Movies Reviewed

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

I've reviewed 1,296 movies here so far. Through 2006 are linked via the alpha links above. Since 2007 are below, in the usual reverse order. Someday, I'll put these there, too. Maybe.

Watching and thinking about movies restarts my creativity and lets my mind wander from art, birds and life. I try to write about them quickly, maybe coherently, before I forget. With luck these reviews are different. I change the words and opinions sometimes.

In 2006, I reviewed 89; 127 in 2007; 106 in 2008 121 in 2009, and so far in 2010, I've seen 8. Gonna have to spend the time alphabetizing all those below. Finally.

I've finally begun to take movies off the bottom of this page and post them on the alphabetical pages. Only took me two years for some of them, and I've only got 54 more scroll pages to go. Maybe I'll finish by next century.

2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009

Not exactly a time-travel movie, but with many similarities, Lost in Austen***/ follows a big fan of Jane Austen's through a doorway that only sometimes works to the very place Austen wrote about in that book. Only the 'real' characters are different from the Austen wrote about them, and they have different motives, which our heroine stirs then rearranges the way she remembers from rereading the book since she was a child. Amusing, endearing, goofy, entertaining and involving. Slightly time-travelish.

Beautiful Losers***/ is an art-umentary about a community of San Francisco artists who did what they wanted and needed, coalesced into a community, got famous, got even better, did amazing things, went places, made livings and, as far as we can tell, lived happily ever after. Amazing when that happens. Nice to see that it is possible.

Sometime during my Freshman year of college, I realized that I'd missed Dr. Seuss. Oh, I'd got plenty of Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore, and even some of Christopher Robin, but I'd missed a lot of everybody else's childhoods, so instead of The Iliad and the Odyssey, I caught up with Alice and Wonderland and the Looking Glass and every other childhood wonder I'd heard of but never quite discovered myself. I felt like that when I discovered Tim Burton's Coraline***/, imperfect though it was. Seems like the rest of my life since Freshman English, I've been catching up. Maybe that's why all these movies ...

Fetching Cody*** just barely makes it as a time-travel movie. Our hero, such as he is, does travel in time and space on an old chair festooned with Christmas lights that aren't plugged in, and he repeatedly goes back in time and space to try to right the wrong he perceived about his beloved, but — unlike any other time-travel flick I've ever seen, he mostly just screws it up. Over and over. Probably because he's just too stupid, possibly because the medium (time-travel) is essentially elastic. But he keeps trying. Until the end when he doesn't anymore. Not quite quirky. Not exactly happily ever after. More just an effort.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox*** is not really fantastic, but it was mildly entertaining, fairly smart, if not all the way to intelligent and it was often funny and usually fun.

Now, here's another not-a-time-travel movie billed as one, but it's more like a dream sequence or a go back and do over movie. This time with likable characters and mostly intelligent story and script. With Kathleen Turner and Nicholas Cage (the 1986 versions), some 50s cars and music and ideas. Lilting, gentle and fun. Peggy Sue Got Married***/.

I avoided this movie for more than two years till tonight, when I needed a time-travel flick. In it Meg Ryan plays a snot, her brother a boob, and Hugh Jack man a duke wrenched unceremoniously from a prior century to contemporary New York. If Meg had more charm I might have begun to like this one earlier, but she didn't until near the end, and while ya gotta admire a little character development, Meg turns the corners so fast nobody can believe the hogwash. Still, it's an almost charming little movie about a woman who probably still doesn't believe, but she's back there now, and who cares? Kate & Leopold**. Not the worst time-travel flick ever. In fact, almost pleasant but not very smart, and it ignores logic and any of the enigmas of traveling in time.

I was trying to remember why I rented Surveillance***/ when David Lynch's name scrolled up the screen. Oh, one of those. And it was. We think it's going to be small-town psycho cops getting their comeuppance, and it is, but there's so much more. More gory than five episodes of Criminal Minds, affecting in ways I'd rather not recount, but once you know David Lynch did it, don't need much else.
 

I've Loved You So Long**** is a deeply moving, long, slow, often subtle movie about a woman who spent fifteen years in jail for murdering her child and has come to live with her sister. Kristin Scott Thomas is amazing. The English dubbing less so, and it's always fun to see the subtitles and hear quite different dubs, but this is an emotional and affecting film. Smart, too.

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

It seems a simple thing to design an object. What's it for? Who uses it? Asking the simple questions almost designs it. But there's more. Much more. Objectified***/ gets at the rest of the story. Superbly. With good design throughout.

Paycheck** is another really stupid Ben Affleck movie with bad sci and low fi. Insipid car chases, mediocre love story and a bunch of kill-crazy angry bad guys who want to rule the world. Truly lame.

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

I stopped that last review in mid-sentence, and now I can barely remember the movie it's been so long. I've just had the pleasure to watch Reign Over Me***/ in which Adam Sandler is a man who lost his family in the World Trade Center disaster, and he does not want to remember. Then his old college friend Don Cheadle befriends and helps him and himself become human again, and Liv Taylor and a couple other people see through all the crazy bullshit to find the human in there. Bit of a weeper, but mellow and smart..

Fritz Lang's M from 1931 is a compelling story that belies its age and introduces many of what we now consider 'contemporary' themes. Well acted and scripted, it's a moving picture of a stage play that's amazing.

Charlie Bartlett*** is a sweet little weeper with solid story, colorful characters, humanly funny dialog and actual plot progression without going overboard on the smarm. Funny and smart and not just for teens. Oh, Charlie is a natural born shrink who gets to practice his craft on a whole high school from the dumb guy all the way up to the principal.

The Double Life of Veronique***** tells the lush visual story of two identical women but largely unaware of the other selves. It is a subtle love story. The logic of it is internal, self-reflexive and mostly visual, though there are words, and they are important also. There are erotic scenes and nudity as well. Veronique is beautiful, nearly angelic. The music is stunning. The story tells itself. The special effects are real. It is easily and uniquely one of the best movies I have ever experienced. Delicious.

Heaven**** is a quiet, gentle movie about corruption, murder, terrorism, family and true love. A love story within a credible escape. It is about redemption and is gloriously acted by Cate Blanchett and Giovani Ribisi with many, exquisite visual transition and an ascension.

I thought I'd seen a movie called Limbo***/ before, but not, apparently, this particular limbo. Alaska, a singer, her estranged daughter and her new boyfriend, a former fisherman with nightmares but not much discernable past, go on what they perceive as a pleasure cruise with his half-brother, only the half-brother is also only half-real, gets murdered, their boat's stolen, and they are hunted, but not found, leaving them on a cold island where they find what food they can and the daughter discovers another, long-ago daughter's diary and reads a little of it each night until help, if that's what it is, comes. The ending is whatever we think it is. We learn that the singer's daughter made most of the diary up, and the end just stops. Entertaining, engrossing, interesting, genuinely human, the diary stories are fascinating, the acting excellent, as is the story and credible characters.

Sunshine Cleaning*** was an almost gruesome charmer, intelligent and humanly humorous, building to a functional family ending that satisfied without bowing to Hollywood hokum

The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes***, a documentary about Garrison Keiler and his Prairie Home Companion radio show I've been listening to for more than three decades, is considerably more to the point of the show than Altman's fictionalized recreation, also called A Prairie Home Companion. This one's true and follows Keillor as he does what he's been doing all these decades, entertaining and showing other gently creative souls on his radio revue. I saw him do one of his shows once, and this was far more revealing — and entertaining.
 

I've watched two documentary movies about two of science fiction's best writers in the last two weeks. In both, the hero/protagonist has seemed loony tunes crazy over the edge bonkers. Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth*** presents one of America's greatest writers being his own highly individualized and curmudgeonly old overweight guy both wickedly smart and goofily stupid in so many ways.

Philip K. Dick: The Penultimate Truth**/ is constructed as a secret government agency's paranoid investigation of whom we learn from countless talking heads in his life actually was a paranoid schizophrenic, who just happened to be one of America's best and most fascinating writers.

There's a commonality about both movies that's striking. The Harlan Ellison movie is better, but they're both marginal. Unless you know who these guys are, you'll probably not be interested in learning what they tell us. I'm a fan of both, even more of a fan of Ellison now I've seen how uniquely individualist he is, less of Dick, now that I see how paranoid and crazy he was, but I'm still a major fan of both their fiction and will continue a course of serious study of both their books.

Not to find out more about their authors, but to enjoy more of the books. What I've read so far was thrilling. I'll probably watch every movie they've been associated with, too.
 

We saw Clive Owen and some precocious kid actors and of course a couple of love interests, one dying, then dead, but still very present in The Boys Are Back***/ between short lines of less-than-famous (I fit right in) movie reviewers at the Angelika last night. Interesting experience — as in the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Behind us, in seats marked with names we'd never heard of, were Mr. Wrinkles and the Bloated Sailor, whose innards gurgled and sporked loudly through the movie.

You'd think movie reviewers would know not to get crinkle-wrapped candy at a flick they're reviewing. The guy whose stomach was afire loudly flipped pages — I know he wrote at least five that I heard turned — during the film. Anna could hear him scribbling. Must be one of those reviewers who have to tell you every turn of the story. Like you need to know much more than I usually tell in my much shorter than this thesis of a movie experience review.

I assume the big-name reviewers got their own screening some time ago.

I remember those when I published Dallas NOTES from the Underground and Hooka in the early 70s, when we got ace treatment in the downtown movie row. Usually a dozen or dozen-and-a-half bigger-than-life, very recognizable reviewers squashed in comfy seats in a small viewing room — a fabulous way to see a movie. All present intelligent enough not to wrinkle candy wrappers or splorch out loud during the playing.

I assumed they were less-than reviewers in our theatre with us last night, because all their seats were on the outside aisle, but maybe that's so they could leave early before the movie was over, as they all did, to escape the crowd or offer pithy one-liners to the guys with clipboards just outside the theatre. We enjoyed that sport, also.

The movie's about loss and gain as the wild and nearly rule-less single-father family with one cute kid joins briefly, then, well you gotta see the movie, the other — whose acting smolders brilliantly — from the former wife. And the father and the kids and everybody else involved's journey for a couple important weeks in their transition. Well written, solid story, often humanly hilarious with exquisite trip scenes — transitional moments of great filmic beauty, only obviously we-knew-exactly-what-was-gonna-happen just once near the end, that proves the title and tells the story.

Nice flick. I'd like to rent it later on, hear all the dialog, back up for stuff I missed or was mumbled, without the added soundtracks from Mr. Wrinkle and The Splorch.

 

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

Trumbo*** is a documentary about writer Dalton Trumbo whose movie credits would startle and amaze you. They did me. But then, so would his life. I had hoped to learn more about him, but at first thought this movie centered too much on his years on Hollywood's Blacklist. Then, gradually, I began to understand that by telling what he did, and what he wrote — including his letters acted by actors you will recognize — I have learned deep about him. Amazing man, superb writer and fighter against prevailing idiocies.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye***/ lets the master of the Decisive Moment tell his own stories, often about his photographs, many of which are shown. It is outstanding because it is his story while he's still alive. Always amazing photographs, many just shown and many others shown and told. It is a lovely movie. I didn't know he was in so many places at so many times.

Panic***/ is a humanely funny yet deadly serious movie about a murderer for hire (William H. Macy) who wants to quit the business. And other complications. Lotta famous actors. Superb screenplay. Everybody's believable. The funny's only in tiny details. The serious is everywhere else.

The Man Who Knew Too Much***/ (1934) was so much better than the other Alfred Hitchcock movied I'd watched a little of. Enough to know that despite it was by The Master, he wasn't very good at it that time. Like he ignored a lot of stupidity in the story and in the acting and in the movement and flow and humanity of it. Foreign Correspondent** (1940) was stupid and dated. Really stupid. Yet six years earlier he'd made a timeless masterpiece. Well, sorta a masterpiece. A really good movie.

Alien Visitor***/ is a much-improved rehash of a somewhat similar, also Australian film I saw months or years ago by some of the Koyanaskotzi people. This is better, more technologically original, with a much better story. A love story in many of the usual ways, but it is about saving the earth and the stars. Less beautiful in some ways than that other movie, but with a better, more filmic story. Moving, serious, real while involving techniques that aren't. Quite good really.

Mona Lisa***/ has Bob Hoskins and Michael Caine in a twisted little love story between two women and a lot of criminal guys. He thinks he's in love, and she thinks she can save her, and there's a lot of confusion between, with Nat King Cole singing the theme song. Violent, mean, but about love in several important ways, some of which are twisted, some cool.

The Quiet Earth**/ was probably a better book. The movie, an inexpensive Aussie sci-fi flick, didn't really make that much sense. The idea — there's always an idea in science fiction. Too often it's all there is. Like this one — is that the three people on earth who were dying when it happened, were the only three left afterwards. The only people still on earth. Everybody else disappeared when it happened. Like the Neutron Bomb or something. Everything else was still there. All the buildings, cars, machines, products. Stuff still there but all the people except these three, gone. A threesome, almost a little love story a couple times. A little bit of intrigue but not much action. Interesting at the end, but not much cumulative, except visually.

I am continuing my art education, especially of my beloved Impressionists, by viewing The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Impressionism and Post Impressionists***/ about Auguste Renoir's Dance at the Moulin De La Galette, Vincent van Gogh's The Sunflowers and Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Despite minor issues of the volume rising and falling without reason, this series is amazing for its scholarship and historical understandings.

Despite its dreadful reproduction of her work, which are sometimes even cropped and the narrator's mispronunciations and hackneyed text, Great Women Artists: Georgia O'Keefe**/ shows an intelligent, if stilted history of her life and work. Presented in the elderly, short rectangular format of early television, with no talking heads and few back stories or images beyond her own and old black & whites of landscapes and a few people, all narrated by a sonorous voiced male reading a script, it's still interesting and presented in chronological order, so we begin to understand the progress of her career.  45 minutes long.

Just Another Love Story**** is anything but. Norse film about a man who assumes the identify of another man to comfort a woman, leaving his wife and children behind in the mists of memory. The truth of this-trans identity story is told in lies, and it is believed and eventually understood.

This movie is nothing like what I expected a movie about Phillip Glass to be or about. Though of course I never thought about it enough to have any ideas of what to expect. Years ago I saw 32 short films about Glenn Gould, and I don't remember movies.

I don't remember dialog — except maybe fragments — and I don't remember plots, but I remember sensations, feelings. And this movie reminds me of those in that one. I'm sure it's entirely different with hardly any analogs, but there's that feeling back there somewhere that's operative.

From almost the first moments, this one is touching. It is human, and it's got a lot to do with art, but more than just that Chuck Close is one of Phillip's lifetime best friends. All the way through it phillip talks about the creative process. Disparagingly much of the time. It's real. It's human. I kept feeling myself smiling big. It's funny. It's fun. It's real. I don't "like" his music, unless I don't know it's his music, then I love it.

The film is beautifully and unobtrusively shot. we are aware there's a camera there and sometimes we even see it. The composition is elegant. The talking heads are real. Everything is. All the way through Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Part***/, I was excited to be hearing it, watching it, feeling.

 

I seem to be in a cheap sci-fi mode these days, although this one probably cost a pretty penny. Knowing***, like any mediocre Nick Cage flick these years, is a little goofy, a lot of action that doesn't really go anywhere, some hyper hysterics with a dollop or more of science and a little religion. Strange enough bedfellows. This is an end of the world scenario that can only go one where. Depressing but entertaining and more than a little depressing.

I've been waiting for Push*** a long time. It's the only sci-fi flick that other watchers have deemed good enough and it got out on DVD today or yesterday or last week. All the way through this slam-bam violence psy thriller I've had the feeling this is like the pilot for a series. Now I'm sure of it. Oh well. Some fascinating idea, some really stupid ones. All messed together with high action, lots of murder and mayhem.

Another edition of The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Masterpieces of Sculpture***/ brings us, again, three major works presented in history, the history of their materials and need, art criticism the people who initially and subsequently encountered it, in all its kitch and glory — Michelangelo's David, Edgar Degas' Little Dancer and Rodin's The Kiss. Fascinating and involving.

The Great Robot Race*** has been in my Netflix Queue for a couple years. Every time it made it near the top, I'd put other movies in front and push it down the list again. I thought I knew I wanted to watch it, but ya just never know for sure till you see it, then it's too late. I liked it. It was exciting and the majorly funded giant team did not win. Winning involved a robot-driven (no remote control or human intercession) 72 miles through the desert and mountains. A remarkable feat for vehicles that operate themselves, and a decent 'movie.'

Not sure how The Blue Planet: Tidal Seas/Coasts*** can be counted as a movie. It's just one-hour long, coincidentally the length of a BBC show, but it tells a story, there are a variety of characters interacting within it, and there's a definite plot. Eat and be eaten. I especially liked the three bits when birds enter the scene, but it's pleasant and educational.

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

Butterfly***/ begins as a coming of age movie about two brothers and their family in Spain just before the Spanish Civil War, and it's a joy, with poignant moments and real friendship with the younger boy's teacher, then it's sad to watch the family turn against the Republicans to get along as the fascists take over. Good movie about decisions and moments that last and lying to protect themselves.

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

In the Electric Mist*** is Tommy Lee Jones in the role he usually plays, this time a near New Orleans cop following a variety of clues leading to locals. Netflix reviewers didn't like it all that much, but I did. Dark, bayou thriller with Tommy Lee, Peter Sarsgaard, Mary Steenburgen, Ned Beaty, John Goodman, Levon Helm and some pretty scenery and vicious violence and seedy characters. What more could anyone want?

I wanted to see Up***/ in 3-D, even though I was cross-eyed as a kid, and my eyes still don't usually work together. The 3-D was okay, since I apparently missed most of it, but the glasses took about about half the light, so I kept looking over them at the fuzzy screen, so now I have to see it again in un 3-D. I'll probably wait for the Blue-ray for that. The movie was several kinds of wonderful, a little slower, maybe more adultish than most of Pixars, but there was always marvelous little touches.

If it weren't so — odd, bizarre, full-tilt-boogie over the edge, movie maddness, mixing the flickering of sense with our perceptions of, it would be amazing. Maybe it is amazing. Lots of self-reflexive film and video gimmicks, plenty to watch and wonder about. Major good actors. Anthony Hopkins is all through it, wrote it, stars in it, if you can call it that, composed and played music, and he's usually more than, this time not quite, enough, but Christian Slater is too much. Visually strange with confusing continuity. 35 years ago, it woulda been a major LSD movie. Maybe it still is. Confusing being in a movie, making one and reality, as if that had anything to do with, but few of those obtain. Another psychotic breakdown, Slipstream***/, is a visual treat.

Three shorts comprise The Nines**** but I didn't figure that out till later, what with recurring and sometimes self-aware characters and self-reflexive plots smudging through each other, and I'm probably going to have to watch it a couple more times to strip out the separate plots. Heartwarming, strange and weird, this movie plays with itself, and it's a joy to watch.

Two little movies. The Same River Twice*** about a float trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, then, unfortunately, those same people as they'd grown up, which all of them did not, thankfully, that had too little of the river and too much as interrelated adults, although there were poignant moments on the adult side, not so much as the naked young adults on the river. But what I always wanted was more time on the river.

And Look Both Ways***/, one of those serendipitous intersections of a bunch of people through their lives along the route of a transit railroad. Individual lives with unplanned crossings into and around each other, several of them love stories with different endings and one main one happily. People ricocheting off each other in various states of grace or not, then everybody denoues toward the end, together in the rain. All interspersed with generous but momentary flashes of annimation that fits, that are revealing of inner fears and greater joys.

Robot Stories*** were only four, counting the extra short short about a mouse, adding to an hour and a half, and they were well acted, interesting in the exploration of humanness and robotness. Nice mix. Lots of human touches. I smiled often.

I read it in college, and like much I read there, I had not near enough comprehension what was happening. I remember the bravery and bravado, the songs and the monsters. Grendel and his arm, his terrible mother and maybe even the dragon. The makers of this story stayed unsubtle through most of it. Plenty battles and violence. At the end, they threw it back in, and of course, I missed it, even though I played it through twice at 1/8 speed. Just didn't recognize the guy without a costume. This many characters, hard to tell them apart. The main character, the animation, is not quite Pixar. Hair's still stiff, faces, too. Not subtle enough to be judged human. The receptors to reanimate the actors needed higher res. Hardly the best shortcut to vivification. All in all, though, a great story, and a good-enough movie. Beowulf***.

The Secrets***/ is poignant, intelligent and romantic, all in ways that twist and turn in grace and healing, with difficulty through. It's a weeper, but a joyous one, about personal liberation.

I am delighting in the stories around and about masterpieces of modern paintings, first Manet's Le Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe, then James Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother, the title of which the Netflix jacket entirely misses, and Edvard Munch's The Scream. Each is explained in high and low art terms, often with kitsch of it and art critics' responses. Thoroughly fascinating, I'm looking forward to more. The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Masterpieces 1851 to 1900***/.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain*** is bizarre yet visually fascinating and tedious at the same time. It has its points, but by the end of that many strange scenes, I didn't care but was glad to have lived through it.

The Girl in the Cafe***/ follows a chance meeting between two extraordinarily shy people, into friendship, gradual, halting romance and a chance to change the world. Superb acting. Deeply intelligent script. Decent scenery, but most of it's interior.

Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino***/ is a solid story with rich characters and gritty realism, and a nice, heart-warming twist at the end that will shock.

Tekkonkinkreet**** is amazing. Since I've been renting only four-star movies on Netflix, I've been a much happier viewer. Except TV shows, which get too much boost from idiots who love them there. I'd slid into a slump of anime boredom. Till this. This is so wonderful old dead Mr. Disney's turning over in his grave. Superb characterizations, color, story and pictures. Incredibly intelligent and intuitive story, full of spirit and inspiration.

Normally I hate Nazi films. When I was much younger, I loved Steve McQueen motorcycling over the barbed wire fence in some stalag, but not it gets to me. The Boy in the Striped Pajamamas*** snuck though my radar, and I watched it in one sitting. It's affecting and scary and strongly family without giving up its fierce moral. Good performances, ideal cinnema for the story.

Tell No One***/ tells a long winding story of love and guilt and seething crime. Tells it well and anything but straight-forward. Superbly put together. Amazing acting. Mysterious.

I only give four asterisks to movies I think are genius, that push the envelope of this art form, that do new things in new ways. Wit**** fits all those categories. Then some. Told in soliloquy, it involves cancer and the poetry of John Donne, but it is not about that. It is about death and Death. Wit is more than sarcasm and well beyond irony, it is the ability to perceive and express truth, in poetry, in life and in death. Emma Thompson stars, and she is superb. Mike Nichols directs, and is even more so. Smart. Surprising. Eloquent. Beautiful. Every movement means something; every moment is important.

Goya, Crazy Like a Genius***/ is remarkable for showing us Goya while an only mildy egomaniacal critic tells the great painter's many stories. Darned few talking heads. More than anything else we see Goya's works, in detail, in most of their glory and in chronological order. Not so much a cinnematic masterpiece, but a story very well told and profusely illustrated.

As if offing yourself and ending up in this movie weren't quirky enough, Wristcutters: A Love Story***/ has Tom Waits running a camp for wayward boys and girls. It's a road and a buddy movie with dark, desiccated humor, mostly pleasant and always interesting characters. Not a happy place but not hell, either.

Revolutionary Road*** is about quiet and noisy desperation. It's a character study of a marriage gone wrong. He's a tyrant, and she lives in fantasy. Neither has a notion of who they really are or who is the person they married. The title is the street they live on.

After a really bad artshow today, I watched Alice Neel***/ and got to see her wonderful portraits that showed real people not just posing for her, but being for her and for the painting. Gives me joy where despair was settling in. Nice to meet the lady, too, well past she's dead. Impressive gathering of her and her treasures. Maybe a tad too much of talking heads, but always a treat to go back to her work.

M. Night Shyamalan having a movie makes it worth my while to see it. The Happening***/ may not be an important entry into his body of stories brought to film. It's no Sixth Sense, for example. Maybe more on a par with The Villiage, which I liked. But I'm glad I saw it. I was angry before I saw it, and its scariness calmed me. It's spooky like the best spookies spook. A little Night of the Living Dead, the first one, that I laughed out loud at when I saw it on LSD so many years ago, inspiring the wrath of fellow movie-watchers. The Happening could be laughed through. That would make sense, and ya wouldn't even need the acid.

It seems only fair that Bill Maher's title for this flick is Religulous**. It is riddiculous, but it's also mean-spirited. Religions probably are, too, but an insipid and mean movie about it proves few points.

Love in the Time of Cholera***/ is a big movie, maybe not in the sense of Hollywood's latest big movie, but in the sense of the lives it concerns. There's lots of those. And the story is loved the world over, so it's big there, too. It's a long-term romance. A love that lasts nearly lifetimes. The movie is not as poetic as the novel, and I missed that. But it has its own filmic poetry that is reassuring, if not empowering.

Starting Out in the Evening***/ is about an old man who was once a literary lion who's been writing the same novel for the last ten years when a young woman who hopes to become a respected literary critic chooses to write her thesis about him. Lovely, gentle, poignant and loving.

A black-out drunk played by Albert Finney dearly loves and viciously hates his estranged wife, played by Jacqueline Bisset, then she comes back to him in Cuernavaca, and he goes to a fortune teller but ignores her advice and they both die, he by evil Mexicans, she by bumping into a horse. Under the Volcano**

I knew Jumper***/ wasn't going to be great, and it has plot holes the size of Gibraltar. Either nobody could figure how to bridge them, or with so much else physical absurdity going on, nobody noticed or cared. I remember local film critic Philip Wunch saying he didn't like the movie Stargate because the story was improbable. When you're talking — or movieing — teleportation, you know it's going to be a little different. So we got teenaged angst, puppy love that never gets much beyond that, and a lot of action with Samuel L. Jackson and other paladins running around murdering jumpers, so the action gets high-powered, and to a limited but unpredictable extent, smart. But it's wild, mostly true to the premise, fast and exciting fun.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall* was too stupid to watch all the way through, and I'd been looking forward to it for months.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button**** is a time travel movie of the first order. A beautiful, poetic movie. Not a little movie, one with grandeur and scope. Individualist, independent and head-strong people making their way through life, one way or the other. Beautifully filmed, with many knowing visual and story touches.

The Lookout*** is another movie about a damaged human being who gets better, figures some stuff out but doesn't know everything he needs to yet. He has traumatic brain damage he caused himself, killing two friends and breaking major parts of another. In the pursuit of beauty, engaging in stupidity. We get flash backs later. He gets involved with rough people, thinks he's tough, too, then remembers again and ... Well, ya gotta see the movie. Nice but not fabulous, unless you have such a brain injury, then either you will be devoted to this movie or you won't quite understand. It's a heist flick and a buddy movie, and a couple other things.

I seem to have forgot the last four movies. Oh, well.

Kabluey***/ has major quirk and, at the beginning at least, thoroughly despicable and unlikable characters, who, by the end, are all hunky-dory again. The progress between is strange, unlikely and difficult, but the ending is happy, even if it doesn't make all the sense it might or should.

Orson Welles' F for Fake: Disk 1: The Film***/ is a film-watcher's hoot. The Master toys with his and our medium in a variety of stylish and sometimes silly and dated manners, but the whole of it, like that old Kris Kristofferson song is "... He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. Takin' every wrong direction on his lonely way back home." That might have been about Ramblin' Jack Elliot, or Orson Welles. This mockumentary takes certain liberties with the truth, but at its heart it's about charlatans, and having Orson slide through it like a Don Quixote is marvelous theatre. I can only imagine Disk 2 will be a disappointment, but I'll let it sift up to the top of my NetFlix Queue, and see. Eventually.

Dragonslayer** is lame and if I'd watched it in real time I could say enjoyable, but only that at 4X, and better 8X.

When Ebert was still on TV and he said a movie was good, I'd go and always have a good time. Now he's not anymore, I'm traveling on luck and hapinstance. I read the reviews on NetFlix, very rarely other places. I haven't found a new, single reviewer I trust. I had no idea what this film was about. Like most people who saw it, we figured it out as we went along. Nice to never know what's happening next. Pacing was perfect. Characters deep and real. The plot amazing. The story intelligent and emotional. Several times through it's a weeper. Something can't be summed in a few words. We have to get involved into the story, the characters, the plan. The Fall****

Inkheart*** is almost wonderful. The story is stellar, but the producers, directors, scriptwriters, etc. never really gave Cornelia Funke's original children's story a chance. Brandon Frazier sleep walks through it like he usually does. Helen Mirren (!) is dreadful — I kept wondering, is that just somebody who looks like her? Several characters almost bring the movie to life, but it never happens. Entertaining about half the time, but there's always something missing. Spirit. Joy. Intelligence?

I still think I have to see every time travel movie out there. Timecrimes*** is another one. A lot on the grisly side as if every choice was to get the hero/protagonist a litle more bruised and bloody. It works. Then it works again. The time condundra that makes a time-travel movie what it is, and may be the only way to prove it, keep piling up. After several iterations, we kinda side with our hero, but ...

Roman Polasnki - Wanted and Desire** and Rest in Pieces - A Portrait of Joe Coleman** are two guys who make art that sets our minds on edges, both of whose personal lives are as jarring as their art, and neither of whose first-person-singular information I care to digest. I got the Polasnki thinking it was one of his movies, and those I'd see in a flash, no waiting, no considering, just watch it and be amazed. Coleman's probably as much a part of his art as Polanski is, but I don't much care.

The Hulk**/ — Nothing exceeds like excess.

I'm probably one of the last people on the planet who haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire***/ but it was fun, intelligent and I'm sorry I didn't see it sooner.

Flawless***/ is a superb, new, different heist flick. With Michael Caine and Demi Moore. There were twinkling moments when I liked him, but only at the end did I like her, at all. Odd to have a film with a thoroughly unlikeable main character/heros.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona*** wants very much to be a madcap romantic semi-foreign film, but as realistic as the possibilities are, the choices only disappoint. Nice try, Woody.

I had low expectations of Rachel's Getting Married**** hoping it would be a flaky comedy, but a lot of it's not funny. It is, instead, human and real. The music is noticeable and here that is a good thing, in ways it is about music, so sound co-stars in this very believable and entertaining movie about real family values.

I've just finished watching the latest version of Horton Hears a Who*** and missed the original that was all verse without any snide 21st Century references. Guess I'll have to go back into history and grab an earlier version with all the rhyming and silliness and none of the mean stupidity. I read Seuss in college and loved him, but never as much as I loved Poo when Poo was new and was only available at book stores, and even I know the good doctor spelled it Hoo.

My main degree's in English Lit, but I didn't have any firm grip on who Walt Whitman was, so I watched American Experience: Walt Whitman*** and am wiser for it. He is or he is not one of the great American poets, but this two-hour documentary is one of the better of those, and the images mix free form from then to now, and some of the moving images chosen to help tell his story are amazing. It has few of the obnoxious cliches of so many PBS documentaries and invents a few of its own.

We saw Frost/Nixon some time ago. Now, I've finally seen The Great Equivocator. They called Mr. Clinton "Slick Willie," and he was, but nobody's got that down like The Great Slime Ball that is Nixon, although sometimes here, we see little glimpses of the human being behind all that. Those moments are golden. The rest is reality, and it's nothing like as dramatic as the fictionalized (!) movie with all its side- and back-story nonsense. Here, we got Frost and Nixon, and that's amazing and enough. Scary and informative. Frost Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews***/

Oh, man. I finally finished Frozen River***/. One of those movies that sounded good on Netflix but once I got started, I did not want to have to finish. I kept stopping and not starting again. Long, slow, turgid movie I didn't want to get into again, then did, then stopped again. Slow. Painful, about near as I could figure, real people, doing real things. From the bottom of things, no money, no husbands, no real chance, two women together leaving their family where they had to while they did what they had to, and I didn't want to watch. Then finally I just did, and loved it. It's about a lot of things, of course, but it's also about kurass, what Kurt Vonnegut called our extended family, however it is they get to be members of that. Real family and extended family, and people you happen on along the way and keep. Oh, it's about smuggling and it's a little fearsome, but it's also about superb acting and what's essentially a short story that's amazingly filmed.

I've just seen a truly remarkable film released in 1943, but I hardly noticed that. It's full of light and joy and death and gloom. All mixed together with amazing dexterity. Everything nearly perfect. Symbols, intelligence, entirely credible character development and plot. It was Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, written by Thornton Wilder and starring Joseph Cotton and Teresa Wright. Called Shadow of a Doubt**** when titles meant plenty.

Phoebe in Wonderland**** is a complex film about a little girl who acts strangely except when she acts in a play about the Alice. It's told rapidly and deeply intelligently. The story is an intriguing mix of reality and Through the Looking Glass fantasy in parallel and opposing worlds within the world of the film. Startling. Intense. Stirring.

Changeling** is the overwrought tragedy of losing a young son and the terribly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department smoothing it over with a big lie that finally comes to bite them in the butt. I wasn't thrilled with it, but it had its moments, and sometimes I almost believed what the film was trying to hand me. Almost.

Nights in Rodanthe*/ is the smarmy and entirely predictable story of two people who meet in an old hotel on the banks of a hurricane and fall madly in love. Hokum. Not altogether repulsive hokum, but hokum.

Paradise Road**/ is something of a cross between The Bridge On the River Kwai and Women In Cages with a little bit of the Von Trapp family thrown in for audio pleasure. British and other women caught by the Japanese after they belatedly attempt to escape Singapore during World War II, then spend the war as prisoners of it. Lot of famous women actors, decent enough story, adequately presented and a good enough script and plot but nothing outstanding.

At first I thought Death Note***'s acting was awful, but I quicky learned that just the dubbing was substandard, goofy in the way bad dubbing can be. As I ignored that, the acting improved significantly. What this is is a comic book brought to life, so some characters are completely unbelievable, yet charming and, well, I can't say exactly lovable, I'll stick with charming. The main character, the young law student whose father is the head cop on the investigation that rules the plot, is not charming, he's evil. But not in any truly believable fashion. That's comic book, too. It's an intriguing story with an intricate plot that all unravels at the end, but it's fun until then.

I have trouble with turgid, psychological and emotional movies like Frozen River that I'm somewhere in the middle of, since it's all too easy to put those down, take them out of the player and replace them with something like Body of Lies***/ that I can sink my eyes and mind into and stay clenched, Gila monster style, till it's over, two hours later. I'll keep going back to Frozen River till I finish the damned thing, but give me a good spy movie with an involved plat, good acting, never quite sure who the good guy is and smatters of soul, or what passes for it in Hollyweird, and I feel like I've been movied. Nice. Tense. Smarter than the average bear.

I saw this one because it has Tim Robbins in it, and Netflix made it sound good. It was, but I don't read the idiocy they put on DVD envelopes any more, because the dolts who write that stuff see a different movie than I'm seeing every time. This is about accidental friendships (Is there any other kind?) and resolving issues by just going along for the ride, learning a little more about humanity and humans, then go back to doing what you were. But it's a road trip. So we have three human beings telling the truth, even though they didn't really want to, and intereacting, for a little while. Humane, intelligent, deep enough, comfortable and gently funny. The Lucky Ones***

We thought we wanted to watch two chronicles in one night — The Spiderwick Chronicles*** and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian*/. But that was a mistake. Spiderwick was not outstanding but it was decent enough and the fantasy almost real and the special effects plenty good enough, but Narnia II was dreadful with inane and insipid characters and filled with idiot battle scenes. Kids might like Spiderwick. It was pleasant enough after Narnia part two, but never quite all there.

Before I started watching it, I wanted to see Vincent and Theo**/. Once it was begun, however, I'd get mad at it for being so lame and ignoring any semblance of story, come back hours later or the next day. It never held me. I wanted to finish it, ever hopeful I'd learn something about one the painter, but there's nothing of that here, except his constant struggle with Theo and Gauguin and life. It almost never felt human or real, only conflicted. Even the paintings throughout this dreadful movie were bad copies painted by art students, because the director didn't care. So the camera often lovingly fondles bad copies by untalented fakers, as it they were telling a true story. Finally I finished it, and now I have to find their letters and read those again. This stupid movie is evil. I'm so glad I don't ever have to watch it again.

W** is a lame movie about a dufus President. Once I started it, I really did not want to plow through the whole thing. But I did, finally, in five sittings. Just doesn't hack it. I'm not a fan, but Condie Rice could never be as simpish as the uh... actress who plays her. At times the dufe seems almost real, but not any more often in the movie as in real life, and not convincingly or often enough to carry this sad, essentially stupid movie. It's a waste of a lot of fine acting talent, though. Great actors, lousy acting. Gotta be the director's fault. Bad as all this is, though, the movie still gives me the willies.

I rented Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin: Nine Hundred Nights*** to see who was playing lead guitar, so maybe I could figure out whether he knew what he was doing or just fudging. I've been listening to her and them for forty years, and I needed the back story and to watch me some fingers. When I see a performance, I have to see everybody's fingers, so I understand how it happens, what makes this noise or that. That lead guitar was so strange and amazing and good and awful, I had to see it. Now I know what I saw was the rise and fall of Big Brother & The Holding Company, which led into the precipitous rise and fall of Janis Joplin. The band kept going, but never at that level. So I'm watching fingers, and every note, is right and there is no fudge. With or without Janis, BB&THC rocks strange and raw high energy. But with her it was amazing.

Manufactured Landscapes*** is like a very slow Koyaanisqatsi. It is a documentary about a documentarian who makes art of industrial destruction and construction. The artist has dense, complex rationale for his works and his subjects. Of what many consider ugly, he creates a spooky beauty in still photography, and the video documenting him doing that does the same, in massive scale. Haunting, scary, beautiful. Art.

All the Real Girls*** is a better movie than a title. It's about one guy who's been a philanderer, making it with every girl in town, so they all hate him. And one woman, who's his and she's his, best friend. Dialog is intelligent, conversations are realistic, the plot progression makes mostly sense. He and she together are golden, then they're not, and then, well then you have to watch the movie, which is mostly worth the effort, a charmer, smart as well as romantic. Friends come and go and come back, lovers are a different story. A complex one but worth the time and effort.

August Rush*** is the rare movie that's uses — and never lets go of — sound. It's about family, fathers and mothers and having and not having those things. It's also a sweet romance and one of those movies where all the main chraracters keep almost but not quite meeting although they're close so many times. Eminently predictable and never entirely believable, it's still a fun flick and a decent tear-jerker.

Torchwood*** is a B-movie serial thriller about tracking down aliens. The new Dr. Who has referenced it on American TV, so it's only a couple years old now. Interesting but predictable. Almost intelligent, but never quite. The ends don't hold together, the story frays here and there, and most of the excitement is pedestrian.

Hard Candy**** is a searing little movie that lets us think and question and wonder all the way through. No pat answers or story elements or music or anything else here. Stark, direct. Outstanding dialog, beautiful camera work, shocking story about control and pederasty and a couple of humans who engage in or against that stuff. Even the special features are startling good.

Traffic: A Film by Jacques Tati*** is a goofy little old-fashioned visual humor film with dialog that mostly doesn't matter and just adds to the quirkesque madness involving attempting to deliver a odd bit of automotive design in the forrm of a camper to an Auto Show and the trials and tribulations along the way. More amusing than outright funny, but done in anintricately choreographed burlesque ballet sort of way that reminds us we are all human and thereby a little off. 1971

'Sides being a really great title for a movie — or anything else, Black Snake Moan***/ is maybe just a little too full of itself. It's a strange little movie and a lot that's interesting and oddly out of place is going on in the telling. I saw it for the buzz and because Samuel Jackson and Christina Ricci are in it. That's before I knew about Justin Timberlake — like I say weird, off kilter, out of place, seeming wrong. All the way through what the cast and crew keeps calling "a parable," which it plainly is not — but it's close enough to tell its story oddly without being quirkish. Parts of it I still don't believe or accept as any order of reality, but it's big on visual concepts. A old Black man chaining a way-too-attractive young white and often nearly naked nymphomaniac to the radiator, then later singing The Blues to her, as the story catches up with the images. Imperfect, but it's got soul. The music's short and brief, but that and the plot will linger.

Traitor***/ is the best spy thriller I've seen in years. Intriguing plot, tense action, fine acting (Don Cheadle is amazing.), with a strong, smart message, unlike most action movies, especially American spy flicks. This one's got depth of character, intelligence and excitement, while still blowing up a bunch of people, while holding back from answering the question about who the good guys really are.

The Island**** is a truly unconventional story about a sniveling coward who becomes a holy man, albeit a seemingly ornery and difficult one, who lives in a monastery in the farthest reaches of the northern territories, where he earns the reputation as a seer, healer and exorcist of uncommon ability and humility. I was expecting an art film and got a new story. I've seen more than three thousand films, and this plot is unique and its telling idiosyncratic. Amazing movie, fascinating character development, darkly and humanely amusing and transcendent. In Russian with good English subtitles.

I was thinking sci-fi when I learned I was getting The Visitor***/, neatly forgetting all the info I'd gathered at NetFlix. I loved The Station Agent as I loved this heart-warming tear-releaser about cultures coming together in our supposed melting pot. Superb characterizations, opposites getting involved in each others' lives. Well acted, marvelous story, outstanding movie.

Frost/Nixon***/ is dramatic and historic, although not precisely so. For truth to history, I'd give it an 8, maybe 7.5. I'd rather see the real debates. What little I've seen of that is noticeably different from this movie's depiction. At least there, the interviewee looks like somebody in history, and that vision is unnerving. The guy who plays Nixon is very good but only for a few instants ever looks like Nixon, although he's got some of the characteristics down. Calling it a dramatization would true enough. The fictionalization is done in the usual haphazard Hollywood manner, although I liked the actors. The Nixonization, however is better than reality.

In Bruges**** is murderous dark humor that's funny like humans are at our best and at these humans' worst. Spectacular characters, superb story, marvelous acting, deeply intelligent dialog, even nice scenery sometimes. It's about being good at what you do and honor and hating being there.

I watched most of The Cats of Mirikitani*** before I was sure I'd seen it before. Heart-warming story about an old curmudgeon angry with the United States (at least I could identify) who was in a Japanese Internment Camp during World War II, even though he was an American Citizen. He was always also an artist. It's interesting to see him progress in that during the movie, which has very little to do with the cats he paints. Very little.

The United States of Leland***/ is about right and wrong, guilt and remorse, love, not love, hate and responsibility. At all that, it's better than most movies. Stranger, too. Put together as a post-modern pastiche, it's easy enough to tell when whatever happened happened, but like the rest of life, it's disjointed and all in the wrong order, except it turns out to be right.

Most collections of short film are dreadful, contain elderly movies or are by friends or families of who did the collection. Wholphin**** is better, the selections stranger and the shorts almost all fascinating. And blessedly short. Getting a good collection of Shorts is almost always a pain. Here the quality and diversity is a joy.

The Fourth Dimension** is long, slow and essentially brain dead. It's about clocks, people and time, but nothing comes of it that I can see or understand. All during it I longed for color and story and understanding. What I got was paranoia and mind-numbing film school over-"acting."

Cracking the Maya Code*** is interesting, almost fascinating, about how we (humans) finally figured out what the Mayans have been telling us in their books, art and architecture for millennia.

Blue Murder** is yet another Brit detective series about a woman detective who's a single mother struggling with life, etc. BS. Except she's slow and doltish as a human being and as a detective, and I didn't care for her for either. A charm free zone.

Just before the end of Dark City****, I was moved to write "Not a metaphor but a realtiy that dreams itself," then in the glorious end, it happened. Never quite perfection but in its own way allows an outside reality that approximates.

Paranoid Park*** is like a bad dream, persistent, nebulous, and not enough details, like sleepwalking, a lot like falling. On the visual theme of skateboarding, it rolls and rocks, and there's a few tricky moments, then it rolls some more. There's a death in it that looks like murder and self-defense and mostly nobody sees but a couple guys know and try to keep it quiet.

An Angel at My Table**** is a deeply affecting story of a reclusive writer whose life passes past her while everybody else tells her who to be, where to go, what to be up to. Till at last she learns who she is. Near three hours long, her painfully shy childhood weaves into her painfully shy time in the asylum and on to her ascension into the great writers and poets. Never an easy life.

2008

Puzzlehead***/ is dark, slow, inventive, human. In it a man who does not know how to love creates an android with his own memories, psychological makeup and dreams, which of course get them both in difficulty with each other. It plays out with European fragility and pacing, so very slowly and deeply. Chilling, with a dark joy.

I know I've seen Say Anything*** before, just as I know I'll see it again next time I've forgot it and lost this note remembering. Something about a young John Cusack in a romantic young romance is too good to hope it's a great movie, and in most ways it is. A classic from 1989. Gentle, realistic, mostly smart.

I wasn't at all sure about a movie named Kung Fu Panda***/. Sounded like a kid's flick, but would I like it, too? Yes, indeedy. Great animation, good solid story. The intro/titles were art. Real visual art. The rest of the movie is pretty terrific action, characters, etc, but very different from Pixar, Disney and the rest. But the titles are real live graphic art. Wasn't anything else I didn't like about it, either. It works, and it works good. With a **** for the title sequence.

Like a David Mammet play only it's the action and cinematography that's crazed and repeated, overacted and under-understood. Usually crooked. Fay Grim***/ is peculiar and off-putting and, well, I just gotta see what happens next. Its predecessor, Henry Fool*** is similarly structured with the same maddening characters but every scene is not seen crooked. The 'cant' I believe they called it in the special features. Nothing is up and down normal in FG, but that's true in non cinnematographic terms in both films. Not sure I needed to see the first and still like the second, of what may be a long-term series. If you have to choose, go with Fay.

I don't remember all that much about Penlope***/, except that I loved it all the way throug. Romantic as heck. Sweet. Gentle. Smart most of the way till the end, which despite everything going for it is a cop-out without making the movie a dud. I'd see it again. I'd enjoy it again.

Ryan**** is weird, honest, human and marvelous. About a real-life annimator who rose fast, then dropped out of sight after becoming addicted to cocaine, then booze. The interview looks like it was done under the influence of some amazing drugs, but probably wasn't. Real interview about a real person, that looks unlike anything you've ever seen. The life histories and showings of Ryan's Academy Award nominated, pre-drug and booze annimations are great, short and superb. The movie passes strange on the right going way faster than the limit.

Hancock***/ is almost an excellent movie, but the screenwriting wasn't given as much attention as the special FX. The story is fine, just the plot suffers without transitions between segments. They come without notice, so they seem unglued, dopey. A little finesse would have gone a long way.

Paul Klee: The Silence of the Angel***/ is a remarkable and affecting film about an artist I knew little more about than I liked the work I'd seen, but I'd only seen a little. As a moody chronology and intellectual explanation, this dark, lilting, intelligent history follows his life and especially his work, tells us what he was thinking, often in his own words, and mimics his sometimes forlorn presence by the appearances of a rag doll he may have created — although it is neither introduced nor credited. The DVD also offers a slide show of 150 of Klee's work we control the timing of. I assume it is presented chronologically. That simple showing was mesmerizing, although I suspect several pieces were sideways.

Pixar Short Films**** is a fascinating history of Pixar Studios style and technique — and especially humanization of animated cartoon characters from primitive to sophisticated. Superb. Glad I got to see the transition.

Perhaps I shouldn't have begun The Impressionists with Disk 2, but the thoroughly fictionalized lead characters, all of whom were the masters of Impressionism were vivid and human, even intelligently shown. Monet, who outlived them all, tells us the story, filled with enough historical fact to make us wonder what all was made up. I found it entertaining and informative.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army** is features the same smart-mouthed characters, but this film is lazy, predominantly stupid, and I loved the first one. This seems an incidental step on the way to Hb III.

Be Kind/ Rewind**, Beer for My Horses** and Strong Bad's Emails* were too stupid, boring and insipid to finish.

Enchanted*** was goofy simpleton-ish, often swarmy yet delightful, despite its akward transitioning from annimation to full-life drama. A treat.

The Last Detective*** — a TV series about an older detective in a Brit cop shop — he's the last detective his boss would want to set on a case, yet he plods away at their complexity and solves every one.

The Golden Compass***/ is a figuratively and literally dark (noir) movie of magic and adventure. The music and plot is often silly and predictable, but the story is entertaining when it is not too busy setting up the next sequel, and the special effects pretty and wonderful, although the heavy color casts were annoying.

I kept thinking about Sean Connery and Ursula Undress when I saw Casino Royale***, but this Bond is better. Not as frenetic, exciting or skilled and intelligent as Bourne and not as cinnematic, but not bad for the aging franchise.

I missed learning how the famous Life Magazine photographer made his photographs, what he was thinking in those moments of exposure, how he dealt with the people in his photographs. But I learned much more than that about the human being who was Gordon Parks, photographer, musician, writer of fact and fiction, maker of movies and photographs. His own unflinching narratives were amazing to watch, his story through his times fascinating. Fine movie, great leading man. Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks***/

The Cool School*** is another adequate documentary about the artists who made Los Angeles artists a force to be reckoned with, but I kept thinking I'd seen it before. I hadn't, but the story is familiar, about an art community growing up.

Martian Child***/ is a heart-warming little movie about a boy who thinks he's from Mars and an adopting father who writes science fiction stories set there. The writer wrote the original Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles," and the kid who plays the kid is almost as good as John Cusak, who's the reason I saw the movie. It's about love, of course, and understanding who we each are and accepting our differences, and it's smart and funny and a bit of a weeper.

Simon Schama: Power of Art: Disc 1 may be the most beautiful, fascinating, educational and interesting movie about artists I've ever seen. Took awhile to not be offput by Simon's accent and haughty manner, but the mix of him talking about works of art we see him next to or in front of in great museums or cut into and away from recreations of the artists' lives he leads us in exploring is visually and factually fascinating. I guess there's more discs and more artists, but I learned more about Carravaggio, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Rembrndt van Rijn that I ever have before.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium***/ is a kid's story that appeals to the kid in this adult, although the adults in this kid's story mostly do not, except when they're being kids. It's fun, but the story turns on unlikely circumstances. Like a woman who's worked there since she was 15 who does not believe in magic, even though it's all around her and she engages it and uses it. Hollywood is stuck in a world where its actors always don't believe its own premises, almost no matter what. It's like propaganda for being stupid and inept. With these movies we teach our kids and our selves never to be real (or imaginary, as the case may be).

Biggles: Adventures in Time* was too stupid to continue watching, and I thought I could stand any time-travel flick. But I couldn't.

Dogfights: Season 1: Disk 1** was amusing, interesting and ultimately tedious. I'd hate to have to sit through more than's on that first disk.

The Man Who Planted Trees**** is wonderful animation that looks like it's growing on the screen as we watch. A fascinating story I'd read decades ago in The Whole Earth Catalog but heart-warming and fascinating to see it fleshed out in this marvelous film.

Pale Male***/ is the fascinating story of a Red-tailed Hawk who takes up residence in New York City's Central Park under — or should I say — over the watchful eyes of many of NYC's people who become fans. Told with grace and style and intelligence.

This American Life*** is one of my favorite radio programs, and before I saw this I could not understand how it could become a television show. The answer, however, is "easy." Like on radio, some of the stories make for compelling media. Some are stupid. Mostly, however, they are intelligent, deeply human and either nod-and-quietly-agree or laugh-out-loud funny.

Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm**/ is a truly awful, stupid and inept movie that is nonetheless entertaining. Taking every wrong direction, this film still manages to confuse and befuddle anyone who's ever heard a story from the real Brothers Grimm, whom should not be mistaken for these lunks. I've been on a jag of terrible movie choices lately, and this could be the worst.

Intolerable Cruelty* was stupider and more inane than The Brothers Grimm.

Speed Racer is for small children without any taste or intelligence.

Barbet Schroeder's Koko: A Talking Gorilla* is lame and so unintelligent it's unwatchable by anyone with a soul. Its mindset is stuck in the 1950s, confusing communication with rote signing. Monkeys have thoughts and feelings, but this movie does not.

Nature: Koko****, on the same topic and using the same characters, is fascinating, humane and beautiful. The biggest difference between these two documentaries is time. Hokey in the 70s. Beautiful when Nature does it 35 years later.

There's a great many things awfully familiar about Castle in the Sky, but they are the things that made me love the best of Japanese anime, so I liked Castle in the Sky***, too.

Frank Zappa's The Dub Room Special**, made for TV several dozen years ago, was on my Netflix Queue for years before it finally rose to the top, and I let it. It was them goofin' and playin' music, and it was as boring as any TV show about music in those long ago days. Just couldn't get into. Best thing about it was some guy's comment about 200 Motels, another Zappa movie.

I guess it's because we've all got it in us, but most of us don't let it out. Lots of feelings actually need to be stuffed down tight, but by watching and beginning to understand why truly crazy people deal with their difficulties, we don't always have to. A lot of what movies teach us is disgusting bad for us and for our communications, but getting to watch crazy people interact and act, may help us begin to understand. Snow Angels***.

Meet the Robinsons*** wasn't as absolutely wonderful as the Pixar / Disney flicks are, but it was fun and funny and remarkably smart. I'm not convinced I'd like it better if I were a kid.

Duma*** is about a cheetah raised on a farm in the outback then taken back to the wild. Many adventures ensue along the way and one colorful character, of course. It's for kids but it lapses into stupidity on several occasions. Not great, some pretty country, memorable characters, overall pleasant, even for adults. But it's just plain dumb the kid hero doesn't already know his pet cheetah eats a lot of raw meat every day, for just one instance of many.

I'd just been asking whether the Sci Fi Channel had any intelligent and subtle movies when I stumbled into The Lost Room****, three DVDs of shows that tell the long and winding tale back through that room that was never there and all the evil and good people who believed and what they believed and the guy who figured it out. Fascinating. Subtle. Deeply intelligent. Wicked witty.

I finished off Dexter: Season 2**** and boy is it different than the series that will be on broadcast TV this fall. I almost didn't recognize the story last season, the B-cast boys chopped it up so. It's just not for anybody, has to be on a Cable channel, so it can be fully raw, intelligent and sexy. Too good for TV.

Rendition**** is the searing story of a man mistakenly stolen from his life by the idiot CIA, tortured and jailed for having a name similiar to somebody they heard might have been a bad guy. Told in an odd, choosy infidelium of time circling back on itself. Gripping and angrifying.

I'm Not There**** An odd, but irritatingly confusing dialectic around and about Little Bobby Zimmerman's protest and progress, with fanciful riffs on historical facts and a remarkable faithfulness to lyrics, even those that have not survived. A strange and complexified bag of rhythms and looks and characters that were and were not Bob Dylan.

A Mighty Heart*** is about Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. More specifically, it is how his wife experienced the kidnapping and everything that followed. His heart may have been mighty, but the heart in the title is hers. This is an emotional event. Not a great movie, but an involving one.

I Have Never Forgotten You*** is a good but not really great documentary on the man who made Nazi Hunting a serious pastime, and his catches that have suicided and been locked away forever.

All I knew for sure was that Frances McDormand was in it, and that was enough. Miss  Pettigrew Lives for a Day***/ is set in 1939 London and involves a thoroughly confused ingénue with too many men in her life and not enough sense to figure out what to do next. Along comes Frances as another failure in everything with nothing left to lose, who helps her for one day and solves all their ills. A tad too pat perhaps, but a delightful one at that, with lots of quirk and hearts of glass and gas and gold.

I Like Killing Flies*** is an old fat cook who owns his own very peculiar restaurant in a big city somewhere, where he makes almost anything for a very select set of customers and runs off at the mouth about everything else while he kills fly after fly in his kitchen. Fascinating character, characters and situation.

We saw Man On Wire**** in a theatre where the audience did not intrude, and we loved that and the movie, about a tight-rope walker who walked a wire strung between the towers of the World Trade Center back when there still was one of those, told in real historic film and fictive recreation and talking heads strung together into a fascinating tale of bravado and courage and stick-it-in-your-eye reality. Bravo.

The logic of a photograph, or a collection of them, about a photograph collector, maybe the photograph collector and Robert Maplethorpe, an odd telling, documentary of a life in the arts and deaths in gay cancer. Such an odd movie, we understand photography through it, and collecting. Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Maplethorpe***/

Pixar is technology. Disney, for all its lacks, has heart, maybe even soul. Together, their films are wonders. This latest, Wall E**** is darker, gloomier, dustier than the lot of clean, shining movies. Less soul, more laugh out loud laughs, more classic story.

Bugs Bunny Lives in Looney Tunes Golden: Volume I, Disc 1***. I thought it was going to be all the Tooony Loons, now I appreciate Bugs much much less. I can go another decade without seeing another.

A little over several edges with quirk, but lotsa great lines, more than a few great characters and an outstanding story put together craftfully, even artfully. Juno****

Sometimes the real world, as it's called, is just too much of a pain, so it's comforting to find a movie as quirky and humanely moving, yet deeply funny, as Lars and the Real Girl***/, where once we accept this difficult alternate reality, like everyone else in the movie gradually comes to, everything is beautiful. Amazing movie about acceptance. Lars, it probably should be mentioned, buys a blow-up woman and keeps her and goes out with her and seems to think she's real.

Ten Canoes**** is great old-fashioned story-telling. This time by Australian Aborigines whose story this truly is. Complete with historically accurate everything, so it's as fascinating for the realities as the story. Absorbing and real.

I'm hooked on MI-5***/, detective and secret service adventure from the BBC. Solid stories, excellent acting, sometimes vicious violence, but searing good TV.

A Rumor of Angels*** is too sappy in too many moments, but overall it's a gentle exploration of grief. Vanessa Redgrave is good. The kid's good, but Ray LIotta as the dad way overacts. Other than that, nothing wrong with it couldn't be fixed with a decent script. This one often makes no sense.

Love Actually***/ is a smarmy little sentimental tearjerker with scads of really famous actors who must have had a lot of fun with this charmer. Tears jerked, I loved it and after watching all the deleted scenes would be delighted to view an unexpurgated or director's cut version in the future.

Sean Penn's Into the Wild**** is subtle movie-making with an overt story that travels inside the real and extended family of a young man who needs to leave it all behind to live in the wilds of Alaska. Beautiful story told in the jump-back snatches so popular these postmodern years, but lush in the ways of making films not movies. Beautiful. Bittersweet. A delight.

Been busy and kept getting bored with Last Orders***, so I saw it over about a week late at night. Seemed humdrum, querulous, slow but with a fine cast including Michael Caine, Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins, but gradually the glorified pub crawl road movie unfurls the story of Jack, his wife, son, daughter and their friends in a bittersweet charmer.

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, imbecilic 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 Palestinian 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 after 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 academy 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 caught 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 scintillating 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 recycling 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 nemesis. 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 soulless 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 cinematography 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 Assassination 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 soundtrack, 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 conundrums 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 eidetic 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) psychological 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 gratuitous 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 tyrannical 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, Levon Helm, Carl Raddle, Robbie Robertson, Stephen Stills and Paul 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 fascinating.

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 nazi. I love his movies And Live Free or Die Hard***/ is another one. Exciting from the get go. Lots of fights and killing and mayhem and even some beautifully choreographed flying hamster scenes. Yee-haw.

I rented Stone Cold*** because i had certain 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 persevered." As if that meant something.

The Astronaut Farmer*** is light fantasy not hardly ever approaching science fiction, even though a couple of rockets, one astronaut 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 Sensian 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 sports car 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 bank robbers 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 resurrection. 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 with 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, strangely, 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 occasionally with short animations 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 some 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 knowledgeable 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 super heroes sans heart, soul or story.

Richard Chamberlain stars in Peter Weir's The Last Wave**** from 1977, in which Chamberlain'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 inherited 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 English. 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.

 

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