My Grade	Movie Title	My Review
B	13 Conversations About One Thing	An "a while back" review: I have only cryptic scribbled notes about this one: talky, too little apparent movement, a little self-conscious; waitress-bill-knife; how did she get the white shirt back???; piano. What I do remember is liking: 1) Alan Arkin; and 2) the phrase "Wisdom comes suddenly".
A+	21 Grams	Intellectually and emotionally engaging, with great performances all around. Still trying to determine if the fractured time-shifting works---or rather, was it necessary? Sean Penn is as good here as in Mystic River, with another understated, nuanced performance. The grainy color-cast look provides a feeling of squalor even in the suburban settings.
B-	400 Blows, The	I've always been curious about Francois Truffaut (my first screening of one of his films), and now that I'm rereading his conversations with Hitchcock as I've been watching my Hitchcock movies, it seemed like a good time. To see one, that is. I see where this was a very influential film at one time (1958). OK. That's lost on me, I guess. Sorry. No great shakes, this one, seen as just another in a long line of unchronologized screenings. What just popped into my mind (rather like the Sta-Puf marshmallow man) was Francois Bueller's Day Off and a couple of Simpsons episodes (Bart leaves his family to live in a loft, and Bart and Milhous possess an abandoned factory). Only in color, and less depressing. There were some things I considered a bit Hitchcockian, if I may (the Rotor ride---conjuring up an unpleasant experience of my own to boot; a high-overhead view of kids peeling off in small groups from a jogging gym class; the room with the horse "souvenir"). Had I expected a pretentious, or at least arty, or at least artsy, or artsy-fartsy "foreign" film, I was disappointed, although the audio commentary track on the DVD fulfilled that role nicely. (Uh, Kat, it turned out to be Glenn Kenny.) For the occasional times I switched to the audio commentary (like the long stretches without any dialogue), GK often wasn't talking about the scene in frame at all, but about Truffaut in general or sometimes I don't know what the heck, and I'm not going to watch it twice for that. (Speaking of dead directors who find it difficult to add audio commentary to their own films, I've just acquired a batch of Hitchcock movies with commentary tracks, and now I'm already bracing myself for what I'm going to hear there.) The only thing worse was the 4-minute trailer---4-minute---yes, a trailer---4 minutes---that quotes the praise of about 35 French critics. To the DVD itself: Poorly subtitled---lots of untranslated secondary dialogue: a puppet show, a class recitation, presumedly small talk from the central characters (I'll be the judge of that, thank you!), almost as if the only dialogue ye need translated is that which advances the plot, and the hell with everything else (flavor, atmosphere, symbolism, irony---or not??---of the puppet show; well, OK, it turned out to be Little Rouge Riding Hood, but still---). What I recognized as a "paddy wagon" was translated as "limo." "Fin" really was the end---an abrupt end---as all the credits came in the beginning, including all those seals, logos, imprimaturs, and stuff you never see if you file out of a movie early.
C-	61*	Talky, batty drama. Apparently there were only two players on the '61 Yankees and two or three teams they played against. Jocks talk deep. Hey, look at my impersonation! Baseball is bigger than both of us. And so on.
A-	8 Mile	Pretty good story about a world that's new to me, living here as I do in the 7-3-4. Shot in the D, for either "Detroit" or "Depressing"---take your pick. The rap battles are really cool---talk about difficult improvisation---and I've got a better appreciation for the art of it, though I doubt that will ever extend to rap music as a whole or to the hip-hop lifestyle in general. I love the song Lose Yourself that's largely associated with the film, but unfortunately it plays only over the ending credits and is not integral to the film (though it should be). You might want to watch this at least once with subtitles turned on.
B	About a Boy	Irritating boy meets irritating man. Hugh Grant is overrated. Loose ends.
A	About Schmidt	I loved Jack Nicholson in this because he wasn't Jack Nicholson.
B	Acts of Worship	I thought this was first-run (first of a mini-festival at Madstone), but the date in the end credits was 2001, so who knows. Mildly interesting window on the street life and social network of heroin addicts, some of whom (e.g. the would-be boyfriend of the lead character, Alix) seemed like pretty normal people, but what do I know? The pre-screening blurbs spoke of success contrasted with failure, and of redemption, but Digna's transformation at the end was a little hard to believe---not the falling back into addiction, but the quickness with which she did it over the relatively trivial issue of her stolen camera. Success and failure are reversed---the successful photographer fails to reform Alix, and the failure/addict succeeds by going home to her parents? Guess so.
A+	Adaptation	This is one of the best films I've seen in quite a while. It is a gimmick flick, but one with more substance than meets the eye. Starting with a fantastic script, the movie features great performances from Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper playing richly drawn characters, and it's highly amusing to boot. Very creative and clever without being irritating because of it. Self-referential material can be annoying, but Adaptation is so "intellectually engaging", I forgive it that. I can't say, though, that I care less, or more, about screenwriting than I care about orchid-growing, ditch-digging, investing, or mink breeding. Well, OK, strike "investing". That he says it's solipsistic and whatnot only wraps it in another layer, and I like that. It's a script and a movie that can laugh at itself. I can't imagine that they didn't get Susan Orlean's buy-in on this project. If nothing else, it gives her a fame she probably wouldn't have had without it. The book may be interesting, but not all books are appropriate for movies---one unexplored question in the movie was why this book was chosen as a project in the first place. Larouche's quirky character, perhaps. The movie discredits the book only if you accept the premise that all books are filmable. I know there's something deeper in this movie that encompasses all of these themes and more, but unfortunately, I can't yet put my finger on it. "You are what you love, not what loves you" comes to mind. That's why I like this movie so much---while it's intellectually engaging, it also struck me emotionally. The "third act" is great, and probably the only existing movie in which such an ending is appropriate. Again, I can't see Orlean objecting. Besides, listen to the ending she provides in her book, showing yet again that not all books should be filmed. Yes, everything in the "third act" is SUPPOSED to be a cliche. From the moment that Susan says "We'll have to kill him", it's clear that Donald has taken over as screenwriter. Like Susan, Charlie couldn't find a neat ending; he half-reluctantly goes to his brother for help. What we get at the end is yes, completely untrue, but so what? It's just a screenplay! Donald tidies things up as so many bad films do, as we might expect his screenplay "The 3" to do, complete with alligator ex machina and even the scripting of his own overdramatic death. It's a satire of bad screenplay endings.
A	After Life	I thought this was delightful. Nice exploration of Memory.
B+	Age of Innocence, The	I didn't care for this at first--not my cup of tea, my tea doily, or tempest in a teapot, this old-fashioned drama of manners, with prudish "scandals" and the foibles of the well-to-do. But I began to appreciate the subtleties. Handsomely presented and well performed.
B+	Aguirre: The Wrath of God	I'm speechless (which in this case is a neutral statement). Liked it. Maybe an A-, I don't know.
A-	Akira Kurosawa's Dreams	Though I really enjoyed only about half of the vignettes (like the Van Gogh scene, but not the Blizzard scene), I at least enjoyed the look of the ones I wasn't so crazy about.
D+	Ali	I was surprised how bad this was. Kind of a focus-less glop. Why is it really boring movies are also very long in running time???
A-	American Astronaut, The	In the self-promotional material handed out at the theater, this film calls itself a "sci-fi musical western comedy", and lists review blurbs that liken it to everything from Eraserhead + The Tooth of Crime, to hallucinogenic Rice Krispies, Plan Nine from Outer Space, Buck Rogers, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Grapes of Wrath, an "avant-rock musical staged on the set of a Poverty Row noir", Dark Star, space opera, a black and white fairy tale, "Laurel and Hardy...directed by Salvador Dali", and "with a decidedly John Ford feel". My own pathetic little list (prior to reading aforementioned self-promotional material) includes: Flash Gordon [but Buck Rogers, above, was more accurate], Rocky Horror, Man Ray, and Devo. What's so nice is that the surrealism here is largely measured and wonderfully just strange enough, like seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar, and vice versa. Certain passages of dialogue---in particular, the stand-up comic's routine, and the leader's speech to the workers of the mining planet---are verbal fugues, something odd lying just below the surface of the words themselves, which make sense and don't make sense at the same time. If you weren't watching a movie, you might think you were dreaming, going very slowly insane, or about to pass out. Losing points only for some scenes in which the oddity and surrealism seemed forced and gratuitous, the film features some really great characters, wonderfully cheesy special effects, and nice rock music, performed by the writer/director/star/composer's own rock band.
A-	American Movie	Entertaining documentary about the making of a bad amateur feature film; a mix of humor (unintentional and otherwise) and pathos. How much, or what parts of this, are a put-on, isn't clear. But it doesn't matter--as bad as the film-within-the-film is, you can't help but wish the filmmaker-within-the-film well.
C+	Anatomy	Mediocre medical-school suspense stuff--even Franka Potente did not impress.
B-	Animal Crackers	I've started going through a stack of Marx Bros. movies I taped years ago (talk about "time-shifting"). Somehow I expected more (better ones to come, I trust---vaguely remember having seen some of them). But for God's sake, lose the musical interludes, please (piano, harp).
F	Anniversary Party, The	Who's who? Who are they? What are they, what do they do? Who really cares? DVD jackets lie---I thought this one said "comedy", not "self-indulgent movie-industry navel contemplation." Unfortunately, I already did my bills this week, or I would have done them while this was on. I've said I will always watch any movie all the way through because hope springs eternal that it will improve, but I stopped this at about 0:41 minutes in. Reality TV version of a much too noisy party. Get drunk and watch this and you won't know the difference.
A+	Antwone Fisher	A deeply moving story with really great, sensitive performances by Denzel Washington, Joy Bryant, and especially Derek Luke. The "Meeting Antwone Fisher" and "Making of" featurettes on the DVD are worthwhile too---meeting the real-life Antwone is just as touching as the film. Great directing by Denzel W.
C+	Apostle, The	An "a while back" review: I only remember being disappointed in this movie. Darn it, Robert Duvall…
C+	Arlington Road	A courageous ending, but otherwise really stilted and forced. Exposition-by-professor-in-classroom is a technique I fervently loathe. I like Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins, but they should avoid political statements, IF that's what this was supposed to be.
B	At the Circus	If I hadn't known this was Marx Bros., I wouldn't have recognized it as an "always see, never saw" movie. Now I know why.
D	Attila	A little something to watch with Dad. An historical epic this is not, unless you believe that Attila the Hun was a noble savage with the cultivation of a Roman poet. Even the battle scenes were goofy.
B+	Bad Santa	I thought I would like this a lot, but it was kinda disappointing. Good dark humor, but a little too bitter and mean-spirited. But, it tried hard and I like Billy Bob Thornton.
B	Basquiat	Interesting enough profile of the art world. Liked Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat. Lots of cameos by art world figures, I think--you don't really know until the end credits, where you see that lots of people played themselves--though you might have suspected, seeing that people playing art dealers and such weren't very good actors.
B+	Bear, The	A rescreening of a favorite. Before this rescreening, I had a higher view of this movie than I do now. I had forgotten there was so much footage of human actors, and I didn't remember at all the stupid "dreams" the bear cub had. You know, the Ken Russell sequences by Peter Max…
B-	Before Night Falls	Learned a little about Cuba, I guess.
B+	Bend It Like Beckham	Beckham (as himself) looked really uncomfortable, like they were asking him things or doing things they didn't tell him they were going to ask or do.
A-	Big Fish	One of Tim Burton's better (i.e. mature) works. Loses points for being slow in places, but otherwise interesting. The tall-tale segments overshadow the real-life connecting segments, but at least the acting is fine throughout (Ewan McGregor, Finney, and Crudup have the more substantial roles). Some nice little touches (e.g. quoting the banjo-duel theme from Deliverance). And what's the University of Michigan's Hail to the Victors doing in there??
B	Blood Simple	Somehow I expected more.
B	Blood Work	Above-average cop flick marred by several untied loose ends, including a significant one that cheats the audience (it involves a bedridden little boy, for God's sake). Interesting story---murders in which the motive is to provide organ donors of the right blood type---made less interesting by the motive behind the motive---which is to say, the identity of the intended organ recipient. A great, refreshing role for Jeff Daniels, finally.
A-	Blow	Didn't even think I would like this.
C+	Bound for Glory	I wanted to like this more than I did. I thought I'd be learning about Woody/Woodie Guthrie the songwriter/folksinger, not Woody/Woodie Guthrie the guy wandering around, hitchhiking, sleeping, and looking and acting languorous. I had imagined Guthrie to be a real hellraiser, but as portrayed by David Carradine, he first had that '30s gaw-shucks swagger I reckon passed for cool back then; then for most of the rest of the film, he was mostly a pretty stoic guy and, well, languorous. His brief flirtation with hellraising comes with about 20 minutes left in the film. (For the easily bored, that's 2:05 into the film!!!) And even then, his inner hellraiser seems to come out of nowhere. Speaking of easily bored, things don't get going until about the 1:25 mark (note that I don't write down such checkpoints when watching a film that is truly interesting). Everything's longer than necessary---minor or superfluous scenes are drawn out and then linger, just as, well, languorous as the depicted drought and the very Depression itself. Oh well; certainly not my kind of music (I still don't get Guthrie's appeal and legend status), though I was interested in his story as cultural history (interest was dashed, obviously). There's a young Randy Quaid, and a pre- or post-Deliverance Ronny Cox, still a-playin' a gee-tar like a good ole boy. The image I had of Woody/Woodie Guthrie riding on top of a boxcar, with a little cap and a guitar (probably from vintage-era trailers), came with about 4 minutes left in the film (2:25, remember), and turned out to be an inconsequential nothing part of the story. If you can't say anything nice department: some nice cinematography, for nought.
C-	Bourne Identity (2002), The	Franka Potente is the only good thing about this.
A-	Bowling for Columbine	I'm ashamed to be from Michigan. We have Columbine AND Oklahoma City connections. I felt this was more an impressionistic exploration on a gestalt level than a carefully reasoned argument, at least not so focused on guns, but good segments and subplots on the culture of fear, if it bleeds it leads, etc. The 11,000+ was sickening. Clever editing, machine-gun montages (no pun) like the one on "black, male, black, black, male", etc., musical contrast, visual/content contrast. Move to Canada? Maybe I don't belong here. Makes you want to cry. You can move, or you can ignore all the crap and get on with your life. I'm uncomfortable with Michael Moore's confrontational bait and switch tactics---more effective to let facts speak for themselves. The DVD audio commentary is by the receptionist, interns working for Moore, and "box movers" at wherever it is Moore works out of---refreshing and kind of cool, actually.
A-	Bridges of Madison County, The	Always see, never saw. Surprisingly engaging, outside of a ponderouly slow middle section. That does seem to be a central criterium for me, doesn't it? If it moves along (not necessarily the same as "action"), I remain engaged by it, but if it languishes or stalls too much and for too long, I get easily bored.
B	Brotherhood of the Wolf	French (dubbed), France (1700s), armored CGI beast of the French Baskervilles, with Asian marital arts and a Native American thrown in, leads to one messy pot o' stew, which works only a little bit. Nice atmosphere and cinematography is the best I can say.
C+	Bruce Almighty	Just didn't have the zing of Liar, Liar.
C+	Bugsy	Kept watching and watching--but it never grabbed me. I didn't care about any of the characters. I guess I just don't like gangster/mob/Mafia movies--why are all of this type of movie always so smug? I did like the birthday cake scene.
B	Business of Strangers, The	Moderately interesting situations, but with characterizations that seem a little off the mark, somehow. Not much else to say---a pretty short movie.
B+	Capturing the Friedmans	This was a strange experience. I had thought this was a film intended to exonerate a wrongly accused innocent or two (a lá The Thin Blue Line---a film I love, for that reason and more), only to unintentionally seem to prove the opposite (thought I)---that perps is perps. Well, it does attempt to exonerate, though it doesn't do so definitively, and there's a rather diffuse feeling at the end. Two things are surprising to me about this documentary: 1) that the Friedmans filmed and videotaped so much of their lives, including the household conversations that went on after the father and the youngest son (age 18) were arrested for pederasty and sodomy with students that came to their house for computer lessons; and 2) that the director chose to leave so much out of the film that could indeed have exonerated the Friedmans---but instead chose to put that material on the 2-disc DVD (along with the usual batch of fodder). The DVD includes various premieres of the film at which the director and many of those involved in the case---most of the Friedmans, the actual judge, detectives, prosecutors, and lawyers---had conversations and arguments in the "discussions" that followed. It's probable the father was guilty---of something, anyway---but the guilt of the son seems in doubt---I almost want to say "very much" in doubt, but... I still haven't made up my mind about that. In the true crime books I read, it's always easy to side with the prosecution, because it's---well, it's true crime. In this movie, the prosecution's case is a little weaker---no physical evidence, for starters. It's in the DVD "bonus" material where a lot of the prosecution's deceptions and tricks are detailed. I wonder how people who saw only the big-screen movie reacted to it, absent the "bonus" material. Shucks. Pretty crappy review. Sorry.
B+	Catch Me If You Can	Enjoyable and entertaining, but ultimately, so what?? A well-done piece of fluff without the normal compensation of humor or quirkiness that gives fluff redeeming social value. Fine performances, even if you couldn't believe Leo was 16 years old. His character did not really come off as the "master of deception"---he can't claim the title of master because he merely bumbled into his various roles. Liked the '60s-style opening credits.
C-	Cat's Meow, The	An "a while back" review: as I recall, this was just rather dull and disappointing, a "Gosford Park" on water…
B+	Changing Lanes	Better than I expected. The screenplay/dialogue really shines in places. How's come I can only come up with these 1-line scrawls for reviews??? [Editor's Note: This tendency has since reversed itself drastically.]
B	Chaplin	Didn't show me what I wanted to know, and then cheated me at the end.
B+	Chicago	I have both good things and bad things to say about this. The performances are great, but the movie, or should I say "the Broadway show and Las Vegas Showgirl extravaganza on film", is no "Moulin Rouge" by a long shot, and certainly not a Best Picture candidate in my mind. Like one of those films that's merely a stage play on celluloid, "Chicago" is the worst of all I can't stand about big Broadway productions and corny Las Vegas shows (though I've never actually seen one). I loved the music, I loved the choreography, I loved individual numbers (the 6 murderesses, Queen Latifa's "Mama" song, the marionette number, the tommy-gun number at the end come to mind), but the movie as a whole didn't cut it for me. I liked it a lot at the beginning, but I liked it less and less as time went on---the musical numbers were separated by what, 2 or 3 sentences of dialog each? And these musical numbers were all basically the same style. It happens to be a style I like (the music, that is, not the showgirl aspects)---gritty, jazz/blues stuff, but it got monotonous. It didn't have the ebb and flow, the hills and valleys, that, say, Moulin Rouge had. Let's just belt another one out. The numerous musical numbers hung on a skimpy plot for which there was no time for any significant development---so instead, plot-wise, we get repetition, padding in which to fit more musical numbers. OK, I think I get the idea that the public and the media are fickle, already! I did like how the musical numbers were spliced together with the naturalistic parts, sort of inner and outer versions of the same scene or fantasy. I did like the performances a lot, especially Renee Z. and Queen L. But I couldn't get it out of my mind that I was simply watching a variety show on TV, albeit one with a huge budget, or the filming of a stage show. The big-ass Broadway musicals that constitute what passes for theater in New York---at least to the tourists from Iowa. (Boy, do I sound like a snob!) I can't help comparing this movie to Moulin Rouge, a movie I love. Apart from a few numbers, such as the marionette number, Chicago just doesn't exhibit the creativity that was a large part of Moulin Rouge's charm. My fear is that Chicago will win the awards this year that Moulin Rouge should have won last year.
D	City of Ghosts	Nice to see Cambodia, I guess, but that's about it. Story didn't make any damn sense---who's stiffing whom, betraying whom, whatever. No reasons given for anything. And what happened to the original insurance-scam plot line that kicked off the whole thing?? No damn sense. Silly of me to want a smidgen of clarity.
B+	City of Lost Children	Inscrutable, Myst-ish, great-looking, oddball, inventive, but wha-a-a?? Brain = 2001's Hal with Predator's green-TV vision. What happened to the subtitles? Siamese sort-of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a nicely done CGI flea (and that's the extent of the CGI), a Santa Claus nightmare. Watching this with the commentary track ON didn't help---Ron Perlman and (apparently) the director (who went on to direct Amelie), didn't seem to understand it either. Ultimately unsatisfying.
B+	Coffee and Cigarettes	Uneven but generally funny collection of unconnected scenes involving two- or three-person gatherings of big and small stars quasi-playing themselves at various eateries or armories. Unconnected scenes, except that everyone drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes. Everyone, except those that drink tea. Well, not everyone smokes, but at least one person smokes, in every scene. Well, OK, they're connected in other ways, too, but these other ways detract and intrude. All the tables have a checkerboard pattern---so what? In I believe three cases, odd little monologues appear in two different scenes, almost verbatim. All of this kind of stuff seems forced, and often makes a particular scene appear more artificial. Some of the scenes really fall flat (Renee French; Joseph Rigano and Vinny Vella---yeah, I never heard of them, either), some are excellent (Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan; Cate Blanchett and Cate Blanchett), and most fall somewhere in between, with entertaining individual performances from Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, Jack White, and the old guy at the end who hears Mahler.
A	Cold Mountain	Nicole Kidman and Jude Law are excellent, but Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Natalie Portman somehow seem anachronistic, and Renee Zellweger feels miscast. Great cinematography; little surprises and/or unexpected reactions; nice script. Disturbing acts with animals, though, and there was no ASPCA statement in the ending credits.
A+	Company, The	What a great film about beauty and business, and the keenly observed details between the two worlds. It begins with the pre-show announcements before a night of ballet---a warning not to videotape the show (ha ha), and a request to turn off cell phones; it ends with the credits rolling during the curtain calls of another, different night of ballet. Beauty and business, as well as the business of beauty. The storyline follows the early careers of several members of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, in particular an emerging young star (Neve Campbell) who has emerged by virtue of happenstance---a seemingly slight neck strain that befalls another dancer, which is enough reason to cause her replacement. Three times in the film, a strained neck, a broken tendon, and a broken arm: you are replaced and your career is probably over. Like vultures, ambitious, entrepreneurial understudies wait in the wings or off to the side, mimicking and synchronizing with the moves of the star dancer---at rehearsals, during performances, it doesn't matter---like on-deck batters swinging at pitches to get the pitcher's motion and timing down, ready to step in at the break of a bone. These understudy routines seem to be entirely voluntary, and the mimicking movements seem surreal amid the mundane backstage business going on about them. In early scenes in mirrored rehearsal rooms, the reflected images seem to say, "There are many of you---slip up and another just like you will rise to take your place," and this does in fact happen three times in the film. In the big, contemporary production number that ends the film (some kind of fantastical New Age piece, but with better music), a huge giant head (which is to say, the big head of a giant) gathers dancers to him using huge giant arms, and stuffs them into his gaping maw---literally---as the dancers disappear into it. Yes, this life will devour you, and spit you out, when your dance is done. Remarkably, there is the almost constant sound, throughout the entire film, of the Chicago streets---car horns echoing in the canyons between skyscrapers, car doors slamming, tires screeching, short, sudden shouts---as within the Joffrey, ballet masters instruct students using language and terminology that might seem bombastic or pretentious in other contexts, but which seem perfectly natural, even necessary, when discussing the artful movement of the human body. The car sounds are not an intrusion of the workaday world into the world of art and beauty, but a reminder that for the dancers, this is the workaday world, and we are hearing two workaday worlds in coexistence. Similarly, beautiful dance performances are punctuated by brief cuts to the stage manager's desk, to people milling about in the wings, with the dancing continuing in the background, suddenly seeming like real work. As for the dancing, the film features way cool contemporary dances, with perhaps only a few minutes of the Giselle kind of stuff I was expecting (that's not a value judgment). Included is a beautiful, romantic, and contemporary pas de deux (Neve Campbell's breakthrough dance), at an outdoor evening performance in Grant Park, as winds from an approaching thunderstorm gust through the audience and we see the performance through a veil of light but intensifying rain. On another night, there is a---yikes, I can use only the word "lovely"---solo performance in which a gossamer-gowned dancer uses a sling suspended from the ceiling, first like a turn-of-the-century swing in pinafore days, swinging breezily on a summer day; then, more nearly like a pole dancer; and then back again. We see her from the audience, from nearly overhead, and from floor level at close range, this last point of view showing how perfectly near her toes almost---almost---come to touching the floor as she swings back and forth. In fact, throughout the film, we see productions from the audience, from the ceiling, looking from or into the wings, from backstage, and from any other angle you care to name. In contrast to the dances, we see the offstage lives of the dancers, at bowling alleys, pool halls, and the chain, leather, and tattoo bar where Neve Campbell works when she's not working (!), going home to her apartment where the L fills the view out the window when it rumbles by. Also thrown in for good measure are the stage mothers, the prima donna, the tragic failure, and the rest. Malcolm McDowell is really great as the Joffrey's artistic director, and Neve Campbell is also very good, in an understated way (and is to be commended for doing her own dancing, as well as co-producing the movie and co-writing the story). One of the most amusing episodes is the school's annual Christmas roast, where the students perform little send-ups of production numbers we have seen performed in deadly earnest earlier in the film, as well as spot-on impersonations of McDowell's character and of the ballet instructors. Finally, the music is as wonderful as the dancing, though in the end credits I managed to pick out only Chopin and the Kronos Quartet, which shows the range covered in the music.
B	Confessions of a Dangerous Mind	A pretty good movie about a character I didn't care a whole lot about, though I liked Sam Rockwell's performance. Some nice little touches, but also some awkward, first-time director stuff (e.g. a pan across space and time on obviously the same studio set).
B+	Crumb	The Keep On Truckin' artist. Fritz the Cat. A real documentary---I think---of a nerd supreme (though a quite likeable guy). (His real brother Chuck looked vaguely familiar, like some actor.) Went on a bit long. Some kind of sadness. Three Crumbs.
B+	Crush	An "a while back" review: this was a pleasant surprise, and the best thing that Andie MacDowell's done. Other than that, the memories are dim…
A-	Cube	Intriguing situation, although the premise it's based on is hard to swallow. Kind of abstract, in an interesting way---a closed universe with its own rules. The script falters in places and the human dynamics often don't ring true, but the puzzle-solving is interesting throughout, despite fuzzy movie math. And now we know what they do with those widgets they make in Saskatoon, eh, Karl?
B+	Dancing at Lughnasa	Good characterizations and good performances, though, strangely, Meryl Streep's is not among them, as if she threw all her energies into getting the accent down. A rather uneventful movie, one driven more by nuance and character study than plot---not a bad thing, certainly.
D	Day After Tomorrow, The	Between the Quakeless Tsunami That Attacked New York and the Big Bagless Vacuums That Ate Los Angeles, just a vast, cold expanse of falsely warm and tired human angles on redemption and other large human emotions because we're not just about the special effects, dang it (Father vows to spend more time with Child after Catastrophic Global Climate Change---you've heard it all before). Sadly, the aforementioned New York and LA fx episodes are the best things about this movie (and both, of course, are featured in all the trailers I've seen for this). Even though the New York tsunami courteously pauses in mid-skyscraper-canyon to allow central figures to pronounce dramatic readings from the poodly script before climbing a few steps to avoid the 10-story wall of water. Even though the LA (tornados? tornadoes? Dan Quail, you pick) look more like giant, radiation-mutated versions of Taz rising up from a nearby Warner Bros. Lot. Worse, both of these "best" fx are shot off early in the movie, and the most excitement after that is watching the snow fall. The logical holes are legion. In discussions in the international scientific community, we're at -150 degrees (Fahrenheitized for American audiences), but we don't see anybody's breath. Dennis Quaid walks from Washington DC to New York through 15-foot snow in a matter of a few days (yes, I said "walked"). Not only that, he approaches New York from the East (that is, from the Atlantic Ocean). My favorite: Jake Glyenhenhallehnal (sp?), holed up at the New York Public Library, thinks the best place to break into to get penicillin for a Love Interest's leg wound is an abandoned Russian cargo ship that has errantly sailed down the street and become stuck in the ice (don't ask). Instead of scaling the hull of a cargo ship and breaking into and/or finding the dispensary and the penicillin therein, I would have thought it would have been easier to break into a nearly pharmacy or doctor's office. (But, then, I don't know New York that well.) Never mind the poorly-CGI'd wolves, escaped from the Central Park Zoo (there is such a thing, right?), who also seem to have scaled the hull of the cargo ship. Caution to fellow Librarians by Training: lots of book-burning at the NYPL.
F	Dead, The	All right, all right. Don't throw things. To me, this was "Gosford Park", but without the "interesting" stuff about class differences. And with even less "movement". On the plus side, it was an hour shorter. As with Gosford, I read nothing but the highest praise for this film, and as with Gosford, I thought it really sucked. MAYBE it's just me, but movies that have me squirming from about 10 minutes in (I'm willing to give almost any film a 10-min. chance) all the way to the end is not doing its job, for me, anyway. Maybe it's theater/actor part of me, but the highest crime---no, make that the highest sin---is to bore the audience. And this film is extremely boring. Maybe "The Dead" is better read than filmed, I can't say. Movies like "Eyes Wide Shut" and "In the Bedroom" prove that slow-moving does not necessarily mean boring. Yes, I watch these all the way through to the end, though I'm constantly pressing the remote button that displays the running time to see if it's gonna be over soon. And constantly squirming. Gosford Park, House of Mirth, and The Dead: the Squirm Gang. Is it any coincidence that at least two of these have high-falootin' literary pedigrees???
A-	Deceiver (1998)	Interesting and engaging, though somewhat implausible. Rather like Mulholland Dr. in that I didn't quite "get it" at the end, but I don't mind. Tim Roth is going onto my Favorite Actors list.
A-	Deconstructing Harry	The best Woody Allen I've seen in quite a while, which isn't saying much.
A	Deliverance	I did rewatch this the day I said I would, when Kat asked about it. I downgraded it from A+ to A, because I thought the last fifth of the movie could use some more work (the part after they emerge from the river), though as Kat says there were good moments near the end as well (e.g. when Jon Voight suddenly breaks down crying at the busy dinner table).
B+	Denise Calls Up	Interesting concept.
A-	Devil's Backbone, The	Nice horror story that was plausible and motivated in its non-horror envelope; well done, good performances.
D+	Dinner with Friends	A seemingly amateur script whose stage version happened to win a Pulitzer Prize---lots of unnatural dialogue. (I have since seen the stage version and I much preferred it to this film version.) A "walking script." Sincere, but talky. Wasn't long before I knew this was going to be a really long screening session. What's with Greg Kinnear's gray/blue splotched hair?? I did a lot of zoning out. At the end, a dead giveaway, in my opinion, of an amateur script: a character extensively describes a dream. She talks, we listen.
A	Dinosaur	A rescreening of a favorite. Once you get beyond the fact of prepubescent dinosaurs that talk accordingly, you're home free. Fantastic CGI. Some of the characterizations are strained, but it is after all a Disney movie. And those carnosaurs are such one-dimensional brutes…
A-	Dish, The	Interesting, funny, a little quirky--at times even a little moving. Warm account of an important little mission on the periphery of a significant event--and apparently all true, though some of the comedic elements seem entirely fictional--and are forgiven.
A-	Door to Door	William H. Macy is excellent as the salesman with cerebral palsy, deftly handling the kind of role that's all too easily handled in a much too facile manner, if that makes any sense. The "invisible thread" concept makes for an interesting story.
A-	Double Indemnity	But Fred McMurray???
B-	Down With Love	Nice, fun retro stuff (I love retro!)---music, fashion, decorating---as well as film gimmicks like split-screen, and yet---unsatisfying. Why are tribute movies like this (The Flintstones, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and in this case the equally cartoony Doris Day) always so bad? (Though this one was much better than the former two, which were awful.) Why would Ewan McGregor's New York playboy have his Scottish accent? Irked me throughout. And, I'm sorry, Renee Zellweger is attractive and I like her acting, but she's not the hot babe called for in the script, like, say, Jeri Ryan. The visual entendres were well over the top---this is PG-13? Only if kids don't know what they don't know. And they weren't even as clever as those in the Austin Powers movies.
D+	Easy Virtue [Hitchcock, 1927]	It was not Easy to watch this movie, which has few Virtues to recommend it. (I hate reviewers' puns on film titles, especially ones as lame as this one!) Lots of my comments on this film are comments about silent films in general (which I'll save for a special essay on silent films). This looks and feels like three separate movies stitched together. The first part takes place in a courtroom and Hitchcock throws in just way too many visual gimmicks and experimentations. In the course of a few minutes, we get the judge's point of view looking through an improbably telescopic monocle, a blurry, out-of-focus lens as he looks sans monocle at the witness stand, and then a series of flashbacks/flashforwards connected by a common object---a decanter or the husband's face (it's a divorce trial). Here's a more detailed example: the woman in the flashback sits down at a writing desk, then Hitchcock cuts to someone writing in a notebook, only it's not the woman in the flashback, it's a juror at the trial back in the present. It was interesting once, but it's done way too many times here. Failures to establish facts and exposition, especially necessary in a silent movie---for example, when the lawyer's "talking", you don't know who's lawyer he is; that's not established either visually in some way or by a narration panel. In one flashback, we see a particularly bad-acting version of a cane-whipping, in which the blows of the cane do not even make an impression in the victim's clothing, although you have to admire the caner's skill in stopping the blow just before actual contact. OK, that's the gimmick-laden courtroom part of the movie. Next is the sloooow and loooong segment at the Mediterranean resort (don't worry your pretty little head over the plot here) with plenty of cinematic padding with slow, static scenes---e.g., about a minute's worth of a couple having tea on a veranda. With these two contrasting film segments, one can certainly see why Hitchcock channeled his career into crime/suspense and not romance! There is a long third segment, having generally to do with manners, family dynamics, high society, and that sort of thing---some big friggin' scandal we'd find laughably tame today (intimated by the title, Easy Virtue). On the plus side, the music on this DVD was much better than that on The Lodger---it actually fit the action.
B-	Edge, The	I guess I like adventure films, but this was no 'Deliverance'. Those characters actually skinned a bear???!!!
B+	Elf	Rather amusing, to damn with faint praise.
C-	Ella Enchanted	I loved this movie!!! Oh wait---I take that back---I'm not a 12-year-old girl. Here's one of those "meets" movie comparisons: A Knight's Tale meets [live-action] Shrek. Unfortunately, more like the former film than the latter. To give you an idea of the groaners peppering this movie: peasant-powered wooden escalators; Spells for Dummies; "If the gauntlet fits, you must acquit!"; a medieval version of the Manhattan skyline (thankfully, without the WTC), and the medieval form of Beatlemania, or more appropriately, Prince Williammania. Some special effects are inexplicably awful, given the quality of other effects in the film. In particular, when there are "giants" and humans in the same scene, it's painfully obvious that both are simply humans filmed on different scales, because the tonal quality of the film is very different in each case, and the outlines of the humans are hardly seamless when placed against the backdrop of "giants". That's '50s or '60s stuff, at best. More? Some of the scenery is obviously watercolor painting. Still more? Anne Hathaway is one of the worst lip-synchers I've ever seen. I mean, "cheesy" is at least of perverse interest, but "bad" is bad. The only good thing is the well-done, computer-generated snake (voiced by Alan Rickman??).
B+	Elling	Nice script, nice look, nice characters, nice little movie, nice line between the normal and the mentally challenged without exaggerating the latter. "BOG" is written on what looks like a big tin of ham 1:06:39 into the movie.
B+	Emperor's New Clothes, The	An interesting, almost cute, but actually pretty unbelievable historical fantasy. Ian Holm is good, of course, and overall a well-made film. Though it took almost an hour to kick into gear. The comic moments are few and far between, when one might have expected more, though it would've been lessened as a buffoonery. Good cinematography.
B+	English Patient, The	Always see, never saw. I was prepared for something worse, so it was a mildly pleasant surprise, though a bit too drawn-out in places.
B	Enigma	An "a while back" review: don't remember too much about this one, except I know I didn't learn much about Enigma. Better to watch a History Channel special on that. This was an Enigma wrapped in a love story wrapped in a spy yarn.
B	Eraser	Occasional bad fx---e.g. shooting the alligator---but good stuff too---like the parachute sequence. Bad: how everyone converged in New York---and at the zoo to boot; why Caan only drugged John (Arnold S.), not killed him. An OK story line---bothers me that there was no romantic interest (as there usually is) between Arnold and Vanessa---because she's black?? Arnold's survival ability a bit too much to take in this one.
A+	Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind	I expected the highly contrived premise to fall flat and silly, but this is a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable movie---and certainly not the convoluted mess I'd been led to believe it would be from some early reviews. Jim Carrey is very good (again, I didn't see the struggling manic within him yearning to breathe free, as some reviews had it), but Kate Winslet is fantastic. This is an outstanding cast---to Carrey and Winslet, add Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, and Elijah Wood. Somehow, the romance and the sci-fi mix nicely. The high-tech sci-fi is nicely understated and matter-of-fact (almost low-budgety), rather more in the spirit of "Brazil" than "Total Recall". The main plot line, an endearing if unlikely romance, is nicely interwoven with two interesting subplots, which grow naturally out of the premise and are integral to the final outcome. The dialogue is natural and well-crafted. The sound design (trying to pay more attention to that) is both rich and nuanced, with spatial qualities that can help your understanding the film. To top it off, the film is very often funny, and it has heart, which, though it emerges late, comes to a crisp flourish at the end.
B+	Every Man for Himself and God Against All	This wasn't as good as I remembered seeing it at college, but I was younger then and stoned. I have a very vivid memory of a scene that, it turns out, appears not to be in the movie... Neither as funny nor as fascinating as I've remembered it... Hmmm---wonder why.
F	Evita	Several "first's" here!!! To wit: 1) the first movie I absolutely, positively could NOT endure watching all the way through to the end, giving up at about the 1-hour mark; 2) my first "F" that was not due to the movie being dull and boring, (though it was a little of that, too). This one made me grind my teeth; I got a complete physical workout just squirming in my chair for that one hour. I even tried doing bills and other paperwork while I had it on, just to say that I watched all of it, but I couldn't take it even as background noise. You should know that as a theater person I am no great fan of musicals (to put it mildly), though there are 3 that I actually like (The Threepenny Opera, Sweeney Todd, and the movie Moulin Rouge). But this was just awful. First, a musical about a Chilean dictator's wife? I was reminded of "The Producers" and the musical about Hitler. Except "Evita" takes itself seriously!!! There's an absurd "story" told without a single piece of actual, speaking dialogue---everything, and I mean everything, has to be SUNG. You'd think you might get music reminiscent of both its time frame (perhaps swing, circa 1936) and place (Spanish/Latin music), but contemporary electric guitar crap???!!! The anachronistic music that worked so well in "Moulin Rouge" (or even in A. L. Webber's own "Jesus Christ Superstar") is just grating in this pail of slop. This movie consists entirely of that: Broadway slop, tuneless crap with smelly old lyrics. As everything is sung, even filler such as exposition, you get a lot of "dialogue" where different syllables are delivered at different pitches, which is how I would describe it rather than using the word "song" or "singing". And there's a big difference between song lyrics that simply don't rhyme (not an evil in itself) and "Evita"'s putrid lyrics, and between an unhummable tune (not an evil in itself), typically atonal contemporary music, and seemingly random assignment of words and syllables to various notes of the musical scale. Well, I guess this turned into a rant.
A-	Eye, The	Liked the music and the visuals during the opening credits. Interesting premise---when the new of sight see weird things, how do they know what they're seeing is real or not? Or, as the "Making of" featurette says---"What about seeing ghosts without realizing it? Everything is fresh to her eyes. So she can't tell the difference between human beings and ghosts". A very good horror film.
A-	Fahrenheit 9/11	Rather than clutter up This Space with my own half-baked political notions and whatnot, I've decided to write a calm, reasoned rant separately and concentrate as best I can here on the movie itself. Which is really two movies in one, or perhaps should have been. Fahrenheit 1 is 9/11 and the whole Saudi oil connection, and Fahrenheit 2 is the war in Iraq. Whatever you think of Michael Moore, cameras don't lie. Well, in this day of digital manipulation, I guess they can, but that technology isn't yet good enough to be fully convincing---as obviously the intended-to-be-humorous "Ponderosa" examples in this film show. And despite what some in the Arab world and elsewhere think we can do with technology to distort the truth. Well, OK---we probably try. But we're probably better than those Soviet-era photographs where non-persons have been disappeared with a few strokes of an air brush (God bless the Clone tool). No. I have to be honest with you. This looks like real footage. There's George W. Bush in class, having been informed of the second plane and the second tower, reading to school kids, peeing his pants (this isn't golf or fishing any more, perhaps), afraid to leave the room, afraid to ask for a hall pass, afraid that this really is real footage, and he's blowing it. Real footage. There's Paul Wolfowitz, "ideological architect" of the war in Iraq, darling of ultraconservative freedom-fighters everywhere (except those perhaps in Iraq), spreading saliva on his comb and running it through his hair---joking, apparently, with the cameras, as if playing Alfalfa (as in Our Gang or Little Rascals, not the name of some town in Iraq, at least that I know of). And what are those winky, pre-On Air smirks George W. Bush is giving to some off-camera presence, moments before what we all will assume is a major address to the nation on a matter most grave? You've seen the trailer---something about Freedom, followed by, "Now watch this [golf] drive." I think this partially has to do with GWBush's very real natural discomfiture in public speaking situations, shifting hypnotically behind the podium from one foot to the other, changing the subject quickly---any subject, really---golf, for example---when he has no script written for him. Real footage, all of it. This would have been a much more powerful movie, I think, if Moore had let the camera speak for itself. And add to that the Congressional Record, the court documents, and all the other too-late-to-shred matters of public record. Regardless of what you hear in Moore's voiceover, the camera doesn't lie. Brilliant use of certain documents---for example, the White-House censored document with a name felt-tipped out, and the copy of the same document Moore had obtained earlier---with the same name intact. I have never been comfortable with Moore's confrontational tactics---they can be dishonest and embarrassing, and the limited use of such tactics in F 9/11was a sigh of relief of sorts. Why bother, when you have the enlistment records of the sons and daughters (not to mention their ages) of U.S. Senators and Representatives, to ask those congressmen---yes, no congressional women were asked---if they'd volunteer their offspring for service in Iraq? Look at the record. Look in the camera. I have two other gripes about this movie. I thought it shameless to put so much celluloid to the weeping mother of Flint who lost her son in the war in Iraq---regardless of the mother's consent. To me, this was no less distasteful than similar scenes on Detroit TV news at 11---the anguish of the mother whose son was shot in a drive-by, whose child perished in a house fire, or whose daughter died in an alcohol-related car crash. This private sorrow has no place as spectacle on public TV or on the big screen. Even when the mother herself wants us to share that sorrow that we might be spurred to action---this was the part of the film where I felt most manipulated. My other gripe is the portrayal of some of the troops in Iraq---the genital jokes at the expense of captured Iraqis, the gung-ho craziness of 18-year-old kids. Such behavior does in fact range from silly to despicable, but I don't for a minute think George W. Bush is to be held responsible for this wild-child behavior. In any event, many people who oppose Bush nevertheless support the troops "100%", and it doesn’t serve Moore's purpose to deflect even a small part of his fire away from the True Target. I left the theater feeling emotionally, and almost physically, sickened; saddened, and angry, all at the same time. Rarely does a film do that, even an imperfect film such as this.
B+	Fantasia 2000	IMAX treatment was a good idea, but this sequel isn't quite up to par with the original. A few of the segments: Noah's Ark (or rather Donald's Ark), the Gershwin/jazz band piece, and the flamingo number are merely big cartoons---on IMAX, make that huge cartoons. My favorites were the first two (leading me to believe this would be a grand experience, which went steadily downhill from there): the abstract Bach and the one with the whales.
A-	Far From Heaven	I liked the '50s look and sound (e.g. the opening credits)---a tad overstylized (e.g. in blue light, especially at night). Saturated colors. Anachronisms ("How may I direct your call?"; a disco ball; carpool?). A great job by Julianne Moore (better than in The Hours). Interesting for tackling hush-hush issues of race and gayness in the '50s.
D+	Farewell My Concubine	Orphan spankings, ambiguous sexuality, and best of all---everything you've always wanted to know about Chinese opera. Long. Real long.
C	Farmer's Wife [Hitchcock, 1928], The	My first-ever viewing of this. The DVD jacket calls it a "dramatic comedy." Well, more watchable than I anticipated---for one thing, a better print than the other silent Hitchcocks I've watched so far. Except the narration panels were often dark and hard to read. It didn't 'elp 'at 'ere was a lot o' lower-class dialect---"Beer drinking don't do 'alf the 'arm of lovemaking," for example---had to use Zoom to read that. (Did I mention I hate the Zoom feature on my new DVD player?) Clocking in at 2:09, this also blows away my misconception that silent films are invariably short---expense of film, limited size of reels, or whatnot---though I suppose some of those big, fat, vaguely biblical epics were pretty long, too. Anyway, a bunch of standard wife/marriage jokes that earlier generations deemed humorous. Wow---this actually is a comedy---but a warm comedy of character rather than of slapstick, which is another thing I might have expected of silent film comedy. But this is Hitchcock, after all. And no wonder it's so long---what with lingering drawn-out shots that go way beyond establishing what they are intended to establish. For example, the farmer's longing for his dead wife and consequent decision to seek new love takes about 5 minutes. The fact that a wedding dinner is going on---5 minutes. Funny names of people, I guess: Thirza Tapper, Churdles Ash, Araminta Dench. Are silent movies inherently boring? To us, that is. Because the very novelty of the moving picture, uh, has worn off a little bit?
D+	Fast and the Furious, The	Being stuck in a hotel room during a thunderstorm has a way of making you watch bad movies---any bad movie. Like this one.
D	Fast Runner, The	Confusing---everybody's name begins with "A" and ends in "-iat" or "-uat", and to me of course everyone---Inuits, I think---looks the same. On top of that, it's very cold, so all you see are faces framed by fur hoods, and have to remember facial details. And not only that, but I THINK it kept going back and forth in time, so you didn't even know, for example, whether A___iat was dead or alive. More like a documentary video, not film. The DVD had white subtitles---on snow!!! Lots of dialog with no corresponding subtitles (either that or I just couldn't see them!). I stopped watching this when a man kicked and beat a dog---after all, this is video, and not digital effects---so it was real. OK in the Inuit world, I would imagine, but not in mine. Interesting culturally, but otherwise really slow-moving. I quit watching after about half an hour, with 2:13 left to go.
C+	Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control	Nice concept, but rather messy; I wanted the movie to succeed, but..
C	Fierce Creatures	Another free rental on a whim. "Uneven", as they say... Sort of introduced a promising premise and then dropped it for the usual crap...
B	Flirting with Disaster	What a cast---Lily Tomlin, Alan Alda, George Segal, Ben Stiller, Tea Leoni, Patricia Arquette, and Mary Tyler Moore (who creates a nice character well out of her "type"). Michigan and Michiganders/Michiganians come off really badly (Kalamazoo/Battle Creek industrial areas, former Hell's Angels, misty snowy weather, bitchy bed-and-breakfast grandmas). Lily Tomlin (from Michigan, if memory serves) is hilarious as an LSD guide talking down a starched-collar type (and a policeman) from an accidentally administered trip. Several funny moments, mostly in awkward situations nicely set up (e.g., the car trip through the New Mexico desert), but other gags fall flat (there are several rental cars involved, each one a white Ford Taurus). Contrary to what you usually find, this film actually picked up and became funnier in the 2nd half---more nicely set-up comically interdependent/interlocking situations, but it was too late. Celluloid-wise, has that bright, vivid, saturated-color look that I like. And, the way you look at armpits will never be the same..
B	Flower of Evil, The	I really don't know what to say about this film. I don't mean I'm flabbergasted by it or that it's confusing or anything. I just mean nothing comes to mind when I think of this film. Is that better or worse than damning with faint praise? I don't know what to say about this film, but "France's Master of Suspense" and "his gift for humor never so wicked" would definitely not be among my comments (though they were among those in the promotional material). Hmmm. . . reminiscent of Gosford Park (both in milieu and estimated level of humor). Lest I give the wrong impression here: this movie was pleasant enough to watch (unlike GPark!), and somewhat interesting (despite a talking couple in the back of the movie theater who later started snoring). (A sparsely populated late show.) Anyway, I don't know my French actors. Oh---why would a rich French family drive things like a Volvo, a couple of compact Renaults, and a "2CV" clunker (you'd recognize one if you saw it). By the way, there was no flower, and not a whole lot of evil either.
A	Fog of War, The	An historical documentary formed around interviews with Robert McNamara, supplemented by archival footage of his days as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson (as well as earlier events in his life). The parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are startling, although McNamara, unlike Rumsfeld, seems the more thoughtful and ethical person, at least given the nature of the office. The structure is that of eleven deceptively simple "lessons", which I forget, but go something like "Trust your instincts" and "Empathize with your enemy." As for Vietnam, McNamara comes off, surprisingly, as something of a reluctant peacenik, in counterpoint to LBJ’s warmongering. The film features images of many of the original documents involved in the historical events, and, strangely, almost poetic images of falling bombs, napalm, and Agent Orange. For once, I can honestly say that I loved the Phillip Glass score, which was richer and unusually "less minimalist", if that makes any sense.
C-	Force 10 From Navarone	It was a lazy Saturday afternoon, the TV was on, I wasn't doing anything, I didn't feel like moving or getting up out of my couch-potato chair, and this movie comes on. I sat, I saw, I was less-than-conquered by this film. I don't remember any scenes from this dog appearing in Harrison Ford's retrospective at the Oscars last year. I remember liking "The Guns of Navarone" as a strapping youth, but this sequel is pretty bad---the word "Navarone" in the title is only there to market the film; there's the thinnest of connections between these two films (not that the original is any gem either).
A-	Frailty	Interesting, nicely done---bland comments for a film in my A range, but sometimes that's enough. I wonder if one of the reasons it's not being seen is it's rumored to be vaguely religious in the sense there's an angel and stuff and also satirical about it, and there's this huge fundamentalist Christian moving-going bloc that has conspired with the Devil to withhold attendance so as to quash its popularity and therefore the true message of this bloc's hidden intent, which is to watch me from outside any window facing east and follow me in my car any time I drive in a generally western direction. At least, I know they're trying to poison my cereal.
A	French Lieutenant's Woman, The	An always-see-never-saw movie. I had no idea that there was a contemporary part to it as well as the costume-drama part.
C+	Full Frontal	Camera work: jumpy documentary style, over-naturalistic, pseudo-low-quality, out of focus, grainy, voiceover stuff, with all the convolution of Adaptation without the clarity, if Adaptation can be said to have had clarity; self-referential movie industry junk. But good acting performances.
B+	Gangs of New York	This could have been a nice historical epic---a truly American historical epic, no less---but for a number of flaws, not the least of which is the long, dull chunk in the middle of the movie, sandwiched between the historical bread. The movie tries hard to reflect the history, but if I hadn't seen a History Channel special on the REAL Gangs of New York, I don't think I wouldv'e known why firefighters were attacking rich people's houses, for instance. Is it history, a love story (of sorts), a tale of vendetta---oops, did I say that Italian word??? I am once again being asked to appreciate the ironies and subtlties of the personal dynamics among gangster types. Ho hum. Still, a good-looking movie that sets up a well-crafted, seedy little world.
C+	Ghost and the Darkness, The	A "period adventure", with fx (e.g. the all-critical lions) that are way cheesy and/or too fragmented in presentation to follow. Liked Tom Wilkinson, as always, but Val Kilmer's "Irish" accent and Michael Douglas' "Southern" accent were like fingernails on a blackboard. On top of that, Douglas was wrong for the role.
B+	Glass Bottom Boat, The	A note about why I wanted to see this: among my childhood memories are two rare Sundays (I think) when Dad asked if I wanted to go to a movie. We saw the big Disney animated films but otherwise we rarely went to the movies when I was growing up. Anyway, I remember the advertisement for this movie in the newspaper (in 1966), though I know we didn't see it---in fact, on both occasions I think we didn't go to any movie at all, so maybe that's why these two movies stick out in my mind (the other Sunday/movie was "The Grass Is Greener" in 1961). I've wanted to see both movies ever since, and now finally I have seen one of them. About the movie itself: I was pleasantly surprised. It's goofy, screwball, campy, Doris Day stuff, with wonderfully campy screwball-comedy-type music. And, it has absolutely nothing to do with a glass-bottom boat, which was a big surprise after all these years.
C+	Glass House, The	Bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, bland, and at the end, a little bland. Scandinavian Insomnia Guy (forget name) does another good American accent job, and normally wholesome Diane Lane gets a chance to be a little evil, but her extended cameo, shall we call it, doesn't leave much room for going anywhere with it. (And not so evil after all.) The "glass" motif---the Glass family lives in a glass house---is---need I say it?---a little obvious, and strained, and unnecessary, and doesn't even have anything to say about throwing stones, anyway. Bland.
D+	Gods and Generals	Every scene is one of a) a prayin', God-fearin', preachifyin' cracker general speakin' a fine line about God and states' rights---often enough looking up at the Milky Way---complete with shooting star, of course, or, a high-falutin' Maine man (Jeff Daniels) spoutin' EXTENSIVE passages from Lovelace or Caesar (the latter on the field of battle, no less); b) annoying tactical crap (captions like "Captain Cracker's 5th Virginia Brigade", or said Cracker saying stuff like "Put the 15th to the left of the 3rd, and the 4th to the right flank"). This is all well and good for Civil War buffs (and to some extent probably some effort to impress them. Also stuff like, "General X, what is your opinion of topic Y?" followed by "Well, General Z, [famous quote by General X]". Nudge, nudge---did you catch that?; c) myopic little battle scenes ad nauseum (either ant-sized battle lines or closeups of shooters or cannons, with no mid-size shots for perspective). No gore, but a lot of monotonous shootin' and killin'---the latter via the sound of bullets going through thick wool. And lots and lots of symphonic music and choirs in the background. Blacks who love their masters, masters who love their slaves. In short, an overblown, stilted gasbag of a movie with no apparent direction other than the depiction of physical history to the tune of violins and sopranos and a revisionist history of the Confederacy (this is a Ted Turner project). Actually walked out after watching only the first 2+ hours of this 4-hour yawner.
A-	Good Bye, Lenin!	An almost really good film. An East German mother falls into a coma and wakes up 8 months later after the Berlin wall has fallen and Germany has been reunited. Upon doctor's orders, her son goes to all lengths to shield her from the shock of the new world order (she was, or claimed to be, a devout Communist), lest another heart attack befall her. The premise is far-fetched but interesting; this is a funny movie that also has real warmth. Still, the time-frame issues here bothered me. Really, how much could Germany have changed in 8 months??? Not only that, but the estranged husband of the coma lady didn't recognize his own young adult son after not seeing him for----ta-da---3 whole years???? Another thing---the plausibility of the fact that the shock of the new world order would INVARIABLY cause another heart attack in Coma Lady---after 15 years, maybe; after 8 months, I'm not so sure. And is that even medically reasonable?? The wall fell! Get over it! On production values: you could easily see the boom operator swinging the boom mike at the top of the frame---at least twice. Stuff that was amusing: the 2001: A Space Odyssey bit in the wedding video; the son's fabricated story of the West Germans fleeing capitalism to come settle in the East (complete with faked news program on videotape).
C-	Good Girl, The	After all these years, we weren't underestimating Jennifer Aniston after all. The script is is bad, trite, and really dumb.
C+	Happy Accidents	An OK idea that struggles to get going and then merely plods along. The ideas, inventions, and so forth from the future, as always in such movies, strain to be described matter-of-factly. Good performances form M. Tomei and D'Onofrio.
B+	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Horrors	Harry Potter and the Chamberpot of Horrors. An "a while back" review: just OK, with the expected special effects. Liked the ugly dwarfy guy---prefiguring, so to speak, Gollum in The Two Towers, screened only weeks afterwards. The story was a bit hard to follow, actually. At least one character who, after he appeared, you had to say who in the hell is that. I'm talking about the guy who showed up at whats-his-name's hut with the other whats-his-name; he looked like an accountant and totally out of place. Later learned it would have helped to read the book. Like that's going to happen.
B	Hart's War	Interesting situation (arriving at the truth in a trial vs. need to conceal prisoner-escape info), but the racial angle is altogether too familiar and unnecessary. Strains credulity at times, but pretty well done.
B+	He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not	A considerable expenditure of time is required---the first 45 slow-moving minutes---until the sudden switching of gears---literally into reverse---that occurs halfway through the film. The completely ordinary story of the first half becomes an interesting exercise in point of view and perhaps of a sort of paranoia, later identified as erotomania (not what you think!). Another of the category of films that manipulate time.
A-	Hedwig and the Angry Inch	Rather outrageous, to put it in understatement. Loved the title song.
B	High Noon	Yep. The 1952 Western. I'm trying to expand my horizons.
B+	Himalaya	The exotic locale and culture go a long way, in a rare story of conflict in which there are no real villains.
C	Hitler: The Rise of Evil	An MTV movie, which is to say, Made-for-TV. A few MTV music videos, though, might have helped, a sort of serious version of The Producers. Anyway, Robert Carlyle just doesn't look very much like Hitler---too thin and pointy. Obvious stuff like Hitler removing flowers from his prison cell---that probably never really happened. This is the Classics Illustrated version of the Hitler story. It's not clear why the epilogue was all about concentration camps, given the focus of the rest of the movie.
C+	Hours, The	I thought the screenplay amateurish, at least in the sense that it reminded me of amateurish playwriting, and the montage or crossfade stuff was rather hokey. I liked the basic conceit ('nuther gimmick flick...), but I didn't need the parallels thrust in my face. Chick flick? Well, I guess, as to me it seemed like the movie was wearing its emotions on its sleeve. Streep disappointed, and Moore impressed at first, until as the movie wore on the script didn't give her much else to do or anything, at least until the end. I did like Kidman, though. Ed Harris' role of Tortured Poet was my first inkling that this was gonna be a groaner. And sad to say, the kind of literary stuff the Academy thinks it loves. I may have misspoken myself. I don't think it's a chick flick, and the themes per se didn't exactly grate on me---meaning the depression, loss, and all that stuff. Those things are human and universal. It's not even the fact that all of the main characters are women. (And The Hours, the book, was written by a man, correct?) I felt my emotions being manipulated, and worse, primarily through stilted, high-falutin' speechifyin'. Ed Harris' character was the worst at this, and Kidman's the least. Another thing I wanted to mention was the music. At times it felt appropriate, but on the whole, Philip Glass' score really started to bug me. I think it was a distraction, because when you start hearing it, it's unmistakably him, and you start paying attention to it. I say appropriate because there is a certain timeless quality to the hypnotic repetition. But at times it started sounding really overdramatic to me, just like the script. I wish I hadn't seen Glass' credit at the beginning of the movie---maybe I wouldn't have recognized it as his, though that'd be pretty hard.
B+	House of Sand and Fog	Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley are good (as is the supporting cast), but Jennifer seems to have been directed to "act pretty", and Ben exhibits a degree of ethnic pathos that is a bit much for my sensibilities. Oddly, he also mimicked the worst of Robin Williams' mannerisms, and at times seemed to actually be Robin Williams' impersonation of Ben Kingsley. Still, the story is interesting, with interwoven situations and circumstances keeping things going, though its obvious derivation from probably a much longer book results in a too-quick romance, a too-quick putting-the-house-on-the-market, and a too-quick and unconvincing personality change in Lester (he of the too-quick romance). Lots of suicides, or near suicides. Some goofy things---like clouds and fog moving in fast-motion, but the ethnic interior decorating is cool.
A-	Howards End	I really enjoyed watching this, particular the performance of Emma Thompson, one of my favorite actresses. I just didn't understand the Wilcox character played by Anthony Hopkins. This time period (the 20s) is about as far back as I can go without thinking Costume Drama, and the attending themes of high society, manners, and all that stuff.
B	Idiots, The	Started out promising, with an amusing premise, but went downhill. A comedy that turned into a serious thing (as many so-called comedies do---Aristotle would turn over in his grave). I like the idea of bringing out my "inner idiot".
C-	Igby Goes Down	Snotty, irritating people---sometimes I like 'em, and sometimes I don't. A stilted, self-important script. Cloying and fey. No character to care about. Not enough of Susan Sarandon to save it.
B	Importance of Being Earnest, The	Too understated humor (e.g. Bracknell). Tattoo, balloon, knight---these are words I wrote down long ago when I watched this and can no longer remember the significance.
C-	Impostor	What 'Minority Report' could have been---had it wanted to be a bad movie. Extraordinarily ordinary for its genre, and pretty darn dull, actually.
D	In the Cut	This movie lumbers along with almost nothing happening, although the Meg Ryan character develops with some little interest. I thought because her character wrote slang dictionaries that the title would be explained, but no dice. Writing this capsule review 7 days after the fact. I barely remember the events of the film except the whodunnit. I think it was meant to be finely textured, but maybe I prefer films with at least grassy knolls, if not outright peaks and valleys.
B+	In the Name of the Father	Another story of the wrongfully accused, but with the twist that his whole family is implicated, including Auntie Annie, etc. Emma Thompson gets near-top billing for about half an hour of screen time---more of her would have been nice. Pretty good movie.
C	Insomnia (1997)	Further reinforces my dislike of remakes; I mean, why bother? Like Open Your Eyes/Vanilla Sky, this and the Nolan version are almost identical, scene for scene. I know musicians make covers of others' songs, and art students try to copy the works of the great masters, but why remake a movie? Nolan added some "American" touches to his story---e.g. he made Pacino's partner a bit too knowledgeable about Pacino's past, so that suspicion would be more likely drawn to him. The chase over the logs isn't in the original, and that was a good scene. I enjoyed watching this---sort of---but mostly just so I could compare it to its remake. I'm not so sure that's the reason I want to watch movies---though I do admit I do like to compare the movie with the book---I enjoyed "The Perfect Storm" a lot because I had read the book, which gave you a good technical background in the art and science of commercial fishing.
C+	Insomnia (2002)	Really disappointed with this. It was somewhat different, but I wanted more, given Memento and Forgetting. One of the few films in which I could stomach Robin Williams.
C-	Inspector Gadget	Some truly funny lines and moments, but mostly a bunch of uninspired silliness. Rupert Everett is miscast.
B	Instinct	Hannibal Lecter + One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest + Gorillas in the Mist = just OK---too schlocky at the end.
B+	Iris	Seeing "Iris" made me realize that I'm OK with knocking down a movie's rating a bit simply because it's not my kind of thing, which is to say, it's a good movie, but it didn't "resonate" with me. The opposite is also true---I may think a movie is just OK, or good, or I'll damn it with faint praise, but I'm OK with nudging up its rating a bit because it's well-made or because I wanted it to succeed and it tried hard, and so forth. When I say "a bit", I'm generally talking only 1 step in my system (A- to B+ or vice versa).
B	Iron Giant, The	Very nice '50s-style animation, but the ho-hum story is regurgitated King Kong + E.T.
B+	It Happened One Night	Ending too drawn out.
C-	Italian Job, The	Unextraordinary caper flick, of the pseudo-high-tech variety. It did pick up a little, and showed some welcome moments of comedy. Then it picked back down again, down, down, back into pseudo-high-tech hell. Very little character. Degenerated into senseless chasing, especially with helicopters.
B+	JFK	Interesting subject matter but Kostner was really flat; a bit too Oliver Stone-y for my tastes, if you know what I mean.
A-	Kill Bill Vol. 2	I felt obligated to see this, as I saw Vol. 1 (and liked it, to my surprise). Although there is some violence here, it's nowhere near the frenzied, ripping gutfest that was Vol. 1. In this Vol., you get explanations---not all of which are satisfying---for some questions raised in Vol. 1. This is perhaps and perhaps not backwards. I missed the mystique of Vol. 1 (as with the original Alien and The Matrix), whereas Vol. 2 felt like exposition after the fact (and a year or whatever later). The end credits reflect the less-than-surgical dissection that was done on the original, full-length version, as acting stars who never even appeared in Vol. 2 (they "died" a year ago) got top billing at the end; the Vol. 2 credits seemed an afterthought. It was as if you'd just seen a totally different movie. That was undoubtedly true for anyone who hadn't see Vol. 1, but it was weird even if one HAD seen Vol. 1 (and not rented it since). Quibble, quibble---I still liked it a lot (well, an A- lot). Timeframes were represented by various tonal or film qualities (grainy, washed-out flashbacks and backstory, colorful current events, and black and white flashforwards and, well, more flashbacks). Extreme, pore-counting facial closeups. Great music. The claustrophobic sound of a terrifyingly enclosed space. For violence fetishists: a recently extracted human eyeball squished under foot---bare foot; and the 5-finger heart explosion (something like that). I've never thought of David Carradine as a great actor, but he is excellent in this---the best I've seen of him. Michael Madsen and Michael Parks also shine. And I'll tell you, I want Uma Thurman with me if I'm ever buried alive. The film does drag near the end---after Daryll Hannah gets it (or loses it, I should say), there's a big anti-climactic domesticity thing going on for awhile. Strangely, the killing of Bill, which might seem to be the ultimate in anti-climactivity, given the title role of a two-volume movie, is surprisingly understated---but way effective.
C+	Kissing Jessica Stein	Mildly interesting and amusing, but rather apologetic---both women are forcibly portrayed as heteros on a fling, not as true lesbians. The movie takes pains to show that both women had been having "boy problems" and that in fact Jessica ends up marrying a once-and-former boyfriend. Messy and needless subthemes of unleashed creativity and whatnot. Light touch, some good performances.
A-	Kitchen Stories	A charming little comedy, a rare combination of deadpan humor with real heart. A humorous premise---a country bumpkin observed by a sort of home economics research scientist, or rather, such a scientist's flunky observer and data recorder, sitting in weird observation chairs (like high-chairs babies use, only adult-sized) stationed in the kitchen to discover the bumpkin's---well---homemaking techniques. Which are virtually nonexistent. There's a quaint Swedish vs. Norwegian (both spoken, English subtitles) rivalry going on there somewhere (like yupers and mitten people?), which was a little lost on me. I think it was the Swedish scientists who "invade" Norway to conduct these studies, although I can't tell the difference between Swedish and Norwegian either by language or terrain. Anyway, there's a funny little thing that goes on at the border crossings, where they have those mechanical arms like in parking garages; because in one of these countries you drive on the left, and in the other you drive on the right, the Swedes slowly maneuver their trucks laden with huge high-chairs around the arms as the lone Norwegian border guard eyes them suspiciously. OK, you had to be there. Much of the early sceneage is funny without dialogue, as the observer and the observed guardedly regard each other. Little by little they start doing little things for each other, and that's where the heart comes in (needless to say, the science of it is ruined).
B	Kolya	An "a while back" review: I so don't remember any details about this film. It was foreign and about a guy and a little boy. Guess that says it all.
B+	Ladykillers, The	Rather too much like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", with gospel instead of bluegrass, Tom Hanks instead of George Clooney as the source of pompous sesquipedalianism (which greatly suits Tom Hanks better---a nice performance), and a different cast of bumbling misfits. Still, I liked this better than "O Brother". The fine, droll humor of this film is ruined by a number of running gags, some of which worked once (the General's smoking, Garth's IBS) and some of which didn't work at all (the changing expressions of the deceased husband, in his portrait on the wall); all, however, were repeated ad nauseum. Good performances from Hanks, Irma Hall, and a few of the other principal caricatures (I hesitate to call them characters, exactly). I liked the small scenes introducing the various players---the explosives expert working on the dog food commercial, the muscle man playing in a football game (from an in-helmet point-of-view), and the General foiling a would-be robbery. We are not treated to an almost obligatory scene (although it was actualized in "O Brother"), wherein the criminals play---or try to play---their Early Music instruments for the church ladies. The ending is bad---it's not properly set up in the first scene of the film.
B	Lagaan	One movie and one variety show contained herein---I would have liked either one of them, but separately. As it is, this is an Indian version of Oklahoma!, with lip-synch hokey lyrics, and Indian Monkees faking their musical instruments. And I don't remember why I wrote down "Feringhees" here, because this didn't remind me very much of Deep Space Nine.
A-	Lantana	But I still don't know what the word "Lantana" means... Actually, just read Ebert's review of this film and he says "we learn", though I don't remember doing so, that it's the name of a shrub...
C-	Last of the Dogmen	Another case of interesting premise gone bad.
A-	Last Samurai, The	Beautifully photographed, or cinematogged, or whatever it is you do when you do cinematography. Loses points for too much Sam Peckinpah in the climactic battle, an unsatisfying love story (normally, I'd think that's an intrusion in an action film, but this film is a little more than just action---a little more), and an unconvincing reason for Tom Cruise to embrace the Samurai way of life. Were those ninja? And what's with the wimpy emperor?
A	Lawn Dogs	I like this kind of movie a lot. Quirky, dark humor, with some odd and/or slightly discomforting scenes involving children and dogs. Great performances by Sam Rockwell and the little girl. But the supporting characters (the mother and father, the neightborhood teens) are too stereotyped.
B-	Leaving Las Vegas	Oops. I had a vague notion this was a comedy, for some reason, so imagine my surprise.. (Obviously, I confused it with some other Las Vegas movie.) It wasn't so much the depravity per se---the drinking, the talk of sex, the actual sex, more drinking---that make this movie dull. It was the dullness; the slooooow dullness. Well, OK, it was the depravity, too, perhaps the discomfort of watching self-destructive people and the things they do. Rather like The Lost Weekend, without the bats. Nicholas Cage is actually pretty good, though he engages in some Nicholas Cage behavior that Ray Milland never would have done. You know, the tic-like stuff. Elisabeth Shue is pretty good, too, although the filth spewing from her mouth has irrevocably destroyed my wholesome image of her---not that I'm complaining.. What the heck were those therapy-session-like sessions in the first third of the film that were forgotten until the very last scene (and still no therapist to be seen)? I was left to ponder the music---the mishmash of lounge music, R&B, some strangely sanitized blues, something vaguely opera-like, and a doped version of Scott Joplin stuff. I think the director wanted me to get his drift through the music and through the observation of relatively static images, rather than in the movie itself.
C-	Legend of 1900, The	A good premise and a good story idea, but the story itself isn't very good, and the actual execution of the story isn't very good either. Tim Roth is good, but the script is weak and the special effects (few as they are) are cheesy.
B+	Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West (IMAX)	Before the fact, this didn't seem to be naturally suited to IMAX, but it was a pleasant surprise. Rather a short movie for such a long journey, but there are the satisfying IMAX FX: lots of Disembodied-Flying Mountain Vertigo action, the feel-able, rumbling sound of a buffalo stampede, and lots of beautiful scenery.
B+	Life As a House	Wavered between B+ and A- on this one; strained credulity a bit, featured some M.A.S.H.-ish dialogue, which lost it points, so settled on B+. That's M.A.S.H the TV series I mean---that has dialogue I can't stand---every single line is a zinger, obviously mulled over by writers for days, rather than spoken spontaneously; sarcasm alternating with bleeding-heart poignancy, giving bleeding hearts like me a bad name. Life as a House had it, but only in places, slightly detracting from it.
A-	Life in the Theater, A	Great acting by Jack Lemmon and entertaining plays-within-the-play [movie].
A	Life Is Beautiful	I didn't find Benigni as annoying as I was led to believe, although I do recall his antics from his Oscar year. Then again, I actually liked Jar Jar Binks, too..
B+	Lilo and Stitch	Some great animation, but story a little weak. Island of Very Thick-Legged Women. Some refreshing angles---for Disney, anyway (two brats---still a goofy sidekick though, as per formula).
A-	Little Big Man	Another personal-story-behind-it screening, this time, an indiscretion. I saw this on a date back in the late '70s, at the old, ungerrymandered State, I think it was. The indiscretion part was, we snuck a fifth of scotch into the movie. Needless to say, I've remembered very little of this 2hr20min film---even that it was a comedy. All I remember are the parts where Dustin Hoffman's head fills the screen (at the beginning and at the end of the movie)---guess I couldn't miss that. Anyway, I really liked the understated wry humor of this movie, which only occasionally and slightly bordered on the silly/slapstick. A versatile Dustin Hoffman plays the 121-year-old man, and all manner of characters, or rather personas of his character, from boy and Cheyenne warrior, through "religious" period (OK, DH himself didn't do the younger personas) and snake-oil salesman, to gunfighter, storekeeper, mountain man, Indian scout, Cheyenne warrior again, Indian scout again, drunk, hermit, and Little Big Horn observer (at the very end, the 121-older called himself an "Indian figher"). A good comedy except for: a) the killin'; b) certain animal treatments (actual with horses, implied with dogs, which apparently the Cheyenne eat); and c) the same old tired white-man bashing, though it was amusing to hear of blacks referred to by the Indians as the "black white man", and the Cheyenne to themselves (only( as "Human Beings". Great cinematography of the outdoor-scenery-and-composition type. Now, when Faye Dunaway puts her leg up on a chair and removes her black fishnets, and Dustin Hoffman says, "Miss Pendrake, what are you doing?"---what other scene comes to mind???
B+	Lodger [Hitchcock, 1926], The	An early, trademarked, mistaken-identity/falsely-accused-man film from Hitchcock. Silent. Includes a few special effects Hitchcock would later deem immature (specifically the plate glass floor trick). This was my first Hitchcock screening on DVD, which of course makes it much easier to pause and move through the frames to pinpoint things like Hitchcock's cameo and other "Hitchcock moments." An early attempt at "morphing" a series of faces reacting to a murder is striking, as used to computer-assisted morphing as we are. Favorite things: the narration panel that says "He's killed another fair girl / No more peroxide for yours truly"; the pietá image near the end where his friends take down the lodger's body from the iron railing on which he has been hanging (Hitchcock was Catholic, but how much like Mel Gibson, I don't know); panel: "Let go my girl's hand, damn you!" (13 years before Rhett Butler's "damn" in GWTW); and the chandelier alone coming to represent the lodger in his room above, after this was established using the glass floor effect. Certain allowances must be made in judging and grading old silent movies on their own merit. The acting is corny, you're challenged to read between the narration panels, and you might find yourself, as I did, listening to the same music---the "wrong" music, in my opinion, over and over again for (in this case) 1.5 hours (whether the contemporary music track to this is the same as when the original was shown I have no idea, but I doubt it very much). Also watched on 6/18/02 for the first time.
A-	Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King, The	Seems like I've seen this movie twice before, and that's not meant as a joke. My lasting memory---because it all was last---was that there were about 9 too many endings, including lots of ends that I didn't even know were loose---Bilbo's final de-earthing or whatever, and Samwise's marriage, and so on, were really unnecessary, fidelity to the book be damned. And what's with Frodo's final decision? The battle at the gates of Mordor seemed anticlimactic after the battle at the pointy kingdom-without-a-king---sort of---place, and I'm not entirely sure that that battle outbattled the big battle in The Two Towers, even with Harry Potter trolls and megaphants disturbingly trampling horses, men, and so on. This is the trilogy volume I never finished reading, so it was interesting to see the unknown, like the Dead Warriors living in the mountain, even though I knew the ring gets thrown into Mound Doom from whence it came.
A-	Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers, The	I enjoyed it---to damn with faint praise. It's excellently done, and there was more emotional and moral depth to this one, I thought. Of course, I did get a little confused in places---something about elves and immortality and where all of them were walking or something---for instance. I did watch LOTR1 the night before, I admit it. It's certainly more a piece of another movie---the movie that's all three of them---than it is a movie in itself, and that bugged me a bit. Not that I wanted or expected exposition at the beginning or anything---far from it---but I felt I was caught in the middle of tying up loose ends from 1 and leaving a bunch of hanging threads for 3 to pick up on. Kind of takes away from the movie experience when the episodes are a year apart. The battle sequences were intense and enjoyable, as hackin' and killin' go, but a bit too much of a good thing. The Ents with the minor hobbits were a bit of a drag on everything else. And for some reason, I didn't like the comic relief that they or Gimli presented---seemed out of place for such a monumental epic. How's come Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas couldn't see a thundering herd of mounted horses coming up over that ridge they vacated mere seconds beforehand??????
A	Made-Up	What a clever and thoroughly enjoyable film. The cosmetologist daughter of a former actress (Brooke Adams) makes a "project" of her middle-aged mother, in hopes of reuniting her with her estranged husband. Meanwhile, the actress's older sister, an aspiring filmmaker, undertakes a documentary project of the daughter's makeover project. As if that's not enough, another member of the documentary team, who's also an aspiring filmmaker, chooses to make a documentary of "the making of.." the (sister's) documentary. Got that? If it sounds gimmicky, yes, it is, but in this case the form serves the function beautifully. Cameras are knowingly and surreptitiously left running when the subject being filmed is unaware of, or even hostile toward, being filmed. It's these raw moments that are, of course, the most revealing---in video veritas, as it were. The actress is unknowingly captured while watching earlier footage of herself. Tables are turned; the filmmaker sister, who has secretly and unabashedly filmed her actress sister as she's dressing herself, is indignantly surprised to discover that the fellow filmmaker has secretly filmed the two sisters as they're having a strained and sensitive argument. The two cameras of the two documentaries are sometimes---intentionally or unintentionally---trained on each other, filming the same scene from opposite viewpoints---in at least one case, both surreptitiously. The point-of-view gimmicks are secondary---there is a real story going on (themes of beauty and aging and so forth). There are some standard, documentary-style, one-on-one interviews, usually self-referencing earlier behavior, as a way of vaguely expository explanation. And at times, you'd swear you were looking through the meta-camera (?---i.e. the camera of the director of the film called "Made-Up"), when you were being asked to believe one of the two documentary makers was behind that camera. I think these detracted from the overall impact, but they are by no means major obstacles to enjoyment. The humor is icy sharp and almost always grows naturally out of the situations and predicaments. Brooke Adams, Tony Shalhoub (who also directed), and Eva Amurri deliver great comic performances (as when Tony, a restaurant owner drawn into the film, is given a few lines to rehearse on his own). Gary Sinise is also excellent, but is underused---appropriately, as his character's main motivation is to avoid getting "caught" on film.
B+	Majestic, The	This is a nice story, and a good-looking, well acted film, marred only by its Act III---with stereotyped, one-dimensional government bad guys, a predictable courtroom finale speech by the wrongfully accused about truth, justice, and the American blah blah blah ho hum heard it all before.
B+	Man in the Iron Mask, The	An "a while back" review: well, not that long ago, actually, but I've seen several period pieces of this type lately and it's hard to keep track of which swashbuckling hero is which. Not sure I liked Leonardo DiCaprio in the role---seemed too young or something, but an OK movie nonetheless.
B	Man Who Cried, The	Russia 1927 in a blue-green cast. Cate Blanchett is a '30s-'40s French showgirl---no, a German showgirl in Paris. No, she's Russian. Hmmm. And I thought she was doing a great accent. (In any event, another great performance from my most favorite of versatile actresses.) It's Mussolini's time, the eve of World War II, before the German invasion of Poland. John Turturro is a primus donnus, I guess it would be, of an Italian opera star, and a bit of comic relief. Christina Ricci is a Russian Jew, who as a young girl (back to 1927) was, perhaps mistakenly, shipped to England instead of America, where she was to join her father. Johnny Depp, to round out the ethnic, but not melting, pot, is a Gypsy, and looks like one, with longish---well, Johnny Depp hair, as it always is, in any movie. Depp seems to live in the same camp as he did in Chocolat. Stereotypes of the Jew as controller of monied interests, and of the Gypsy as the dirty thief, and the sorrows and fears the two of them shared in Nazi-infested Paris in 1940. By the way, is there ever any logical order to the ending (or opening) credits (other than Director)? (Note to self: subject for essay.) Case in point: the real opera singer---namely Salvatore Licitra---is credited pert-near the very end of the last reel, although appearing much earlier in the credits were "Stand-In for John Turturro," "Opera Singer Coach," and "Lip-Synching Consultant." Oh, by the way. No man cries, per se.
A	Master and Commander	There's a second part to the title, but I don't think non-sequels should have two-part titles. First of all, I can't remember that second part, and second, I'm sure it added nothing to what---my at-a-glance understanding of the film?? Nice cinematography.
A-	Matrix Reloaded, The	Fantastic stunts and chase scenes, but overall somewhat disappointing and at times confusing.
B	May	Creepy, artful, some nice music, with blood that by turns looks like red paint or a red cream pasta sauce (lost points for that). Otherwise, nice color and lighting. Veterinary medicine, sewing, and imaginary friends.
B	Mean Girls	The first 15 minutes were promising---that this could be a pretty funny movie, but it seemed to plateau early and gradually slip down into pretty unfunniness. The jokes got old, the schtick became tiresome, and the moral of the story started creeping in. Tim Meadows is wonderful but grossly underused as the school principal, but Tina Fey (who also wrote the screenplay) as the math teacher always seemed to have an inappropriate smirk, as if she's just delivered a wry one on the SNL Weekend Update; all the young girls are pretty good---I think---unless they're just being girls. There's a public airing or two of dirty laundry and then some clean sheets, as per formula, but actually, to its credit, in a somewhat less didactic and more creative way than I've seen in other "school" movies (you know, large auditorium, filled to capacity, a single, inspirational speaker calling all to task, and so on). Not bad, exactly, but Heathers was better.
B+	Men in Black II	Great special effects and good sense of humor, but the storyline was very weak.
C-	Metropolis (2002)	Gratuitous animation. "Visually stunning"??? I think not. Often gaudy or garish, with an unconstrained palette, sometimes highly saturated, often a mix of truly yucky colors. Odd- and/or multi-angled shots, often from quite a distance where you can't make out the characters (and sometimes they're completely out of the shot, even)--and all the Japanese voices sounded the same to me, so that made things worse. Another confusing story line. A clash of animation styles. And the music: jazz and big band and electronica in all the wrong places…
D-	Million Dollar Hotel, The	A hotelful of crazies---tiresome, stereotyped crazies whose character traits always seem forced. Irritating characters. Slow, rambling story; random acts of boredom. Wants to be offbeat---as if that were enough.
A	Minority Report	Some great scenes and shots (dare I say "Hitchcockian"?) and an overall engaging story; generally excellent. The only things that prevented my giving this an A+ were some minor flaws (stuff like continuity, anachronisms or reverse anachronisms, implausible escapes---the usual) and that feeling of too-many-endings, though it does end properly.
B-	Missing, The	What a (long---2:16) disappointment. On the plus side, some nice cinematography that you can actually see in shots other than picturesquely posed scenic vistas and such---hey, there's cinematography in closeups, too?! An "off" performance by Cate Blanchett, just about my favorite actress. Please don't unnaturally call attention to things like the telegraph ("This takes just a moment. The device is truly a miracle!). Wink, wink, we get it---the telegraph is spankin' new. Show, don't tell, damn it! Show them making uncertain, novice use of it. And even I know that Morse code doesn't come in as fast as the guy was reading the English translation. It's 1885, and everything has to be spankin' new all at once (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)? Telegraph, "graphaphone", photography (new, at least, to New Mexico, apparently). The little girl---Dot (an unlikely name for 1885, if you ask me)---gets really bad dialogue to speak---maybe written by her 8-year-old screenwriter equivalent. And, she's reading all the "X begat Y" stuff from the Bible, but clearly the book is opened to near the end, whereas all the begettings are in Genesis or thereabouts (that's in the beginning of the Bible, for you heathens---i.e., Apaches). Uninteresting movie, you start lookin' out for these things to keep yourself entertained. Brujos and Carlos Castenada kind of stuff. "No animals were harmed.." says the American Humane Association (always almost last in the credits, woe to us animal lovers), even though some horses had some really nasty falls, and at one point Tommy Lee Jones tells the others in his party to shoot the enemies' horses in the neck. A whole 2nd DVD with 3 alternative endings (including one "long version"---!!!), deleted scenes, and 11 (count 'em) behind-the-scenes featurettes, but why bother? Will go down as one of Ron Howard's dogs, I'm afeared.
A-	Mona Lisa Smile	A pleasant surprise, with more complexity to the characters than the stereotyped treatment would suggest (especially Kirsten Dunst). The humor comes out, walking a fine line without lampooning and caricature---until the ending credits, which reminds you how real the reality was---and that's a good thing and yes, funny. Really liked Maggie Gyllenhall, if not the spelling of her name.
B	Monsieur Ibrahim	Enjoyable enough little movie. Especially fun to watch the nuanced acting of Omar Sharif and hear his character's little snippets of wisdom (oops---forgot 'em already). Lots of French prostitutes, in a nondescript little corner of Paris at an indeterminate time in the early '60s or so (that would be the 1960s), some whirling dervishes (Omar is a Turkish Muslim Sufi, his adopted son a Jew), and hilly swatches of outback Turkey, set to the likes of Wooly Bully and other mostly American tunes from the '50s and '60s. Little fun stuff (e.g., the paté), but otherwise a blur of the aforementioned French prostitutes and the Turkish desert (not colocated).
B	Murder by Decree	Plummer and Mason are good. An interesting and plausible explanation of Jack the Ripper (?). Slow moving. Good cast.
D+	Murder by Numbers	An "a while back" review: I don't remember why I thought this was so awful, but I think I actually expected it to have something to do with numbers---the lyin' trailer strikes again. Not that I crave movies about numbers. Borderline crap, if memory serves.
B+	My Big Fat Greek Wedding	Couldn't help comparing it to Monsoon Wedding, which was better. Trivia of a sort: who can name other worthy ethnic "Wedding" movies?
B+	My First Mister	Though I could have done without the Ally-McBeal-type stuff.
C+	Mystery Train	I remember liking this film a lot many years ago when I first saw it, but after this rescreening I find my opinion of it has plummeted (earlier, I might have given it an A- or so---now, a mere C+). Maybe it was one of my first indies and therefore seemed so different at the time, compared to the usual blockbuster fare I watched back then. Maybe it was one of the first clever time-manipulation movies I like (paling now in comparison to Memento and 21 Grams). In three short-story-like "acts" ("Far From Yokohama", "A Ghost", and "Lost in Space"), all of which mesh in time but not space (that's the time-manipulation part), well, not much happens There's a connection between "acts" 2 and 3, but neither has a connection with "act" 1, save for a single, relatively distant event. Slower by much than I remembered it. Nice vivid colors showing off delightfully seedy Memphis. Steve Buscemi and Cinque Lee (playing the bellhop) were the top performers, with Tom Waits voicing a late-night radio DJ. I hadn't really remembered much of anything from my first viewing of this film, and I'm afraid what I'll most remember now is that one of the characters had the exact same set of luggage that one of my sisters used to have back in the '50s-'60s.
A+	Mystic River	Very fine acting throughout, and the first performance of Sean Penn that I've really, really liked. Example: when Jimmy's sitting on the porch with Dave after he's learned of his daughter's murder, he's getting all weepy, but he's not actually weeping tears, and I'm thinking, cripe, he should be bawling his eyes out now---not believable, Sean. Then he says, "My own daughter, and I can't even cry!" Some acting control, in my opinion. It's a tribute not only to Penn but also to Clint Eastwood, who sprinkles these kinds of moments throughout the film (mini-surprises? Mini-gotcha's?). It also features a fine screenplay and a soundtrack fortunately not littered with popular songs or Oscar-nominee ditties.
A-	No Man's Land	I still liked Amelie better (both competed for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, but this won).
D+	No Such Thing	Starts off with a promise of being quirky, but becomes just plain odd, before settling into being dumb, and finally degenerating into a bunch of crap. The script gets progressively worse as the film goes on. This wants to be a fable of some kind (overly overtly, at that), but the serious half becomes pretentious babble and the quirky part becomes silliness. Both major characters undergo sudden and unbelievable transformations to advance the plot. Other things just didn't make any sense. You'd think at least Helen Mirren would choose her projects more carefully. Oh--did I mention it's about some monster living in Iceland? Rented on a whim.
C+	Nobody's Baby	An "a while back" review: I remember being disappointed by this movie, both on its own merits and on its under-use of one of my favorite actors, Gary Oldman.
B	Nowhere in Africa	Three different languages---I think---and they're not always subtitled.
B	O	Interesting attempt. Failed in the denouement.
C	Ocean's Eleven (2001)	Same old same old. Maybe I just don't like caper flicks (True) and Why Bother To Remakes (also True). Trivia: this was my first rented DVD.
B+	October Sky	Did not include the line, "You're going to put your eye out with that thing."
B	One Hour Photo	The New Age music in this movie bugged me (though I'm sometimes receptive to it). Slow, including lengthy shots of Robin Williams, although I liked him, which I don't often do. Wha the ending??
A-	Open Range	I'm a fan of neither Westerns nor Kevin Costner, but I really enjoyed this.
A	Open Your Eyes	As for Open Your Eyes (Marimba Taco or whatever...), I was surprised how virtually identical Vanilla Sky was to it. I'm giving Open Your Eyes a slight edge over its remake, however. Things I liked better in the original: 1) P. Cruz is an actress/masked-mime rather than a dancer, which makes more sense viz-a-viz the real vs. the manufactured reality, with her "mask" a nice touch; 2) his business partners were irrelevant; they were never shown, but when they were mentioned, they seemed more ominous and he more paranoid because they were a faceless force (so to speak); 3) Life Extension was still an American company, not a Spanish one (leave it to those wacky Americans). Well, that's all I can remember now; a couple of things I liked better as done in Vanilla Sky, but the films are so identical the differences are extremely minor. I also had the advantage of having seen Vanilla Sky twice---can't say how I might have reacted to Open Your Eyes in a virginal screening of this story.
B	Osama	The title refers to a hurriedly bestowed male name (guess whose) given to a 12-year-old Afghan girl posing as a young boy under Taliban rule. The girl comes from a family whose male members have all died in various wars, and the Taliban forbid women to work or even be seen in public without male accompaniment. Interesting for depicting life in Afghanistan as you won't see it in travelogues, and especially under the Taliban---with open-air "trials" and public stonings. Some images stay with you---a simmering milk vat, a genital-washing episode (not explicit) presided over by a Taliban youth instructor who is either perverted or strictly religious and matter-of-fact---it's hard to tell which. Unfortunately, the young actress playing the girl seems to have been underdirected, and often appears in various states of fear and/or furtiveness that are not convincing. I didn't exactly get the ending, but it couldn't have been a good outcome.
A-	Our Lady of the Assassins	Shot on video rather than film; not sure if I like that or not. Seems to make locations look and sound more "real" somehow (especially ambient sound), while at the same time makes it feel like a daytime soap opera. Any violence, including several gun shootings, look really amateurish. Still, interesting story and characterizations, so it gets an A-.
B+	Owning Mahowny	An interesting and well done, if rather slow-moving character study of a man with a gambling problem. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is excellent, the best thing about the movie, if not the only thing (finally, add him to my Favorite Actors list). Minnie Driver's character, for a long while, seemed way too patient and oblivious to Dan's problem. Reminiscent of Lost Weekend.
A-	Panic Room	Good for this kind of movie.
C-	Passion of the Christ, The	For the record, I was born and raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools for 12 years, though it is all behind me now. The most disturbing thing about this film is not the gory depiction of the tortures of Christ, but that this depiction is, to an ultraconservative Catholic, a devotional homage. There's something very gothic about it, though it sometimes feels more like the gothic of the 1950s than of the Middle Ages. Essentially, this film is a long, fleshed-out, high-production-value version of a Catholic filmstrip (without the ding between frames). It seems less a film than a simple dramatization of a familiar story, as Mel Gibson doesn't add anything---an insight or a speculation---to what we already know. Except, of course, for all the blood, a creepy (though inexplicable) devil, and, on the plus side, an intimate portrayal of the relationship between Jesus and the stranger who helped him carry his cross to Golgotha. The story begins in the Garden of Gethsemane and ends, briefly---almost as an afterthought---with the resurrection. The resurrection is Gibson's obligatory scene, because without the resurrection, the passion of Christ is meaningless. The scene's brevity, together with the fact that Gibson has dared to imagine exactly how it happened, hardly compensates for the film's emphasis on violence and degradation. (OK, I guess that's an added speculation. . .) At first, the little flashbacks were charming (e.g., Jesus inventing the table and chair---the closest thing to a humorous moment in this movie), but later became preachy little vignettes. The content of these was welcome (at least if you feel that Christ's teachings are as least as important as his torture and suffering), but their impact is lost with the warm fuzzy lighting, the beaming disciples, and so on---Filmstrip City again. I wish I could comment on the acting, but it's difficult to remark upon the omnipresent (well, OK, ubiquitous) staring and weeping (or, in the case of the Jews and Romans, the jeering) that passes for acting in this film. It must be said that Jesus certainly looked like Jesus (if you know what I mean), although we get a rather stoic Mary. The film is subtitled in English, with Aramaic and Latin serving as the spoken word. The first time you hear Aramaic (Christ praying in the Garden before the betrayal of Judas), it unfortunately sounds rather like Klingon; still, I liked it---after all, which English would you use? (I can't remember if the subtitles used "you" and "your" or "thou" and "thy".) Annoyingly, though, I'd say one-third of the dialogue is not translated into subtitles. More bad directing choices: slow-motion whipping and torture; extreme close-ups; the occasional point-of-view from Christ's eyes; "Jesus rays"; and mawkish music. Did I mention the little green blip that crawled slowly and repeatedly up the screen for at least the first two or three reels of the film?; it seemed almost sacriligious. As horrific as crucifixion is, I have read about (and unfortunately, imagined) even more monstrous forms of cruelty, torture, and suffering. One can certainly feel compassion and empathy in observing the ordeal depicted here, but for me, I cannot recognize the divine redemption for all of humanity that Gibson wants me to recognize. My feeling for this gruesome episode is the same I feel for any other act of depravity or crime against humanity. I would lay down my life for a select few, but I will not take on the guilt of the world.
A-	Patriot, The	A rescreening of a pre-database movie (the Mel Gibson one, not the Steven Segal one). I liked this movie, even with the occasional gung-ho patriotic speech (ironic that "gung-ho" does not exactly sound like an all-American construction). Both meanie and more multi-dimensional Redcoats.
B	Pauline & Paulette	A nice enough trifle---with emphasis on "trifle". Over before you know it. I had expected (from the trailer) something more quirky and comic; this, I would call "pleasant", maybe, though I don't mean to damn with faint praise. Actress who plays Pauline is very good.
C-	Paycheck	You know, Dear Reader, I don't really like writing the kind of review that this is going to be---a litany of logical flaws---but it sure is fun, at least for me, so that's what this is going to be. I like to think that I'm forced into these situations by movies that don't really offer anything else---I will have my entertainment, I guess, one way or another. This one---another John Woo potboiler, or potsticker, or whatever it's called. Where to start? Well, first, the premise. Ben Affleck (not quite right for this role---still too boyish to play a real adult---where's the younger Harrison Ford when you need him??)---works for an evil corporation, and after he pulls an engineering job, they erase his memory so he has plausible deniability (trust me, this is no Eternal Sunshine---or Minority Report, or even Simone, both of which receive brief homage in the first minutes of the film). Suddenly, things change. He's screwed. Chase scene, ho hum---even more stupid and improbable than usual (and that's a BIG "usual"); I had no idea there were so many motorcycle-sized tunnels in the world, and so many OPEN-ENDED cargo containers placed end to end to form---yes, more motorcycle-sized (but smaller than car-sized) tunnels. Then there are the 20 Things---the 20 objects the future-knowing Ben Afflicted sends into The Future---things he knows he will need in The Future. He sends the Things---everyday objects such as a matchbook cover, a key, a crossword puzzle, and so on---but he isn't smart enough to send notes on when, where, and how to use them. This places an extreme burden on knowing when, where, how, and even who to use them. How in the hell was he to know that the key was for Paul Giamatti to get into the electrical room at the train station? At one point, he explains this seeming lack of foresight viz-a-viz instructional material and the commonplacency of it all: they had to be everyday objects so as not to arouse the suspicion of Allcom security (Allcom is the evil corporation in the movie). Everyday objects?? Not arouse suspicion??? An Allcom security pass and a bullet counted among the 20 objects did not arouse the suspicion of Allcom security???!!!! Or even the paper clip, as a suspiciously TOO mundane object?? (See, isn't this fun?!) Not only that, but the security pass later proves never to have been deactivated at the system end. Must have been our very own Department of Homeland Security on the job, there (except I'm sure they would have confiscated the paperclip). All of this provides the feel of a Gabrielle Knight type of computer adventure game---you pick up junk but you don't know what to do with it---but you keep it anyway! More Fun with Logic: the FBI seemingly knows the importance of the futuretelling machine that Allcom has developed---or rather stolen from the government and reverse-engineered. Yet it isn't until 75% into the movie that they decide to seek a warrant to tap Allcom's phone and data lines. Sheesh! Our future FBI and Homeland Security, working hand in hand. More: Ben A. forgets that he himself built the futuretelling machine, yet he knows immediately how to operate it. How do you get it to show you a particular time and place in the future? Unexplained. You wish or will it, I guess---in which case, they have an even more powerful machine on their hands than they even imagine! Lots of unnecessary and unexplainable dry-ice fog---unnecessary, that is, except to cloak our heroes' escape. At least Uma Thurman still swings a wrench, albeit a baseball-bat-sized wrench, like a girl (ha ha). (Though she still gets my Best Girl to Be Buried Alive With designation for Kill Bill Vol. 2.) What IS clever, I grant, despite itself, is Uma's robotics-assisted combat moves---nice to have a robotic arm or two within reach when you need one---but cleverly implemented and choreographed nevertheless. OK, that's enough praise. Just a brief word about the technological equipment. Yes, there's a long tradition of technology through the eyes of Hollywood---from blinking banks of rectangular lights that no human could interpret and react to quickly enough, to three-inch-high letters on all computer screens, to---well, to the kind of slightly more sophisticated crap in this movie (among lots of others). Like the silly, gratuitously hi-tech animated, explosive graphics that introduce, for no rhyme nor reason, professional football games on TV. Like the needless, swirling Tesla sparks or music "visualizations" in MP3 software---2001 Stargate vortex stuff you've seen in 100+ movies since Space Odyssey. On a more mundane level, I'm STILL trying to figure out how it can be that in movies 85% of the people with a personal computer have a Macintosh. Well, I actually do know the answer now.
B+	Personal Velocity	3 Portraits. 1: Delia : Kyra Sedgwick : failure : husband too violent. 2: Greta : Parker Posey : success : husband too nice. 3: Paula : Fairuza Balk : neither/both : no husband. There's something about the movies I've seen by women directors (not counting the ones I didn't realize were by women directors). Correct me if I'm wrong, but they are rather forthright about sex, language, and violence towards women in ways that perhaps male directors couldn't get away with---or just won't attempt. On top of that, I'm not sure of women directors' attitudes towards their subjects. Offhand, In the Cut is a similar example that comes to mind, and Lost in Translation comes to mind as the exception. Sex: Delia's promiscuous exploits as a 12-year-old. Language: rhyme-joke with the character who's name is Shunt; a little girl says, "Come here, you f****** cat" (and she wasn't talking in asterisks, I can tell you). Sounds like guys talking!!! Otherwise, some nice writing and acting---I liked Portrait 3 the best. I'm not sure the still-shot sequences did anything for me. And why is there a male narrator, and who he is? (In the Special Features, it was explained that a narrator was included to capture the language of the original fiction stories---hence, what I thought was some good writing, then. But who is he??) This movie has the tiniest credits I've ever seen---even at maximum zoom…
B	Piano, The	I had a hard time watching this, not only because it was really slow (although well made), but because it's easy to be uncomfortable with the subject matter. In 19th century New Zealand, a mute Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) is transplanted---sold---to a white man of means (Sam Neill). His foreman or whatever (Harvey Keitel) rescues her piano from abandonment, but uses it for sexual manipulation, rather like sexual extortion. In a world where natural sexual behavior (exemplified by the Maori attitudes towards it) clashes with the civilized view of it, Harvey Keitel's character is by turns a noble savage as well as a crude and ignorant creep; Keitel's performance is nevertheless excellent. Holly Hunter can be remarkably expressive even with no spoken dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, so to speak, it's in New Zealandish or whatever, supplemented by a young daughter's Scottish, and only partially subtitled Maori---all of this without the benefit of subtitling on the DVD. Good thing Holly Hunter is a mute. (I have since started noticing DVDs that say "Fully Subtitled" on the outer packaging.)
B	Pieces of April	Patricia Clarkson is good, Katie Holmes I think is not so good, and I wish post-Antwone-Fisher Derek Luke had had more to do. A touching ending, some funny and semi-touching moments in between, but mostly a rather depressing film about Thanksgiving turkey and masectomy. Sort of billed as a comedy. Short (1:20). Includes the rare occurrence of a phone number that does not begin with 555, so everybody applaud that and for a good time, call (212) 737-3858.
B+	Possession	A two-timer reminiscent of "Arcadia" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman". Lots of little incredulities and dumbnesses, but an interesting enough literary detective story (nope---hadn't read the book). The Victorian-era love affair is much more interesting than its current-day counterpart; the latter is just screwed up, although Gwenyth Paltrow upholds her end higher than the constantly-dumbly-grinning whutzizname Eckert. So is it OK to steal rare library materials, pocket private mail from somebody's Out box, and rob graves, in the search for literary truth? Look for the cameo by Buddy Lee, the little Lee Dungarees guy. Talk about possession…
B-	Princess Mononoke	Some great animation, some not-so-great. Slow, confusing story regarding animal spirits, demons, gods, big blobs, and what-have-you. The dubbed English voices are often mismatched to the animated characters.
B	Punch-Drunk Love	Quirky, but in a too-self-conscious manner. Adam Sandler's character couldn't be an insurance salesman or work at a retail department store---he had to sell novelty items (I already forget what, exactly). He has to carry a phone all the way to Utah, doesn't he? That's just dumb stuff. Still, the best thing Sandler's done, which I know isn't saying much…
B+	Quiet American, The	Almost an A-, but Brendan Fraser???
B	Rabbit-Proof Fence	Scenic, nicely shot, another sad chapter (true story) in the history of the One-Dimensional White Man. While the situation is emotionally moving, the movie is not---moves rather slowly, with a large chunk of it devoted to walking around in desert or near-desert conditions and staring at the horizon. The kid actors were pretty good. I always like seeing the real-life people whose true story is portrayed in the film, to see how little the actors resemble them---or not (other films with this: Radio, Schindler's List).
A	Radio	This was a pleasant surprise (went to see Mystic River but got the time wrong). Very well done, from great performances by Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, and supporting characters, to an intelligent, anti-cliché treatment. Didn't play the race card, or played it very subtly, as if below the surface (this was late '70s in the South). The cliché of the Southern sheriff who roughs up the innocent black man is entertainingly turned on its head. The bad kid who has a change of heart was done well too---nicely understated. It was nice to see the real-life Radio and coach as the ending credits were playing.
B+	Raising Victor Vargas	Love and sex amid the kinds of kids you and I didn't grow up hanging out with. Turns into a nice intimate portrayal of young, awkward love amid generational family dynamics. Good dialogue.
B-	Rana's Wedding	The business of arranging a wedding against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Errands are disrupted by roadblocks, checkpoints, and closed roads. Israeli soldiers tensely face off against small gangs of boys throwing rocks. Rana picks up her wedding dress, as through the window a steam shovel levels a Palestinian house. (Yes, I believe a steam shovel, not a bulldozer.) Filmed on location in East Jerusalem and Ramallah, these old cities, especially on the outskits of the two towns, seem to be under constant construction---and de-struction. One of the Palestinian girls (Rana herself, I believe) rather looks like Barbara Striesand. Like some other Middle Eastern movies I've seen, there are lots of static shots of people waiting, then moving around hurriedly, then waiting again. One unexpected nice touch is two Palestinian men making funny faces into an Israeli surveillance camera. However, although I thought this film was making a statement apolitically through Art alone, the political message at the end of the film was a disappointment, with blatant use of "occupation" terminology. Still, a refreshing viewpoint that provides a touching look at life for everyday Palestinians.
B+	Read My Lips	Interesting. A deaf (though not much made of that), lip-reading woman's journey from innocence to crime. Didn't get the parole officer's story line that just sort of happened along the way. Subtlties and intimacies of closeups.
B	Reckoning, The	A so-so medieval murder mystery thing, with a dingy blue cast to it all. Features a traveling troupe of actors reenacting the murder to draw out the real murderer---hmmm, sounds familiar, which wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't taken place in such similar times and places (roughly)---which is where, exactly? Well, there's a grandiose computer-generated vista of a castle town nestled alongside some mountainous terrain, in the bluish cast looking rather like a discarded Lord of the Rings set, but possibly intended to be Scotland (?), which seems odd to me as representing Norman England (though speaking from ignorance here), in which the story is said to have taken place. Some hand-held camerawork, shaky and uncalled-for, made several frenetic scenes virtually indiscernible. Willem Dafoe is largely just rather---there; which is to say, uncharacteristically flat. However, Paul Bettany is good, looking but not acting like his Geoffrey Chaucer character in A Knight's Tale. A scene between Dafoe and a deaf woman who can read lips strained credulity, as I couldn't even make out half of what he was saying with my own (albeit failing) ears, and his lips muttered and hardly moved at all (they were in a basement dungeon, trying to be quiet).
A-	Reign of Fire	Sure, as the reviews say, some things are illogical or unexplained, but they're DRAGONS, for God's sake. The first half reminded me of 'The Road Warrior'; it faltered a bit, but fun to watch and mostly very well done.
B+	Requiem for a Dream	Dreams and addictions--the exploration of that was OK. I could do without the fast-cut sequences and other gimmicky shots, though the overall effect seemed to work, and fit the subject matter.
B+	Reservoir Dogs	I didn't care for this at first---a caper flick---but warmed up to it eventually. Great scenettes and great dialog (far surpassing in naturalness the dialog of, say, "Heist"), but these parts were greater than the whole of its sum. Now Tim Roth can officially go on my Favorite Actors list, as he reveals a little more versatility.
B+	Rhinoceros Eyes	An OK film that tries really hard to be quirky, and partially succeeds. But what can you expect of a film that takes place in a movie prop house, and there is much ado about costumes and masks---oh, that secret-self persona thing, right. Features props from the small (little stop-action figures composed of even tinier everyday objects) to the huge (a 50-pound cherry rented out for a movie). It's a cross between the Brothers Quay, George Grosz, and ventriloquist dummy suspense thrillers, and perhaps a tribute of sorts to the absurdist Ionesco's play, Rhinoceros. The stop-action figures are only in the mind of the creepy and not altogether likeable protagonist, Chip---oh, dementia, and all that. Quirky. There is humor in all this---when the prop house owner yells "50-pound cherry!" and Chip just goes and drags it up; when a woman who's art director of a movie comes in and asks to rent rhinoceros eyes ("Yeah, we got that."), he has to go steal the eyes from the set of another movie as it's being filmed; and later, she comes in asking for a prosthetic arm that has to be a woman's, wooden, and reminiscent of the '30s, he goes across the street where a woman who happens to own such a device lives, using it to beat her husband. Some nice sequences involving doll houses, and doll houses within doll houses within doll houses. All in all, interesting enough, but tries too hard. This is an offering from Madstone Films, and it is nice to see a movie chain financing small independent films like this.
B-	Ride With the Devil	Apart from the historical aspect, not much of interest here. Hard to identify with the protagonists---murderous gangs of Confederate bushwhackers. Lesser effort of Ang Lee, but watchable (the kiss of death). And not 1:39 as the Blockbuster box says, but 139 minutes, or 2:19.
B	Ring [Hitchcock, 1927], The	Yep---boxing, not evil videotapes. Actually, a bit of a comedy, or at least a light treatment of, boxing, not just directed but written by Hitchcock. Like Easy Virtue, a plethora of odd camera angles and gimmicks pepper the opening and establishing scenes (and beyond). Twice, as new characters were introduced, narration panels put up the character's name AND the name of the real-life actor playing the role---never saw that before.The night at the amusement park reminds of Strangers on a Train. A little hard to follow the story. The boxing racket is part of a traveling circus, and there is some humor with circus act people (including conjoined twins) acting up or behavely uncertainly in the church wedding scene---much of the comedy in this movie involves low-life carnies. There is nose-picking of the intentional, semi-comic variety (and another route to notoriety thankfully avoided by H). Several attempts to simulate drunkenness through the eyes of a drunk by stretching and warping the film. Boxing and sparring matches set to classical music. Time-lapse photography to show sparkling champagne, already poured, going flat as an anticipated celebration is put on hold. (I took lots of notes on the film/DVD itself, including splicing errors, notations written onto the film, and so forth, but as they're not central to the story of the film, I'm saving those comments for my essay on old/silent movies.)
A-	Ring, The	A pleasant surprise. A thoughtful---or should I say intellectually engaging---horror movie, with a good performance by Naomi Watts. Something about the ending irritated me, but overall a smart and good-looking film.
B	Ringu	The ending was more clearly explained, but getting there was even more muddled than The Ring. Who was who? ESP? Why the video?
A	Road to Perdition	Thoroughly engaging. Only a couple of minor issues involving the credulity of Jude Law's apparent prescience, but this film is so very good looking and the contemporary suspense music is so wonderfully sublime, succeeding despite the '30s time period of the film, I'm willing to overlook them. I'm not a fan of gangster movies, but here gangsterism simply provides context; it doesn't interfere with the real, more interesting story.
A+	Road Warrior, The	A rescreening of a favorite. This is just about my favorite action movie of all time, as well as one of my favorite films. The chase scene at the end of the film is unparalleled. Some wonderful, colorful characters as well. Other Mad Max films don't measure up, however.
B+	Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead	Stoppard directed; nice---especially the Players' acting sequences and the performances of Tim Roth and Gary Oldman. Still, a better play than a movie.
C+	Royal Wedding	Endured this '50s musical in search of Astaire's great solo jazz numbers (not the ballroom stuff)---in this case, the gym room and wall/ceiling numbers.
A-	Runaway Jury	Probably wildly unrealistic, but fun to watch.
C-	Rundown, The	Hate the quick-cut, strobe-light, scat-like camera work, such as at the beginning of this film. A disappointment, after hearing some good things about this, and despite the presence of Rosario Dawson, Christopher Walken, and The Rock (who I do like, as action heroes go). The Gato, the golden cat that is the ancestral quest of the Amazon people, looks like a cheap garage-sale find, rather than an icon of whatever Mesoamerican tribe inhabited Brazil back in ancestral times.
A-	Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, The	A longtime favorite. Droll comedy mixed with near-slapstick. Proves that comedy can consist of silence alone, through far shots of a drunk chasing his horse, rather than the asinine in-your-face junk that passes for comedy today. Sure, some schticks are overdone, but for the most part a comedy with excellent timing, well drawn characters, a liberal heart, and many truly funny moments. Alan Arkin is wonderful in this.
B+	School of Rock, The	This was a pleasant surprise. I like Jack Black, as a character if not as an actor, and while I still consider his performance in High Fidenity to be his best work so far, he was right for this role. A little too much underdog mentality pulled up by its bootstraps kind of thing.
A-	Scotland, PA	Quirky humor of a type that I like. I have only a vague memory of reading MacBeth, but some story elements may have been too forcibly fit into the original's mold. I believe, though, that it stands well on its own. Perhaps more interesting to those more familiar with MacBeth than I am, but the dark humor missing in Shakespeare compensates.
A-	Seabiscuit	I read the book, I taped/watched the A&E special "The True Story of Seabiscuit", I taped/watched the PBS American Experience special "Seabiscuit", and I taped/listened to the interview with Laura Hillenbrand on NPR's Fresh Air. I got weepy-eyed for all of them except the NPR interview. As for the movie, I didn't get quite as weepy-eyed, but I was in public, after all. Others around me certainly were weeping as the movie was letting out, and everyone cheered when Seabiscuit beat War Adminal (well, I didn't, actually). The three leads give excellent performances (I especially liked Jeff Bridges), as does Wm. H Macy in a cameo sort of role as a reporter. My only quibbles are minor. The horseraces can't be depicted in as fine a detail as in the book, but it was nice having read the book to know what was going on in the minds of the jockey(s) as the races played out. The movie version, of course, also gives you some intense you-are-the-jockey shots that you don't get watching the real historical footage. But you certainly won't let these things detract from your experience of the movie-version races. The beginning is a bit slow as the main characters are introduced, sometimes in ways you know conflict with the book, but that doesn't really matter either. One moderate defect is that you don't get the frustration, suspense, and frenzy that leads up to the match race with War Adminal in November; the movie doesn't mention anything about the earlier match races that were planned but fizzled, for example, and I don't even think they mentioned that War Adminal was the Triple Crown winner that year. Also, none of the strategic thinking about setting up the match race that went on between Howard and Riddle. They completely leave out Red Pollard's first accident (crushed by Fair Countess, I think her name was), though they do have his second big accident, the leg injury. I think that would have said even more about Pollard's determination and so forth. Fortunately, I think, they left out Pollard and Agnes---fortunate because I think the story is big enough (and the movie long enough) without throwing in a love story on top of it. Also missing: a lot of what jockeys go through to make weight---the steambaths, tapeworm pills, etc.---at least back then. There is a nice little invented scene of jockeys riding prostitutes like horses in some bar/whorehouse in Tijuana. This is still a darn good movie, and really accessible. I liked the cinematography, and I didn't know what to expect knowing that Randy Newman wrote the score, but you wouldn't even know that. At least, it didn't include his song "Short People", which would have been perfect for jockies. ;) Unfortunately, they left out my favorite line from the book: Tom Smith tersely saying "My toe." (after he had chopped it off).
B-	Secret Window	Music by Philip Glass, but fortunately you won't notice. After my recent outbreak of documentaries, silent Hitchcocks, and other "art films" of one ilk or another, this was an anticipatedly uh anticipated return to a good old old-fashioned story-line type of thing (this, a Stephen King story---oh look, about writers again). At least a writer with a computer, thank you very much, not some phony purist with an Underwood typewriter or some such. Little touches---the slinky, the Doritos in the drawer. I like [for now!] John Turturro's creepy Southern characterization and Johnny Depp's silent and angry little gestures---finger-shooting the maid behind her back, shaking the phone during a phone conversation of which he wants no part. Suffering from Sudden Fatigue Syndrome, I continue watching this film in 10- to 15-minute chunks over the course of the next 18 hours. By the time it was over and I was still too tired to write this, I concluded yeah it has a nice rich look to it in a lot of ways but I was duped again in a not-too-interesting way and who cares I'm too tired.
A-	Shipping News, The	Nice locations, great characters, great acting; slightly unsatisfying story. Cate Blanchett is on my Favorite Actresses list.
A-	Shrek 2	Although this was very good, I couldn't in good conscience give it a grade equal to or greater than the original. While the newness of the superb animation was no longer fresh, this sequel seemed to embellish itself with more intense action sequences and production numbers. However, it lost some points for several unfunny contemporary references, a la Hercules or Ella Enchanted; other contemporary references worked, though. I enjoyed the cinematic references, though I probably didn't catch them all and can't remember all the ones I did catch, so furiously flying were they. But I do remember the references to Indiana Jones, Flashdance, Ghostbusters, and Mission: Impossible. Antonio Banderas was a good addition to the voice talent. My favorite line/part would have to be: "I'm a real boooooyy!"
C+	Sid and Nancy	Characters it was hard to care about, of course, but despite Gary Oldman, not a very interesting movie.
F	Sidewalks of New York	Totally unbelievable characters, down to their proclaimed ages; totally trite script; half-documentary style is inconsistent, a cop-out, and a miserable failure.
B-	Signs	I liked the aspect of viewing a global calamity from the intimate confines of a boarded-up farmhouse, but there was even more I didn't buy, including the highly contrived: the boy's rather convenient asthma, the girl's--what?--fear of water?--Gibson's "swing" from minister to near-atheist. Did we really need crap--whoops--crop circles and invading aliens to learn this lesson about purpose and destiny? And by the way: I'm still waiting for the reincarnation of Hitchcock.
B-	Simone	Yucky script, far-fetched, exaggerated initial reactions to Simone's first performance. It's such an awful movie within the movie (Eternity Forever), that maybe it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek (?). Pacino's good, however. Usual computer nonsense: the keyboard has "Mimic" and "Tears" keys on it. The software, of course, is cheesy. Pacino's character knows how to use a "portable hard drive", but "Plague" comes on ancient 5.25" diskettes, and for some reason a chest of 3.5" diskettes is dumped at sea.
A	Simple Plan, A	A rescreening of a favorite. This is a very nicely done movie with ethical and moral stuff to think about, even. Good performances all around, especially Billy Bob Thornton (a favorite actor).
A-	Sliding Doors	I liked Gwenyth Paltrow, and I hope I spelled her name right. I had a problem with the script here and there, but hey. The gimmick on which the movie is based was fine, except maybe when they tried to explain it---as a dream, perhaps, or as if some cosmic connection between the two worlds.
B+	Slums of Beverly Hills	An "a while back" review: quirky, dark humor that works, as I recall. Another enjoyable performance by Alan Arkin.
A-	Something's Gotta Give	Along with About Schmidt, one of my favorite performances of Jack Nicholson. There aren't many.
B+	Space Cowboys	Not too bad, even given the implausible premise (in turn, even given John Glenn's octagenarian romp in space, as mentioned in the film). Nice performances from a bunch of Old Fart actors, and I mean that affectionately. Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Tommy Lee Jones, and James Garner. The Russian space rocket thing is an unintentional laugh, as is what happens at the end (someone should have read about colliding bodies, for example).
A-	Space Station 3D (IMAX)	Surprisingly, the IMAX cool stuff in this one doesn't come from dizzying vistas of Earth from the International Space Station, but from the active camera work inside the station, as you float and glide with weightless astro- and cosmonauts through the tubular "halls" of the station. A real good "you are there" feel to it. Also very cool are the close-ups of spacewalkers doing work outside the station--in some cases, the close-ups are in first-person point of view. And don't forget--all of this is in 3D (special glasses handed out as you enter the theater--and they're not the cheap red/green kind you had when you were a kid, either).
B+	Spartan	0:28. As near as I can figure, Serbian thugs have absconded with the president's daughter to sell into white slavery, or prostitution, or something, and the Secret Service is on it. Got the president's daughter part vaguely from a long-ago and mostly forgotten Ebert & Roeper. The rest is semi-educated guesswork. So far, I like Val Kilmer and Derek Luke, and William H. Macy and the Married with Children guy (in a dramatic role) have just walked into the movie and are on pause while I write this. More later. It's now later. 0:46. The thugs---Yemeni or something, not Serbian---don't know they have the president's daughter. The Secret Service, or SS, to wit, Val Kilmer, shoots a policeman and a convict to "kidnap" another convict who seems to be in on the sex slavery ring. Oops. Uh-oh. Plot twist at exactly 1:00. I'll shut up now. 1:41. Now it's over. Pretty good movie, but ultimately conventional in development and denouement, as political thrillers go. Actually, the trailer says it all. Just watch the trailer. They should stop putting trailers on DVDs. %-) And that's not what you think it is.
B+	Spider-Man	He's the only superhero I grew up reading; I had to see it. But when oh when are they going to get computerized human motion correct??? (This was one of Ebert's big gripes, too.) They need to learn to "humanize" the motion the way electronic musicians have learned to "humanize" musical sounds, giving slight variations and random imperfections to it to render it less perfect and digital and obviously computer-generated and fake.
C	Spy Game	An "a while back" review: in fact, I don't remember even seeing this, although I did in fact rent it (see Blockbuster receipt). If I did see it, it was so ordinary (hence the "C" rating) that its goodness or badness doesn't even register in the old memory banks.
A-	Spy Kids	This was a pleasant surprise. I like highly stylized stuff like this, as long as the stylizations are artful, as they are here: bright childish colors, smooth, graceful lines, yet quirky and exaggerated in a semi-adult kind of way. And fun.
B	Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones	It's been a while since I saw Episode I, but I may have liked that one better. (Remember, I'm the guy who liked Jar-Jar Binks.) It was kind of a mush, a bit confusing, and had nothing really gripping, excitement-wise, like the chariot race in Episode I. Boring stretches.
B+	Storytelling	Why "Fiction"? I would have preferred just the "Non-Fiction" segment. I liked the wry stuff. Ending abrupt.
B	Stranger Than Paradise	Black and white vignettes of a dryly humorous nature about not much in particular, divided by short blackouts. Pretty good performances and mildly entertaining, but you're not left with much.
C-	Stuart Little	Talk about emotional manipulation. The whole inter-species thing was a little off-putting, if not downright disturbing. A mouse in ugly blue/gold plaid driving a toy sports car over a waterfall in the sewers of New York? Uh-uh. I just don't buy it.
A-	Sum of All Fears, The	I enjoyed this, and think it's a pretty good example of its genre, which means I ignore the implausibilities and so forth and just enjoy it---not at the "Art", wash-over-me level, but the Rousing Good Fun level.
B-	Sunshine State	Community activities centered around the town's history don't seem true---overly extravagant (like any Halloween costume you've ever seen in any movie is overly extravagant, not the realistic, homemade stuff our lives are made of)---and where are the crowds, anyway? Or are these rehearsals? Some slightly stilted speeches that they tried hard to put into a context so they didn't seem like the didactic things they were. Oh---the small crowd thing was explained. Liked Timothy Hutton---where else is he these days?? And I guess all land developers are evil. Well, that we knew from innumerable other movies. Also liked Angela Bassett. The movie is slow. Long. Disconnected.
C+	Sweet Hereafter, The	Too self-consciously poignant for my taste. Fractured and slow. Lose the fairy tale metaphor and the narcotic New Age music. Otherwise, well done, including a good story/plot, but still unsatisfying.
A	Tape	Wonderful acting, wonderful script. Which is fortunate, as there isn't much else, given the setting. Top notch.
B	Terminal, The	Steven Spielberg seems to make things like The Terminal and Catch Me If You Can only because he can, seeing as how he can make just about whatever he wants. Was Schindler's List so depressing to make that he has a need for light fluff like this, or was it so vindicating that he no longer feels the need to prove himself? Enough of that reflective stuff! Hey, this is an OK movie, but I just wasn't crazy about it. Tom Hanks is great, and everything else in the movie is---well, not Tom Hanks. Stanley Tucci is a good actor, but here suffers from character motivations that seem to be all over the map. It's never quite clear what his attitude is, and it's hard to discern why he does the seeming---gulp---"flip-flopping" that he does. Catherine Zeta-Jones is OK, saddled as she is portraying a nice, unlikeable character---worse than an outright villain. There aren't very many memorable scenes, even for a movie I saw earlier today, and a few that I can remember stick out like bad jingles I can't get out of my mind (e.g. Gupta stops jetliner with broom). No Tim Henning sighting, though there are a lot of extras walking around all the time, and it was an overwhelming task trying to squint at passers-by while watching the real movie. I'm sure Tim will let us know…
B	Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines	Only vaguely remember earlier offerings in this series, but it rang a bell, so I must have seen at least one of them. The chase scene with the crane is relatively fun. Wishy-washy story line and a bummer of an ending, but some decent special effects and, for better or for worse, another sequel lead-in, writ large.
C-	The Manxman [Hitchcock, 1929]	Hitchcock's last silent film (yay!) and my first-ever screening of it. A couple of other firsts. The first appearance of Hitchcock's first blonde leading lady (Anny Ondra), who's very appealing, actually, considering it's 1929, which is to say, she looked almost contemporary---until she started with the melodramatic overacting whenever her soul was tormented. The first actor I recognize as being in more than one Hitchcock film (Carl Brisson was also in The Ring---in both films, incidentally, within a love triangle). Strange to see a scene played out from the POV of a character watching it through a window---oddly enough, it felt even "more silent", as the same scene within a talkie would feel merely "silent." Passage of time indicated by Kate thumbing through her diary: "Mr. Christian called"; "Mr. Christian called again"; "Mr. Christian [crossed out] Philip took me for a walk"; "Philip and I went for a walk"; "Phil is going to meet me." You see where this is going. One advantage of long, lingering shots in silent movies is that they give you plenty of time to read handwritten letters held up for the camera to see (though with DVD now it is very easy to pause and zoom in on any letter in any movie). Hitchcock cuts out the largely unsuccessful gimmick shots of earlier silents, but replaces them with slow-moving melodrama. Ill-repute stuff (the profligate '20s hadn't prudified into later decades yet): lower-class fisherman is best friends with upper-class lawyer (yeah, right), both love lower-class girl, blah blah blah, wants, father, snobby aunt, marry beneath one, seek fortune African gold mines, false report of death, baby's not yours, and so on. We're talking sloooooow-moving, Overacting Emotive City. Complications. "Hitchcock moments" now few and far between. Messy endings, though the "sinners" lived ever after, if not happily. On to the talkies!!! (By the way, a "Manxman" is a person from the Isle of Man; apparently nothing to do, directly, with a tailless cat.)
B	Thesis	Rather too much jerking back and forth between the same two suspects, dragging the same red herring over and over and over again across our path. Silly suspense music at times, lots of loose ends, but engaging enough, especially for a snuff film addict. Oh---which I'm not.
C-	Third Man, The	I was shocked to read afterward that this is considered ("by some", I guess) one of the most suspenseful movies ever made. Hmmm. I didn't like it much at all--too much German, ja,?, too much loud zither playing (I've always liked the Third Man Theme, but not played on a zither---plus, it seemed totally inappropriate for this movie).
A	Thirteen	The humiliation, the anguish, the embarrassment, the desire to fit in, the peer pressure, the exaggerated life-and-death significance of casually occurring everyday events---I took time out from all that to watch this movie, and hey, I'm not alone! Thirteen-year-old girls have many of the same problems. This film, co-written by the young actress playing The Bad Girl (Nikki Reed), has a very authentic feel to it, not just in the dialogue, but in the situations and emotive content. Holly Hunter plays the too-hip mom, doing the well-meaning but nevertheless embarrassing things that well-meaning, too-hip parents do. She gives an excellent performance, as does Evan Rachel Wood, the young Good Girl Gone Bad. Both are superb in the intense, heart-wrenching scenes near the end of the film, with the troubled teen out of control and near total collapse. Synchronicity Sidenote: at one point, Tracy runs over to a poster of Christina Ricci on her friend's wall and says, "I love you, Christina Ricci!", when earlier that evening I had watched a movie with Christina Ricci in it (The Man Who Cried).
C+	Timeline	Read the book (don't ask me why), had to see the movie (don't ask me why).
C+	Touching the Void	Another disappointment. Starts out nicely educational about mountain climbing, but soon becomes very dull. A combination of documentary interviews + dramatic recreations using actors who looked nothing at all like the real people being documentarily interviewed. And dressed up all in hooded parkas and such (who's who?). With both actors sounding just about the same (who's talking?). And we get to watch the one guy watching the ice not melt as he crawls through flashlighted darkness for, like, three days (who cares?). As with any film involving a large mountain, it's difficult to get the Big Picture. And as with another documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, the most revealing episodes are outside the feature film itself, in the special features on the DVD. There, we learn that the two climbers, who in the film appeared to be friends, were merely climbing companions, one-night mountain stands, as it were. That helps explain why the one guy---well, I won't give it away. Oh, what the hell. You aren't going to rent this, trust me. It explains why he cuts the rope. Or at least, why he could rationalize cutting the rope. Then, there's the special-feature scene where the director leads the two climbers to the exact spot on the real mountain (Something Grande, in Peru) to which the climber with the loose end of the rope, shall we say, crawled, with a broken leg, to discovery and rescue by the he-who-cut climber and the base camp guy. God, this is getting boring just in the retelling. Anyway, the director wanted to record the reactions and emotions of the climber who was rescued there that day. But the climber didn't feel anything. He thought it was silly. He came back to the mountain for the money the director offered him. It was embarrassing, yet somehow vindicating, as if you'd just witnessed a defeat of the papparazi mentality or something. He didn't feel anything. He thought it was silly. See Spot run.
B+	Trainspotting	Amusing, somewhat inventive (two qualities I like), and a little aimless (a quality I don't like). Ewen's detox nightmares were nicely done, but the baby crawling on the ceiling was poorly done.
A	Treasure Planet	A return to form for Disney, after the dreck that was "Atlantis". The outer-space-ifying of a Victorian classic somehow works. It's opulent Disney, with even some more-than-one-dimensional characters thrown in.
D+	Triumph of Love	Moliere without the humor, Shakespeare without the poetry.Talented actors without anything to say. All convoluted plot, 1732-style. Oh, except the two fleeting glimpses of a 21st-century audience watching the "play", a most unwelcome and inexplicable intrusion (ending credits would have been a more welcome intrusion). Presumedly, these audience members didn't mind missing the 85-90% of the "play" that occurs on other sets.
B	Truman	Gary Sinise does a good job with an impersonation role, which I normally don't like. Too much fast-forward in this: he decides to run for the Senate---fast cut to him entering the Capitol as a Senator. All of a sudden, he becomes FDR's running mate---no, he's ALREADY FDR's running mate. The storyline is really that choppy, but at least the pieces that are there were well done.
B+	Tycoon: A New Russian	I never thought I would enjoy a movie about economics, and not just economics, but Russian economics, and not just that, but underground Russian economics, replete with scams and schemes in a nebulous no-man's-land between communism and capitalism. Well, it's true, I didn't enjoy it that much. Still, it's interesting enough in exploring what's legal and what's not, in-between governments in post-Soviet Russia. It's hard to tell who's good and who's bad, and, for that matter, who's who. (Appropriately, the acting credits rolling at the end of the film include about 20 guys named Vladimir, out of about 30 acting credits.) A longish film (2:15), it features rich Soviet-era colors (dingy dark pastels, glimpsed through steam rising from everywhere in the Russian winter) and a Colombo-like detective (sorry---no cigar; rather, vodka).
A-	Under the Tuscan Sun	I love Tuscany, and Diane Lane even more. With larger roles (this and Unfaithful), I think she's showing she's a good actress as well. I'm not sure about all the little facial mannerisms (e.g., the momentary pout), but they sure are appealing, acting aside. Where were all the oddball characters rumored to pepper this movie? This was a nice movie with a nice script, nice scenery, and a good heart.
C-	Underworld	Must everything be all midnight and neon blue in these dark, sci-fi thrillers?? Yes. At first, clever me had noticed that you could see the reflections of the vampires in this movie, although it later became clear that, for whatever reason, they wanted you to notice that. Revisionist history, perhaps??? A somewhat novel premise: semi-futuristic conflict between vampires and werewolves, with bumbling humans (naturally) caught in the crossfire. In this struggle between "vamps" and "lykes" (short for "lycanthropes"), which might to those barely paying attention sound like a battle between seductresses and lesbians (boggling the mind), how's come the vamps are the "good guys" and the lykes the "bad guys". Well, not so fast. It's all explained in the end---first in the near end, by the vampires, then in the far end, by the werewolves, so you don't know who in the hell to believe. Lousy werewolf effects, for the few brief times you see them---for the most part, lykes look like---well, me, for instance---but after all these years, there have been no lycanthropic advances over American Werewolf in London and The Howling kind of stuff (crackling noise as nose extends to become snout, and so forth). Unextraordinary claptrap, with blurry, fudged-over flashbacks. And despite the patent leather outfit, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is no Trinity, neither in martial arts prowess nor pure style, though Kate gets the beauty queen award. The guy who was "both vampire and lycan, but stronger than both!", which he certainly wasn't, looked laughably like a blue (rather than green) 98-pound weakling version of The Hulk. Way too many plot turnarounds as half-baked lies and truths come to light, with lots of misleading characterizations early on to unfairly lead you on. The producers make it quite clear that there will be a sequel---to avoid.
B	Unfaithful	For a movie, disappointing; for a decade-long (or longer) crush on Diane Lane, quite satisfying. People seem to agree this is one of her finest performances, myself included, though it didn't quite blow me away like Halle Berry's in Monster's Ball. A movie that felt like it was about to end in at least 4 or 5 places.
A-	Van Helsing	Yup---more sci-fi done up dark in midnight blue (perhaps that part of the visible spectrum in which the human eye cannot distinguish between art and junk), but this is actually an above-average globbing together of classic horror (Dracula, Frankenstein['s monster], Wolfman) and classic sci-fi (namely, the Vernian leather-and-burnished-brass of Victorian high-tech) to produce something that is classic neither. (My A- is based on pure entertainment value, not artistic merit.) Dark bluage aside, a rather inventive film, weaving together the Drac, Frank, and Wolf legends. Similar in premise but superior in execution to its recent next of kin, Underworld. Both films happen to feature Kate Beckinsale, doing pretty much the same thing, but in different clothes; she desperately needs another Pearl Harbor, although if they ever do a Gypsy version of The Matrix, she's a shoo-in. Hugh Jackman wears a Central European cowboy hat, and---well, he wears a hat. Richard Roxburgh makes an excellent Dracula, in stark contrast to the mousy wimp he portrayed in Moulin Rouge. And finally, David Wenham is nice as comic relief, which would usually annoy me in a film like this, but is more tolerable as some of the humor is actually pretty good ("Why does it smell like wet dog in here?"). Well, there is an unfortunate 007 thing going on early in the film, with a Vatican version of M, a monkish version of Q (Wenham), and an underground testing facility (staffed by clerics and such from all the world's religions, like the Vatican would allow that going on in its basement) where new-fangled-in-1887 devices are tried and tested. But fortunately, the gag passes quickly and is forgotten. The fx, for better or for worse, are the stars of the show. The werewolves and flying vampires are really well done, and here there is finally an advance in the technical execution of the man-to-werewolf transformation (unlike the 20-year-old effects seen in Underworld). Frankenstein's (shTEEN's!) monster too closely resembled Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein, and the baby vampires could use some work to discourage memories of dashboard trolls. Overall, however, morphing is used to better effect than in a great many other movies. There is a nice attention to detail: in the pre-story, Mr. Hyde nee Jeckle is seen from behind with a plumber's butt crack, and he casually tugs once to keep his pants up---only once, and in a passing moment. Little moments like these are nice as long as I’m not hit over the head with them. Similar attention to detail in the interesting physics of some of the CGI sequences (for example, when a flying vampire tries to catch a wagon by grabbing a lazily spinning wagon wheel as both the wagon and the vampire plummet to earth after falling over a cliff). But still---are good as these effects are---the fluidity of creature, and particularly human, movement remains elusive. You'll publicly complain that this movie's all action and CGI with no story, character, or meaning, but privately you'll yawn during the brief, lame, in-between scenes of romance and exposition.
B+	Veronica Guerin	Just not very interesting subject matter to me, and not a Cate Blanchett performance that will stick out with me.
C	Walk on the Moon, A	That ol' debbil moon, huh? I'm afraid this was a disappointment. For starters, the setting of 1969 had rather the look and feel of the '50s; even though there were tie-dyed shirts and so on, the hula hoops and little cowboy outfits seemed dated. The film is integrally bound up with the Apollo 11 landing and Woodstock. When I realized this, I was afraid they'd manipulate the small-step/giant-leap moment and they did, with unsatisfying blatancy. And we're force-fed various '60s tunes to tell us how to feel at various turning points in the story---or just to show how cleverly tunes can complement what's happening onscreen. And why is there a Blouse Bus anyway?? I like Diane Lane, but here she can be overexpressive at times (quirky mouth gestures and so on). This movie is actually a retro version of Unfaithful---almost a prequel, down to her same mannerisms---her brief little chuckle to herself in bed the morning after the first infidelity is virtually identical to what she did on the train coming back from her first infidelity in Unfaithful. I liked that in Unfaithful, but now that I've seen the same thing in an earlier movie, it's no longer the fresh thing it seemed to me at the time. The PA system lady at the summer camp really annoyed me (turned out it was Julie Kavner); her announcements were almost constant and almost never funny, as I think they were intended to be. When my mind wanders during a film, I start asking things like: her mother and her children don't notice that she's gone for hours at a time?? It took her husband 13 hours to get to Woodstock, but neither Pearl nor her daughter, traveling separately, had any trouble getting there and back?? Etc. A word about the DVD: this was the first DVD I've ever seen where the audio and video weren't synchronized (this started about an hour into the film). Now whose fault is that?? Also, there were several instances of swirling moiré effects at normal magnification; you had to zoom in to see the image without the patterns.
F	War Zone, The	A free rental, rented on a whim, because Tim Roth directed. I was "supposed" to like this---7.4 with over 1,000 votes---but I'm sorry, I can't stand films with 30-second shots of a tree or a chair or whatever. Dull. Really dull. All of my F's have been extremely dull films...
C-	We Were Soldiers	Overdramatic and at times schmaltzy, this fails to satisfy even post-9/11 patriotic urges. Inspirational speeches and slow, ponderous music contribute to the blatant emotional manipulation. As with many true-to-life battle flicks of recent years, the tightly focused emphasis on naturalism (read "blood-squirting", often in Sam Peckinpah slo-mo) forbids an understanding of the big picture---the strategy and tactics of what's going on. The intended historical accuracy doesn't help (in a scene with the caption "6:09 a.m. - The Ridge", the soldiers' shadows show clearly that the sun is almost directly overhead---noonish). Whatever happened to large-scale maps with big red arrows showing the assault routes??? It comes off as a lot of guys just running around, getting shot up, almost every one with the obligatory heebie-jeebie death throes. Some attempt to humanize or personalize the North Vietnamese, but such moments are few and far between, and have an odd Westernized feel to them.
B-	White Squall	Wish I knew all that sailor talk. I like, more often than not, Adventure, as opposed to Action, movies, sometimes regardless of the cinematic action. (Adventure Movie = Action Movie - Stupid Human Violence + Natural Nature's Violence.) A true story, set in 1961, of the school ship, or "Ocean Academy", called the Brigantine Albatross. I didn't buy Jeff Bridges, who I normally like, as the Wise Old Man of the Sea and Seaman Extraordinaire. I pictured Robert Shaw of Jaws fame as a better fit, though a cross between the two would have been even better. Too much landlubbing, especially all the coming-of-age stuff, though I suppose it was necessary to put the Boys on display so we can later see the Men they will eventually become. Or not become. Anyway, somewhat reminiscent of The Perfect Storm, but not as educational. Too many kids to keep track of, especially during the violent squall scene. (Turn subtitles on, or you won't know who's screaming what.) Speaking of squalls, the white one occurs during Alan Shepard's ride in Freedom 7 (looked it up---guessed right!). Like the moon landing in A Walk on the Moon, an inappropriate synchronicity with an actual historical event. There's an onboard radio, somehow heard above the din of---well, a huge, violent squall---broadcasting an account of Shepard's flight as the squall batters the Albatross to smithereens. Worse, they see Shepard's capsule streaking across the night sky from their lifeboats, when Shepard's ride, of course, was in daylight hours, and lasted like, what, 15 minutes (yep, looked this up too---guessed right!)? And all of it unnecessary. At the very least, this is manipulation of History for very little payback. And "true story"? Ha! As for White Squall vs. The Perfect Storm: no contest, either cinematically or meteorologically. And note: the captain did not go down with his ship---though his wife did.
C+	Windtalkers	Pretty much what I expected. It's only marginally about the Navajo code talkers---fortunately, I had the chance to watch a History Channel special on the code talkers and the code itself (the latter of which was totally ignored in the movie). This should have been called "The Battle of Saipan", since that's really what it's about, mostly. The computer-generated fighter planes were rendered in laughably bad fashion. Another in a spate of recent war films (Saving Private Ryan, e.g.) that tells us that "War Is Hell", and that rather than honor and glory, it's mostly about severed legs and squirting organs. Did we need to be reminded?
A	Winged Migration	This Oscar-nominated documentary about bird migration is like no other movie or nature special, except maybe that Jeff Daniels movie where he flies an ultralight aircraft with some geese or something---I haven't seen that---because that's what this movie is. It's astonishing footage of migrating birds taken from the birds' perspective---no special effects. Caution: there are a few sad moments, nature and life being what they are, so if you have a soft spot for animals, cover your eyes.
C	XXX	An "a while back" review: not as bad as I expected, but not even of James Bond quality, overall. Still, Vin Diesel has potential for an action-hero franchise kind of thing.
B+	Y Tu Mama Tambien	Why all the irrelevant details, like the dead chicken truck accident? Good script as far as it goes, and pretty good performances. But what was all the fuss about?
A	Zelig	I really liked this and thought it was inventive, like the dropped frames, audio quality, etc.; don't remember those kinds of touches in Forrest Gump.