Movies I saw this year & last are here. Previous years' are listed in the alphabetized pages:

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Movies Reviewed

© 2000–2008 by J R Compton. All Rights Reserved.

I've reviewed 1,118 movies on these pages so far. Those through 2006 are linked via the alpha links above. 2007 and 2008's are listed below, with my latest first, and I'm even further behind than last year putting all last year's reviews in the alpha pages linked above. Not a difficult job, just an easy one to procrastinate.

Watching and thinking about movies restarts my creativity and lets my mind wander. I try to write about them quickly, maybe coherrently, before I forget. With luck they're different from anyone else's reviews anywhere. I go back and change the words and opinions often.

In 2006, I reviewed 89 films; 127 in 2007. So far in 2008, I've seen and reviewed 47.

2008

Then I procrastinated seeing The Man from Earth***/, never having heard anything about it. The blurb sounded like B movie sci-fi. And it was, low-budget, full of fascinating ideas. A bit of theater translated up to a movie, with no external action. All of it up here (points to brain) and in a cabin in the hills on a cold winter's eve. Close friends with differing beliefs. A great long conversation sparked by someone who looks about forty, but has accumulated some serious history. A goodbye party for a teacher, with other teachers and a student or two, asking questions and not quite believing the answers. About a lot of realms, but it kept circling back to religion. A great conversation movie I want to see again sometime. I believed everything but that the terrible painting near the beginning was a Van Gogh.

I avoided The Diving Bell and the Butterfly**** because I knew it was about a man who stroked out and couldn't move anything but his eyelid. He could blink, and by blinking, he told his story. Wrote a book about it, one letter at a time. Yet the movie is anything but tedious. We see through our hero's eyes, watch him change who he is, watch him learn and dream and relate and, slowly, remember. Visually stunning, this is exquisite filmmaking, directed by Julian Schnabel. The soundtrack's amazing. Bittersweet, gentle, strongly visual — a positive vision.

Though not perfect, Charlie Wilson's War**** is smart and humanly and every other way funny, bittersweet and quintessentially American in all the best ways without sidestepping our stupidities — our own and our idiot government's. I can't help but think it did not achieve widespread popularity from some sort of plot. The characters are fascinating and, like the story, real. As in history. How one terribly imperfect guy ran the Russians out of Afghanistan. Setting the fire that burned them out of world domination. For awhile. How long, we'll see. Exciting, entertaining, beautiful and fun. Fabulous dialog.

Drawing the Line: A Portrait of Keith Haring***/ is only 30 minutes long but includes many pieces in the historic progression of his work; homage to his art heroes; a minimum of art critic gibberish; plenty of him making and talking about his work; and like his work, a maximum of fun. 2004

Bubble** goes on and mercifully stops. The only real story happens near the end, though it builds up all through lot of character development. Then something happens and it ends. Apparently with some basic guidelines, the actors (if they are actors) put a lot of themselves and their own stories into the story. It's questionable if anybody directed it, but if somebody did, it was Steven Soderbergh. Obviously low-budget, low-quality, low interest.

Flyboys** is an incredibly stupid movie with cheap special effects, stupid dialog, imbecillic love interest and barely adequate aerial battle scenes that usually suffer from inept editing and hokey story line.

I don't have cable, so I didn't see Dexter***/ till I caught it on Broadcast TV lately, where I always seem to miss major chunks. Since it's been around awhile, DVDs of the first season that Broadcast has only begun are available for the whole first season. I'd call it quirky macabre, even figuring if Dexter ever gets a sidekick, that ought to be his name — Quirky Macabre. Like any good character-driven story, we identify lots with Dex, even if he's a crusading serial killer.

I saw it because it had David Duchovny, not for any sane reason, and I like the title. Things We Lost in the Fire***/ is about friendships and facing fears and taking the good. In it Halie Berry plays an evil selfish bitch who won't grieve the loss of her husband, an overzealous small-time hero, and Benicio Del Toro is amazing as a her husband's lifelong best friend and heroin addict, whom she takes advantage of, twisting him in and out of her control. It's a bittersweet little weeper, but watching Del Toro is worth the tears.

I Know I'm Not Alone**/ is a stirring little people-to-people visit to places that are under occupation. Who's visiting is a film crew, of course, led by an American musician. What's special is that when it is not devolving into person-against-person politics, these visits show real people who live there — Iraq, Israel and the Palestianan territories — and we learn what they have to do to survive. The music he sings as voice-over is from a recording studio someplace else and is good, but when he sings playing his guitar in people's homes and soldiers' recreation areas and in the streets is pretty bad. About it all is a naive hope for peace.

I didn't see There Will Be Blood*** in a theater, because I don't like seeing movies in noisy theaters, but also because I was tired of violent movies afte the essentially stupid No Country for Old Men. So we saw finally saw it on DVD, and yeah, it's a good performance by Daniel Day Lewis and a less than good performance by his nemesis, the preacher. But a beautiful film, if you like dark and gritty. It's about a real AH oilman, whose only honest moment in the whole film is when he talked mano-a-mano with the guy who was pretending to be his "brother by another father." Mean-spirited, a multi-murderer who cheated people whenever he could. Not really the sort of movie I can get excited by. I think the acadamy is nuts.

Memory*** is a stale gimp of a movie with acting and story and visuals and editing that are sometimes right on and sometimes at least absent minded, if not completely gone. What we used to call a B movie. Must have been expensive, with Ann Margaret and Dennis Hopper and Billy Zane, but directing is also MIA. Not completely stupid, but lost somewhere along the way. A little spooky, a little lame, more than a little intriguing trip down primordial memory lane.

I like a good spy thriller and Breach***/, despite the title, is tense, fascinating and intriguingly complex. Worse, it's true. I remember when they cought Hanssen. I wondered how Hollywood would screw with the story. They didn't, much. It reads like the best fiction, strong in characters and story. Scary.

Kurt Cobain: About A Son**** is a searing set of interviews with the man who became the amazing rock star. A different sort of story telling with Kurt talking straight about who he is, his life, loves and everything; superb visuals of the people and places of the cities he grew up in; a scintilating soundtrack of appropriate music by everybody else; and Kurt's and Courtney's and the interviewer's voices. Gorgeous visuals. No soundtrack CD. I looked.

In 1967 it was said that no one could sail alone around the world and keep his mind, and they were very nearly right. One man did, winning the prize. But this is not his story. Deep Water*** is about a lesser man who failed the rules, his family, his nation and the world. Good documentaries are puzzles put together from what is available, and here many people's stories of this race are told simultaneously and in remarkable detail. There is the sensation of, not being there, of course, but of understanding why what was done, was done.

I rented Painted Lady*** thinking it were a movie. It is instead two episodes of Masterpiece Theater, and though theatric no masterpiece. In it Helen Mirren plays a has-been singer whose friend is murdered, and to catch the killer and get back the painting stolen from the victim and to pay off the murdered man's errant son's gambling debts (the plot continues to spin nearly out of control...), she becomes an international art dealer (just like that, oh and she reads one book). If you can believe any of this plot, you'd probably have more interest than I in seeing the conclusion that's not mentioned in the menu. I called Netflix's 24-hour help line (buried deep in their public menus), and a nice woman helped me find the second half hidden in the Scene Selections. No mention anywhere else. I watched till the end, which was a silly as the rest of this labyrinthine story and noted the stupid visual pun but didn't catch the lifting of Sister Wendy's PBS lecture. Masterpiece, my foot. 1997

When they put "contract" in the title, you know it's not about buying widgets. The Contract*** is about an assassination gone bad before it happens then the melee of good and bad bad guys and stupid good guys and inept good and bad guys, except it's not really about any of that. It's supposedly about a father and errant son bonding, but the dialog there is usually inept. The big chase is through the woods but never goes far or exciting enough. The confusion of good and evil is par for the course, but the course is at leas a hole short. Kinda goofy, it has its exciting moments. I got it because it had both Morgan Freeman and John Cusack, but for too big a change, neither was good enough reason in this tepid thriller.

Anna loaned me the DVD of Stay****, which I'd seen before, but didn't remember, and it still didn't help me figure it out till the end, again, when it all comes together anyway. Visually fascinating way to tell a story. True in the beginning and the end. The middle realities dream-like, slid together with beautiful, visual transitions. Elements of the story feed us details to understand what happened, as if we ever know that. More than a little Sixth Sensian, spooky shrink movie where the story is important more for the details, than the sense of it. Beautiful, haunty.

Oh, my gosh. I'm so glad that's over with. I've spent the last three days watching and refusing to watch more. Watching almost anything to keep going back to watch Edward Munch: Special Edition. Disks One and Two***. All the way up my Netflix Queue, I thought it was just one disk. But then I was expecting the usual biopic. Two was too much. Three hours of constantly circling back to his family. Children bleeding from their mouths. Swaddled in white stained by the blood. Dying of tuberculosis. His father a doctor. Everybody dying or committing suicide. Not a lasting relationship among them. Gloom, doom and no wonder he was troubles. Then there's his romantic life, if you can call that life. Instersticed among all that depression. His art. We see hands painting, etching, gouging woodblocks. Get a feel for his art, see his art, like all the other elements of his life, recurring again and again. I liked the special features on disk one. They tell about the museum. Recurring through the movie perhaps every critique of his art through his life. Nobody liked it, yet he kept being invited to have solo shows, be in shows around Europe. Then back to reciting how much everyone loathed his work. Now I have to go back and explore his art again. I've always liked it, always thought those who wrote about it attributed too much depression to him and his art.

From what I'd heard and read about Atonement****, I didn't think I'd like it. Though I should know not to believe those things. It was a beautiful WWII and pre romantic novel about truth and fantasy from someone who didn't know the differences, then learned them too late. It's beautiful to look at, delicious to watch it stop suddenly in its tracks, back up and tell from a different angle or point of view.

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre**/ is a 35-minute program about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's life and art. It's interesting, has photographs of the artist and paintings and drawings and posters by him in a sort of twisting, turning life's story. The art is discussed by somebody who keeps assuring us that the artists, poets and dancers in Lautrec's life were working on Modernism, not on their ouvres. Which is to say, the narration is full of high-falutin' art crit, which as usual, has little to do with the facts of an artist's life and time. Worse, the same images of his work keep recyling till I had most of them memorized. There's also a lot of early photographs of Montmartre and Toulouse and his friends that are fascinating, and movies of the times and some of the places that are just parked there for historic, not significance, more like flavor. I know a little more about Lautrec now, and I'm thankful for that, but I know there's much else that needs telling that is not dependent upon bullshit art crit.

Sunshine***/ is ambitious as a hard science fiction story. Film. And it succeeds. Ensemble crew flies a payload they hope will reignite the sun, into the sun. Will they succeed? Who's fault? Etc. The usual interplanetary project movie plot devices, and — unfortunately — one of the usual nemisis. There at the end with not much leading to it. Very good everything, especially special effects. I thought we'd learned fire in space doesn't make oxygen noises.

Among the Special Features for The Host***, the director apologizes to all the actors whose parts got cut out or whose costumes hid their identity and citizens whose leisure and commuting time got interrupted. He did not apologize for incredibly stupid dialog, utterly indifferent and nonsensical jump-cut editing, lame monster and effects or the essentially stupid plot. Still, this darkly humorous and sometimes touching story about a family whose daughter is taken by a monster (think giant, animated sushi) is involving and exciting. Instead of the government tracking down the monster, they pursue the family who was exposed to the monster, believed to be hosting a secret virus. Lots of cops and army and their concomitant bureaucracy, but no official effort to find or kill the beast. Desperate to get their daughter back, the family pursues it. This film has much more beautiful cinematography than it has any right to have, it's badly dubbed in English and goofily inane.

How strange. I've just seen and immensely enjoyed I Am Legend***/, only I saw the alternate, special features disk version and with what I assume is spacey happy ending — I assume the other one was not. I've heard it was complex and confusing, and I think that probably would be better. Now I'm wondering what else was changed in the alt version. I've seen this plot before, and I think I read the book thirty or so years ago. Too many movies and Twilight Zones and short stories have the essentially same plot, except maybe the zombies, who aren't all bad once you get to... Well, you and I both might have to see the movie twice to know. So exciting I had to stop and gentle down a couple times. Listen to music. But then, I couldn't watch 24 past the first season. My heart 'd get thumpin' too much. Visceral effect, not emotional. I liked Sam in this movie, and Will Smith has been great in everything I've seen him in, every apocalyptic one of them

I've often wondered who Francisco Goya was. How he lived. What he did. How was he so, lucky, if that's the word, to have been in the thick of the action war, friends and portraitist to kings, yet intimate with the madhouses and whore houses — all the most fascinating places. In Goya's Ghosts***, I see glimpses into that rich brown era, lurid with evil and madnesses in every direction. The Inquisition, wars and revolutions. Badem's another ultimately evil bad guy, and except for the paintings through the titles at the end, I don't want to have to see this one again for many years.

Time-stopping movies and TV shows are almost as wonderful as time-traveling ones. Cashback***/ began as a sweet, short movie time-stopper, won some awards, added a life, some loves and a few characters, then grew into a full-length movie of the same name. Gentle, sexy (lots of full frontal female nudity; only hints of male parts) and sweet little movie about a guy who thought he could, and in movies that becomes the same as being able to, stop time.

Time-changer* was so inept, stupid and souless I quit watching it. I could tell you a little about the story but I've already said enough. I thought I could watch any time-travel movie, no matter how bad, but I can't and won't.

4 Little Girls*** is a Spike Lee documentary about the four little girls killed by a dynamite blast in the formative years of Birmingham's climb out of segregation. It's solid, not great, eminently predictable in a historic way, doesn't give the evil perpetrator much humanity, not that he ever had much, but otherwise tells the story in depth.

Didn't' know I was so angry with Gone Baby Gone**** till the end. Fiercely strong movie whose conclusion gave me the willies. Long detective story needing lots of detecting. We follow a motley crew of characters through twists and turns high and low. Moral dilemmas all along. Till the end we thought we knew what was going on. Then it got hijacked. Creepy big movie with pretty great everything, except ending. Shudder.

Mediocre title for a movie this good, this is deeply darkly funny yet goofily romantic. I know its meaning, but its use here is nearly inconsequential. Okay, stupid title, but the movie is superb and swimming in serious quirk. The story, the soundtrack and the cinnematography all gang up to create this massive and delightful force of humanly comedic quirk. Maybe I like it because I identify with the main character or because so many fine actors are involved. Or the wild story or its probably predictable end. Superb cinematography when it is as well as when it is not engaging in the quirk. Oddly vaguely hauntingly similar to Spotless Mind but not, really, at all. Dedication***/

Seeing Blade Runner**** again after so long is like going back someplace I left 25 years ago. Familiar but the details are different. This is the director's final cut. I put it on top of my list soon as I knew it was out. Piecing what I remember of the three versions, some differences are obvious. Most aren't. It's cleaner. The wet grit lives through it all. Stellar visual moments like shooting the female replicant through the glass windows, reflecting and refracting in and through is amazing. Many scenes are. Where once I would only have followed the action, this time my eyes dance around the frame, taking it all in again. I was never enamored of Rosebud, this is my best movie of all time, now only 11 years from now. Beautiful and plotfully perfect. At last.

Equilibrium** is as strong on design as it is weak in plot. Very on both. Stupid anti-totalitarian, emotion, art, emotion plot doesn't even hold itself together. Unlike in Sixth Sense, they don't follow their own rules. Other than the putrid story, it reminded me in a synesthesia way of Centerville, only acres stupider.

The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford***/ actually does turn up a few historical facts about the notorious outlaw of the American West. It's pretty to see and psychological to consider, even if it engages in historical misdirection.

Aurora Borealis***/ combines coming of age and aging into an excellent film about families and, of course, romance, and what you have to give up to get the joys of those. Plus it's got Juliette Lewis and Donald Sutherland in the best performances I've seen of either of theirs in years. Wry, funny, serious, heart-warming.

POPaganda: The Art & Crimes of Ron English***/ is a little more involved than most art documentaries, and we appreciate the little things like its own soundrack, but mostly that's what it is. A movie that documents Ron English in both his legal and illegal art forms. Legal in galleries and chapter transitions and illegal glued over billboards. Actually one of the more intelligent art movies, since it gets at the artist's true motives directly from the artist who has lots of those, many of which skewers McDonalds and other symbols of Corporate America. 2004

Last time I saw Idaho Transfer*** was in 1973 at a film festival in Dallas. I think director Peter Fonda was there, maybe with a youngish Keith Carradine. I liked it then, as I like it now, because it's a time travel flick, although one that doesn't entirely deal with the conundra of that genre. The acting's hardly noteworthy, either. I like the story though that's got holes, too. And at least twice there's objects other than what's supposed to be in front of the camera in front of the camera, and while those continuity incongruities are fun enough, they show the cheapness in a cheap movie that couldn't come up with a good ending at the festival. Now, there's a slightly more comprehensive ending, accomplished with voice-overs, even if it doesn't make much more sense.

Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator** is another of those niche star rises, does several things really stupid and goes away movies. Lotta documentary footage of the early years of skateboarding, but not enough.

Seraphim Falls**/ is a movie I kept wanting to be better than it is. What it's about is revenge, and it goes on and on about that, killing a lot of people along the way. Then at the end, it loses all continuity and just stops. Neither Piers Bronson nor Liam Neeson look like themselves, but Angelica Huston does. Oh, and it's a cowboy movie, a Western.

El Aura (with vivid English subtitles)**** is about a timid taxidermist with complicated ambition who stumbles into murder, a plan for the perfect heist and the violent perpetrators needed for the task. He has eidedic memory and epilepsy. Both play roles in this long (2 hours and 8 minutes), slow (more like the best of European cinema, except this was made in Argentina) phychological thriller, with plenty of time to let it all soak in, nice scenery and very real looking characters. Only one pretty here, most are ugly and credible. Superb.

The 3:10 to Yuma***/ is a compelling, viciously bloody Western with a passel of competing moral dilemmas, vivid characters and a story that trashes some well-worn clichés.

The title probably fit the book and the comix, but we never see enough of star dust to make it work here. Otherwise, Stardust***/ is excellent and exciting with a dozen or so superb actors having fun and usually doing quite well, in an enjoyably complex story that keeps us involved and surprised, laughing and trying to think ahead, but it's not predictable. Marvelous a magic adventure / romance.

The Invisible*** by, it says here, the producers of Sixth Sense. Too bad they couldn't get the writer. Then we learn this teen angst murder ghost story is the Hollywood clone of a Swedish film that was probably amazing enough to try to copy line, fish and stinker. Lots of gratuitious stupidities that don't quite stitch together all the flyaway plot threads and never quite knows what to do with the enigmas. Sometimes it almost works but usually not.

Paprika***/ is a strange anime of psychobabble dreams mixing a hard-bitten detective, a tyranical egomaniac, alter-ego heroines, a good doctor and other characters in an overly un-simple evil vs. good adventure in quavering dimensions. Noisily fascinating in a dull way, sci fi ish in a better way in colorful but not really high quality animation, at least not on the DVD I saw of it.

I don't think I even watched My Father the Genius. If I did, I don't remember any of it, so no review there.

I've seen Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle***/ before and loved it. This time, it seemed more difficult, not nearly the wildly barbed wit-fest I thought it the first three times I saw it. Not sure it deserves an All-Time-Great anymore. I'll go back at it in another couple years to figure that one out.

Ratatouille*****, however, still is, and the two animated short features it came with were worth watching the whole thing all over again. Just as funny, enrapturing, and engagingly spirited as the first time I saw it on the big screen. I'm not counting it again, but perhaps I should. All five asterisks worth. Wonderful characters, beautiful amazing animation, involving intelligent story. And funny. Funny ha-ha, funny smart, funny human.

I watched The Bourne Ultimatum**** three, maybe four times before I finally sent it back. Kinda retreading the franchise's former greatness. Excellent chase scenes, adequate character development, I'm waiting for #4.

A month later and I still haven't watched more than a few minutes of Stalker. If I don't watch it within the next few days, it's going back, so I can get a movie I will actually watch and send back quickly, so I can get more.

I did not see The Great Gatsby***/ when it was made in 1978. Perhaps I should have. Everybody seemed amazing young now. Interesting story, though, and good acting. Would have awarded it three and a half asterisks.

I shouldn't have seen 12 Monkeys again. It has fallen in my estimation at least an asterisk. First ten times I saw it I thought it amazing intelligent, well puzzled together and a remarkable time-travel movie. This time I was awestruck how well it was edited together, how low was the tech, how simple the story, how amazing good the acting.

The Last Waltz*** has been on my NetFlix queue for more than a year. I wanted to see it but not that much. I was never caught up in The Band. Nice to see those other musicians, though. Especially Joni Mitchell singing Coyote; Bob Dylan having obvious fun being himself among old friends, no pretense or holding back; did not care any for many of the players or The Band itself. I fast-forwarded through many of their bits; Lawrence Ferlinghetti was fabulous and brief; Emmylou Harris is probably why I rented the flick. She was awful young, didn't seem to participate past her brief appearance. Another marvelous long moment was the excised "informal jam." I guess there are formal jams, but isn't that the point? This one included Ringo, Dr. John, Ron Wood, Neil Young, Garth Hudson, Eric Clapton, Levaon Helm, Carl Raddle, Robbie Robertson, Stephen Stills and Pual Butterfield. Wow. I played it four times. Liked it much better than the movie.

2007

Strange Days***/ couldn't have been the original title, too stupid, too Hollywood. The concept has been around science fiction for decades. Several of my fave sci fi writers have written it. Instead of drugs, a device tunes in to whole body experience recorded by someone else's whole body experience. People get hooked to it. Our anti-hero is both addict and pusher. Except for that, this is a we-got-a-video-of-cops-doing-bad and everybody wants it or wants it back movie. Vincent D'Onofrio is a murder-crazed cop. This frenetic film is nearly nonstop action, so plot implausibilities never have a mullible chance, and vicious, overt violence fits right in. Overacting is palpable, but a lot of good actors are involved. Probably should have been an hour shorter, but which excess to excise?

Dark Days***. documents the lives of homeless who live in an abandoned subway cavern under the streets of New York, where they build a nasty but livable community of sorts. This flick is strange. The next one is dark.

The Heart of the Game***/ does all those feel-good sports team movies a couple better by being real, about real people, with real everything. It's a documentary that follows one high school girls basketball program till they finally win that state's championship. Along the way, we learn who many of the girls on the team are. There are team stars but there's more stars in the movie than those. It's moving, not just because our team sometimes wins and sometimes doesn't, but because these are real people involved in reality.

I'm a typophile. I've been a typesetter, a publication designer and a publisher nearly all my life. I have used it and abused it. The movie Helvetica***/ is funny and fascinating. I know a lot of the talking bodies in it, because they are and have been my type and design heroes. If I'd known David Carson was going to be in this, I would have rented it just for him. As it is, there's scads of great type and design ers here, and I found it fascinanting.

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures*** is a great retrospective of all his movies, with lots of famous _______s for each category. Actors, directors, producers, whateverers. Fascinating introduction to some movies I hadn't seen. Intriguing backstories for the ones I had seen. Understandings for all.

I love Die Hard movies. All of them. Probably, they're all riddled with plot holes with all the bullet holes, but I don't care. I don't even care that Bruce Willis, whom I'll see anything he's in, is a natzi. I love his moies. And Live Free or Die Hard***/ is another one. Exciting from the get go. Lots of fights and killing and mahem and even some beautifully choreographed flying hamster scenes. Yee-haw.

I rented Stone Cold*** because i had certaine expectations for a movie with Tom Selleck as a police chief in a small town. All of which were realized. From the beginning it looked and felt like the first of a TV series. And it is. There wasn't a lot that wasn't entirely predictable once we knew who and what it was about, but those few minutes made the rest worthwhile. Not great. Not bad. Darkish, dry and momentarily gentle. Now it's a broadcast network TV show, and I still like it, although there's a uniformity of plot going on.

Mary Cassatt was a fine American painter, and we're told that repeatedly in this uninspired movie that suffers from an insipid script, spurious and oft-repeated images and a lot of stirring b.s that sounds good but doesn't mean much. Mary Cassatt - A Brush with Independence*** is adequate as a documentary and an introduction to her work and life story. We learn about the person but not much about her work. One of the stupider lines in this fairly stupid movie is near the end. "She slipped into a diabetic coma, but like she had so many times before, she perservered." As if that meant something.

The Astronaut Farmer*** is light fantasy not hardly ever approaching science fiction, even though a couple of rockets, one asstronaut and nine orbits around the earth are involved in the plot. But then so's a happy family. It's a fun little movie with more heart than head. It's about hope and dreams with some science lingo thrown in and NASA, the FBI and the government as the bad guys. Its setting is down home West Texas, and its people are about as real as Hollywood can budget.

My brother is profoundly deaf, meaning he has more than 99.9% loss of hearing. We grew up on Strategic Air Command bases where B-52s took off and landed vibrating the whole base. Feeling that vibration was as close as he got to hearing. But all his life he's been on the outside from most people, including his family, us. I believe he would have been happier and more a part of the community of everybody, if he were hearing. He had an opportunity, a few years ago, to get a cochlear implant and was evaluated as a good candidate. But he decided not to for the same reason the deaf people in Sound and Fury*** were opposed to getting the implant. They did not want to lose their Deaf Culture. It's a vastly supportive and extensive community that would be difficult to leave after a lifetime membership. He and his non-hearing wife raised two hearing children who are still very much a part of that deaf culture. They sign, they communicate with hearing and non-hearing alike. They often interpret for their parents. I kept wanting to tell the movie's deaf people about my two nieces and their continuing acceptance and comfort in both worlds, but I'm not sure even that relative success would have tipped the scale against so much fear.

The Lives of Others**** is about Stasi (secret police) and some of their victims in East Germany before the wall fell. This movie is exquisite. Gloomy but with a light at the end of a dark tunnel. Smart. Long enough to develop a deep plot. Superbly acted, the story is about mind control, loyalty, freedom, ideas, and of course, treachery.

Almost all the way through, Mr. Brooks***/ (Kevin Costner) is spooky dark and smart. Then, penultimately, we get a quick taste of stupidity, then the story stutters back to semi-reality and ends. It's about a man who prays, attends 12th Step meetings, has a family he's not perfect with, a job, a hobby, a passion for murder and an alter ego (inner demon) personified by William Hurt at his most malevolent. It's amusing to hear the creators talk about their 'perfect' script. By now, they should know that's the kiss of death. It is an affecting and well written script till that end we mentioned and macabre sense of humor. Dark. Cosmically funny.

Visually and everything else, Stay**** (2005) is about transition, beautiful, intelligent filmic ones, often and startling. I want to say the story is solid, but it's anything but. Strange, ephemeral plot line holds somehow together. Red shadows annoying, but everything else isn't. Great acting by surprising actors. Beautiful. Smart. 20 pages of visual effects bys in the credits. Haunting. Sixth Senseian in the best way.

It's been too long to remember anything resembling a plot or whatever drove Nightwatch. I remember being blown away by it. I'm sure I gave it at least four asterisks, and I remember not being able to wait for Daywatch***/, which I watched a couple days ago. I've been watching a lot of movies lately. Really good ones mostly, and writing about art and taking pictures of birds and being involved in stuff on several levels. But always fitting in some movies.

Some movies just sit in my mind and melt away. I can't remember anything about them half a week later. I remember a dozen instances in Day Watch. Fantasmagorical special effects. A lady driving a fancy sporstcar wild and then up across the front of an ultramodern building. Exploding spheres throughout Moscow, slicing the world apart, killing thousands. The basic plot is good verses evil, although figuring out who exactly were the good guys or the bad guys wasn't all that easy. Those demarcations are always a little iffy. But this is a movie I'd want to see again. Maybe in tandem with Night Watch. Thrills and chills, incredibly fine special effects, an accumulating plot line. This film is hard to believe, difficult to fathom, strange and bizarre and amazing.

Some movies make me wish I had a scale of one to five asterisks instead of just one to four. I have graded some few movies with five, but it's not a regular thing. It doesn't make sense to suddenly start with 1-5 when I've been doing 1-4 all these years already. Not that this movie deserves five stars. No, it's forever stuck between three and, oh, four, I guess. It's a stupid movie with an especially unoriginal ending, but its stupidity all the way through is an endearing stupidity. I could not watch this thing end to end, and not because it's two hours long. I wanted the two leading bankrobbers to just go ahead and murder their getaway driver / watcher, he's so stupid and causes so much trouble that could never have happened otherwise. But they're not that smart. Didn't find out till the Special Features that the really stupid guy was played by Jane Fonda's son — movie royalty, they called him. Which is also pretty stupid. But when it was finally over at least six separate sittings later, I liked it. Even the Special Features are really funny. The movie, crackpot as it is, is funny, also. Cracks me up. I got it because it had Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton and because Netflix rates it highly. They were right. Bandits***.

Cypher***/ is very very strange. Stylized simple with a plot so strange and complex even our hero doesn't believe till the very end. Bizarre but compelling. Not entirely different from the real world or industrial espionage, but it's a start. Intelligent.

Notes on a Scandal**** is brilliant. I shook with nervous dread as the first affair began in its lurid sensuality. I hadn't wanted to start this movie, never sure why those happen. But all those famous actors lured me in. Beautiful people in beautiful cinematography. Intense story, fierce plot. It's about love, of course, and relationships. Users and abusers in several dimensions. Startling, shocking even, then near the end, it turned, cleverly to darkest humor.

I didn't want to like Snow Walker*** at first. Hated its main character, there for us to hate, then grow slowly to like and even admire as he changed. Not really a love interest but the Inuit woman teaches him the old ways, and yet knowing that, the plot took me by surprise. Noble and knowing, beautiful cold desert. Impetuosity meets Native understanding. Subtly at first, but uplifting, not preachy.

When it started, I thought, "Oh, god. I've got to stop NetFlix from sending me any more flicks till I can figure out which ones are good, again. Then I just let it play. Gradually, I warmed to the stupidity. When it's not the name of a stupid smart movie, The Darwin Awards*** go to people who do monumentally stupid things, in this case, to get themselves killed. Here, Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder team up to solve idiot killings for an insurance company. Each Darwinian excess is reenacted as the two remap what happened, and we get to watch. Lotta famous actors, but this movie stands out as the only to have a major cameo by my Senior Poet (in college), Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Like, wow, man.

Like most Americans, I got about a paragraph and a half about Sacco & Vanzetti*** in my history book. I knew their trial was important, but no idea why. I did know Ben Shahn's drawings and paintings of the pair, and always wondered how they rated that and the history books mentions, where almost nothing was explained. Here, we learn. Now I understand.

I got Snow Cake***/, because Alan Rickman's in it, and he's wonderful. So is Sigourney Weaver and her screen daughter who dies early. In many ways, the movie is very much about what she learned from her autistic mother. The joy of living totally in the present, without recourse to subtleties of meaning or motive. It's also about guilt and ressurection. A little movie, but profound and human.

Sweet Land***/ tells a long and winding story of a woman, brought to America as something close to a mail-order bride, who grows in her own independence as she grows in her love for a man. It's a gentle story, told at a slow pace and beautifully. A period piece from rural Minnesota about loyalty and love.

Perfume***/ is wicked. About a boy, unloved and enslaved since he was a baby, born wih an amazing nose. He yearns to save the scents of women, learns the sense of perfumers from Master Perfumer Dustin Hoffman, then steals beautiful women's essences after murdering them. Sex, stragely, is no part of this, although gender is. It's a synesthetic movie, showing us what scent does, making us believe in its presence while letting us handily forget about the smelly parts of rigor mortis and rotting flesh.

Mrs. Potter*** is Beatrix, who wrote about Flopsy, Mopsy and Peter Cottontail, and many other memorable characters in a long series of children's tales that made her a woman of independent means, rich enough to buy thousands of acres of lake country real estate, which she conserved then gave back to England's National Trust. It is also about the two other loves in her life. The story is sweet, spiced ocassionally with short annimations of her interacting with her characters, but its plot evolves in a very predictable manner.

She's a watcher, adjunct police person who watches a city (in Scotland) through the eyes of a bank videos around the city she can zoom and pan and follow and focus details. One day she sees someone she knows. Someone disturbing. She engages him in lust and sensual sex, (frontal nudity of both sexes, amazing if it wasn't real.) A plan. Revenge. Slowly we discover the plot after it has unfolded. A dark mystery going through. A quiet redemption by the end. Characters developed. Some beautiful visual passages. Red Road**** messes with our emotions and perceptions, tells a strange and provocative story about people and pain and retribution and renewal, too.

Zodiac***/ is about the Zodiac killer in California in the 60s and the 70s. It is also about the police and other men who became obsessed with finding the killer. Obsessed to distraction. The police detectives who had to quick obsessing to save their sanity. And about one newspaper cartoonist who became the writer who solved the case, because he also became obsessed to distraction.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles***/ is particularly good at what it does. The story is story of and by itself, but it is also a slowly evolving metaphor. The Chinese are probably particularly adept at this sort of weaving. This movie is about a father and a son. But the father is not the father of the son we see. The father is the father of a son we do not see, yet it is that relationship that is strengthened by the story we see. The son is the son of a person in the movie we do see. It is the relationship of the aforementioned father and this other man's sone that makes this movie — and the metaphor.

I like movies about persons who shoot guns good. I liked that silly Aussie flick with Burt Reynolds, The Shootist. I didn't care if the flick was bad, and it really was, I liked it. I liked Shooter***/ a lot better. Hardly an original plot. My favorite author wrote a really bad book with the exact same plot: Really good shooter hired to tell how to kill the President, so the secret service can protect him, except it isn't the secred service, and they kill the President using the shootist, er... shooter's plans, then blame it on him and hunt him down, or try to. Another kind of movie I like especially is when the hero — sometimes it's a heroine — is always a couple steps ahead of the bad guys at every turn. Is very very knowledgible and very fast and very good. That makes it for me. Your mileage might vary. I could see how it might.

Films of Kenneth Anger: Vol. 1** is enough I know I do not have to see any more. The one of the midget walking around an Italian waterpark is okay in small doses for a couple of minutes. The rest are awful.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley** is pretty much the same stirring anti-Brit Irish independence movie we've seen again and again. More vicious. Good acting, a lot of violence. As much Irish on Irish as the overplayed mean, awful Brits, not a human in that bunch. Uncredible.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont*** is a sweet, gentle movie about the friendship of an older woman and a much younger man. A heartfelt and deep friendship, but just that, although there are certain complications. The Claremont is a retirement hotel where Joan Plowright's Mrs. Palfrey goes to retire.

Millions**** is wonderful. Visually quirky from the get-go, a marvelous sub-plot involving God and saints who appear to one kid brother who wants to give the millions of dollars that opportune themselves into their lives, and the other who just wants to spend it all. A classic find-some-money tale without a lot of complicated characters, but with a lot of heart and whimsy, a little romance, not much religion but lots of human condition laughs, and joy.

I wanted to like The Number 23*** because the number 23 keeps coming up in my own life. My zip code, my birth date, used to be my phone number. Etc. Plus Jim Carrey is amazing, and I loved Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind like a devotee to a new religion. This film shares similar sorts of spiraling logic and plot arcs though memory loss and redemption. 23 starts fascinating of character and plot, devolves into a dark, stylish, nearly macabre Sin City strangeness, almost but doesn't quite recover, and has all the makings of a cult classic. Eternal darkness of a marked soul.

Befitting the book it came from (which I never read but only heard about like everybody else), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind***/ is amazing for the utter surreality of itself. Obviously fun to make, serious as a double-murder-suicide, funny in the pathetic way life can be, strange and peppered with big-name actors and a rational, if bizarre, plot flow.

Piece By Piece***/ is about a whole different set of outsider artists, the men and women who mark and tag their colorful if often gaudy ways across our urban centers. Graffiti artists. Some would say a contradiction in terms. The music is wonderful and as exciting as the stories, the legends, the lores and the artistic styles. A lexicon of new terminology for the new form of expression and destructions. A lot of information piled in fast, just like the real stuff, piece by piece.

The made-for-TV and boy does it show The Highwaymen - Florida's Outsider Artists*** lacks visual or video or lighting — or for that matter audio or much of anything else — sophistication but it does tell the story of this historical group of Black artists led by "a benevolent White artist" (naturally, or could they have shown it on TV?) whose work is now, supposedly, selling like tulips. The title's sponsor is the gallery selling the work, and the video sells and sells and sells (but is anybody buying?). It is racist through and through, running subtitles on Black guys whose words are plenty clear, and it is repetitive, befitting that it was made for TV viewers who don't know from ART, and some of the "historical" visuals are just stupid. But it's also interesting and shows a lot of these outsider artists' work.

The Greatest Game Ever Played*** is another rags to riches golf story, pleasant enough, well acted, solid story, just so very much like all the other good ones of the nearly word-for-word genre. I don't care for golf, but I like golf stories more than most sports but in most respects this is just another duffer, with more than a nod to history without being quite realistic.

I wanted to enjoy The Weather Man**/, because it's Nicholas Cage playing yet another mildly interesting character caught in the throes of the human condition, but this one paces slow and replaces the expected humor with gloom.

Super Inframan* reads good in the description on Netflix but is incredibly lame like 50s Japanese sci fi superheroes sans heart, soul or story.

Richard Chamberlain stars in Peter Weir's The Last Wave**** from 1977, in which Chamerlain's character, an Australian lawyer attempts to defend tribal aborigines from the Aussie court system, fails notably but reconnects with his own mythical past. Lots of very credible magic shown with great compassion and deep understanding. Amazing film, sterling story, timeless. Nice, quick interview with writer/director Weir is the only special feature.

The Last Mimzy***/ is a science fiction children's tale — about them, not for them (rated NR) — in which a young brother and sister discover a mysterious lump that, when they think about it and explore, becomes something like a toy box that makes them smarter, then becomes much more, expanding their minds — all the while shrinking all the adults' — helping heal future generations. Unfortunately, that far future bit is terminally cute, way too flowery and just goofy, while the present tense, where it's genius children vs. freaked-out scared stupid adults, in a sort of a thinking person's Disney (Think Flubber, not Herbie.) An odd, but often intriguing cross of new age jumbo mumbo, real science and hope.

Before Night Falls*** follows Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas quickly through his poverty ridden childhood, then slowly through his twenties. We see the writer's gay social life in great detail, even his typewriter, but no words, no phrases or lines, except a couple poems to show us this is a writer, without a hint of his genius. We just have to believe. Tawdry life made miserable by Castro's Cuba. He's gay. They hate gays. like our government hated gays back then. Eventually he emigrates to New York and dies. Then we get words. But still not nearly enough for the story of a writer. The whole of it is interesting and involving, but not really fascinating. There are, however, two (one rather bizarre) cameo appearances by Johnny Depp. Good acting throughout, good enough story. Sad.

Touch The Sound**** is the joyous documentary of a profoundly deaf woman who has learned to hear through her body and become a superb musician, percussionist, teacher and collaborationist who works — or plays — with other gifted and strange musicians in acoustically fascinating places around the world. Unexpected musics fill this aurally mystical movie. It's about sound, of course, but this movie directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer is also visually stunning. The visual transitions — musicians might call them bridges — are transportive. I chair danced to both watching this wondrous production..

Opal Dream*** was an endearing little movie from Australia about a whole town of people crazed for the lust of opals, who eventually let down their designs on each other to bury a little girl's two invisible friends. It's about family — a brother, sister, mother and father, and by extension, the whole town, who let go their less than firm grip on reality long enough to believe in the impossible. Quirky, and for all that, real.

Picasso, Magritte, Calder and all those other big-time famous fine artists of the last century are intriguing to learn about and watch their influence on so many artists since, but one of the most influential artists of all time has to be Chuck Jones. In Extremes and in Betweens, a Life in Animation***/ we don't learn all that much about his personal life and family, but we get to see many of the cartoons that have subtly or overtly influenced us all. He didn't invent Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, but he had a hand in their development. However, he did invent Peppy LePeau, Wylie Coyote and the greatest underdog who ever lived (in celluloid, at least) and always won, The Roadrunner. Here, we get to watch the development of all those and many more remarkably human, mostly animal characters.
 

This following extended review is taken from ThEdBlog on DallasArtsRevue. Only the bolded movies are new here.

I've been watching art movies. Not art house movies, but movies about artists. My favorite is still Hiroshi Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudi*****. It's exquisitely visual, as I wrote on my movie pages and have added to the DARts Art Movies page. Oddly, the subject of this latest artist movie, Dallas artist Rusty Scruby, mentions Gaudi.

They have visions in common. Both create natural undulating surfaces in service to their art. Both are complicated people who obsessively make complex art. Even elements of the artists' work are similarly interconnected. Rusty is still very much alive, and Antonio has been dead since 1926. Gaudi is world famous. Rusty's working on it.

My understanding and appreciation for both artists deepened as I watched their movies, although Gaudi has been one of my heroes since college. I have seen Scruby's work but had passed on it as gimmicky. Now I see both sides.

Not surprisingly, Hiroshi Teshigahara is more deft a director than Quin Mathews, but Quin's work here is solid, although the lengths of the titles may be instructive. Rusty Scruby - Beyond the Plane, A Portrait of The Artist in Motion**** verses Antonio Gaudi.

Teshigahara's film moves us through the Catalonian master's buildings — and his mind. Quin's shows Scruby in motion as a human, a creator, craftsman, theoretician, exhibiting artist, salesman and musician. I didn't learn about Antonio's personal life, but Scruby's is populated with three-dimensional characters who help.

I award more asterisks to innovative movies on the leading edges of their form. Teshigahara qualifies. Mathews is good at what he does, and I'd give him points for following his form to function, not fashion. But I want more of Scruby talking and less of the people around him — some of whom have not got comfortable with the camera like Scruby has — although it was pleasant to see some old friends we share, and they wouldn't be so 3D if they didn't share who they are, too.

The moments when Scruby talks about his obsessions and how they feed his art are intellectually enthralling. Set my mind to rambling about my own craft's concerns (and more). Many artists don't know what their work is about. Most think they know but get lost in theories and forget facts. When artists speak knowingly from their selves as they make art, it's inspiring.

Difficult to get long-dead artists to give the real skinny or go off on personal tangents. Talking heads, even if they're moving around the screen, don't cut it. In Picasso: Magic, Sex, Death****, a very personable and knowledgeable old friend narrates telling details, but the movie provides rare few short movies of Pablo in action. We see and hear but do not necessarily understand. The master's voice is curiously missing.

Many artist movies screw up talking art-crit nonsense. The narrator of Artists of the 20th Century: Man Ray**/ runs off at the mouth through a long series of sloppily=prepared copies Ray's work, then stops dead at a gleaming phallus. It's wonderful education to see the work of artists, famous or not. Worth the price of admission. Even when a movie fails, getting to see dozens, even hundreds of their work is fascinating, though sometimes we have to turn off the sound.

In the Picasso movie, reflections of people moving in his work on the walls of active places show us it's real and alive, not some stupid slide Ken Burnsed in and out of. Seeing the textures — Scruby's art is vivified by them — like seeing a sly silhouette etched in a Picasso painting, is stirring.

A more recent favorite is Magritte, An Attempt at the Impossible**** (reviewed below), that incorporates much of the Original Surrealist's work, intelligent biography, understated art-criticism and surreal vignettes that reveal and promote understandings of specific work. Similar to the quick, colorful painting-inspired back-story scenes in Frida, only better, more intellectual and stranger.

 

Because I honor Ursula K. LeGuin I watched all two hours and 52 minutes of Earthsea**/, but it was a stupid, sappy, cliché-ridden movie about wizards and maidens acted by actors, most of who couldn't act, and those who could should have known better; impelled by plots that made only the barest sense — there were plot reversals but more awkward were acting reversals. Way too much got lost in the book to film transition.

You're Gonna Miss Me ***, the Roky Erickson story is a long, depressing story that emphasizes the power of positive thinking without showing any credible evidence that the "inventor of psychedelic music" is ever going to be sane again, if he ever was to start with. His crazy mother, his crazy brothers, his crazy father, his crazy fans, all the crazy famous people who see rebirth in his soul when there may be no soul left.

I am indulging in a history of art of the 20th Century, one famous artist at a time. Lately, I've watched Picasso, Alexander Calder, Mac Ernst and Frazetta flash DVDs. It is not like watching Dallas artists appear, grow, learn, expand, expound, disappear (etc.). But my concentrated attentions have taught me new facts and fascinating concepts I did not learn from reproductions in art history books. The filmmaker of Magritte: An Attempt at the Impossible****'s contemporized film sequences of the painter's works at first seemed odd, over edges. But they are informative. Some — like the candles burning — quite marvelous and memorable. We see the filmmakers making art of the artist's art. I've seen it twice now. I will see it twice more again before I send it back.

Madagascar**/ was mostly stupid. Every five or six minutes, there's be a chuckle. Sometimes an outright laugh. I didn't think it was possible, but I actually liked the penguins, though they were a small part of this movie that didn't have much humanity. I know it was all about animals, but we humans have come to expect humanity in our animations, and this didn't have it. Fifteen years ago, this good animation would have been astounding. Since Pixar, however, it's just second rate.

Night Watch**** is an extreme torrent of vivid, violent, magic, movie making. Light vs. Dark. Deep, complex plot, distinctive characters, quirk and mayhem from Russia. Way over the edges. Can't wait for Day Watch. Nothing like it. Wow.

M. Night Shyamalan is why I watched. Slow to start, it gathers pace and a band of misfits to fight the evil after a woman who lives under the apartment swimming pool. A story about a Story within a story, self-reflexive and interlocking like a complex clock. Intelligent and magic. Good vs. Evil. Lady In the Water*** is a little movie big on heart with a heavy dose of quirk and multicultural community.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky**/ was a good deal more than America's most important intellectual talking about what makes sense to him though there is that, too. What this movie does is sandwich him telling us what he's thinking into a visually comedic movie that works pretty well. But it is nearly three hours long. The guy is smart. But I'd much rather listen to him talk in unbroken lectures, have done with others of his DVDs. But then I like sitting in a darkened room while someone ruminates intelligence or art. This man's art is politics, and he is more intelligent about it than anyone. Wise, too. However, in this movie, everybody who is nobody openly disagrees with what they think (always wrongly) he is saying, and it is annoying to have to listen to all those boobs when I'd rather hear Noam.

Phantom Museums: Quay Brothers Short Films*** is very very strange. Animation like you've probably never experienced before. You might not want to again after this, but it is different and amazing, if not exactly entertaining. More like deep-think provoking.

Some movies I never figure out what they're about. I'd see any George Clooney, because he makes interesting, often lefty choices. Eventually I'll even get around to Ocean 13, I suppose. Meanwhile, The Good German*** is, near as I figure, about all the rocket-science genius Nazi scum (Werner Von Braun?) we got in the trade with the Russians at Pottsdam. They got the Iron Curtain countries, and we got evil men with brilliant minds, that made the U.S. the world-dominating power. And forced Eastern Europe into years of slavery. Good for us, except that it was bad for them and for everybody else we've dominated since. Like the last film I reviewed, this is set after the end of World War II. Again in black & white. More stylish than that, but not as human. The B&W itself is superb, as complicated as the plot but easier to watch than understand. The music's as stringy but sophisticated. I like that Clooney gets clobbered every fight he's in, all very anti-hero, and that Spiderman is not just the bad guy but mean and stupid, too, like many here. When it first came out, we chose The Good Shepherd as that year's spy flick in a movie theater. They are very different films, but this one may be better.

The Best Years of Our Lives***/, about guys coming back from the war, their expectations and the realities once they're back. Its luxurious black & white looked a little strange but never got in the way of telling a hopeful and human story. It's nearly three hours long, filled with actors acting, deep characterizations and amazing little moments, gestures and looks that shine true from 1946 and always. Drippy strings too often remind us when to smile or tear up, but all that is easily over-looked. Lotta famous actors, Fredrich March, Myrna Loy, a young Dana Andrews, but when I saw Hoagy Carmichael playing piano in a bar, I knew I was in just the right place.

Longitude**/ is long, too slow, but its momentum builds, made for TV treatise paralleling 200 years apart the men who made it possible for ships at sea to know what longitude they were and the man (Jeremy Irons) who put their accomplishment in the history books. Before them, naval navigation was primitive matter trial and much error. This movie is a life-long lesson in the abject stupidity of governmental boards. Not a thriller, fascinating but slow.

The Pursuit of Happyness*/ with Will Smith and his real-life son, is a long, slow, dull, dreary sap of a movie that I couldn't finish.

I rented PBS's American Masters production Alexander Calder*** to see his affect on my late friend Jim Crowe's very similar work. As I watched I learned Calder's effect on all sculptors, whether they know it, own up to it or not. Art Shirer's work has that childlike simplicity and wiggling, sometimes winding movement. He has taken Calder's directions and expanded them in several dimensions. T.Stone has inhereted his monumental moderness. Jim copied many of Calder's ideas and delight. So many others have copied this or that piece possibly without even knowing it. This bit of history of a happy, often child-like man, is its own delight, complete with many films of the master himself doing what he did best, have fun making art. A must-see.

Once I started Once Around***/ I only wanted to stop. It is a difficult film to watch in the way it is difficult to see our own families disintegrating around us. Ultimately it was not as disastrous a relationship movie as it seemed along the way, but getting through it was a challenge. Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter are why I bothered. For the characters it was a once in a lifetime joy not without difficulties. For everyone around them it was major cause for worry and concern. Ultimately it is about family and the possibilities of joy.

Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader in Secretary***/ is dark, humanely hilarious and ultimately sexual. She's a masochist. He's a serial sadist. Both extreme. Together they are an extreme example of the difficulty of any relationship. This is an unusual — okay, bizarre — romance. Strange, startling, shocking. Visually as well as verbally as well as very very smart. Forget it if you're PC.

I've just watched 2 hours and 8 minutes of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center** and it's a big copout. More than 2,700 citizens murdered with police and firemen and rescuers everywhere, and this movie ignores all that to tell the long, slow story of two guys who survive barely. Okay for a movie called two guys who survived 911, but hardly one called this. Tear-jerker, tense, emotional, etc., but such a little movie about such a big event. Like wars, it make take decades to do this story right. This ain't it.

Greenfinger*** is hokey, contrived, lightweight and silly, with enough heart to make it charming, although whomever chose the music should probably have their ashes scattered in the garden. It's about hard-core prisoners who take up gardening, so they'll have a job when they get out, who make it big in the horticultural world. With a young Clive Owen and Helen Mirren, whose talents here are slight.

The Science of Sleep*** shares a deeply self-indulgent underlying illogic with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, whose director made both. Where Science is funky and hand-made, Sunshine nears sophistication, albeit with the same clunky machines. In the messiest of manners, this often childish, sometimes dream-like, usually charming little movie  is about rejection, selfish love and not being able to discern dreams from reality. Its quirky characterizations, odd animations, strange interactions and extraordinarily low tech tech almost work, except that its hero is petulant and piteous.

The godfathers of the title are a disreputable bunch. Hardly heroes. Liars, homeless, father-stabbers, drunks, homos, louts. But somehow lovable. Sometimes. Other times I couldn't stand them. It's anime, so they're just lines and areas of color. Moving Hanna-Barbera style across a comix Japanese landscape. They are ruined souls, each with a horror story how they came to be where they are, but they have heart. This movie has soul. And redemption. Tokyo Godfathers****

Art City*** is a quick paced run through a variety of New York City artists (whom I probably should know) and critics and curators (whom I am aware of) in a documentary about art. Very reminiscent of Art in the 21st Century, though not as deep, it's fun to listen to the selected artists talk about art as they make it. Special Features include the portions of the interviews that didn't make it into the film, and we can easily see why. The film's not always in focus, but the film's focus is sharp and incisive and the artists fascinating.

Venus*** is a quirky, gentle, bittersweet movie about old people, death, lust and love in a December/May friendship that slowly turns to a sexless sort of romance between an elderly and infirm Peter O'Toole (essentially playing himself, only older and more infirm) and a very young, sensual but destructive woman and what they both learn.

The Fountain*** is an ambitious journey in time and space from Mayan magic, valiant conquistadors, Queen Isabella, a pretty woman named Izzie, through the brain tumor medical science present and off into the mystical future. Not exactly time travel, not exactly science fiction, not exactly original. They borrowed Silent Running's spherical spaceship sent to seed the stars, any number of eternal life, magical map and interlocking gizmos that magically reveal the Holy whatever movies into an intriguing mess of parallelish plots and hopes and dreams and a wedding ring.

It's Denzel, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen and Spike Lee, but other than the really intriguing concept behind the plot, The Inside Man*** is mush of a movie that doesn't make a lot of literal, A to B, let alone A to Z sense, ignores its own rules and is showy offy rather than intelligent.

The Future We Will Create - Inside the World of TED***/sounded like a conference where highly intelligent people talked to other brilliant people about new ideas. And that's pretty much it, except they don't just talk. The ideas were brilliant and deceptively simple. The TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference brings together 1,000 people who have resources, intelligence and have already implemented great ideas. It's a community that listens to new ideas every year then implements these world-changing ideas. Watching it happen is fascinating for the ideas, enriching for the community accomplishment, entertaining, inspirational and thought-provoking. TED.com, their amazing website, expands these notions spectacularly. (Looks like the new iPhone operating system is a subset of one of ideas.)

Crank***/ is cranked up, high speed, almost never stop. Action, violence, a little pseudo sex, a lotta crashing cars, bodies, wall-to-wall action. Fun, funny in a sick and twisted way and did I mention hellaciously violent. Another first-time movie by adrenalin freak camera guys. Vicious high energy. Flat-out fun.

Iraq in Frangments**** is a beautiful and crisply detailed movie in three distinct parts that are in few ways unified, except by the country and the direct documentary style. Intimate into the lives of of Iraqis in three very different places and all but ignoring the American invaders, this is about the people, in gritty detail, in their own words and day-to-day lives. Hardly kind to the people there, this movie shows their wisdoms and their stupidities and as close as I've ever seen of their realities.

The strictest of documentaries, this startling movie begins with the story of an illiterate boy in Baghdad in the weeks before, then during the war's beginning. The second part takes us into southern Iraq for astonishing footage of al-Sadr and his supporters fomenting liberation. Up close, very personal. Scary real. Then finally and nearly as intensely into life with the Kurds.

It is a beautiful movie, shot with grace and beauty by one man. Not just the director, the everything. No crew. Just James Longley. Shooting what he could where he was. Un scripted, this movie lets us piece together in our minds this place where war is.

At its center, it's a hard boiled detective story, very Dashiell Hammett. Smart, fast, the hero gets beat up a lot. But very intelligent. Remarkably so. The dialog is clipped. So much said in few words I had to watch the subtitles, done better than any movie I've seen. One of the special few flicks that follow their own rules well. Stays in the reality it sets up and strings out. I saw this movie twice. Will again. Every clue and extension works, makes sense. The continuity right on. By a first-time director with impressive new style. Brick***/ doesn't look like a detective novel, set in and around a high school in a small town. Everybody of any importance is a teen or just older. Like a Hammett, this is deeply clever. Funny in odd little moments. Astutely visual. Not for a moment dumbed down.

Letters from Iwo Jima*** is another war is stupid movie. Noble, ambitious, spectacularly better than its English-language companion, Flags of Our Fathers, stronger story, probably more accurate, better acting. But

Pan's Labyrinth**** was a kind of wonderful. A child's story, but not a movie for children. It has both implied and on-screen violence, and it's about a vicious fascist in the Spanish Civil War. But it's also about magic and fairies and a princess who has to prove her princess-ness by completing three (It's always three.) tasks. Beautiful, haunting, truly evil sometimes, spooky, gross, gruesome. This one has it all. The special effects are spectacular. Like nothing you've ever seen. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Ram Dass' Fierce Grace**/ book was better, more inspiring, but for long-time fans wondering where he's at, what he's up to lately, this brings us up on the old man, which is what this movie is about. I read the book. It was fascinating. This wasn't the book, and it wasn't fascinating.

I had to see Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers***, because their music at that same time (1958) was a childhood favorite. Not the first record I ever bought, though that too was jazz. But an early addition to my burgeoning LP collection. I watched it three times, actually listened to it, usually while writing. Interesting but not fascinating. A slight return. Not really a movie, just them on stage, no background info, no documentary, just them playing amazing jazz. Would have been substantially better if it'd told us something about these players.

Max Ernst*** was a color- and shape-ful character. One of the greats of 20th Century art. But this documentary, at least the first hour is not up to his quality, although it has its moments. I've had to stop it in its tracks four times now, just to stop the stupid soundtrack long enough to regain my sanity. Igor Stravinsky is great, and maybe whoever used it here was attuned to surrealism, but it grates. Great, though, to see so much of his art and to hear his friends, especially the women in his life talk about him — often more eloquently than he does. Waiting endlessly, for the rarely simultaneous for translations of his early German is tedious. But once he gets to America, the story brightens, and he learns Englilsh. Watching him dance down a narrow street in New York City is almost worth the price of admission. Nice.

The Secret Life of Words***/ was slow and gentle, speaking subtly funny lines and building surely to expose former horrors, then gentles out again. Superb acting, amazing little plot and a cast of memorable and quirkesque characters.

I didn't think I did till the end, but I liked this movie though it has damned little to do with Diane Arbus or making photographs or visual thinking (that's the part that angered me) and overly much about the famous photographers' strange subjects, without tying them into her work. This film is not about a lot of things it properly should have been. I appreciate historical accuracy, and the biographical aspects of this movie are blatantly imaginary. But it is strikingly visual, often beautiful and intentionally weird (even though actual freaks inhabit it), and intriguingly and inappropriately spooky, as if the filmmakers forgot they were not making a horror flick. Or they thought they were. The title is stupidly funny, but not much else about Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus*** is.

It's about an important guy in New York in the middle of the last century Who Gets to Call It Art?***/, and it may be the best movie about an art era I've ever seen. Henry Geldzahler curated exhibitions and knew artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaller and many others who are now household names. At least in the households I know. It's done standard documentary style with few new edges and an irreverent style. Wonderful soundtrack that got me boogying when the art world changed and settled me down when it was settling. It's only 80 minutes long not counting all the extras, but it tells more about that era in art, via the voices of the artists and the visuals of them than anything else.

I read Robert Penn Warren's novel, All The King's Men*** when I was in journalism school at East Texas State University in the mid 70s. I was moved by it and still quote lines that echo in my mind. None of the extensive documentary and historical special features on this disk seem to remember an earlier movie of the same name, and I'm now compelled to see that again. I'm sure it's not as darkly gritty as this, nor as complex. A lot of fine artists mixed up in this one, so it's easy to watch yet complex to understand.

Some movies age well. It's difficult to imagine a time when Logan's Run*/ was considered credible or intelligent. Old future sci fi comprises more contradictions and conundrums than time travel, which this movie is nowhere near as interesting as. Fanciful futures seem really old hat. Hard, too, to imagine that anyone anywhen considered the acting in this movie intelligible. Farah Fawcett plays a dumb blonde. Badly, of course, but remarkably badly. The "actors" (except Peter Ustinov), the plot, the dialog, the concepts, the director, the continuity, the story, the main set (a mall), the "future" are all lame. The only visual interests are the use of Fort Worth's Water Gardens as the secret underwater portal to The City and the circle dance to rebirth, which is actually death warmed over.

The King of Masks*** — heart-warming. good story. wonderful characters. odd, set in 1930s China. Interesting place and time, neat old man, ingenious little boy girl.

The United States government has a long and inglorious history with the Indians of America. After all the broken treaties and promises, what's a little injustice that keeps one Indian in jail forever? Incident at Oglala - The Leonard Peltier Story*** proves one more injustice against one more Indian. He didn't murder the two incredibly stupid FBI agents who crashed into the reservation guns blazing, but the government needed a scapegoat, so they fixed the evidence, threatened witnesses and convicted them an Indian. Big surprise.

I enjoyed Charlotte's Web*** when I saw it, but the more I think about it now, the less I appreciate it. I was raised on Poo, not spiders from farmland, so I didn't know the story, but it reminds me too much of those talking pig movies from a few years ago, and why are the birds (who weren't in E.B. White's book) portrayed as stupid when everybody knows crows are smart. Heart-smarming but less than the utterly wonderful I was expecting. Perhaps I should finally read the book.

Groundhog Day is a great movie, nearly perfect. 12:01*** has an essentially similar plot but less fascinating characters involving a shorter learning curve. Its recycling has a sci fi theme that's it's endearing, but it's not Groundhog Day. I dunno which came first.

I've seen strange movies. Generally like 'em best. Terry Gilliam is a favorite director. But. Phew! This one is hanging off the far edge of the gone world. Madness and truly deeply disturbing. I didn't even know it existed. Would have paid attention. Thought they wouldn't let him make any more movies for awhile. Easily see why this did not achieve wide theatric release. During and after, I felt separate from reality. Had to stop 26 minutes to go, twice, to remind myself I wasn't crazy. Not all that certain now. Affecting movie, this. I am afraid Tideland**** will be memorable nights I'd rather forget. Its madness is what makes it special, but as Gilliam prefaces, half the people who see this film won't like it. It's also funny in strange, twisted way. Funnier in hindsight.

Volver**** is the first Pedro Almodovar movie I've seen that translates everything, even the songs. There's always a pivotal moment when a song moves the plot, and I have often complained that they aren't translated. This one was. The women in this marvelous, gentle, sweet movie about murder and dead people coming back, look like real people, not the strange women Pedro used in the past. Even the Almodovar colors are toned down making the movie all the more vivid. Fine story, superb acting and actors, gorgeous filming. Not an envelope pusher like I usually award four asterisks to. Just a lovely, kind movie.

Somewhere perhaps a little lost among time travel movies, second-chance movies (like Sliding Door and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind) and self-reflex movies (like Adaptation and Being John Malkovich) is a yet to be defined sub sub genre wherein the plot doesn't just intertwine with another much crazier, zanier or fantastic version but actually interacts with a bunch of them. Stranger Than Fiction**** not only has that going for it, it has wonderfully inventive visual devices almost entirely unlike those projected on the background in Natural Born Killers, except that they also further the plot. Fanciful, fantastic, of by for and comprising literary fiction, memorable characters, great actors and acting. Dark, light, funny, smooth. Like Sunshine, I want to keep seeing it every couple of months for several years.

I'm a major fan of time travel stories and movies. I dig all the conundrums of then and now and how different movies treat them differently. Deja Vu**** is excellent, exciting, exacting. Intelligent, follows the rules and makes sense in both movie and human logic. I only noted one, small, nearly inconsequential continuity issue when one of the techs showed remarkable knowledge of New Orleans (shot there, and of course NO is an important player in it) streets, even though he just got there. Remarkably well written. Visually stimulating and its imaging style fits into the science of its fiction. All that and Denzel and Val Kilmer, too. Amusing that Jim Caviezel, who plays a major role in one of my all-time fave time-travel flicks, Frequency, is the bad guy here. I liked it so much I watched it twice, got more out of it the second through, and want to see it again. All aces.

The Visitation** was a spooky little film with a Christian attitude about a healer who comes to town, only he's the devil in disguise, only he's the abused son of a preacher, only... Not a terrible plot, just a mediocre execution, except it's spooky. A real B movie.

Lord of War***/ was a surprise. I was looking for a little Nicolas Cage adventure. What I got was a visually stimulating, deeply ironic comi-tragedy about running guns, yeah, but also about violence and love and family. I needed a B movie fix, and I got a much stronger experience. Laced with laugh-out-loud funny and deep, dark tragedy. Well enough acted, particularly well plotted and amazingly political. Until the cutesy trick ending that extended the anti-war, anti-gun message, but was ignored all the rules of story-telling and was really really stupid.

Another Julianne Moore movie, one she's in all the way through and she carries it — about an incompetent alcoholic boob played to distraction by Woody Harrelson and an entirely overcompensatingly pre-women's liberation 50s too-positive (or so it seems till near the end) mother who supports her ten kids by winning contests. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio*** is a bittersweet movie with large and small triumphant ups, depressing downs and a weepy ending.

The Killing*** was a complex heist flick seriously marred by my Netflix disk stopping short never to go again at just the crucial moment. I know what happened and mostly don't care. Okay for a early 60s flick but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it through, didn't ask Netflix to send me another copy.

I somehow managed to miss THX-1138**** in 1971. I would have loved it then as I love it now and still cannot imagine missing it first time around. So many subsequent films owe their all to copying from — homage to — this starling original view of the future. Every sci fi flick since then, including all those star wars, has ripped it off. I suppose I should mention this was George Lucas' first feature. A classic original. Amazing.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated*** is brilliant. A documentary, it's a good, solid story. Superbly plotted and edited. Very funny. An adventure with detectives and spying and revealing secrets. Has lots of sex and violence. It's fascinating, educational and entertaining. The deleted scenes are amazing.

It was difficult to believe the premise of Children of Man***, because I never understood why all those people were attacking our heroes and heroines. It still doesn't make any sense after I've seen the movie and all the Special Features. Turns out I would have had to read the newspapers on the wall in the kidnapping scene to learn it, and everything that happens is based on that missing knowledge, so it doesn't make any sense. The whole movie is a chase, but I rented it to see Julianne Moore, and she's only onscreen for fourteen minutes then gets killed off bloodily. And Rolling Stone said it was the Bladerunner for the 21st Century. But it's not. The concept is intriguing; the execution uncredible; the low-budget future design has been done before and better; and the plot is missing major chunks.

Production Value can all but be forgot in most DVDs. Even sappy heart smarmers like Eragon have remarkable high standards for the audio and visual portions of our programs. I (a bird photographer of some experience) had to notice that the people who put together Birds, Birds, Birds!: An Indoor Birdwatching Field Trip*** cared not a whit about focus in any of the video segments in this primarily audio program. Most of the still photographs were in focus, but barely. A pity with such colorful characters. It's always intriguing how different nationalities pronounce "universal" onomatopoetics, like "meow," which is strictly Estados Unitosian. In this presentation — it is not a movie — a woman gives American English verbalizations to bird songs, which luckily also occupy the soundtrack, though usually at less volume. Her voicings are traditional and how many of these birds came to be named, but they sound nothing like the bird noises presented, and I can't imagine remembering them. Of course, my audial memory sucks.

I did so want to like Eragon**. I love movies about dragons and wisdom and magic. Unfortunately, this was short on all the major ingredients, while still employing some superb actors, including Jeremy Irons. Just not superb in this rip off of every dragon, allied armies against evil magic, massive crusade movie ever made. Almost nothing original in this movie, about a stupid boy who becomes a hero, because... because... Well, there's no reason, really. He's an idiot and he stays an idiot and the movie lives happily ever after. Where the scriptwriters might have shown humanity, intelligence or wit, they didn't. Every chance they got.

The Prestige**/ was confusing. About magicians and their tricks, stealing from each other, and hating and murdering each other, and it goes on and on and never really gets anywhere.

Turns out much of the sweet country gospel music I cherish was written and first performed by A.P. Carter and the Carter Family. I knew who he was and some of what he did. Now I know most of the story and have had opportunity to hear even more of the songs, sung by the originals. The Carter Family - Will the Circle be Unbroken*** was an episode of PBS's American Experience, and looks like it. Old stills and motion of pitiful poor white children in battered black & white interspersed throughout and all that panning and zooming of innocuous still shots. But their music suffuses the one-hour program, and that makes it all right.

I thought I needed to know about Gram Parsons, mysterious, enigmatic, crazed, tied with Emmylu Harris and a lot of other women and musicians, etc. But again it's the music that kept me watching his life story till the whole crazy story of his burial and reburial and partial cremation in the desert that woke me up again. Lot of footage of Gram performing and words from enough famous and involved people to keep it complex and interesting. Gram Parsons - Fallen Angel***

The U.S. vs. John Lennon*** is a good movie about a fascinating character whom Nixon feared might turn the tide against him and the war. One of many such people, of course. Some of the best-known of whom speak in this film. The music, performances and historic film clips are wonderful and the revelations would be startling, if I didn't live through that period of official paranoia and catch my own little bits of it, myself.

I saw The Departed*** but got so confused when I couldn't distinguish Leonardo DiCaprio from that other not so young anymore actor who's in all the movies that I was lost through the first half of the movie. About two moles. One paid by the bad guys who's in the police, and the other, a good guy, posing as a gang member. Both tipping each other's bunches off at crucial moments. And lots of people getting killed. I hope it's better than I make it sound, but I'm not convinced. It's a gimmick.

Infamous*** came out just after that other movie about Truman Capote. It may be more honest and true to life, but it's not as good a movie and covers the same limited scope of his life, those same few years he was hooked into the Cold Blood killers.

Babel***/ was episodic like Crash, tying together gradually, more about obstinate stupidity than simple miscommunication. The kind of stupidity that just happens and the kind that is culturally reinforced. Cops assume everyone, even the innocent victims of crime, are criminals and treat them that way. Pop gives kids a gun and doesn't teach them safety, so they go off and kill somebody without quite meaning to. Stupidity, ever its own reward, accumulates through this sometimes grisly movie. Interesting enough to watch, always something happening, and it seems important and like it's going somewhere, although finding meaning in it is absurd.

I would like to have heard and seen Leonard Cohen sing his own songs in the tribute, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man****, but I could almost always hear his voice vibrating below, inside or behind the singers anyway. Some performances were amazing — Martha and Rufus Wainright separately and together and Antony, who brought tears he was so perfect. That it also comprised an Cohen biography, instersticed into the bridges of songs and between them, made it nearly complete.

By the end of the really long and slowly, moving, Ikiru****, I realized I'd seen this film at the University of Dallas in the middle 1960s. It was already a classic then. Initially, I resisted seeing it. So slow and such an alien culture, I put it off, and put it off. By then, the movie grabbed me in and hauled me off with it. The great anti-bureaucratic story of the last century. Marvelous characters and characterizations. It was the drunken wake near the end that brought it all together, and the hero's fellow bureaucrats figured out what happened, and what they assured themselves they would do about it, but we know in fact, they could never accomplish. Amazing movie in squarish black & white.

Wordplay*** was an entertaining documentary about crossword puzzlers, following the annual world championship competition. Interesting people, fascinating fascination for words. Much more interesting than it sounds.

I don't have cable, so much of the best of TV passes me by. I'm catching up with Firefly***, a dynamic, fun science fiction adventure romp through the supposed future, though it often more approximates Hopalong Casady and Roy Rogers plots and even employs horses to cross alien territories. But it's the characters that make this series. A motley band of individuals with great heart. More fun than fine sometimes, but fine fun often. It was over four years ago of this writing, but I miss in now.

In the same Cable TV vein — only this one hasn't yet been cancelled, yet, Dennis Leary's character-driven Rescue Me**/ at first seemed fascinating — following NY firemen after 9/11, then rolled quickly downhill into utter predictability. Perhaps irascible, but after two disks of six episodes and the pilot, I don't care anymore.

Another TV favorite from several years ago that I can't get on my five-station TV anymore is Gilmore Girls**/. I used to love it. Then I started re-watching where my reception had left off, and it drove me nuts. That much fast-talking repartee is grand fun once a week on my little screen (or every half-year or so with my sibs at family gatherings), but four or five or six episodes in rapid succession were too much — or too little. I might pick them up further into after I lost track of the Gilmore's seasons, but not for awhile, and then only one episode at a time. I only count TV shows as one movie, even if they go on forever.

Flags of Our Fathers**/ was a vast disappointment. Long, slow, grisly black and white, telling a story I'd seen too many times already, knew almost by heart, like an old movie I'd almost forgot, maybe should have.

Like a low-contrast black & white grandfather of Koyaanisqatsi, Man with the Movie Camera*** (1929) is long, tending toward the tedious with a repetitive sleep-inducing soundtrack, and it is not nearly as interesting to see than to talk about its importance. It's only an hour and eight minutes long, but I had to watch it in segments. It is more visually fascinating when it shows the man with the movie camera than what he filmed, and the editing is experimentally and annoyingly non-sequitur. It's an interesting enough look at the early years of movies while the syntax of film was still being invented. Documentary in content and context, it's a truly lurid portrait of "Modern Soviet Living," accomplishing its purpose to create a new language of film by being far enough ahead of the curve technically, but it lost its soul and most of its meaning in all the early/basic visual gimmicks, and now it's more dated than historic.

The best thing about Frazetta*** is his art, by the hundreds, filling the frames of this documentary, and it's nice to see him and listen to him talk about his life, his family and his art — and even watch him make art. His art surpassed the supposed limitations of illustration in the 1950s and reinvented it since, but this movie never makes the jump. Although the content is fascinating, the movie itself is gimmicky and hokey.

I wouldn't recommend Oldboy**** to anyone. Twistiest plot I've ever encountered. Strange, beyond quirk, well into crazy. Violent. Vicious. Mean-spirited. Evil. That's the bad guy. Our hero sporadically engages in much of the same, is confused, controlled, loses his edge near the end, goes bonkers himself. Then lives happily ever after. From Sixth Sense we learned that movies need obey their own rules. This movie makes up the truth as it goes along, so we never have any basis of reality. It comprises an experience, not any sort of reality.

Winter Passing***// is gentle, and kind. The characters mostly lovable. The lead is Ed Harris, but the star is probably Zooey Deschanel, and she's not entirely lovable but gets there. Three and two halves asterisks doesn't quite make four stars, because this is not innovative in any of the filmic directions. But it has heart.

I thought Serenity***/ was going to be a TV show. I don't have cable, or I'd probably waste all my time watching it. But I misread Netflix blurbs enough to get it wrong about 20% of the time. I knew it was science fiction, and that a lot of people thought well of it. I did, too. The central premise, the big secret, doesn't hold enough water, but the action is exciting, the sci and the fi is good enough and very good, and the characters are outstanding and lovable. I'd still like to see the next installment, but I'll settle for Firefly that actually was a TV show.

Little Miss Sunshine*** is pleasant, fun, alternating silly and serious, even ironic, interesting, not exactly precisely plotted, but it does have some intriguing swerves, if not exactly twists, and even employs interesting characters with some development and a bunch of famous actors. But not hardly the best movie of last year.

X-3, The Last Stand**/ (Oh God, we can only hope) is a sappy, eminently predictable mishmash of tired special effects, lame characterizations and a monumentally goofy soundtrack. The same old, essentially stupid, Good vs. Bad idiocy one more time with not that much verve. It was fun, but...

The White Countess***/ is a lilting genius of a gentle, romantic film involving serious quirk, only occasionally devolving into predictability — about imagination, blindness and, peripherally, race; idealistic freedom vs. world domination, and refuge, set in Shanghai shortly before and during the Japanese Invasion.

Like every other Hollywoodish movie involving famous — or infamous — Black people, Idi & The White Kid somehow had to be made with a white star. Hardly matters that the White kid plays a stupid, naive fool, he still gets more screen time and plot involvement than the remarkably fine actor Forest Whittaker. Not for nothing that the inane, grinning White Kid didn't get nominated. The Last King of Scotland**/ is an over-dramatic (the music at the end is truly stupid) film documenting the ineptitude of White People verses the true, but inspired insanity of one Black man. Interesting but not notable.

I like Keanu Reeves in science fiction. I adore Richard Linkletter's peculiar variety of kinoscopic animation. And Philip K Dick is god. So A Scanner Darkly**** was amazing to this humble reviewer. Inventive, thought-provoking, weird, funny, dark, intellectual, superbly acted, marvelously rendered. I still watch Linkletter's initial experiment, Waking Life, from time to time. I know they take years to make, but I am waiting eagerly for the next one.

MirrorMask**** is a marvelous fantasy, aimed at children but more in there for adults. It blends drawings and computer-generated animation with actors in a manner and style I'd not seen before or since. Fun, funny, marvelously inventive. Unique.

The Conformist***/ was sometimes beautiful. Hauntingly almost surrealist in look. The story, however, was depressing, almost sad, more for my dislike of the title character, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant superbly, than the story. I stayed angry with the story but relented for those marvelous visual scenes that only almost made up for the rest. Depressing. Amazing editing and story-telling, especially for 1970, but Bernardo Bertolucci was like that.

Far from being "the best spy movie ever," The Good Shepherd** was long, slow, tedious and predictable. It was about style more than telling a story, and lame at that. The style was all that held up.

Just before, we'd seen The Black Dahlia**. The first time for that one, but I'd seen many Black Dahlias before, and any of them were better than this. All style, lousy acting, stupid screenplay. A waste of time, but stylish.

Happily, I did not recognize the historical importance of The New World***/ until near the end, when I finally recognized his name. I must never have heard hers, or surely I would have snapped to that. It's an unfamiliar take on very familiar history, I suppose. But more than that, it's mystical, an achievement few works achieve. And many try. Beautiful, spiritual, realistic, fascinating. A long, slow romance with few met expectations.

Transamerica*** is a buddy pic, a road pic and a transsexual journey, although I never believed the man about to become a woman (played by a woman) was ready to transgenerize. Half the plot depends on her not telling the kid (who is an obviously fatherless and parent-less wild child) she's his father. She has a terrible mom, whom they visit on the way trans America, so she/he never had a good role model to peg her new femininity on, and she doesn't do it well, ever. But the movie never gets maudlin, and there's no real character development, just acceptance. So the movie is real on several levels, just never enough.

Who Killed the Electric Car*** tells the truth and tells it visually. Which is an apt description of another leftist plot movie, An Inconvenient Truth***, which proves Al Gore isn't nearly as wooden as he used to be. Why couldn't he be this sma