I've ever seen, but you never know how the plot will twist. Superb. Tense, engaging, exciting, amazing.

I suppose it's possible I could stand a 24-minute discussion of the design of dissent that is the bonus material for Milton Glaser: To Inform and Deilight***, which itself is informative and Glasser's graphic arts and illustrations reproduced are delightful, but I just don't think I could stand that much more talking heads. He's famous, amazing, extraordinarily talented in several art directions, and his heart is obviously in the right places, but though I was inspired by his history of images, I was dismayed at the pacing and over-reliance on gabbing faces.

I watched 23 episodes in a row of Sports Night**** — I started to just give it 3.5 asterisks, because it's just a TV show, but watching this many hours of it nearly makes it a movie, and it's wonderful — although not altogether different from subsequent Sorkin Sitcoms. I saw a few episodes when they were just a few months old on late night (like the fictional show of the series) on local Dallas TV. Seeing the computers from way back then reminds me it was before W was President. That old. It was funny then. It is funny now. With a little serious thrown in, the usual Sorkin human kindness with a liberal dose of Liberal politics, copious advice to the lovelorn and that elusive sense of community so much of TV and the world lacks. When I finish this whole thing (23.5 minutes each), I'll look for another by him. I love the fast-talking, quick-thinking and intelligent humor and situational ethics of Sorkin's characters and stories. Addendum: I'm almost all the way through with all the episodes, and while I am eager for the next one and wish there would be one after that in an unending line, I think I understand now why it didn't get renewed, why there will never be another Sports Night. It dwindled. It was ahead of its time, and its time was never allowed to catch up. And there was way too much about everybody's love lives.

The Beaver**** is wonderful. Dark. Very dark. But deeply and humanly funny. About fathers and sons and how sons are like their fathers, even if their fathers are suicidally depressed. Like I said, dark. Very noir. But human. And so hilarious you'd laugh out loud if you weren't afraid somebody'd think you were nuts, too. But you are nuts, so you laugh along. Because reality is too funny to ignore.

Namesake*** is about a Bengali family living in the U.S and raising, mostly a son whose is the namesake that I never understood the connection, and a host of others. It is about a family growing up and learning who they are. It is strange and exotic and real and personal. Not fabulous, really, but mostly nice and a lot human.

Alfred Stiglitz - The Eloquent Eye*** is informative, illustrative and almost inspiring. It's a slightly better than average documentary about a famous and seminal character in the history of art photography. Yet not quite fascinating and not quite amazing.

Public TV's ongoing series of American Experience documentaries are several cuts above the ordinary, and Ansel Adams - American Experience***/ is, too. It quickly and eloquently crosses the lines from about art to inspiring. I've heard and read about this guy all my life since I turned onto photography at the University of Dallas in the early 1960s, but this video turned me around an inspired me to pay attention. I learned who he was, what he was up to and what he was like. More than that, I learned about his struggles, his personal life, and best of all what it took to make him who he was. Gently told, but hardly a gentle story. Marred by chronological wandering and rarely just showing a bunch of his best images, I'd still rent it again. It's probably worth its while just to see the wild parts of Yosemite.

When The Levees Broke*** is a disturbing reminder of how bickering politicians and an uncaring government ignored Hurricane Katrina as long as they possibly could. Long and lurid.

Rock Prophesies*** is the overblown title of a slightly overblown documentary about an old guy photographer who's going around, still taking rock pix, but also looking for the next big things in rock and roll, including a band called The Sick Puppies from Australia and 16-year-old guitar wizard Tyler Dow Bryant, oh, from somewhere small town in the sticks. What's the guy's secret? He asks other stars he's photographed, then he and his film crew follow through. Interesting enough. Made me want to check them out, but the movie's pretty cornball. And the next big thing never quite is.

This one's title is The Photographer***/, and I keep trying to watch it, but I just can't. It's so stupid. Ignores every reality to tell this semi-mystical story. Our hero (or anti-hero, who knows, it's early in the movie.) is a photographer who has a show in New York, and sells everything, then he's got another show coming up, but he doesn't have any shots worth showing, and he's in anguish. But doesn't go out and shoot the same old stuff, for no apparent reason. Then 8x10 black and whites keep showing up, images of his life that he lives into. Image shows up. Later he happens upon the place they were shot at and is in the pictures. And he obviously knows he didn't shoot them, but he's gonna show them anyway.

Somehow the black & white 8x10s are going to transmogrify into big exhibition prints without the negatives or digital original images. Yeah, right. Maybe somebody who didn't know how this stuff really happens, might believe some of this crap, but mostly, nobody could be that dumb. So now, maybe I gotta finish the stupid movie. But I don't want to. But I keep at it. It occurs that our crew. It keeps growing. Is like Dorothy, off to see the wizard. There's a photographer — he keeps saying he takes photographs, but we haven't seen him do that even once, although he held a camera (no film) in one seen. And his acquired first pal, whom he saved from muggers. The new pal is a writer who doesn't write. They went to a fortune teller, who's not quite sure she sees anything, but she emcees into a feather duster like a microphone and explains what's going on as we watch it happen. OK, so this is going somewhere. But the photographer is still schmuck.

Then while the team (that now includes a drunk warrior 'celebrating' his bachelor night on a Monday) looks for the photographs that the photographer in the title didn't take but wants and probably needs, Romeo finds a typewriter ribbon, the photographer finds another 8x10, the warrior (who isn't) gets snagged on some barbed wire trying to drain the main vein. They have a fun little party, and eventually Max (the photographer) attains enlightenment and learns the big lesson, and they do not all live happily ever after, but the important ones do.

And after watching the whole thing, and putting all the pieces together (well, most of them) I went back and changed my original two asterisks to 4.

Then I posted it online, thought about it once more, pulled it back up and left the asterisks at 3.5.

Rango*** is funny and almost deep, but mostly goofy.

A Passage to India*** seemed promising, beautiful cinematography, India during the British colonization, David Lean of Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia fame, big scale but goofy in the details. We follow an independent woman and her daughter, also independent there for awhile, visiting India. The mother is great but gets older and feebler. The daughter seems good (Hope Davis, why I saw the movie), but after instigating a trip to the hills, accuses the guy who organized their extravagant trip, of rape. He did no such thing, is tried, yada yada. Like she just blanked out and did that rude thing, then she takes it back, and the film goes on and on in too typical 50s stupidities. Lame flick had promise, lost it.

The Adjustment Bureau*** runs everything but stays in the background until our enterprising young man catches them at it, wants what they don't want to let him have, gets it, drops it in the face of their further opposition, remembers eventually, fights them awhile, then drops the matter again. Like there's an AB running the movie, too. Goofy, somewhat adventuresome, awfully tiresome. Happily ever after ending for no particularly good reason.

Source Code**** does time travel one better, neatly sidestepping the usual movie and novel limitations. Good drama, solid story, deep thought till the copout ending Hollywood must have insisted upon. The science is flawed, of course, so why not the fiction, too?

Never quite knew how Rabbit Hole***/ would work out. Sad, of course, most of the way through, but enobling, not enabling. Niccole Kidman's usually worth it, but barely here. Kid dies, mom and dad are devastated, of course. Eventually, well, watch the movie.

From almost the very beginning, I knew what was going to happen in Clint Eastwood's True Crime***. Happily ever after, after a lot of trouble. May have been worth most of the trouble, but sure wish I didn't know all the way through it. Thought that's what great directors knew how to do best. TS

I got it because Steve Buscemi's in it. And some actress. Sienna Miller. It is an Interview***/ and that's what it's called. But off the wall. It is a Buscemi, and he directed. He looks awful in it. Pale with what looks like lipstick. Maybe he got beat up, too. Hard to say. He's a on-the-skids journalist interviewing a famous soap actress. They're playing games with each other, as well as being honest. Or is it the other way around. Odd dance, quirks and twists. More interesting than great, but the story pulls us through.

After the inept and tedious Masters of and Wizards of Photography, comes the superb American Photography: A Century of Images,**** made in 1999. Although I'd love to see the last dozen years protrusion into digital, this is a beautiful and intelligent history of American photography chunked into themes that add breadth and depth. Remarkably well done and beautiful to watch. And vastly informative.

The pre-movie and hideously audioed click click progression of famous photographs would have been far more effective if they'd been in focus, but here we have another dull grayscale — plenty of white, but never a definitive black throughout — documentary whose greatest lift is getting to see lots of excellent photographs, even if they are all out of focus here. Not often I long for the mind numbing lingering zooms of Ken Burns, but here it might have helped. I wanted hard details but got none. Fifties hokum, apparently before color film was invented. Masters of Photography: Edward Steichen**/. Way over-explained. 30 minutes.

Calling George Eastman The Wizard of Photography*** is piling it on deep. He was the businessman who popularized it and commodified it, but he wasn't that creative, except for making money at it. He was a micro manager and clearly uncomfortable with his eventual massive success. When I saw the unexplained title, I thought it would be about Jerry Ulesmann or one of the other true wizards of the form. The straightforward chronological documentary is interesting enough, but I expect more from something calling itself wizard.

Buck***/ is about the Horse Whisperer in the Robert Redford movie many years ago. About his job traveling around and helping horse-owners train their horses with kindness not control. And about the man and what made him so compassionate. Mellow, sometimes tear-jerking film, a craftfully and carefully-told story

I'm watching a really really really bad and stupid monster movie called Carny**. I guess I'll finish it, if there's not too many more commercial breaks offering us an opportunity to save some more wounded dogs — there's one in the movie, too. Not quite every stereotype in the book, but a lot of them. And nearly everybody in it, even the hero, is really really stupid — especially the director and writers.

If I subscribed to two-year-old movie magazines, maybe I'd know what the ones I get in the mail would be about before I choose or decline them. Had no idea what The Lovely Bones**** was up to. Almost dropped it again to the bottom of my queue, then on a lark let it rise to the top and watched it. Once that started, I couldn't let it stop. It's about a murder, and I knew that, but I could not have imagined the magical and mysterious and ethereal and deep down mystical truths of this — well, it was never a mystery really, but it feels like one. Will he get caught? Was the question, not who done it. And will she take the next step? Remarkably beautiful film about death. With marvelous special effects. Deep. Intelligent. Beautiful. In the end uplifting, but scary along the way. A treasure of a cinematic experience. Superb. Music by Brian Eno. Wow.

I have finally caught up with Rooster Cogburn, Tom Chaney, the Texas Ranger and 14-year-old Mattie Ross, and I have seen all their True Grit***/. Interesting how people talked, back in cowboy days, and how they carried through with their grit. And I am impressed by all of it.

Always wondered about Julia (I can hear him singing it in in my head.) and John Lennon's beginnings. This tells the tale. Possibly fact-based. Based on a true story. Not sure how true, but it gives a flavor, and that's plenty. Nowhere Boy***

I'd just read a longform essay about Buster Keaton and especially The General*** when I stumbled on the opportunity to watch it on Netflix online. A little dated, it was made in 1925, before sound, although the soundtrack added in 2003 was terrific. A comedy about the Civil War must have been daring at the time, but it was beautifully shot in glorious black & white and superbly edited. Good story, broadly acted of course and often funny.

Absolute Wilson*** caught me up on avant garde dance and theatric production through sometime late in the last half of the last century. Interesting to intriguing, combining personal elements from teaching brain-damaged hyperactive children; to wild, open collaboration; incarceration; and autism by this guy from Waco.

The Work of Director Chris Cunningham***/ varies from exquisite surrealism to loud, stupid repition, but through these too few visual tracks for songs is a outré attitude and psycho babble heart. Fascinating, unbearable, and lots between.

Exquisitely visual, clipped, clean, approaching surreal throughout. Serene, as is the pacing. Remarkable. Befitting the story of a Marine officer escorting the body of a fellow marine killed in action. But more than meets the eye here. Taking Chance***/

I've finally got my Neflitx queue down under 140 (it'd got past 250 for awhile) movies, so moving them around, up and down is a lot easier (the software works up to about 200). But it still takes awhile for one to rise to the top, and by then I often have no idea why I chose it.

So went Ghost Town***, which I actually thought might be some updated Western, but it's about New York City, or the people who died there recently and, as the old-time movie gimmick (that this movie fully subscribes to), they have not finished their job on earth, so they haven't sparkled into a gleam of light and disappeared yet. This might be the second movie by Ricky Gervais I've seen. I have not seen anything he's been on TV. Until earlier this week, I hadn't had TV for about three months. Now I got cable, and it is cheaper than paying the lying and thieving AT&T (who is by no means the only phone company in town but they still act like it), just for the phone that didn't work at least two weeks out of every three months. But that's about six other stories. GT is good enough. It's entertaining. It breaks almost zero new ground, so it's not even eligible for four or five asterisks. It is amusing and persistent, and I liked it well enough for a standby of Hollywood movie. (and now I get phone and internet as well as TV for less than I used to pay various other institutions of lower learning for not getting TV).

Cloverleaf**** is a scary monster flick. And really is scary, and there's several monsters involved. It's all shot from the Point of View (POV) of a video camera in the hands of one of the actors as they try to escape from the monsters attacking Manhattan. I got a little tired of the characters, who acted like real human beings. Instead of a brave, smart team working against the scary monsters, like most monster movies, we have a bunch of 20-somethings running scared, discovering the story as they attempt to get away from it.

Nice music, some sensitive singer-songwriter, gives the whole thing a, well, sensitive tone that's … well, needs emphasizing. At one point, early on, they ask each other if they are "fuck ups." They are, but they don't think so. She's pregnant. He seems to be employed, but with all his kid-like attributes it's hard to scope out who's really in there rattling around. They're touring the U.S. trolling for people they'd want to move near. All been real duds so far, but we're barely into the movie. O-okay, so maybe it's darkly and humanly funny. Or just stupid. Away We Go***. You know how all those foreign movies translate every word of dialog in the subtitles? Well, here someone in the next room is singing "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man," and we can barely hear it, but the subtitles get every word. How weird is that? Oh, here it is, that poignant moment when one of them tells a childhood story that brings them together. Of course it ends happily. [Sometimes it's nice to write a review while the movie's still going. Nice to have this already done by the time it finishes.]

The Burmese Harp***/ tells the story of Japanese soldiers in Burma at the end of World War II, their last battle wherein one of their number has the opportunity to give other soldiers the chance to surrender without killing or dying, they choose killing and ended up dying, and the soldier who risked his life to give them the opportunity becomes a monk. This sounds so cut and dry, but it is an affecting and spiritual movie that is difficult to put into words, although the soldiers put it into choral song, accompanied by the monk and his harp.

A Small Act*** is a beautifully videoed documentary about scholarships for outstanding students in Kenyan primary schools.

I thought it was going to be yet another documentary on her life and work. But Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen as Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stiegletz. Wow. An idea fraught, like their marriage and relationship, with difficulties and pain. Amazing to get so much understanding in just those few word. And beautiful. Amazing. Georgia O'Keefe***/

I was just beginning to write about this movie I just saw, formulating the words: odd but affecting movie about, well, I was going to say about a paranoid schizophrenic who follows random Middle eastern men around the city, with paranoid notions about what they are up to, and his long lost niece, who has come back to America after 9/11, when I saw that it was directed by Wim Wenders, and a lot more of it tumbled into sensibility. What it is about is acceptance and sanity, although it uses extremes and opposites to load up the irony. Remarkable motion picture. Affecting and deeply think-worthy. Land of Plenty***/

Youth Without Youth***/ is a stupid name for this great little movie about time and life times and aging, forward and backwards. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It is wildly romantic, nominally scientific, and fiction, hence science fiction. A good story, beautiful, haunting and ultimately, about life. As we don't really know it. The special effects are ultimate simple, but effective.

TV teen sci-fi, with every goofy adolescent stereotype known to Hollywood. Part horror, part teen angst and young love, all intermixed with sentimental tripe and alternating moments of evil stupidity. Like a battle of directors. The good one has a story and a little soul. The bad one needs to throw in all the crap, to get attention. Plus there's a few shreds of intelligence hid behind, that comes out briefly, but never long enough to save this poor movie. I Am Number Four**/. Good thing they all read the script. Otherwise it wouldn't make any sense. Oh, that's right, it doesn't. And the pacing: Exciting, sentimental, exciting, stupid, exciting… Hokum poke 'em. Oh, lard, and it looks like a sequel comin'.

Brothers***/ is about two brothers, a bad boy just out of jail and the perfect soldier just off to war. They exchange modes. The soldier goes haywire, as they often do in wars, and the bad boy goes good. Smart movie, mostly.

I watched Chops***/ so I could listen to the jazz, what it's all about. Free my mind, put it into other orbits. Worked, too. Wrote some stuff I'd not tried before. Movies about high school jazz competitions. I remember my high school band. Not much compared to these geniuses. Flick's got soul and charm. Human and amazing.

She's smart, wants to be a doctor. He didn't graduate from high school, is an alcoholic, goes by momentary feelings. But he's an unrepentant alcoholic who's always going to be a drunk, and he's never going to learn anything different. So it's hopeless. And we're supposed to feel for him? Yeah, right. Blue Valentine***/

A dark future. Is there a chance of any other? Full of secretly controlling influences. Advertising. Voices in his head. TV reality shows. All in distinctively odd animation. Very strange. Bleak landscape. We know what's going on, but the details are vague. Like real life as we think we know it. Realistic faces. Odd walking. Dark. Strong, superb science fiction. Makes ya think. Unique. Metropia****. 2009

The Illusionist*** had charming animation, lilting story that was so simple I almost missed it, then it was over and I thought I must have missed it.

Another dark future in The Road, which I did not finish. Tried multiple times. Couldn't beat to watch it. Had listened to the complete novel, which was much more — oh, more everything, credible, human, possible. The kid was younger, and the father more frail. Like it was originally written. Movies change even fiction, making it more fictional, less credible, human, likely.

I am watching Masterpiece Mystery: Sherlock the new, British update to Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Here, better acting, beautiful cinematography, we get to see the clues, or rather they are labeled on the screen, almost like clicking on them. Fast thinking, fast action. Quick-witted, too. Also witty. A delight. I'll count the whole kaboodle as one movie, although it goes on and on. Then, nearing the end of one, I recognized another I'd seen some time ago, not nearly as good as the pilot, though.

Farewell***/ is a spy story the way probably most real spy stories are. No car chases. Plenty of intrigue at the expense of loved ones. Not so much something everybody involved wants to be involved in. More personal than political. Remarkably good film about those inner issues of espionage so major it actually changes the world. Not Bourne but real. President Reagan portrayed as the idiot he probably was. In French. 2009

Pixar*** is a tried and true historic look at a very successful enterprise, with lots of samples of Pixar magic. Near total clone of a the film about the history of Disney animation. Hard to remember them apart.

I had two other Netflix flicks I'd tried to start and will finish eventually, but soon as I started The Butterfly***/, a French movie in French-only, I knew I had my evening's winner. It's about a nine year-old daughter whose mother has not found time to be with her, so she befriends an old man who collects butterflies and enters his world of hiking in the mountains and collecting, without telling anyone where she was off to. A bit of adventure in that, then something almost dire. An enchanting movie with a simple story, beautiful cinematography, all gentle and mostly sweet. 2003

Incendiary****, on the other hand, is a real movie. Not predictable. Strong characters and characterizations. Fierce story, again involving a journalist, but also love or what passes for it, and guilt — it's got guilt in spades. A couple faked scenes — well, a lot actually, but two egregiously faked. It is about bombs and bombers, after all, and who is murdered by them and whose lives are destroyed, and it actually gets at what that's all about, but mostly this movie is a dream, not the fakey kind where somebody wakes up and … but one in which we are all still asleep.

Secretariat*** is Hollywood through and through. I wonder how much of it is true so much of it is hacked through with Hollywood movie tricks. Tricks to make us smile — goofy caricatures of characters, including a Black guy who's almost Steppin' Fetchet but mostly ignored, one assumes, because he's Black. Stupid, invasive music. A plot/story-line that absolutely dead-on predictable every step of the way. Cute to watch, but essentially stupid.

Runaway Train … oops, that's Unstoppable*** was exactly as expected, all the way along the long track. At speed. Heroics. Stupid management, etc. etc. Fun. Just what I wanted. Denzel.

Netflix has all this data on computers that tell me I'm going to like this film instead of that film, because I liked some other film not remotely related to either film, but they won't warn me when I'm about to rent a film I've already seen. But this one I like. I like a lot, and once I realized I'd seen it before, I didn't stop it. I watched it all the way through again, even though I knew how it ended. State of Play****. Of course, it helped it was about newspaper reporting and newspapers and spies and murder and a bunch of other adventure stuff, and it was beautiful and intelligent. Etc. etc. I'm not counting it again, but it counts.

Mostly Martha***/ is mostly Martha, and she's enough odd her boss sends her to a shrink once a week, where Martha talks about her one obsession, cooking. So this is a foodie movie, and an outstanding one of those. I wish there were smellavision, this would be great in it. Along the way, Martha lets some other people into her life, grudgingly, with great difficult, and it's worth it, but she still goes to the shrink, because she's still obsessed. The movie is a delight, with fascinating characters, little and big ones.

So often, movies that everybody likes turn out to be dreadful, but The King's Speech***/ is quite wonderful. About an odd friendship and history. Something about a king with a speech impediment.

It's not about A Man on A Train****. That's just how he gets there. When the hotel's closed, he is befriended by a man who lives well. It's about their unlikely friendship. There's character development, of course. With quirk and seriousness. The man is there to rob a bank. His unlikely friend is about to experience a Triple Bypass. Both on a Saturday. Both lives change in the friendship, then on the Saturday, something mystical happens. English subtitles.

House of Games***/ is a con that cons us all, or tries to. Nice to see a name low on the list of actors who later makes it. I love looking down those lists, always hoping to see someone I recognize. This one was W.H. — later William H. — Macy, in just a bit part. Joe Montegna's our anti-hero and the anti-heroine is somebody time has not honored, and her name was near the top. It's a game. Con and be conned. Crazed dialog and direction by David Mamet. Interesting puzzle of a movie, that in the end, doesn't really make sense, and loses track of dollars, but seeing whose hands it's in is the name of the game.

One of those separate stories you know will combine in the end. Exquisite unfolding. Beautiful film. Engaging stories, memorable characters. I will have to see it again, later. Clint Eastwood. Steven Spielburg, even though it is somewhat schlocky. Matt Damon. Only originals get four asterisks from these reviews. It's about the Hereafter****

I had just been rewriting an old story comparing autusm and artism and wondering not for the first time if I had serious aspects of asperger's myself. I needed a movie, so I pushed the DVD into the computer and was charmed, and chagrined, pleased, a little sadened. A very pleasant little coming of age story that kept reminding me of who I was, too. Nice of movies to sometimes do that. Adam***.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father*** is almost amateurily put together, while retaining verve and deep human humor that turns darker and darker. But it's about the good people who survive several turns of horrible luck and a government (not ours, for a change) that's both ignorant and stupid about letting a premeditated murderer free to kill again. Strange, often goofy, laugh out loud funny and poignant and real.

Freakonomics*** seemed right on at first. Then it lagged a little with each segment. By the end I didn't believe they knew what they were talking about.

Although I was a fan of The Beat Poets a decade after their rise, I never understood Howl, the poem and book, before this movie. Nor did I understand the prominence nor eminence of Allen Ginsberg. Till now. Pitty as that is, this movie is remarkable, and not just because every word in it was actually said by the persons portrayed as having said them. It is an amalgam of annimation and fictional-appearing reenactment cinema and pseudo documentary. It tells a story, an important story while elucidating the poem, the book, the writer and his times, and that's a good thing. Howl!****

I didn't watch all of it, but I got through it okay — better than our hero. I remember suggesting it to watch with some friends in a theater, where I could not have escaped or fast forwarded through much of it. That would have been a mistake. Luckily, nobody else wanted to see this one. So I got to wait till now to see some of it, and that was enough. No real surprises, since they advertise it as a guy gets his arm trapped under a big rock as he descends a crevice in the Utah canyon desert, so I knew all along he'd cut off his art to escape, and I watched that much of it. 127 hours***

Fair Game***/ is about the unfair game the President, the Vice President and others in the U.S. Government played against Valerie Plume and Joe Wilson when they learned and told the truth about Saddam's supposedly secret program to create weapons of mass destruction, so the American People would feel that going to war against Iraq would be okay. It's strong as a spy movie and superior about the XXX of power in what is supposedly our government, but of course it doesn't belong to us anymore.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John***/ is about the ups and downs of family farming from John's childhood through several failures and several periods of relative joy and the land under him has dwindled and grown out again. It's a documentary with spunk and originality, and towards the end, real joy. I put off seeing it for a long time, because I didn't know what to expect. Now, I expect it will stay with me awhile.

It's got Robert Redford as a cranky old man mad at everybody because his son died before he did, and Morgan Freeman as his best friend and cowboy on his ranch who got mauled by a bear and Jennifer Lopez as the woman who was driving his son when she crashed and killed the son, and a kid who's his grand daughter. And the bear, and the ex-boyfriend who beat her up and some other folk up in Wyoming. Bit of a smarmer, but a nice one. Mostly mellow and getting mellower. About forgiveness and being who you are without being a total AH. An Unfinished Life***/.

Intimate Strangers***/ is a French movie in French-only with English subtitles about a married woman who attempts an appointment with a psychiatrist but goes the wrong office and tells her secrets to a tax attorney instead. And he listens. What evolves is sensuous and intimate without becoming sex. It's about trust and having someone to talk to. It's subtle, interior and intellectual and mostly gentle, beautifully acted.

I waited a long time for Sita Sings the Blues***/, and it was worth it. Its' the animated epic of the Indian classic Ramayana updated with the singing of 1920s singer Annette Hanshaw and some remarkable and colorful and often goofy animation styles. Still have issues accepting that I liked it this much, but I do.

The Battle for Terra*** is, to a limited extent, quite good. But the limitations include that the plot is hardly original. Or if it is original, it's been copied and copied and copied. Little thing called Avatar was nearly identical. Star Wars had a huge influence, shall we say, on this one, too. Many scenes copied almost directly from it. Earthians try to take over another planet after destroying their own. Beautiful annimation, gentler people and renderings than those other scifi movies I mentioned. Lilting greatness, except, oh, standing on the shoulders of giants. Etc.

Science Fiction, definitely. The title is Monsters***/, and there are those. Lots of them. Giant octopus-like ones. Eventually we get to watch our … well, they're not exactly heroes (and that's a relief), though it's a man and a woman, and basically they're trying to escape from the area infested by the creatures. We see several. When the local humans go nuts and try the good old American (don't have to be north of the Rio Grande to be Americanos) kill-everything-in-sight ethos, the monsters get 'em all and leave their stinking corpses all over the landscape. A lot of that is off-camera, though we hear strange noises. There's character development, growing rapport between the woman and man, lots of back story for both, and a creepy (but not really crawlly) feeling of impending doom from time to time. It's well-crafted sci-fi, with enough chill to make it interesting, and interesting enough characters to chill. I'm impressed.

What glorious, goofy, Bond-like fun with spies and the CIA. Bruce Willis and Mary Louise Parker is all it took for me to put this in my queue. Then there's Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfuss all obviously having great fun, and we got a secret agent kill-kill hootenany. Smart (in too many historically accurate ways to bother counting), wild, action, adventure, deeply hilarious, righteous, exciting, fun and funny. Red***/ (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) !

Jack Goes Boating***/ is scintillating like only Phillip Seymore Hoffman can. Three sets of couples. Twice a man and a woman, and the friendship of two men drive this halting, timid, ultimately gentle romance between one man and one woman compared harshly against the other man and woman. Ultimately positive at both ends, but not all the way through the middle.

It's been at least a century since I last saw 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, but I got the same kick out of the experience as I did upon first seeing this oddly accurate and sometimes surrealistic collection most often audio-backed by great music and all produced by The Film Board of Canada. In another thousand years I want to see and enjoy this one again

Never Let Me Go***** sounds like a romance and it very much is, but it is also deep Science Fiction in a mind-blowing and startling dimension. One that is never seen except vaguely in operating rooms and briefly in scars. A whole class of people are raised for their organs, which will be donated to the people they are clones of when those mostly unseen here people need replacements. Sometimes after the first donation, but almost always by the third one, the replicants die. So they have that to face all their lives, which are remarkably normal otherwise. This haunting and superbly told story — the cinnematography, pacing, story, dialog and chilling notions — nearly every aspect is delicious. But always with that invisible fright and fear hovering in the darkness.

Get Low***/ is the story of a hermit who'd locked himself away from humanity for forty years then decides to attend his own funeral to hear folks tell their stories about him. Instead he ends up telling his story, one that needed telling, so he could get forgiveness. It's a pleasnat story, human funny often enough, Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray, and of course, the old curmudgeon Robert Duvall. A tale of forgiveness with lots of quick and little bits of joy.

Even that stupid fox movie was better than average. I'll see any movie with George Clooney. This one, called in the bonus features that weren't on my Netflix disk, Journey to Redemption was how too many black ops guys retire. Beautiful scenery. Beautifully filmed. Well acted. Tense but with some love interest, too. The American***

It's been on the local PBS station for the last couple weeks, but I never saw it end to end till I rented it, then finally, I began to think I vaguely understood William S. Burroughs. This movie William S. Burroughs: A Man Within***/ was good, if not entirely great a documentary of much of his outter life. Now I have to see Naked Lunch again.

The Five Senses*** is slow, sensual and mostly melancholy. A movie in which almost no one changes very much. Then it stops

After the first movie, I read all three books in a mad, page-turning several weeks. But I always wanted to see Mikael and Lisbeth again, so I watched the third one, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest**** soon after it came out in video, remembering the distinct differences between the movies and the books. I may have to hear all three books again sometime in the next few years, but I've had it with the Swedish movies. I know the dorkwater who inhereted Stieg Larsson's fortune has set Hollywood on making one movie out of all three books, and I'm sure it will be stupidity squared, but I'll probably eventually see that one, too. Wish there were more Stieg Larson books to swallow whole, but he died before all this worldwide popularity and major big bucks.

So it wasn't really that big a jump to see this one, which until I heard Sorkin wrote it, I had avoided, pretty much like I avoid Facebook and most other really popular things. All I knew about it before I saw it was that, and that several people said it wasn't true. Maybe true to life, but not true. I think I can live with that, although I far prefer honest biographies. I loved the Zuckerberg characterization as a high functioning austist and/or AH, and I way too strongly identified with him. As usual with Sorkin screenplays, what was said was important and fast-paced and often very intelligent. I'd give The Social Network**** four stars, even if I don't visit my own fb page more than every three, four or more days, and I never know what to do with all the people who say they want to be fb friends.

I knew Aaron Sorkin was writing for something else, but that something else was on cable, and I don't want cable, because if I had it, I'd watch TV all the time, instead of the several other slightly more important things I do. I figured I'd catch up eventually. He's perhaps the best TV writer ever. That he did West Wing proves it, whatever political side you might be on. Luckily, he's still on the leading left edge, and Studio 60**** is already amazing, and I'm in the middle of watching the pilot. I'm sorry I only get to count this one once, because I'm going to be floating all of it over the internet these next few, probably, weeks, and I'm really looking forward to it. Great. Just what I needed, another addiction. Then I watched eight shows straight, got some sleep, did a couple other things, watched eight more, and by Weddy saw number 22 and final, but if I could see more new ones, I would.

Truly a Rube Goldberg movie of visual hijinks, the French Micmacs**** is a fun run-down of International arms trading pulled assunder by a gang of misfits, contortionists and goofballs. Deeply and visually intelligent and quirky to the max. Even the special features are a joy to see, although the shooting-of does go on.

The Vanishing***/ is a dark little tale. As dark as I can imagine. About a woman who disappears at a rest stop on the highway, and whose boyfriend become obsessed with finding out what happened to her. And in the end, he does. Oddly told. The humor, what little of it there is, is dark, too. A mystery revealed but not until the end. Spooky and creepy and mean-spirited.

Salt***/ with Angelina Jolie is exciting all the way to the finish, smart, plot twisting, fun, lots of action. Less than a week later, I can't remember anything about it.

A Touch of Frost: If Dogs Run Free*** - Jack Frost Season 15, Episodes 1 and 2. I'm counting them as one movie. Another long-running Brit detective. Smart guy who thinks it through and discovers. Older guy, not really an action hero. But wise. Season 15. Now I'll watch more on Netflix Instant View or whatever they call it. 88 minutes each.

I'd forgot I'd seen Manhunter**** (but didn't review it till now), probably before I saw Silence of the Lambs. Even before the first CSI. I keep seeing William Petersen in 80s movies. He's so much better in this one, which is in most ways, better than Silence. Except this one's Dr. Lektor isn't as sinister as Anthony Hopkins. But the detective, Petersen here, is amazing good, dark, brooding, more than a little psycho. Don't understand why he wasn't a bigger star then, but I always liked him on CSI, then when he retired, they replaced him with Lawrence Fishburn, which is high praise indeed. This one's dark, deeply evil. With Joan Allen, always a treat.

The Andromeda Strain***, the 2008 movie version was good solid science fiction up till near the end, when it reverted to stupid mechanical processes then tagged on a rip-off story device from an old Indiana Jones movie. I was glad for the opportunity to see Andre Braugher again. He's always worth watching, but the movie veered from a super-smart-think-team-figures-it-out to cornball bad endings. The journalist character was fun. The President seemed presidential often and sneaky bastard some of the time, probably like most of the real ones. I could dance to it, liked that it went on for two segments, maybe three-plus hours.

Legend of the Guadians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole**** was remarkable. Of course, we're birders, so there's a special bond already, but we were amazed at the annimation and the details. Some of the battle scenes are a little confusing, and like any good saga, there's too many characters, so we didn't always (usually) know who way saying what, but it was inspiring. English subtitles helpd get through the Aussie accent on second viewing. First time I saw it it was on a screen halfway across the room, but the details held up up close on my Mac hi-def. Plenty of detail, action, adventure, marvelous flying scenes, fascinating feather work. Perhaps a tad too Star Warsian. Although I thought this first one was plenty, I guess they're already planning more. But I'd probably watch them, too.

Jan Svankmajer: Disk 2 (The Collected Shorts)**/. I'd never heard of Svanmajer, and it's just as well. The short shorts were funny and inspired stop annimation. The longer shorts were tedious, supposed to be scary — I'm guessing, and just weren't.

I must have seen movie art from Fantastic Planet*** hundreds of times over the deaces since 1973, but I don't remember anything of the annimated movie of the subjugation of the tiny, human-like Oms by the giant Traags. Now I have. Primitive annimation, but interesting ideas, especially for that long-ago era.

Another one I think I saw before but am not quire certain is Enigma***/, a World War II mystery that may be "based on history," but probably not on facts, since it has some of the geniuses who built the Allies' copy of the Enigma Machine that unencrypted all the secret codes used by German, and helped win it for the good guys. It's a couple of romances, a period piece, more than a little mystery, even has one rather tame car chase. Pleasant in a laid-back way, smart.

I wasn't going to count it, because I saw it when it was new in 1974 and again many years later, but it's not in my alphabetical movie pages linked above, so I am counting it here. I remembered Harry and Tonto**** as a charmer with some quirk, and it is. Much more than that though. Art Carney and an orange cat's adventure out West from New York City. It's about independence and family and friendship.

That one got me up to one-thousand-and-five-hundred movies so far this century. I'm amazed, and only 90 years to go (of the century).

War Photographer***/ is a documentary of someone who may well be the best war photographer. I don't follow war photographers after David Douglas Duncan and Danny Lyons (different kind of war) any more. He is good. But deeper than being a good composer, exposer, etc., he is a good person, willing to go to wars and other dangerous places around the world, to elicit our help for the poeple James Nachtway photographs. Interesting, compelling, gentle.

I have a lurid painting by Ann Huey titled He Was Quiet and Kept to Himself. This movie, with a very different looking Christian Slater and, among others, William H. Macy, is about the guys thus described who climb out of their shells long enough to murder a bunch of people in a corporate worklplace. Most of whom — in this movie, at least — richly deserve it. Some of the sudden plot left turns make a certain sense, and the acting is peculiar but more realistic than we'd like to admit. Cinnematography as quirky as the story and plot. It is deeply and darkly funny, even moving. Not perhaps a great movie, He Was a Quiet Man***/ is, nonetheless, memorable. Did I mention dark?

Entering other's dreams is not new. There's a long tradition of the notion in movies: Peter Ibbetson, Dreamscape, The Lathe of Heaven, The Cell, Open Your Eyes/Vanilla Sky and Waking Life. Now Inception***/, which promises greatness but delivers too much of the usual gangster pap of violence, car chases, and raisn of bullets. This movie veers between wretched, violent excess and intelligence, ultimately crashing through stupidity.

In some ways xxy*** is a mess. Another of those movies when no one will talk about the elephant in the room. That Alex has both male and female organs and has not decided which to choose, although everybody seems to have made up their minds. Resulting in too many issues for everybody including Alex. In the end, Alex does what's right for Alex, a point it seems like everybody else — compassion or not — should have got to by the time this movie started. So it's a movie that is a movie because somebody needed a movie, not so much for the reality of it, but for the story of it. I'm glad they felt the need. It raises interesting and important concepts, but it does seem they waited an awfully long time to come to their conclusions.

Vaguely I remember seeing the first Ghost in the Shell, but it was nothing like Ghost in the Shell 2****, which was superb anime, delving into areas usually not dealt with, deep stuff like existence and souls, on beyond Artificial Intelligence. Mostly very cartoon like hero annimation but with beautiful transitions of startling depth and pseudo-reality. Nice.

2010

I saw 174 movies that I remembered long enough to review in 2010. Never thought I'd break my old record that big.

City of God**** is viciously violent — filled with it. What it's all about. The blurb spoke of a young news photographer's eye, but I wasn't ready for all the murder and mayhem delivered at break-neck pace in powerful POV camera work and staccato, let's-back-up-and-tell each new character's story till we've told the whole movie. If you can stomach the brutish savagery and don't mind its stopping and backing up repeatedly, it's an amazing movie that tells the story of a crime-ridden Brazilian slum called City of God. If you can't take the barbarity, don't watch it, but its amazing cinnematography is as non-stop as the violence, drugs and inherent evil.

Something must have got lost in the translation from Somerset Maugham's classic novel, but Bill Murray helped. The Razor's Edge*** is almost a good movie, mired though it is in old style English stories of the aristocracy, of stupid men and stupid women and stupid romance. Just too confusing and, well, stupid. But even an enlightened Bill Murray doesn't make it sing.

Hard to imagine Joan Rivers as endearing, and she probably would not appreciate ir or approve, but in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work***, she gradually builds up to endearing. If only because of her brutal honesty. I hoped it would be funny, and it was — well, funny enough. I hoped I'd learn who she really is, and I have. I sincerely hoped I'd get to see behind the mask, and there's much to be seen back there.

As a documentary of early 21st Century graffiti artists, the early portions of Exit Through the Gift Shop*** are exciting and informative and very art and art history. As the documentation of the fall and rise of Mr. Brain Dead (no, no, that's Mr. Brainwash, but I think I was right the first time.), it grows tedious. I didn't want this idiot winning and he kept winning at the art game, even though he clearly had never had an original idea in his head. All totaled, it's a big minus. Not exactly a waste of time, but mostly. Clearly Banksy is a better filmmaker, a much better and more intelligent artist, and Mr. Brain Dead is just that.

Except for that one little plot swerve, In the Cut***/ (really stupid name) coulda been a contender. But any thinking person who sees it, will know soon as they witness the evidence too early on what the plot's gonna be. Then the who who sees it, won't tell who she really should, because of her trust issues, and because the stupid movie's mired in one of those dumb ass plot devices left over from the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, etc. back into movie time forever, where somebody knows but just won't tell, stupid reasons, dumb plot device, idiot writing makes viewers angry, not intelligently toyed with. And this flick has a very sexy Meg Ryan (upper frontal nudity) and a close-up organ blow job in about the first scene, and Kevin Bacon, and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mark Ruffalo. And any movie, sensual, otherwise intelligent, very sensual, this good shoulda had a plot coach to tell them, no, that's not going to work. However it might have been finagled in the book. Unlikely they could get it past the censors with the overt orals sex. But really, Jane Campion directing. These are not stupid people. Nice love story, nice side stories, fascinating characters, solid acting. Everything going for it, but that incredibly stupid story swerve. Damn.

I had higher hopes for a movie called Inside Bob Dylan's Jesus Years: Busy Being Born Again*. For one thing, I expected some Dylan performance. Foolish me. This sad, scrawny little film. Is about the talking heads who are this movie. And only incidentally, maybe only coincidentally about Dylan. Which is too bad. They refer to songs, to style, to music, but they don't show us those people singing, and we don't hear them playing those songs. This is a pitiful excuse for a movie. Too much Jesus, and not nearly any Jesus singing, dancing or playing.

Waltz With Bashir**** is a slow, often surreal and deeply affecting animation (no rotoscoping) of trying to remember a soldier's part in a famous, very real massacre. It's a movie about war and remembering and trying to forget. About stupidity, fear and base human meanness. War. Presented in often painfully slow walking figures across a desert landscape. Fighting, escaping, battle, firing incessantly. About the reality and the psychology and the not wanting to remember.

Triage*** is about two war photographers, only one of whom comes back. What happened to the other is the question, and it is slowly answered through psychiatry. Unfortunately, it is not a new story or plot. It's a tired to the bone version of both. I wanted to like it, because it's about photographers, but despite the subject, I kept wanting more than the usual, and it wasn't there.

More poignant than any other emotion, I suppose. Jeremiah Johnson**** is a mountain man, seen some trouble, too little joy, Keeps going higher into those hills. A gentle movie for all its killing and retribution. Robert Redford in a classic. Memorable. It keeps coming back, not to haunt, but to think through.

I kept wondering after seeing A Man & A Woman**** again after 44 years whether when I saw it the first time, did I appreciate all those wonderful filmic details. Did I notice how the man and the dog keep showing up in moments of transition? Did I care that many scenes weren't miked and were shot telephoto or that we never heard the unnecessary dialog? I don't know, and I don't remember individual scenes, but I remember the movie and when I saw it and with whom, and that we loved it. Wildly romantic. As alluring now as the first time, and the only thing dated about it was that the credits rolled before it started. Once they did I didn't care, I loved watching it again as I loved watching it the first time. Easily caught up in its motions and emotions. Only learned later, in the interview with filmmaker Claude Lelouch that all the interiors were in black & white and all the exteriors in color. Jean-Louis Trintigant and Anouk Aimée are fabulous, as were the old man and the dog.

More, major quirk, this time Korean. The blurb calls him homeless, but clearly he has accesses plenty homes, just they belong to other people, and he always improves some things, cleans, buries a suicided body, waters the plants, feeds the Koi But he's the Trickster, too. Changing clocks and scales. Stays one or two nights. When he stays too long owners return and treat him variously. All's quiet so far. No dialog from him, or her when she joins his adventure. Then the violence starts. Sado and maso. Beautifully filmed. Outstanding story, actors, cinematography, concept, plot, everything except the savagery the 3-iron plays part in. 3-Iron****

The Tracker***/ is about race and racism, justice and humanity. It takes its time. Coulda done without the fella singing, until he sang in aboriginal language. But then he switched back later. That the only really lame idea in the film about white racists tracking a black man accused of killing a white woman through the outback. Our hero is the tracker who metes out everybody's justice. Obviously written by a white guy with broad taste in story telling, but so well acted by David Gulpilil as the tracker, it was hard to fault. Then there's a documentary about Gulpilil's real life that's fascinating if much less exciting than the movie.

Harry Brown*** plays on the same fears, sympathies as Charles Bronson's vigilante hero did decades ago. But this is a grisly movie. Dark, fright-laden. Scary stuff when lowlifes take over a neighborhood and the police are too stupid to do anything about it. So Harry Brown does. If Harry Brown were not played by Michael Caine, I would never have rented this vicious and malevolent movie, but he is, and I did. Caine is still amazing. Of course. Emily Mortimer is good also. And the bad kids are truly evil.

I couldn't get over the overwhelming feeling that this is a stupid movie. Entertaining, yeah, kinda. But stupid and hackneyed and dumb in every possible way. Good vs. Evil with every trick in the Hollywood book. Stupid. I liked the first one better. Yeah, Mickey. The Sorcerer's Apprentice*/

Now there's a movie that did much for and against psychoanalysis: I'm surprised I had not seen it, even if it was made in 1945. I keep thinking I'd seen all of Hitchcock's movies, then I find another, and sometimes I think all his movies are great, and then I found several that clearly were not. But this one, Spellbound***/ with a very young Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, was quite good. Dated by all manner of sophistication since then, in psychiatry as well as story-telling, but compelling.

The Human Stain**** is great acting by Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris even Gary Sinese as the young author — all quite different sorts of people from most movies, a great chronology-jumping story by Philip Roth. Searing emotionalism from Kidman, easily the most original character in this or most movies. Harris is sometimes chilling as the protagonist in the quasi love triangle. Knocked my sox off. Wow.

Waking Sleeping Beauty*** is a documentary about the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall and ... of Walt Disney's Animation department. Like any decent movie, it's got plot and characters, more than one moral, challenges and triumphs, etc. It goes on and on and on, with marvelous little transitional sequences of sunrise to sunset of the buildings the animators inhabited as transitional sequences. It gets carried away with itself sometimes, probably pushes too hard on the corporate side and little light on the creative side, but it's all in there together.

Post-Apocalyptic in the style of Mad Max — even a bunch of the same bad guys with about the same scripts, only everything's in Brown-A-Vision. Lot of violence, a plot that hovers near Christianity but never gets that close, with dozens of murders, rapes, a lot of bullets and some explosions that don't do anything, some characters, a Holy vision and there it is, The Book of Eli***.

The Crimson Wing***/ is more beautiful than most bird documentaries. Some of the music is distinctive and appropriate, but a lot of it's the same old stuff. The images, however, are not. We get to follow pairs of Flamingoes as they pair off, lay and take care of eggs, see some of them lost to predators and others get herded off somewhere. Fascinating really and a little mysterious seeing how where they're from and go back to.

It's about self-righteously doing the right thing, every wrong time. It's tuff, grisly, dark. Heavy detectiving, not a lot of soul-searching, but everybody makes the wrong decisions and only one has to live with it. Lot of the others die with it. Gone Baby Gone***/

Cold souls*** is among the tiny but growing fraction of movies belonging to the category of self-reflexive. Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are probably the most famous, although there are others — Adaptation, The Science of Sleep and the oddly brilliant claymation Mary and Max. This one is about a business that extracts, then stores your soul for you when it become unbearable. Like most enterprise, there's a dark side, this one in Russia, and therein lies the conflict. Basically this is Paul Giamatti as himself and what his soul is and does for who has it. Introspective, intelligent, darkly funny and thought-provoking.

My brother is deaf, and he learned to read lips at Spencer Tracy school in Los Angeles in the 1940s and worked hard many years to hone that craft. So I know it's not a simple skill you can just pick up without careful training, the differences in sounds are subtle and indistinct. The little boy in Dear Frankie***/ is smart, but not that smart. The movie is a lovely, bittersweet story about a kid without a real dad, whose Mom makes one up for him and sends letters. I understand the oversimplification of reading lips. This movie depends on Frankie understanding what's going on, but it's never that easy in real life.

After so many father/son movies, it's past time for a good mother/daughter one. This one is. A good movie. Dark for all its light. Little joys dashed by one or the other for each other. A lesson in all of it that's subtle, but eventually they each get it. White Oleander***/

The Last Airbender**/ goes around bending a bunch of stuff, and there's a planet's worth of good and bad soldiers, and good spirits and, oh, what a mess. I enjoyed it but perversely. I especially liked its pop (or is that pap) magic, but as a movie it is a disgrace and disaster. Plenty grandiosity, not nearly enough story to hold it together.

Temple Grandin**** is almost a new kind of movie. One that treats autism from the autist's viewpoint. At its best, it is a strongly visual movie that lets us see the world the way Grandin and some other autists do. At its worst — and there's a lot of that — it is as manipulative as Hollywood has learned over the last century. We are prodded like Grandin's cattle through chutes and into pits. We feel joy or panic or triumph, all on cue. But it's still a showstopper of a movie blending all that hokum with visual understanding, much like early CSI sequences, when they actually made sense. And the story is mostly true, although TG is hardly that pretty.

The Merry Gentleman***/ was an unexpected gem. Bitter and sweet, a little scary sometimes, starring Kelly MacDonald with Michael Keaton, who directed. Lilting dark but affecting story about friendship and starting over and telling the truth. Almost a romance. A lot about trust. Protection. And a downward swirl of other topics rendered noir but beautiful, real and human.

Took me several sittings to get all the way through Yellowstone: Battle for Life Episode 1*** — winter, but it's not like there's just one story to follow, and not counting the people behind the cameras and support crews, whom we never see, there's not much humanity in it. Good thing it concentrates on animal life. Superbly filmed, and I recognized several places I've been in the distancing past, even covered with snow. Amazing place. I won't count each as a separate movie, but I will enjoy many more seasons at Yellowstone.

Any time-travel flick anytime. The mechanism (deus ex) for transporting back this time was a rainstorm, an old chimney and a dog named Tess. Set in World War II and contemporary England, it's an interesting bit of history, but more a bit of friendship than romance. Pleasant, wiggly-walls were all the special effects, darned few anomalies, but time travel nonetheless. An Angel for May***.

There must also be dysfunctional family movies set at Christmas and New Years and the Fourth of July, but Thanksgiving takes the prize in so many movies. Pieces of April***/ is only an hour and twenty minutes, but as much as happens, it seems longer, fuller. Lovely really, a little weepy near the end, though nearly nothing of the evil havoc that precedes makes it inevitable. About family and strangers, community and love, even if.

Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio*** is the long name for a one-hour-short documentary about a school of architecture that designed and built (important) a series of homes and public building for the people of Hale County, Alabama. It is both charming and educational — and inspiring. The houses the students made are beautiful and comparatively inexpensive. Maybe a little too much talking head scenes and never enough images of the buildings and the people who use them.

Before the betrayal, I Am Love***/ is about everything and nothing, family, then slowly we perceive sensuality, subtly at first, like all else that gathers through this movie, till it takes over. Food, flowers, then sex comprise a visual complication of themes building through the first hour. Going nowhere until it is everything, a culmination, a gathering of concepts into the tyrannical complication. Beautiful throughout, often mysterious — did that really happen? we ask ourselves. And deep.

Winter's Bone***/ is a savage little movie about a strong woman — who may only be 17, but she's got grit — and her father, whom we never see, and their extended families, many of whom are in the illegal drug business in the Missouri hills. It's told slow, but deep, and with a lot of emotion, and none of it syrupy or fake. Very real, very gripping. Serious movie that never once got tedious. Fierce.

Startlingly and amazingly intelligent dialog, considering half the leading men (twins played by Edward Norton) generally acts like a hick, and the other is even slower on the uptake till towards the end. Deep and darkly funny in that deadly serious way that makes a shockingly good movie. I am in awe, and I want to watch the whole thing over again before I send it back. Wow! Leaves of Grass**** is a true original, and only has a very little to do with Walt Whitman.

Bela Fleck goes to Africa. Well, it's not called that, but sometimes it's too much like the famous American banjo star goes to Africa to play with their best banjo-like musicians, because that's where banjos came from. Sometimes a banjo can't help playing louder than everybody, but in the best of this trip, Bela blends in. It's a music movie intersected by travel and people and musics. Had me chair dancing often. Only rarely got bored. Set me off buying many of the Africans he played with, with and without Bela. Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart***. I wish some of the best jams and tunes in the film were available online, and it seems wrong that Bela to take solo artist credit for all the creativity on the soundtrack. Should at least list the African musicians for each tune. They are wonderful.

Okay, I finally saw High Plains Drifter***, but I still don't know what all the fuss was about. Stupid story, stupid killing of everybody in sight. A gunslinger saves a town, but why? They're just a bunch of cowards. Style, I guess, if you can call it that.

Made for TV, Something the Lord Made*** has honor, tears and the triumph of human spirit going for it, but it still overlooks most of the difficulties of being Black in mid-20th Century America.

Selkies are mythical creatures who are seals in the water and human on land. A lot of purposeful confusion between the woman Circus nets on a fishing run and the mythical creatures gets swirled and mixed in this dark fantasy Ondine***/ — mixed with spookiness and fear and joy and quirk and love and magic. Possibly the best of all that is the underlying darkness of fear and unease.

The Secret of Kells**** has real soul. Animation so lively and beautiful and visually exquisitely innovative, with hardly a nod to technology. This is an eloquently told tale of youth and age, creation and fear, perceived fact and vivid fantasy, hope and courage. A remarkable film that gets joy and doom and can actually tell them apart. Unlike Dreamworks. And a wicked subtext of Catholicism that's important to the very real plot.

I don't usually review movies I saw on TV, but The Parking Lot Movie***/ about The Corner Parking Lot somewhere in Virginia was so outrageously anarchic, intellectual and anti-intellectual and cleverly funny, I can't help myself. There's this pay parking lot owner who hires over-educated attendants, who live through the taunts and tribulations and mete out parking lot justice and talk about the people who park there and chase them down the street when they refuse to pay. And develop attitudes and ... Well, once again, you gotta see the movie. Maybe KERA-TV will show it again when we least expect it. Meanwhile, Netflix has it, too.

Anna was amazed I'd never seen Badlands****, but I've probably missed a lot of good movies along the way. This one's surreal in several senses. Wonderful, amazing transition scenes including a fabulous fire sequence. Senseless violence. Confounding music. A story unlike any other, except Mickey and Mallory's much later Natural Born Killers, but here the love interest is a very young and confused Sissy Spacek, and our anti-hero is a slightly older but still youthful and searing evil Martin Sheen. Great acting. Strange story. Love. Or something like it. And a lot of death.

Dreamworks got something akin to soul, and in How to Train Your Dragon***/ it shows in higher tech and more human humans and other characters and characteristics. The fur still is not perfectly rendered — Hiccup's Dad's beard is a mess of grime and fluff not hair, but much else is. They've got body language down close to pat, and it plays important though hardly pivotal roles in this high adventure for the sake of high adventure, where subplots get lost in the action. Fun, very pretty, exciting, peace-loving, violent, funny ha-ha and funny human. Basically a Father and a Son flick, but on beyond that. A thoroughly watered down unmessage of peace underlaid with grisly war in this manufactured plot. Very little blood, but lots of violence and occasional nuances of human spirit. Nice. I've watched it twice already and need to one more time again.

Not many movies about artists go this deep. Into the art and into the soul. About a Philadelphian artist who covers the walls of whole neighborhoods with his large, sometimes flat, journals in tile, mosaic, etchings, ink on paper. Odd characters but always true, if not to each other then to life. Married 42 years by the end of this movie. Which has marvelous filmic sequences and searing truths and a lot of the artist talking about himself. And his wife and family. Sometimes fascinating and visually elegant, sometimes not at all. In A Dream***/

It's crawling with early 20th Century chronisms, and I know I've read the novel. I read all of Steinbeck, but I don't remember a lick of this book. The Grapes of Wrath, some. Of Mice and Men, a lot. Both probably helped by big movies of their time and mine. And the Cannery Row series now I want to revisit. But East of Eden***/ still escapes memory. Guess I don't identify with all that brooding James Dean sloshes into this story of father love. Overdramatic from the overlong title sequence all the way through. Almost laughable now.

Believable, if not entirely credible. Not like the book I remember reading in college. I mostly missed it growing through a Pooh-laced past. I saw this movie in 3-D. I was there. What actually I saw, since my eyes don't work together, was slogs of mush that more or less coalesced into great ugly too-many-colored everything-nothings in the same space and mostly identical circumstance, glop. I hated it, because I couldn't see individuals, just slop. This DVD version, in all its un tri-dimensioned glory, was clarity after those fleeting sludgeoid impressions. Good enough story, a little Tim Burton over all the tops, more than a tad quirky Depp depth and plenty Character-Generated animation stripped into live action. Exciting, funny, bad, good, all those and more. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland***/

It's fiction, or fictionalized faction, but it often carries the look, feel and heft of documentary. Not all, but a lot of what happens, is real, not Hollywood. Hardly ever Hollywood except, well, the acting parts, I suppose. When they kill and butcher a pig, that's real. When they brand cows, that's searingly real. Some other parts, like when they supposedly have their arms up a cow's uterus to pull a breech birth, that's cheap-out obviously faked, until they pull it out, then that looks real. They are a couple living in Montana in the early years of the 20th Century, against the odds of nature, low cattle prices and each other. Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrerel. Much more interesting and engaging than I expected. Heartland***.

The Barbarian Invasions**** is a wonderful movie about life and death, love, men and women and everything in between. It caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting such lovely visuals and deep-felt emotions. It's about an old man who is dying and this son, whom he seems to hate. Then the son, who happens to be a millionaire, comes to say good-bye, gatherers the old man's friends about him, keeps him oddly pain-free and friends-rich till the end. Many telling moments of human realism, a few quirks, a lot of marvelous people and good actors.

Glenn Gould: Hereafter*** is of and pertaining to perfection and what follows. Him talking often, with others, to himself, but more often or at least the best of which is him playing the piano, and almost always subvocalizing along. Informs what he was thinking about. Shows him as the mad genius of the piano.

Some reviews write themselves all during the movie: Title sequence is several kinds of exquisite. Superb. Begins as a proper, almost Japanese anime fantasy. Wondrous characters. Certainly an odd world view. I'd rather they weren't, but here dragons are definitely the bad guys. Ill-manered and mean, in all shapes, colors and compositions, most unlike classical dragons, but all very creative, if not altogether fanciful. Towards the middle, it gets a little full of itself. Although the landscape is always lively, our heroes and heroine do get a little tiresome. There's a few largish laughs and a lot of little ones, usually rooted in visual. Then it picks up again, gets exciting, then stops. Etc. There's a remarkable rhythm going here among all the absurd fantasy, fear and fierceness. Then the big dragon and a big fight, quite colossal and horrific. Then, when then it's all over. Or almost, comes the goofy ending and more exquisite titles. The Dragon Hunters***/

Took long enough for me to get around to putting this one in my Queue, then longer to let it up to the top. Just never really wanted to watch it, but eventually I did. Basically, it's a character development plot. Our main character trudges around in some deep shit a long time, then with some help, figures out who she is, and what she can do about it. Not a really great movie, but a good enough one to win some awards. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire***/, which ungainly title appears to be somebody's way of thanking the writer for these characters and this story. I'd thank them, too, but I'm on my way to see the next flick.

Just a couple minutes into Ken Burns' America: Thomas Hart Benton**, I had to stop it. At the time, all that panning and zooming into Benton's paintings must have seemed the height of filmic expression, but it drives me nuts. I wanted to see his paintings and would settle for the low res TV version of his colors, but all that camera and frame movement was too much for my stomach, and however that connects to my brain. Unmittigated visual crap.

Without a Netflix, I would never have discovered The Secret in Their Eyes***/, an exquisite Argentinean story of a crime and punishment, governmental stupidity, love (of course) and justice. It's an exquisitely filmed movie. Acting, story, script, all superb. I wish it'd been dubbed in English, so I could have watched the movie more. That's the star here. The transitional scenes are lush and beautiful. Argentinean by Director Juan Jose Campanella.

Much is made of the fact that this filmmaker, Lucy Jarvis, was allowed into the Louvre with television cameras, but not much was revealed of its inner life. Its art and history are of great interest, and the paintings are always fascinating, but in this low resolution videotaping, we see these works in even lower resolution than we saw them in books and reproduction — vague phantasms of the real art, nor is much of the building and its operation or expansion or care mentioned, let alone shown to this TV show's intended mass audience. The Louvre*** was good enough for 1978. Is there an update?

Orson Welles & Me*** Is a way to tell the story of Orson Welles without getting lost in Orson Welles, whose part is important, maybe even pivotal, but he's not the star here, and that alone makes it worthwhile. Odd little romance that doesn't work out, interesting characters on stage and back. Good enough without being boffo.

Let the Right One In***/ is slow, spooky and gruesome. About a little girl who is a vampire and her friend, a boy who is not. It is about torment, and standing up for oneself and decency among the unlawless. Bullies play an important part in this quiet thriller. All these things different from however you've seen them in other movies. Deep, dark and frightening.

I was riveted by the two-disk Brit political thriller State of Play****. There's a Hollywood version coming, but the original is substantially better. Five hours worth of fascinating characters and searing interactions among them, fast action and lots of thought, twisting plots, great, involving story. Amazing. I'll watch the truncated Hollywood version, but I know they'll fuck it up.

Kind of a Funny Thing** is a long, slow, tedious, minutely quirkesque but mostly boring movie about a teenager who checks himself into a psych ward so he won't kill himself. It has its moments but not enough. A couple characters are unique, most are in every mildly romantic or shrink ward flick out there. It is badly done, badly organized. Falls apart entirely several times, muggles it together, then dies on the vine. It is possible they can put it all back together, but I doubt it.

All The Real Girls***/ is quirky deep, not goofy quirk. Serious strangeness like life is. A guy who's had every girl in town, now with his best friend's little sister, and everybody's worried about them being together. Him, too. But he and she know it's right, or think they do, then something happens, and they're not, and then ... Cinematic transitional scenes like the two-legged dog walking through emphasize the oddness of it, yet the deep reality, and that it goes on. People make do, screw up, learn and make better. She's not scared with him, but he's very careful with her. Slow. Shy. She's not. He is. And all the way through there's the oddest dialog, with everybody. They're real to a fault, only more real than fault. Really peculiar dialog. Somebody thought it through careful, though because it all works. It's close enough to real to accept, believe.

From nearly the beginning of this taut, tense chase movie — no cars — you'll know all but the final twist, but there are some surprises in this sci-fi thriller originally by Philip K. Dick and interesting characterizations — Vincent D'Onofrio's bad guy or is he, Sinese' good guy or is he and Madeline Stowe as wooden as I've ever seen her. Somebody said it was over-directed but it's worse than that. Even scifi needs to be credible and this never quite makes it. Imposter***. Now I want to read Dick's original. I suspect it'll be an improvement.

I remember another, far sadder movie about Townes that led me to buy some of his deep down blues, that I still love. Townes Van Zandt: Be Here To Love Me*** is a little more upbeat. Tells the story, in post-modern disjointedness, so we never follow the chronology — though maybe it's like a Townes song even he doesn't understand, but the words and music come into his head like a dream, and he writes it down and plays it.

What grabbed my attention was that this was Terry Swigoff's first feature documentary before Crumb. And this, too, is a revealing film about a creative person, but the dark side, so evident on Swigoff's amazing Crumb is here only thinly, a little hijinks porn. Nice music, though. Really fine Old Blues with tweaks of great new blues, too. Louie Bluie*** is a born entertainer in several mediums, obviously including music but story-telling, poetry and painting, too.

War, Inc.* has John Cusack, and I kept wondering why he'd make such an obvious dud as this. Was it fun? He needed something to lower his average? Then I see at the end of this terminally supid wreck, that he helped write it. No wonder. It's supposed to be an anti-war send-up. It's supposed to be: funny, interesting, engaging, a romp. It isn't.

Oh, no wonder. Atom Egoyan. I hadn't known till the credits at the end. No wonder. Exquisite film. Very accessible. Luscious. Deeply sexy. Switchback curves of plot. Sumptuous cinematography and story. An erotic thriller. About Chloe****, of course, but more about the woman who did not trust her husband then became the unfaithful one. Not steamy but sexy and scary and intelligent and beautiful. About need and its fulfillment.

I've begun being enthralled by Glenn Gould again. Something played on NPR set me off, downloaded some MP3s of The Goldberg Variations I'd seen and heard him play on 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould in 1993 or thereafter. Which film is set to release "soon" sayeth Netflix, so I can watch it online. He could probably play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and I'd be glued to the speaker or a good set of headphones for the duration, but Bach or those other guys, including Atonal, knocks me out over and over. So Glenn Gould: On and Off the Record***/, meaning in recording sessions in New York and not and at home in rural Canada instead, thrill me without knowing much about Classical music at all, except that I like it sometimes. Always when Gould played it.

Took me nearly a week of mostly not watching Shutter Island**/ to finally finish it. With so many setups for the obvious, what happened at the end was zero surprise — twists, my foot, but it was at long last, over.

A little too sloppy with the teen angst and way too much pathetic crying, but for a time-travel flick, interesting with flashes of brilliance. For anime there might be too many times when the visuals went the too-easy way and got sentimental, but then there are trip scenes and some moving (the anime part) passages that are treasures, beautiful and wise. The Girl Who Leapt Through time*** isn't really for adults, but this one mostly enjoyed it.

The Eclipse***/ is a lovely dark (so dark many details disappear into pure black) film with even darker bits of horror that're over the top and sudden, and how humans cope with it and live around it. A lilting love story, a character-changing sequence of events around a literary festival in Ireland, but with only one literary reading, at that was major interrupted by the cad who is the nemisis.

Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Schulman*** is the long way around calling Mr. Schulman the best photographer of Modernist Architecture. This documentary about the photographer shows his work and the houses he portrays giving us a four-dimensional view of architecture in the middles of the 20th Century. Sewing the segments together are sometimes delightful — one is utterly goofy, but most are beguiling and entertaining transitional animations. There's too much reliance on what the filmmakers thought a view camera sounded like — the hackneyed camera click transition, but overall it's an informative and occasional entertaining thesis on Modernist architecture and its photographer.

Color me shocked. I've just watched Season Four of Dexter****, and the season finale blew me away. I never liked Rita, Dex' girlfriend/wife, but what a shocker for a bloody thriller of a TV Show.

Cute little plot-play, but essentially and repeatedly stupid. It's a time when most people have timers, hence the name of the movie. Sorta science fiction. The TIMER*** on the back of their wrist, counts down to the time — sometime in their lives — when they meet their true love. Guaranteed. Maybe. The movie is about doubts. Our hapless and deeply disturbingly inept heroine has one and believes way too deeply in them, till she finds out stuff that she'd been lied to about, then decides to .. oh, you just have to watch the movie, which has its own charm, some humor — which entirely escapes most of the people in the movie but not everybody, and some sparing intelligence. What I'm trying to say is that, it grows on you. It even gets a little sad near the end. With inklings of Eternal Sunshine all through it and a lovely soundtrack.

The Cove**** documents the butchering of thousands of dolphins every year in a little cove at the city of Taijii, Japan, where they assure everyone that they do not, but this is a heist flick, a real Oceans 11, where dedicated humans surreptitiously installed hi-resolution cameras to capture the murders, then show the video whenever and wherever governments lie about what happens there, saying that the killing happens quickly and humanely. But it does not, and we are witness. Much of the documentary and its Special Features has to do with the camera and other tech involved in videoing that which the Japanese Government prohibits our team from videoing — and the mercury in the dolphins and tuna that we love to eat, even if it is killing us. Fascinating stuff.

The Universe of Keith Haring***. Nice enough flick. A little uneven. Intrusive soundtrack sometimes. Historic video smears on pan and keeps panning, but the contemp stuff is good, clean. Lots of works by him and him making lots of work, usually sped up to amaze us. Yoko Ono among the talking heads. Interesting. Lively. Not a great film but a great artist.

Having Netflix Five at a Time is a lot like going to the neighborhood multiplex and moving to another theatre every time the going gets a little boring in the one you're in. I keep switching movies. Watch a little. When it gets tedious, eject that one, and put another one in. That last flick wasn't terrible, but maybe the next one will hold me a little longer. I figure if I can manage to hang on till 40 minutes from the end (I often watch that little backwards clock; it's an awesome movie when I don't even check it out once.), I can go on to the finish. I should have fled Sherlock Holmes in Washington. I must have been sleepy or something to sit all the way through.

Not sure why I felt obligated to rent a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes in Washington*. Maybe because it was short, but my god was it ever stupid and dated. Hard to believe I've doted on Sherlocks through the last couple centuries. Now see Robert Downey, Jr.'s much more recent version was so much more intelligent. This one, from 1943 was, by its own admission, "updated." Downey's much more so and up-intelligenced, too. At least it was short.

Somehow in my long history of movies out the yin-yang, I managed to miss McCabe and Mrs Miller****. Now, finally, I see what so many others have seen in this one the last 40 years. Hilarious to see Warren Beatty playing an empty-headyed goofball most of the movie. Nice, too, to see a Western town very much like they probably were, complete with cursing and cussing and not so much strength of character, but a lot of weakness. Nice.

Oh, blast! I saw this one before. Had a couple inklings as we traveled down memory lane with the Nick Cage character remembering and talking out all the adventures he and Birdy***/ had growing up in Philly and visiting him every day in the Army loony bin, trying to bring him back from catatonic bird-dom, winding through life, eventually through both their deep psychologica Viet Nam traumas. Talk therapy.

The Art of the Steal***/ See how politicians, beneficiaries, lawyers, so-called journalists including NPR, major Philadelphia foundations, including the powerful PEW and Annenberg foundations, museum mavens, the American Judiciary, the IRS and others stole the world-famous Barnes Collection that Barnes himself insisted remain always as a teaching institution away from the grubby hands of all those Philadelphia liars and thieves. So the liars and thieves got it. Fascinating story, lots of evil amuck. Not nearly enough attention to the individual work in the collection, but a real flavor for who has the real power in America, and can have anything they want and nearly always win.

I love Jesse Stone mysteries. I've just added three more, No Remorse, Sea Change and Night Passage, and I hope to see all the rest soon as they become available as DVDs or digital movies to watch on my Mac. Jesse, as played by Tom Selleck, is a compassionate and intelligent crime-solver with a drinking problem and a haranguing ex-wife — and a marvelous collection of good and bad friends who help him.

Before The Rain**/ is an anti-war film, so of course it has to include hate and killing, hardly matters who, them and us, and they always lose. Pretty, absorbing, but ultimately, stupid. Like war.

Unexpected twists. Thriller stuff. A little terror, lots of great actors. Outstanding story. Intelligent plot. Fun. Oh, the name of the movie, Ghost Writer***/ Polanski is brilliant. Except I do not believe the supposed source for the secret McGuffin is was suggested, which blows the whole plot.

Herb and Dorothy***/ are two of the greatest collectors of minimal and conceptual in the world. They amassed their remarkable collection slowly, carefully and passionately — they wanted to see everything — within their modest means. Herb worked at the Post Office, and Dorothy worked at the Library. They lived on her wages and bought art with his. It only had to be affordable — and fit into their smallish, one-bedroom apartment, and they often paid it off on time. If Herb couldn't carry it or take it home in the subway, they didn't want it. Most of their collection, that was eventually donated to the National Gallery of Art, is what Herb calls "tough art." They never thought the artists they bought would become famous — they bought it because they liked the work — and the artists, many of whom became their friends. The movie is not just about the collecting couple, it shows many of the artists — famous and not — they collect, early and late, so it's a wonderful bit of New York art history.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs*** is better than it sounds. Odd, visually and verbally quirky while retaining an utterly standard and largely stupid "plot," this animation is often funny, even somewhere in the constant melange of visuals .

Hard to believe a movie incorporating this many really gross, stupid and bad ideas, yet shot through with time travel and its many wonders, could be such a hoot. Hot Tub Time Travel**** is almost too good to be true. A guy flick, no doubt: stupid runs deep through it and out the other side. But funny and a little human even, and maybe a little inconsistent, but great.

Green Zone***/ is a great name for a movie, even if it has little to do with the Green Zone, although that's where the political intrigue part is. Baghdad is where the action intrigue almost all is. Exciting, fast moving, intelligent, telling the truth with fiction. Good politics, good spy flick. Great message: We lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, so we could start a war there and kill a quarter of a million Iraqis just to show we are the biggest and baddest country in the world. The world knows no terror like American terror. We are the great Satan.

I hadn't seen On The Beach*** in 40 years. Hope it'll be another 40 before I see it again. Grim tale of nuclear warfare till the world was enveloped in radiation and what the last humans left did with their time. Gregory Peck was implacable. Fred Astaire is a much better actor than Ava Gardner. The Young Anthony Perkins was superbly grim. Intended as an intelligent warning against nuclear war, and probably had an effect. Did on me.

Poerrepoint*** was chief executioner and hanged 608 English persons from 1933 to 1955. He was kind, gentle, and mercifully quick. Until he executed his best friend, he was not altogether bothered by his job. Then he did and was. Serious, sad tale, a Masterpiece Theatre production.

I thought surely I'd seen it before, but now I know I hadn't. I'd remember glimpses, moment, flashing scenes. I didn't want to see it because I knew I'd been crazy, just as I collect crazy friends, and I didn't want to go there anymore. Then Sybil***/ wanted to meet her other selves. Took a long time before I could settle in with Sally Field's Sybil self, she looked so young, and this was so far ago. Once in a while, I'd remember the Joanne Woodward I've learned over so many years since. I'm sure a lot of it was psychiatric hokum, but the movie was always real to me, timid as it now seems. I'm sure it scared a lot of people in the 34 years since.

I kept thinking this must be fiction but isn't it amazing that a woman painter is portrayed as other than young and beautiful, and her paintings were remarkable. That's what the visiting German art critic thought when he discovered the woman who cleaned his house painted amazing work. When he could, he showed and sold her paintings, but he kept leaving, for World War I and the Depression. And he always came back. Usually kind, but always a little crazy, and driven like painters sometimes are, Séraphine*** de Senlis achieved success in her own lifetime, but it was never easy.

Netflix called it an underappreciated comedy. I was expecting funny ha-ha, instead I got dark humor, intelligent character development, quirky characters and genuine affection. Gentle movie, deeply funny and human. A surprising little miracle directed by Christine Lahti. My First Mister***/

I still think 9/11 was a U.S. Government conspiracy. That George W. Bush's Presidency was a lie, and I am convinced that the United States of America is the world's biggest and worst terrorist. Israel's only a distant second. So a movie like Reflecting Pool*** is right up my alley. It presents facts in evidence and not about the fall of the Twin and other towers. It's scary. It could have used better actors and better scenarios, which would have lent it more credibility. But it scares the willies out of me, because it's probably true.

I watched as much as I could of Jeff Dunham: Arguing with Myself**/ but there is a limit. Kinda funny for a comedy TV show, but the hilarity doesn't hold up, the dummies are innane, and I could almost always see his mouth and throat moving.

Did not plan it, but here's another Danish movie, another winner. This one quiet, not so gentle, a woman who's married the wrong guy — he beats her, is unfaithful and a bully — finds a kindred spirit when she tries to hock a camera she'd won before she was married to Sigfried. He paid the ticket, she won the camera. If he wanted the camera, he'd have to marry her. They did, and years later she found it and tried to hock it. But the kindly photographer insisted, instead, she takes pictures with it, and it changes her life, eventually becoming a portrait photographer of some note. It ends happily enough, but there's enough strife and not nearly enough picture-taking. Everlasting Moments***.

Another real-father-comes-back movie. A much better one, whose plot lines are never so clear, whose realities are more complex and whose characters are far more interesting and human. After The Wedding***/ is superb, beautiful, rich and deep. This time the returning Dad has more character and responsibility. The story twists without Hollywoodian clarifications, because there aren't any of those in real life, and death.

Lemme see if I got this right: Two kids of two lesbian moms want to see the sperm donator for each of their births, contact him, find a nice-enough guy who's made something of himself since selling the sperm, though not academically. He falls for one of the moms, and she for him, so they have an affair. Just as the other mom is falling for the sperm donor, they are overheard fighting about it, and everybody's mad at Dad but mostly okay with the mom in the affair. Then the family takes the daughter who initiated contact to college, and they all decide to keep Dad out of their lives forever and ever. But at least The Kids Are All Right***, and it's nobody's fault but his. Right?

Another quirksome movie, this time about two mentally challenged Norwegian men, just out from the asylum, trying to make it on their own, despite many challenges. Elling***/ was difficult to watch, mostly because of Elling — the smarter of the two — 's maddening mama's boy attitudes and deep self-unconfidence. Over and over I'd get mad at his sniveling manners and pause the movie. But I kept coming back. Different from most make-it-on-their-own movies, but in some charming ways, the same as all of us making it on our own, despite and because of, our friends. Mostly gentle, largely credible, deeply human, hilarious when it's not maddening.

Some serious quirk at work here, too. The Hairdresser's Husband***/ is erotic without approaching porn. It's about love and not at all about growing up, although we see the husband of the title as a young boy and learn of his early obsession for hairdressers and his marriage to one much later. Gentle, funny, I don't mind repeating, erotic and loving. A sweet movie.

Love a good angel movie. Haven't seen one for years, maybe decades.This time the sinner's a short, little-minded lying thief, and the angel who saves him (or is it him saving her) after they both jump in the river has acquired a sexy bitch costume for this assignment. Great casting, great little story shot in gorgeous, subtle black & white in Paris. Superb filming, always coming back to one bridge or another they're walking over, a consistently marvelous transition. Bridges into sensible-ness, sensitivity, actual love instead of using, telling the truth, but I'm getting ahead of ourselves. Quirk as all get out of. Amazing chemistry between the gutter rat and the sexy angel. French. Wonderful. Angel A***/

Lyrical movies that only slowly make sense can be beautiful. The Caller***/ is like that. Takes some time to put the pieces together. Not that it's a great revelation. It's a different sort of murder mystery. We know who's doing it, and mostly why. The mysteries are more real than that, and it's a gentle movie for it. It's about friends and family and watching birds. Beautiful cinematography, lovely music, much of it Old Country accordion. Exquisite little movie with Elliot Gould and Frank Largella.

I wasn't as enthusiastic about Mary & Max**** as Anna who highly recommended it to me, but it grew on me. Not unlike a familiar wart, I suppose. Droll, dark, human — despite that everything was clay-mationed — loving, friendly, odder than almost anything else I'd ever seen. There's serious quirk here, from both main characters. In fact, it's a world of quirk. Yet perfect unto itself. Psychological and psycho-illogical all rolled up. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but usually deeper and stranger. The clay-mation is superb, I kept forgetting I wasn't watching actual humans interact.

I usually reserve five stars — asterisks — ratings for movies that do something new, distinctly different and superbly. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo***** is just such a movie. A thriller, violent, sometimes sadistic. Diverse characters brought together to solve a mystery, yes but deeply psychological and amazing underneath all of it, and it all ties together in the end. The book must be a literary masterpiece. So's the movie.

Each new Sherlock I just know I won't like as well as the last. From Basil Rathbone to, well, Robert Downey, Jr. Wouldn't see seeing it on the big screen. Kinda glad I waited it till the littler screen, wonder now if he'll show up near midnight on Channel 13. Rousing good time, lots of the usual tricks and a couple new ones. I would like to see another and another with him, don't know how likely that. But this was darned good. Sherlock Holmes***/.

Started to say it didn't count, but I checked. It's not on these lists, so seeing Jaws**** again after all these years does count. What a rip-roaring movie. Oooof!

I blew it. I had the chance to go see Julie & Julia**** with dear friends soon after it came out, and I didn't go, because I imagined an entirely different kind of movie than what I've just watched and joyed all the way through. Corny to call it delightful after probably every other movie reviewer in the known universe probably did, too, but it was. It still lingers. The mingling of the two characters in the two time periods and all their friends and lovers was magnificent.

I feel like I've seen it before, long ago. But then I've rated more than a thousand films on Netflix, and remember — vaguely — many more as time goes on, but Enchanted April***/ was a delight. British ladies on a holiday in Italy, away from London into a natural paradise with a castle. Lovely altogether.

Netflix gave it fewer than three stars, so I should have known better, but I rented the 2000 flick The 6th Day** about cloning and gangsters and bad guys and two Arnold Schwartzeneggers and even Robert Duvall in an incredibly stupid sci fi thriller that was not worth watching, even if I did.

I wanted to, but I never did believe that a mediocre national team rose to be an international winner by wanting to. Even if the whole country was behind them, we never saw the players learn to be better, we just saw them want to and hope to. Meanwhile the movie played every emotional trick, and of course they won. Ho hum Invictus***.

The Escape Artist*** had its moments, then got mired in goofy surrealism and stupid, almost slapstick politics with none other than Dezi Arnez as the mayor/bad guy, though not as bad as his crazy, malevolent kid. Probably more realism in the corrupt mayor routine than anyone still would expect, but poignant as this movie almost is sometimes, it never rose to what it could have been. It almost had heart, almost had spirit, but ended up with neither and was a little too evil.

My theory is that the best movies involve a new way of telling. Not technology, but use of the tools at hand to relate what can only be related in words and moving pictures. The Secret Life of Words**** does that. Surprisingly well. The story is told in words, and they are telling, and the story is told in a deeply emotional manner. Achingly long and slow and deep.

Oh, Lard! I've finally seen one of The Twilight Saga: New Moon***. I'd hoped to catch the first one, but it musta got confused in my Netflix Queue. But it hardly matters. Now I've seen one, I don't have to see more, and that, to strain a pun, is a blessing. Vampires vs. Wherewolves, Indian and old White Guys, lots of goofy symbolism. I love a good scare, but there's hardly any there.

Art & Copy*** is another one of those documentaries about the ad biz. The really good ones come along every once in a while, and the bad ones more often than that. They are all mostly the same. Creative people talking about being creative in service to industry. They're like listening to somebody talking in an otherwise dark room. I get ideas. That's enough reason to watch the next one, too. This one is rather ordinary. Nice enough examples. Very ordinarily put together, but nothing as interesting nor as creative as Helvetica.

Studio Ghibli has produced many magic-infused (in one way or several) anime movies, this was a little stranger than some, with a more spiritual (and over my head) theme, but still delightful, especially in the details of annimation and stuff going on in the backgrounds. Ponyo***/ is lovely, but maybe a little too stupided down.

I saw It Happened One Night***/ so long ago, I must have been a kid then, and it had to have been on TV, and I ain't been a kid for fifty some odd years. Nice to see it again. Goofy. Stupid. Wildly romantic. Clarke Gable and Caludette Colbert. Classist as well as classic. Fun.

Jesse Stone - Thin Ice*** with Tom Seleck as the gentle, kind police chief is another one of those movies I know what to expect, and get it every time. Has to have been a made for some cable channel TV movie, and it was delicious.

Michael Caine in anything is worth watching. There's something about his little movies that's expected. I expected, and I was rewarded. Curmugeonly at first, then kind-hearted, doddering and. And there's this little boy who's ghost-obsessed since he lives where old people go to die. The two avaget together, get apart, back together, back apart. You know the drill. Heart-wearming, even a bit sad but happy at the end. What I expected. Is There Anybody There***

Four Minutes***/ is about passion. Our heroine, if we can call her that, has more than she or anybody else, can handle. Her teacher, has but a little, and she hides that so well. In the end, of course, it all comes tumbling out. Those are the four minutes in the title. All hang out piano playing, her passion, released. For a change without hurting anybody. Beautiful movie in strange ways, the timing for one instance, is impeccable throughout. Like a 30s farce or a choreographed footbal movie, ballet-like, with fisticuffs and screaming, crashing fits. Passion overabundant, if not triumphant.

1,000 Journals***/ inspired me to start another of my journals. Not entirely unlike the ones in this journal, mine were words written, art cut and pasted, streaks, original art, stolen art, borrowed art, pieces of stuff glued, taped, nailed, drilled, etc. in. Mine were of travels, and so are these. Mine will stay mine; these were variously shared.

They were sent out via 1000journals.com, which I never heard of till I saw the movie, but I'm glad I saw the movie, of the making of a 21st Century community established by sending 1,000 journals out to people who wanted them, leaving them at bus stops, on benches, tables, in bathrooms, all over the world, then seeing some of them come back decorated, written, drawn, etc.

Crazy Heart*** is pretty cornball country, but then that's always been my favorite kind. Like any "good Country & Western song, You can sing along Never having heard the words Before"... [Guess I'm old enough to start quoting myself now], although at least it doesn't end happily every after. Not a great movie, but kinda sweet and sour in unexpected moments.

Inglorious Basterds**/ is mostly stupid, but I'll give it an extra half an asterisk (/) for rewriting World War II, but it's still mostly stupid with scads of gratuitous violence.

Gustave Courbet** gives hints as to who this artist was, shows his work, tells a once over lightly version of his story for TV audiences, misses a lot, is kinda stupid.

Warning: this is the whole story: Lars van Trier movies are difficult to watch sometimes. Other times to understand. I am not even trying to comprehend here, just soaking in the senses in this. I am watching Antichrist**** as I type. It is visually beutiful but interiorly grisly. Frightening without visual traces of that eeriness, of the fear that grips as I experience its dark shadows and strange but real, natural sounds. It is comforting that I can stop it — as it plays on my computer, fed by Netflix. Rich and exquisite nightmare. Ah, there's a memorable bit of surreality. Trip scene. A moment of strange psychedelia. Haunting. Like when the devil transfers person to person in Fallen. She says she's fine now. He has been, but we now see he's acquired the fear, even he's not sure yet, but we know. A palpable fear, made real before our eyes, he is coming upon it. Spooky whoosh of wind. Geez, a bit of fearsome horror. The antichrist speaks the only time. I want to finish the movie, then sleep, but I am afraid. Not surprising. Lars is amazing. This may be his most accessible film yet, but deeply disturbing. Any movie I can get to forty minutes to the end, I will finish. Witch burning imagery now, in the attic, someone or some thing's rogue gallery, long ago thesis. Dark brooding music now. And bookmarked books, handwriting into dindecipherability writ large. Trees falling. Vivid psychological scary. Her grief consumes. She wants pain instead. He won't. They are controlled by something outside themselves that is growing into them. Their fear becomes our fear. Is made into sex, the ultimate film prohibition. She sucks him into her fear. He succombs. They are fucking in dark hell. He, the therapist. Telling her people cannot be hypnotized to do something against their nature, while he has just done those things. Spooky fog as their history with the child who died, almost suicide in the tragic first moments of this dark film. Violence now. Sexual violence. She on him. Bloody ejaculation. Slow, turning violence against his prostate, perhaps dead form. Gruesome. He comes to, in pain and horror. She axles heavy millsone to his shin. Refracting her torturing their child in Left and Right wrong shoes. Her fear, his excruciation, mix in our minds. We watched those altogether too familiar dark women in witch trial reports we've all seen too many times, as they descend into hell, she fears he'll leave her, he decending still, into the dirt she dug under real ground. Where he is discovering evidence ... Hatred now. She's screaming. Running through dark fog, back to bury him. I am shaking. Wish I hadn't started this. It may haunt me too long. Trier's movies are too often deeply affecting. This is one affecting me. Scary. Dark. She unearths him, not dead. More implements of torture. He's been torturing her to experience the fear by therapizing her. They are alone in the darkness. Tweny minutes to the end. "Did you want to kill me?" he asks. "Oh, yes." How I wish subtitles were available here. Inaudible rhymes like witches' chant. She to him in intimate whisper. Scissors and a vagina. Screa., and she is alone in the dark night woods. He wakes, sees stars patterning the Three Beggars Constellation she denies the existence of. More screams and hail on the tin roof. A fox enters their night cabin woods. The writhing crow trapped under the floor. He finds the wrench, unwrenches his grindstone, slow with great pain, we see blood and blood and deep shadows. She stabs him with scissors. More blood spatters. He wrenches the stone from his leg, strangles her. Her writhing, eyes fall back. She falls limp. A fire in the woods. He limps slow motion through the Dantean hell like she did to enter it before. Epilog, it says. He limps back in soft maybe infrared black and white, sees all last night's dead creatures in dawn's light, living, looking back at him, people coming in, faceless women everywhere, mobbing the graytone woods. Fade to black. Dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky 1932-1986. End credits in slow crawl, fine print over the hand-written title. Of body doubles and set runners, medical service, script consultants and on. Brief music fades into dark gutteral sound. I've been movied. Hope you don't mind this, but I doubt anybody would want to subject themselves to this. Deeply affecting. Horror film. Dark music again, slowed. Another minute and a half of slow crawl credits. "All animals in this film were handled by professionals or computerized." Fade to black. I put the requisite asterisks on the title above and wonder whether anybody reads these words. First time I've seen a movie not DVD released yet on my computer screen. Might not want to again. But's amazing dark. Gloom-filled. Not so sure about the Antichrist, but truly dark.

Yesterday***/ was beautifully filmed, slow-paced, careful about a woman learning she is dying of AIDS, her husband comes back from working in the mines in Johanisburg, and their child, Beauty, goes to her first day of school. Yesterday says she is not brave, it's just the way it is.

Departures**** was beautiful, magical and telling in so many visual ways. Simple story, people the fates gathered, family and transitions. Eloquently told.

Avatar*** was okay. Big, comic book story and execution. I knew soon as the characters were established how it would end. There was never any mystery or magic. It just plodded along and eventually it stopped.

Nice to know that it's still even possible, but seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind**** thrilled me all over again. Maybe not as much as the first time I saw it in a theatre when it was brand new and it wasn't possible to Netflix it, but wow. Still gots its magic, and I'm still willing to let it.

Iron Man 2** sexist, racist, violent and stupid with no redeeming social value. Aimed at 13-year-old boys, who will love it.

A Very Long Engagement***/ is a big story of love lost and sought through many other stories in war. A detective story putting all the pieces together, so she could find him. Long — 2 hours and 13 minutes, winding story of visual poetry and hope. French 2004

It's really too bad they couldn't come up with a better title than The Thirteenth Floor***/. That very nearly wrecks it, although there is a flair in the name. The movie is part immersive digital life/game, part time-travel, part a complicated interdimensional Thugs vs. The Good Guys in Computerland — On Beyond Tron. Intriguing mix. Some of it is smart; too much is dimwitted. Overall, not terrible and certainly not great, but watchable and even better, ponderable. 1999

I had no idea that The Invention of Lying***/ could possibly be as charming and honest and real as it was. Or that it would be deep down interesting and entertaining. Made me laugh out loud often. Even made me think several times running.

Liam Neeson as the grizled ex-spy whose daughter is Taken*** for the White Slavery trade in Paris, and he goes to get her back. Pretty strenuous for an old man, but exciting, fun and a little tear-jerky at the end, though hardly ever credible. The worst part was when he shot his friend's wife just to make a point. Other than that, the flick was fun.

Fire in the Sky*** has been in my Netflix queue for several years. Last week it finally made it back up to the top again, and I didn't push it back down. First movie in awhile, I just watched all the way through. Didn't check the clock, didn't wander off for a couple days. About an alien encounter and the guys who were with the man who was abducted. First they were accused of murdur, then when the abductee came back, for making it all up to get attention. Not sure who'd want that kind of attention, except maybe the people who were accusing. Jim Garner plays a very credible cocky lawman asshole. Everybody else is at least credible. Solid story. Based on a true story. Every part of it fascinating. Who believed who. Who did not. Who went a little crazy.

A Serious Man***/ is a fable about a man who does not know who he is or who are the people living with him whom he supposedly loves. It's not a great movie, but it is interesting, Jewish, truly Coen Brothers strange and a deeply black comedy.

Vanishing Point* is promoted as the classic chase movie, although of course, it is not. It's just Kowalksi racing across the desert west with a bunch of state cops chasing him from time to time with loud music playing and an uncool Black DJ telling us it's about The Last American Hero. Mostly it's just a stupid chase more like O.J. in his Bronco on the LA Freeway, with slight hippie and dumb cop variations. Boring. Silly. Stupid.

Maybe it is that every once in awhile I need to see Suspect Zero**** again. It's a dark thriller. Ben Kingsley is amazing as the anti- anti-hero. The one who sees. Who sees remotely what no one should ever have to see. And the tracks down the ones the FBI guy should have been tracking down all that time. But they can't see what he can see, and they do not believe.

This is a movie of the heart, about a community that moves and grows under the deft but unknowing leadership of a member of that community. That learns to know itself and each member learns who they are and what their voice is. The community is a choir and a town and people. The story builds slowly, and its beauty in interior. Its truths real. Its people human. Its metaphor is its music, sadly unavailable except here. It grows like a symphony. As It Is In Heaven***** is amazing, beautiful, joyous and sad. Triumphant. in Swedish.

The Blind Side*** is a cute little weeper with heart, a decent story, nice good characters and a lot of smarm. Not sure how it came up with an Academy Award, but those politics are thicker than any in Memphis. The feel-good movie of the week.

I'm a major fan of Terry Gilliam movies but The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus*** seems weak-hearted and unneccessarily dark, without ever going anywhere. This is probably a lot like everybody else thought The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was, only I loved that movie and saw it several times. Anna suggested it was great on the big screen, but as much as I like watching movies on the big screen, I don't like sharing the space with all those idiot people who talk, talk on the cell phones, play video games, etc., so I far prefer seeing movies on my little screen at home. And there, this one don't make it. Maybe I should rent it again in six months when I calm down.

I haven't had as much pure, raw fun watching a movie as I have watching The Transformers***/ in a long, long, time. The plot is riddiculous, the acting suspect, the dialog often borrowed from other movies and popular culture is sometimes surprising and often hilarious. If it weren't having so much fun making fun of itself and its whole teen monster, save-the-world gesnre, this might be a lesser movie. But it's not. Everyone we've told about it, have turned their noses up at the very idea, much like I did before I saw it. Now I know better.

The Beautiful Country***/ tells the long, arduous odyssey of a young Vietnamese man born of an American father finding his father in America. It's a beautiful film in many ways. Superb acting, script, cinematography. But it's also human beautiful albeit with elements of brutality and evil. It's a big movie about a tiny minority, but a fascinating and in the end, heart-warming.

I'm always leery of a new sci fi movie I've never heard of. Sleep Dealer***/ did that to me, again. But once I settled into — and that worked quickly, lots of human emotion, feelings, a a credible sense of reality, along with fascinating technology, not out of place in an imagined near future — it, I liked it, and never once thought of pausing it or coming back later. It's a quick 90 minutes, but very well done, good everything, great tech and story. Admirable job.

Not so much laugh out loud ha-ha funny about this movie, but lots of deep, quiet chorteling and knowing that's how we humans really are. The Men Who Stare At Goats*** is humanly hilarious, and toward the end of the movie, it all gets funnier and funnier. This is how wars should be.

Spent a long time and many stops and restarts seriously disliking Where The Wild Things Are**** for not being understood by me, then suddenly near the end I figured something out and loved it. Seriously different from any other movie ever. Gently serious in several crazy ways, it makes sense without a lick of linear progression. Goofy, maddening, wonderful.

Mr. Bing and L'Art Nouveau** is about a fascinating turn of art and the guy who gave it its name and who shoved it in most of the right directions and gave a bunch of later famous artists enough to go on for awhile and the impetus to be a serious worldwide moviement, and lots of intriguing art, but — and I'm not sure what it is — something major missing. Soul?

I stayed angry with the 'hero' of Breaking and Entering***/ nearly the whole movie, relenting only at the end, when I finally saw the points of this cinematic exercize and began to appreciate not so much what happened here, but how it was put together and what its lasting effect was. Looking back, it's quite a trip. Remarkable actors, superb story, involving characters.

I almost quit The Importance of Being Earnest*** about two-thirds through this silly farce, then came back and finished it. If I'd known Judi Dench was in it, I might have liked it more immediately. All those other stars don't hurt much, either.

I never expected The Informant*** himself would be a bigger nightmare than Archer Daniels Midland, whom he schemed for. This movie is a lark. It's not deeply funny, it's deeply stupid, and I feel taken for watching it and about half of the dozen or so previews it came with, and in another tweny years, I might like feeling duped again to watch it.

How sweet. Surrogates***/ with Bruce Wilis is a new classic science fiction story. Not a long one, but long enough to thoroughly tell an intelligent story about being human. Updating The Twilight Zone. Sharp. Solid story. Big smile on my face at the ending. Sweet.

I want to tell you that Tim Burton's new Alice in Wonderland***/ is wonderful, but all I saw was fuzz. In the bathroom later, I overlistened to someone telling his friend the same thing. I wasn't the only one. Some of us can't see the latest 3-D technology, all we see is fuzz. I'm looking forward to seeing the 2-D version. I think it'll be really good.

I hadn't seen Imagine: John Lennon*** though I've meant to for a long time. Now I have seen it and I think I've been seeing it on public tv for years. I thought he was amazing, but the movie's just plugs along.

The Counterfitters***/ is a heist movie set in a German Concentration Camp. It is a superb movie, because of its story, which apparently is true, and because of the characters, mostly jewish with a few camp officials, all bad. It's all very dark, most of the color washed out of it, moody and deeply, chillingly ironic. The camera moves often adding to the discomfort. What is evil?

The Ricthie Boys***/ were Germans and Jews who left Germany for America before World War II, then went back to infiltrate so they could interrogate German Prisoners of War and anybody else with information that could save Americans. This reverse espionage was dangerous and fascinating and often funny. Lots of talking heads, some in action, reminiscing, painting feelings from back then. Very well put together.

City Island**/ is a seriously flawed move. It starts out with a colorful Prince of Tides home-town narrative about the island and its inhabitants, then that goes nowhere. It's quirky, but the quirk doesn't add to the story, it only detracts. It's about a disfunctional family that lies to each other every chance they get. Hardly new territory. And the Dad who's taking acting classes on the sly, but his wife assumes he's having an affair. Nothing new there, either. Nothing new, nothing fits, nothing goes together. It's still a smarmy little heart-tugger but most of what pulls us in are tricks, and it's not smart.

It says F**k: A Documentary" on the Netflix wrapper for this film. The film itself uses a star instead of an asterisk, as in "F*CK," but when it shows up on my desktop is full-fledged "FUCK***," so it's difficult to tell what the actual film's title is, but that's what it's all about. Oh, there's some knowledge in the Biblical sense. In fact The Bible gets mentioned a lot, even though the word is neither there nor prohibited there. Certainly some direct references to sex. But mostly the movie's about saying that word. How it's bad when some people say it, but okay when others say it, although either of those can change at any moment. I like words, and fuck is one I don't say nearly enough, and after seeing this movie, it seems just a little more revolutionary to say it.

Up in the Air*** was a lot better and deeper than I thought it would be. Less than wonderful people making character transitions into actual human beings, and visa versa. Think-worthy, gentle, humanly funny, almost deep.

Plymptoons* - tedious.

I haven't even started with The Time Traveler's Wife***, but I'm already angry with it, because it won't let me skip the interminable previews and go to the movie, which oddly enough is why I rented this DVD. I get "Not Permitted" every time I attempt to watch the movie. And that's just wrong. Luckily, my iMac remembers how far I'd got the last time and returns me to that point every time I restart it. But this is really a nuisance.

Okay. I saw it. I've thought about it. I liked it. Time travel is one of my favorite flick genres. I'll probably rent this one again in a couple years. It's smarmy and intelligent, warm and cuddly and starkly unreal. It's pretty to look at, but really very so-what? We loved it as an audio book all the way to Colorado, but as a move, nyeah.

Had low to no expectations of 2012***, just looking for some big escape, and I love science fiction, so have at. Only after this end-of-the-world disaster film started did I realize John Cusack and a bunch of other famous actors were in it. Him alone woulda done it. Lots of high adventure excitement separated by slow scenes I mostly fast-forwarded through, going for the thrill. Yee-ha! Loved it.

In 1968, I had the opportunity to participate in a war. Called Vietnam. It was strange and stupid enough to run screaming from any notion of war since. Iraq baffled me. Afghanistan, too. The Hurt Locker**** scared the bejesus out of me. I believe there are people who are so good at something so necessary that they can do it in life and death circumstances of total chaos. This is a movie about one such man. Beautiful, strange, surreal, violent, vicious and stupid. The movie is amazing, but I don't want to be there.

Hadn't seen The Ghost and Mrs. Muir*** for at least 40 years. Minutes after the wildly romantic movie started I forgot it was in black & white, let myself back into the story of the sea captain and the widow. Smarmy and absurdist, yet warmly comfortable and comforting.

Using apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes as examples, The Botany of Desire*** uses the sometimes strained metaphor of understanding how plants adapt to our world and what that can do for and to us. It's pretty. Very well organized. Fascinating and has several important points.

Netflix keeps wanting to sell me a player, recorder, set top box, thingy. Never once told me I can play movies on my iMac. Never even mentions it. Plug into the net, pick one, watch kind of easy. No switches, no dials, engage brain, watch. Just thought somebody ought to say that.

Dark, suicide dark, comedy, yeah, why not? But dark and sneaky-up funny human. Shrink****

Mostly, Me and You and Everyone We Know***/ is quirky and deeply and humanely funny. There's an ongoing undercurrent about art and several others about romance and growing old and being a kid and more sex than you'd normally expect in a movie with so many cute kids — everything else.

Though incredibly stupid in many places, especially the beginning, Star Trek***/ is a good TV show pilot. I can't wait for the series.

Vitus**** is utterly charming. The story of a boy prodigy, who just wants to be a boy. But his parents, especially his mother, is too caught up in him being altogether special. His grandfather is the hero for our little hero. Grandpa treats him in immediacy, sparks his interests, plays with him. Superb film with outstanding characters, fine acting and an excellent story and plot.

11 Minutes Ago***/ has the feeling of a student film. Only a few of the actors — and nearly none of the ones who star — look like actors, but the story has been crafted carefully, and time-travel though it crosses with first-meeting of the romantic kind, catches it in 11-minute segments, which is as long as he can stay each discontinuous time through the evening of somebody else's wedding, during when we get to meet the characters. A delight of genuine human actions and reactions, even if you don't believe the time-travel bit.

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens*** is a credible documentary about one of the most credible photo portraitists of our time. Her story is more interesting than three asterisks, but the movie has a sameness about it.

Bright Star*** is the romance — perhaps entirely ficticious — between poet John Keats and Fannie Brawne. Fans of Brit period pieces will enjoy the ambiance. I just never quite believed it, kept checking internet sites for the facts through it. Lilting, pleasant, keep wondering if I've learned anything aobut the real people portrayed.

I accidentally re-rented The Nines thinking I was getting another of the recent spate of 9 movies. I saw the alien-contact race-relations turnabout Project 9, had seen the enigmatic The Nines, now have seen 9**** and loved it enough to watch all the bonus features. I think yet another of the recent 9s is a musical, so that'll eventually stir into the mix.

9, however, is the best of them so far, and though none of its actors are human it is ultimately very human and science fiction at its best also. Man — in the form of a series of animated rag dolls — versus machines that have taken over. Each rag doll is a part of a human, and each plays its part against the machines. Very poetic, cinnematically beautiful, intelligent and deeply human.

I met I.M. Pei**/ when he was designing our bent city hall, so seeing him and some of his projects and a lot of his thinking and designing in this movie was pleasant.

Against Time**/ is a sloppy, sentimental claptrap movie that borrows time travel without really ever engaging it and at the end, blows all sense, smarts or character progression out the window. Stupid. Disappointing. Like a made-for-TV movie.

Tickets***/ is a lilting, lovely slice of life. Three directors. Three stories. Not sure I could tell you when one started or another ended. They intertwined without the obvious tricks Hollywood would have suckered us with. Gentle. Mean-spirited. Positive. Negative. Like real life. Connected by a train going to Rome. Beautiful along the way. Odd, quirky pacing. Italian. Very differing sorts of people. Dreamy, too real, a little pain, a little pathos, some bathos. Fine little film, despite English subtitles I had to pay attention to rather than the visual subtleties, but I guess I caught enough of those. Sweet.

Moon***/ is set on a sound stage with all "moon" activity as obvious models, though everything else seen is mostly credible. It's about cloning, especially illicit cloning of human beings as workers in far-flung places and what happens when the clones find out. The movie is smart, sometimes exciting and often intellectually challenging.

Open Your Eyes*** seems like a lurid psychodrama in which a narcissist can't match his reality with his lover, so he kills her. All the way through I kept waiting for the cheap trick at the end that'd explain everything. Only it wasn't all that cheap. Like Sixth Sense, the movie actually followed its own rules, turning plot twists into a genuine story as our hero flashes in and out of reality. This is the Spanish original for Vanilla Sky. (There's a little time travel in it, too.)

Spooky. A little frightening. Smart story. Decent acting. A chilling love story. The Mothman Prophecies***

Brilliant. Deeply, darkly hilarious. Superbly well thought-through science fiction of the first order. Bizarre. Amazing. Intelligent. Exciting. Mind-bending. District 9**** is first contact with an alien species, in which humans are our usual insipid, insanely greedy, stupid, war-mongering selves, and the aliens — some of them at least — are human and better. Fun rooting for the good guys again.

2009

I was offerred two free tickets to some movie for mentioning it in this blog. C'mon, guys. If I'm gonna sell my soul, the price should be a little more substantial than two free tickets. Of course, if I am bribed to mention a flick here, I'll let my readers know the makers and the value of the bribe. It's the law now.

There's a bunch of vids I saw at last year's Dallas Video Festival that I should write about here, several that inspired me, and I should go to that thing more often than I go to the Fair.

I've been watching TV shows on and via Netflix and being alternately fascinated by their intelligence and appalled by their stupidity. The Brit crime series, Wire in the Blood***, about a psychiatrist working with the police to solve heinous crimes, is fascinating, though dark. Burn Notice**, exciting at first, has become tedious — there's story and interesting characters aplenty, but it's painfully bereft of plot or character development. And I've caught up with the last season of Dexter***/ and still find his story delicious, intelligent and wicked funny.

I been diggin' Instant Viewing flicks on Netflix. Never tried it before, because I thought I had to have some expensive Blu-Ray player, but it works on my elderly Mac just fine. Not everything's available, but plenty.