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© 2004-2008 by John Varley; all rights reserved

3 Women (1977) There's Mildred (Millie) (Shelley Duvall) (Olive Oyl?) and then there's Mildred (Pinky) (Millie) (Sissy Spacek) (Carrie?) and then there's Willie (Janice Rule) and Lillie (uh ... wait a minute, that's 4 women ...). Okay, there's no Lillie. I think. Millie, Millie, and Willie (and maybe Lillie) live in the desert. Millie and Millie work at a place where old people sit in bathtubs and walk in pools. Lillie (or maybe Willie, or Milli Vanilli), who doesn't talk, paints odd murals on the bottoms of swimming pools. She's pregnant. Millie moves in with Millie. Millie is child-like, until she gets a concussion jumping into Millie's swimming pool. (It's full of water, and a mural.) Then she turns into Carrie. Millie is a constant talker, but nobody listens to her. Willie's husband (Billie?) fucks up, and the baby dies. Millie and Millie kill him, and bury him under a pile of old tires. Then it looks like Millie may or may not be Millie's mother. Marie Dressler isn't in the movie (though wasn't she great in Tillie's Punctured Romance and Tugboat Annie?), but Jean-Claude Killy puts in a brief appearance as the bewildered downhill skier from France. And it's all a bit sillie.

Believe it or not, the above paragraph makes as much sense as this movie does. Robert Altman was one of the top American directors of all time, but he made his share of boners after his amazing streak beginning with M*A*S*H. He took a lot of chances, skated close to the edge, and when you do that some of it just ain't gonna work. This came during that period, when most critics were writing him off (deservedly, I think), as irrelevant, along with the pretty bad Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson and the just plain awful Quintet. Luckily for all of us, he got it back together in the decade before his death. IMDb.com

3:10 to Yuma (2007) SPOILERS HERE. This is a considerably pumped-up remake of a 1957 movie based on an Elmore Leonard short story. Outlaw and murderer Ben Wade has been captured because he did a really dumb thing. Now he has to be put on a train to the prison in Yuma, but his gang will try to get to him first. In the original there was only a small-time rancher, played by Van Heflin, and the town drunk involved in transporting and protecting the prisoner. Here, we get half a dozen, who gradually get whittled down until there’s only the rancher, Christian Bale. Everything has to be much bigger these days. Also, his son tags along, which is a new element. The son admires Wade, who is smart, charming and glamorous. He’s in dime novels. Dad is a plodder. So the movie becomes one of a father redeeming himself in the eyes of his son. The shoot-out at the end is much bigger, too.

I was enjoying it right up to the last ten minutes. Well, I had a bit of a problem with the stagecoach driver, Peter Fonda, taking a .45 caliber bullet in the gut at point blank range, early on, and then basically shrugging it off. Uh-uh. You get gut-shot, and have the bullet pulled out by a veterinarian with dirty tongs, you do not shrug it off and go about your business. Soon you are one sick puppy, oozing pus from your belly, and soon after that you are dead. They hardly bothered to treat such wounds in the Civil War. But okay, westerns are larger than life, there is a lot of symbolism. And it seemed that Ben Wade was being awfully accommodating. Yeah, he attempted to escape, but once they holed up in the hotel he could have gotten away and saved everybody a lot of trouble. Then we get to the big climax, and it lost me completely. I just couldn’t believe that Wade would gun down his own gang, and then board the train voluntarily. He did board the train in the original, and both the rancher and Wade’s gang survived. Here, everybody dies except Wade and the son. He was repaying the rancher for saving his life. Now, that’s a little hard to swallow, since I really don’t believe in honor among outlaws except to their own gang, but killing his own men was way over the top.

I wanted to like it more, and I did, almost all the way to the end. It had a nice, gritty feel. The sets and so forth looked real good, they captured the era well. You might say the set designer had a … dramatic pause … a good sense of Yuma. (God, I’ve wanted to use that line for years now, and there it is!) (And okay, we don’t ever really see Yuma, we see Bisbee and Contention, but it was too good to pass up.) IMDb.com

The 5 Obstructions (De Fem benspænd) (Danish, 2003) What an odd little movie. The grand old man of Danish cinema, Jørgen Leth, made a 13-minute experimental film called “The Perfect Human” in 1967. Leth’s student and current bad boy of Danish cinema, Lars von Trier, who professes to love Leth and his film, challenges the master to re-make his film 5 times, each time under conditions, or “obstructions,” dictated by Lars. First obstruction: no sets, no shot longer than 12 frames, and you have to make it in Cuba. Sounds awful. Jørgen ponders it, we get to see him working it out, and eventually delivers his film to Lars. It is astonishingly good. Lars is pissed. Two things eventually become clear. One, Lars wants to somehow, for some reason of his own, make Jørgen produce a bad film. Two, Lars is, not to put too fine a point to it, an asshole. Lars keeps throwing up obstructions, justifying it with increasingly tortured explanations on the order of “I want you to loosen up, you’re too controlled.” Jørgen keeps bringing back wonderful little films. For the fourth obstruction Lars demands that it be a cartoon, which they both profess to hate. Jørgen finds a brilliant animator in Austin, and they turn in a really fantastic bit. At last Lars basically gives up for the fifth one. It’s all a bit like a showdown on a dusty western street, the young punk calling out the old gunslinger. The difference in character and talent is painfully obvious.

There are two problems with the film. We see parts of “The Perfect Human,” but we don’t see it in its entirety. Luckily, the DVD includes the whole film. I would advise you to watch it first. It can still be enjoyed the other way (we enjoyed it a lot), but we wished we’d seen the short first. Second, none of the 5 new films are shown in their entirety. I would really like to see them.

This is not a film for everybody, but one good measure of a good film is how long it stays with you and what it does to you. By that measure, this one does the trick; Lee and I discussed it compulsively for a long time afterward. I’ve become a big fan of Jørgen Leth, though I’ve never seen one of his films. Sadly, I’m not a fan of Lars von Trier, director of the aggressively awful Dogville. On the other hand, I have to give him credit for releasing a film that makes him look like a pretentious idiot. IMDb.com

8½ (Italian, 1963) There has been so much written about this movie that there’s not a lot I can add. The glorious black and white photography, the incredible shot composition, the amazing harem sequence, Mastroianni’s fabulous performance ...

But I confess I’m not a huge Fellini fan. I mean, he’s one of the greats, no question, but his metaphors are not mine: The Catholic Church, miracles, circuses. Bob Fosse did essentially the same thing in All That Jazz, and used metaphors that are mine: show business, song and dance, musical comedy. So that film resonated more strongly with me. But for sheer in-your-face wild imagery you can’t beat Federico. In my opinion, 8½ is his best movie since he abandoned his social realism roots. La Dolce Vita is great, but not this great.

After that, I didn’t like many of his movies at all, and in fact didn’t bother to see many of them. But this is a must-see for everybody. IMDb.com

10 Items or Less (2006) We were so uninterested that after 30 minutes (or less) we abandoned the three items in our cart and didn’t even make it to the check-out line. IMDb.com

11:14 (2003) Here's a little indie gem that's developing a cult following. If you like weird, anything-can-happen movies like After Hours or Into the Night or Miracle Mile, films that don't go where you expect, you will like this. Also, if you like fractured time lines, telling a story from the end back to the beginning, like Memento or Pulp Fiction or Run Lola Run. Or hard-nosed, smart, relentlessly logical stories like Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. You want one more cinematic reference? How about Blood Simple, where characters behave badly under stress, become "simple" and do the worst possible thing, operating on facts they think they knew and are wrong about.

The humor here is very, very black. I love humor like that, and I laughed a lot. Litmus test: A couple is making love in a graveyard. The motion dislodges an angel's head, which smashes the guy's head literally flat as a pancake. She doesn't see it, and goes on to climax. I howled with glee. If you don't think that's funny, don't see this.

The characters are one-dimensional, mostly, because they are being moved like chess pieces in the director's intricate web. That's okay, none of them are very nice ... but I have to add that Hilary Swank manages to make her character wonderful, unique, and memorable with only a few small scenes. That lady is good. IMDb.com

13 Going On 30 (2004) Think big. No, I mean think Big. The movie, with Tom Hanks. This is the same deal, a young person wishing to be a grown-up and getting her wish. The difference is it’s more like amnesia; she’s had a life those 17 years, and seems to have been a conniving cu— ... bitch, the result of bad decisions she made when she was 13. Jennifer Garner is very good, but this didn’t quite work for me. IMDb.com

13 Moons (2002) Not much info was available on this, but I rented it on the strength of Steve Buscemi and Peter Dinklage being in it. What it tries to do is capture the weirdness of Scorsese’s After Hours, one single night of weirdness and coincidence in New York, this time in L.A. Or even of All Night Long, a much lesser effort starring Barbra Streisand. Sadly, it just doesn’t work. IMDb.com

15 Minutes (2001) This movie is a cracking good thriller for about 90 minutes. Unfortunately, it still has 30 minutes to go. IMDb.com

16 Years of Alcohol (UK, 2003) This Scottish film can’t seem to decide what it wants to do. It’s narrated by a dead man, and most of what he says could be on a Zen Hallmark card, and he says it over and over. We see a man with serious issues around violence, not alcohol, and he’s smart enough to realize he’s capable of better things. He gets some help, makes a lot of progress, but then is brought down by his old ways of thinking, and finally is murdered by his old mates. What’s the point here? During his violent days there are many, many references to A Clockwork Orange, and that’s fun for a while ... but I don’t know if it was smart to make one think of one of the most visually stunning movies of all time unless you have something to add to it, and this movie doesn’t. And it was so orange. IMDb.com

21 Grams (2003) Films aren’t novels, even if they have been made from novels. Each form has its strengths and weaknesses, and particularly in movies, the way is story is told can be as important to me as the story itself. In fact, a different way of telling can rescue what might have been a routine story, if told routinely. Good examples: Forget Paris, which I loved, was unfolded as a series of episodes related in a bar to someone who knew none of the principals. Memento and the musical Merrily We Roll Along began at the end and worked back to the beginning, the first because the main character had anterograde amnesia, the second because Stephen Sondheim just wanted to have fun. 21 Grams is told in fractured time. You see scenes to come, scenes that have already happened, in no particular order, and you have to put it together yourself until the end arrives, not with a surprise, but with some satisfaction, at least on my part. I can see how it would be annoying, though, especially when you put it all together at the end and realize there was really nothing special about the story itself. But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? IMDb.com

28 Days Later (2002) Good SF movie that loses steam toward the end. But there is some fantastic imagery. Worth seeing. IMDb.com

28 Weeks Later (2007) Here’s a sequel that subscribes to the “The last was one pretty bloody, so let’s make this one even bloodier” school of sequel-making. 28 Days Later was pretty good until the last twenty minutes, when it degenerated into a ho-hum bloodbath. So they started this one with a bloodbath, and had another every twenty minutes. You begin to wonder how these virus-crazed rage zombies can bleed so much from every orifice and not keel over dead in ten minutes. Then you stop wondering about anything, except how did this piece of shit manage a 78 score at Metacritic? IMDb.com

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) Lee said it was maybe a guy thing. Well, the very first scene definitely was, if you've ever awakened with an erection and had to lean over the toilet to piss. Not a girl thing, for sure. I laughed pretty hard. I laughed a lot later, too, but I have to say this movie had the potential to be a real classic, like There's Something About Mary, or Fever Pitch, but didn't quite make it. The first was balls-out over-the-top gross-out popcorn-spraying yuks, and the second was gentler, with a finely-drawn ensemble cast. This one tried to be both, and partly succeeded at each ... but that doesn't make a classic. This is writer Judd Apatow's first feature-length movie as a director, and he is a great joke writer and a good actor, but he needs to learn to tighten it up some. Scenes went on too long, as did the whole film. A one-joke premise can only go 90 minutes, maybe 100 minutes, tops. This one went a tad over 2 hours. You have to learn to kill your favorite children, Judd. But I'll go see your next movie. IMDb.com

42: Forty Two Up (1998) IMDb.com

49-Up (2006) The latest and possibly last of the monumental study of human growth that began in 1964 with Seven-Up! I wrote an extensive essay about the series, which you may read if you wish, so I won't repeat any of my raves here, merely update.

... and there's not a lot of updating to do. The years between 42 and 49, barring catastrophe or a full-blown mid-life crisis, are usually not years of great change. You're formed by 42, and by 49 you haven't yet entered fully into the agonies of aging. The biggest event in most people's lives in these years is the arrival of grandchildren. If they ever do a 56-Up I'd expect to see some more radical changes as you realize that the Big Six Oh is not far away, and you'll soon be old!

There are spoilers ahead, but none of it will surprise you too much.

Tony: The would-be jockey and long-time cab driver now has a second home in Spain, and laments that England and the East End ain't what it used to be. By he means all the Pakis and other non-white elements. He plans to pack it in and leave England completely, as this corner of Spain is "99% British."

Suzy: No change except, like almost everyone else, there are grandchildren. She and Rupert are still together, still profess to be in love, and she still finds the whole Up business a horrible burden which she feels a duty to fulfill. In fact, all the upper class kids dislike being in the series, and all the lower-class kids seem to enjoy it. At least none of them complain. Not surprising.

Nick: Divorced, with a new companion. Misses England badly.

Symon: Doing okay. Thinks that if he'd applied himself at school he might have been more successful, but doesn't seem to mind too much. You never know for sure, of course, any of these people could be putting up a front.

Paul: Not much has changed. The producers bring him from Australia to England again for a brief reunion with Symon, the other "workhouse" boy.

Jackie: One of the East End girls. Still plugging away, and a bit hostile to Michael Apted when he questions her happiness. But she always stood up for herself, though she often sounds a bit defensive about it.

Lynn: Still a librarian, working with retarded kids. She gets emotional and asks that the camera be turned off at one point.

Sue: Basically, no changes. She's still the prettiest of the bunch, though she's put on some weight. Later: Okay, Lee reminded me, Sue had been a single mum and now she's found a new man and they seem very happy with their children, and a little dog that likes to watch "Animal Hospital" on the telly. No kidding. He hears the theme music and comes tearing down the stairs and sits right in front, watching every minute.

John: Still snotty after all these years. Does good charity work, but is appalled at the state Britain has fallen into. Well, he's not the only one, but different people have different reasons to think that.

Andrew: Left his law firm, and seems happy about it.

Charles: The absent documentarian, still absent.

Bruce: Has stopped teaching in the inner city and now teaches at an exclusive school. Big surprise. I suspect a case of burn-out. Another significant change: Bruce and his wife have two cute little boys!

Peter: Hasn't come back since 28, when he was badly burned by something he said, I believe it might have been about the crusty old bitch Mrs. Thatcher. I don't expect to see him again.

Neil: The one who lives on the edge of madness. He's left London and moved to the Northwest, which I know nothing about. Still living in a Council flat, running for another office with chances of winning slim to none. At least it keeps him busy.

Michael Apted is now 65. He could certainly do another when he's 72 ... but is it worth it? I really don't know, but I'm so glad we've come this far. We'll have to wait and see. IMDb.com

50 First Dates (2004) I really hate Adam Sandler. It’s almost a personal hatred. Almost single-handedly he has lowered the standards of funny movies to a level I’ve never seen before. But from time to time he has tried to do a movie above this shitty level. I hate him so much that I haven’t seen Punch Drunk Love or The Wedding Singer, both of which were reviewed well. But I had to see this one. For one thing, it sounded like a good idea. For another, I was pretty sure it was my idea. I wondered if I might have a lawsuit.

In 1989 I wrote and published a short story called "Just Another Perfect Day." It concerned a man who had anterograde amnesia, which means that he can’t form new memories. So far as I know this affliction is really more like it is portrayed in the excellent Memento, where the protagonist will lose all his new memories without warning, so that from one minute to another he never knows when he will be hurled back to square one, memory-wise, to the day he suffered the brain injury that put him in this predicament. But in my story, he lost his new memories every time he went to sleep.

After seeing it, I think there is at least a possibility that I could have sued. There were two problems. First, I’d need to show that the author, George Wing, had read my story. However, that would only be if the case came to court. Suits like this are commonly settled before they ever get there, as nuisances. Second, I’d have to have the two stories compared in open court ... and his story is better than mine. Ouch! But I admit it, he made much more of the idea than I did. And I’ll even admit that Sandler was not bad. It would have been a better movie with someone else ... but that’s sour grapes. I liked it. IMDb.com

6ixty-nin9 (Ruang rak noi nid mahasan) (Thai, 1999) I loved this little film! Every once in a while you discover a gem that no one has heard of, and this is one. It is a crazy mixture of Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers, the Marx Brothers, and maybe just a little bit of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If there’s any one film it reminds me of it’s Blood Simple. Tum, a secretary in a financial company, is laid off. She goes home and thinks about suicide, then someone drops off a package at her door, and it’s full of money. She’s in Apartment 6, but the numeral is held on with only one screw and sometimes flips over to become a 9. That’s where the package was supposed to go. (The Thai title translates as “A Funny Story About Six and Nine.” Even funnier, when you realize Thais use different symbols for numbers in their language, but not on apartment doors.) Gangsters show up and she kills two of them. Then the bodies start to pile up, to the point Tum is having a real problem disposing of them. Mistaken identities, confusion, mistakes, near misses, good luck and bad luck accumulate, and it is all hilarious. Lee and I were a wee bit disappointed in the ending, but that’s a small complaint. The editing is masterful, the shot composition is imaginative, and the music is dark and haunting. I recommend it. IMDb.com

75th Annual Academy Awards Short Films (2003) Every year if you watch the Oscars, as we do religiously, there comes a time when they give out the awards for short films, and you see a five-second flash of movies which, unless you live in Los Angeles, I can practically guarantee that you have never seen, as they have played in maybe three theaters in the whole world. The winners are some of the most grateful of the evening: this is their 15 minutes before a billion television watchers. It’s a shame, really. I’m old enough to remember when a double feature at the movin’ pitchers included a cartoon or two, and a "short subject," a travel documentary or the like. I even caught the tail end of what used to be a theater staple: the newsreel. These films are too good to be as neglected as they are. Now the Academy has released a DVD of all the nominees for 2003. I can only hope they’ll continue to do so, and maybe start working their way back through the years.

300 (2006) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups) (French, 1959). IMDb.com

1408 (2007) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

10,000 Black Men Named George (2002) George Pullman seems to have been a bit of a progressive, at least at first, for his day. (Never mind that Pullman strike nastiness in 1894.) The country was filled with ex-slaves with no jobs, so he decided to hire Negroes, and only Negroes, as porters on his Pullman cars. He figured they’d work hard, and they already had subservience down cold. And they did. But by 1925 there was a lot of dissatisfaction with poor working conditions, low pay, and lack of respect. A union was organized to go up against the company union. There were labor laws by then, though they’d never done Negroes any good, but sending in large numbers of goons or troops was not a real option. Still, there was a lot of nastiness against the top union men, like Philip Randolph, and the rank and file. But you know they will prevail, and they do. This movie was originally on Showtime. It’s competent, earnest, has its heart in the right place, and is pretty dull. About the most interesting thing about it is a supporting role by Brock Peters, who I thought was dead. Turns out he is. He only lived three years after making this.

Bemused aside: There is a scene when Randolph is in Chicago and gets a phone call from his wife, in New York. His mother has died. He is in a room full of people talking, she is at their apartment. They talk quietly for a while, almost whispering. There are long silences. They take their time. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Almost everything about the scene is wrong. I’m sure a lot of screenwriters in this age when some countries have more cell phones than population (many folks have two) don’t recall the days as recently as the 1960s when a call across the country was a big deal! I remember people would lean out the back door and shout “Long distance!” and the person called would come running. For one thing, it was very likely bad news, so Randolph would have already suspected the worst. Plus, it cost real money! Person-to-person cost even more than station-to-station, if any of you are young enough to remember those terms. Only guys like Rockefeller got long-distance calls every day, and kept others waiting on the line. When those magic words were yelled, the room would have fallen silent. And a good thing, too, because there would be a good chance that Randolph would be barely able to hear his wife on the other end. People shouted into the phone when the call was coming from across the country. They shouted even when they didn’t have to, reflexively. And they got their business over fast, because there was a good chance the caller didn’t have any more change. So I doubt Mrs. Randolph would have been placing the call from her apartment in the first place. It had been made clear they were nearly penniless. I see her down at the drugstore waiting for the operator to put her through, anxiously counting her nickels to see how many seconds she has.

Ah, phone nostalgia. I guess today’s generation will look back in wonder at how they managed to carry around these huge, heavy, non-implantable phones with no 3D projection. For me, it’s remembering when area codes first arrived. And prefixes. Any of you remember those? PEnnsylvania 6-5000? Our was RAndolph. I can’t remember our own number, but my best friend’s was RA 2-8591. In my grandparent’s town you didn’t even need 7 digits, 5 would do you. Granddaddy’s was 48512. Uncle Billy’s was … but wait, better not write that one down, he probably still has the same number, 50 years later! And rotary dials, some of you may remember those. And no, I do not recall having to hold the mouthpiece in one hand and the earpiece in the other. How old do you think I am? But I do recall the introduction of the Princess phone, which came in colors other than black … IMDb.com

A (1965) I saw this animated short in film history class at Michigan State in about 1966. A writer is tormented by a giant letter A. After battling it in various ingenious ways for 10 minutes, he defeats it. Then a giant B appears. Cute. IMDb.com

The Internet Movie Database lists movies with the titles A, B, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, O, P, Q, S, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. There is also a film titled Pi, which I haven’t seen. I’ve only seen A, M, and Z. The movie O is available on video; I think I’ll check it out. None of the others are available, or if they are, they’d be terribly hard to find. Oddly, there are no movies entitled C, N, R, or T. Something should be done about that. Somebody alert the Directors Guild. IMDb.com

Absolut Warhola (2001) A few German filmmakers go to Andy Warhol’s ancestral home in Ruthenia, which is a part of Slovenia close to Ukraine. Warhol is the local boy who made good. Everybody knows of him, or is part of his family, though they only learned of him in 1987; decadent western art, I guess. The government has built a museum to Warhol in his home town. It looks like a bunker with two huge tomato soup cans out front, and it leaks. Buckets all over the place. This is the perfect illustration of Andy’s notorious “15 minutes of fame.” All the people in the film are getting their quarter of an hour, and seem to be enjoying it. We see his aunts, uncles, and cousins. They have different ideas on his art, but all agree that he wasn’t a “you-know-what.” One cousin is sure that no “you-know-what” ever came out of the town. It’s all very amusing, if a little patronizing at times, especially when it comes to the clueless staff at the empty museum, which doesn’t admit gypsies. “We would,” says the director, “if they’d clean themselves up. They smell.” IMDb.com

Across the Universe (2007) You don’t so much watch this movie as you drop it, like a tab of Owsley’s Finest Acid back in the ‘60s. Roger Ebert said in his review that in the ‘60s, there was The Beatles, and there was everybody else. Some of those everybody elses were damn good, and played a big part, but he’s right. This movie contains 33 songs by The Beatles. Think of that. It also takes the opportunity to reference dozens of Beatlebilia things, such as the concert on the roof at Abbey Road, coming in through the bathroom window, Maxwell’s silver hammer, and hundreds of other things from that crazy decade, from Janis Joplin to Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus. Some of the songs are performed by familiar faces, such as Bono doing “I Am the Walrus.” Joe Cocker is particularly good in “Come Together.” But most of them are done by kids who weren’t even born when this music was new, and they do a terrific job. Many of the songs are completely re-interpreted, but not messed with in any way. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” for instance, is entirely new when sung sorrowfully by a lesbian who knows she will never hold the hand of the woman she loves. Can you imagine Janis doing “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road”? Well, you don’t have to, Dana Fuchs positively channels the Pearl.

The project was conceived and executed by Julie Taymor, a real genius at choreography and production design. Time after time it knocked my socks off. Stunned me. I found myself in tears three times, once for a sad scene, once for a scene that was so incredibly beautiful there was no way else to respond, and once for … sheer nostalgia, I guess. Everything was possible back then. This movie is my life, from about 15 to 30. Oh, not literally. It’s mostly in Greenwich Village, and I was in the Haight. I didn’t go to Nam, but spent a lot of my life avoiding it. I never got politically active, though I marched. But the riots, the assassinations, the protests, the descent into political stupidity, all those icons and benchmarks and good and bad events now so far in the past… I was there. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I made some bad mistakes (did any of you get through those ages and not?), but there was magic in the air. I feel so sorry for those who missed most of it by being good and responsible, or all of it by not being born yet, but if you did miss it, you can get a glimpse of what it was like in this movie. My friend Spider says it’s better than any documentary, and he’s right.

The people who don’t like it (and there are some) mostly didn’t like how the plot was sometimes stretched in an obvious way to accommodate the songs. I can see it; a few times I thought they were straining a bit. But it didn’t matter. In a conventional musical the songs are written to advance the plot. Cool. But here it’s been reversed. These songs were written (though not consciously) to define the world, and it seems right that they should now define the direction of a work of art that breaks all the molds. Don’t apply your usual standards to this, they won’t fit. Though it is a love story, it’s not really about the characters, except as they reflect all of us in that time. Everyboy, Everygirl, Everyhippie, Everysoldier. And the music. It was an age driven by the music, and the kings of the music were The Beatles. This is the only movie I’ve ever seen where I walked into the theater singing the songs. (Once more, I thank Roger E. for that insight.) I knew every word to every song, every chord change, every harmony. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Is love all you need? Sigh. Probably not … but we never really got to try it, did we? Not all the way. We were screwed, and we screwed ourselves. John Lennon was assassinated. I guess that’s what you get when you ask people to come together, over you. But maybe if we’d tried a little harder … IMDb.com

Adaptation (2002) Simply one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, written by the most imaginative screenwriter working today: Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich. I laughed my head off, even though it’s not primarily a comedy, especially when Kaufman’s fictional twin brother took over the project and turned it into an action/chase potboiler in the best Hollywood tradition. It deals with the agonies and insecurities of the screenwriter himself, in the writing of the very movie we’re watching. I wonder now what the author of the source material, a simple little book called The Orchid Thief, thought of what Kaufman did here. Chris Cooper richly deserved his Supporting Actor Oscar. IMDb.com

Aeon Flux (2005) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

After the Sunset (2004) Lee asked me several times what the second feature was going to be as we planned a night at the drive-in to see Ocean’s Twelve. I could never quite remember. Was it Before Sunrise? Just After Dark? Dusky Twilight? I could never remember, just something to do with the time of day, and if you ask me a month from now I’m sure it won’t spring to mind. It started out promising. Maybe we’ll have a neat little caper movie here. Then it seemed to forget what it was about and wallowed in clichés. But it was obvious why it was made. If you were an actor, would you turn down getting paid for a few months shooting at the fabulous Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas? IMDb.com

Against the Ropes (2004) Meg Ryan hasn’t made a very good film for some time now. She seems to be trying to stretch herself, as in In the Cut, which turned out to be simply dumb, in spite of being directed by the acclaimed Jane Campion. She tries again here, in what begins as a fairly standard woman-in-a-man’s-world success story, briefly shows promise as Jackie Kallen, the only female boxing manager in the world, falls afoul of her own celebrity and loses focus on her fighter, then falls apart into a standard underdog-victory sports movie. It’s hard to sell a boxing movie to me in the first place, since I hate the “sport,” and this fell far short. Heart Like a Wheel, about Shirley “Cha-cha” Muldowney, was much better. I see Meg Ryan is going to be in The Tortilla Curtain, based on an excellent novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle. I hope it works for her, because I find her tremendously appealing. IMDb.com

The Agronomist (2003) Haiti is a little country shaped like a crab claw on the western side of Hispaniola. In 1804 Toussaint L'Ouverture led a slave rebellion, the only successful one I know of. From there on, everything was pretty much downhill. (The Haitians had to pay the former slave owners, and it took them 100 years, and the economy never recovered.) This is the story of Jean Dominique, who trained as an agronomist so he could help Haitian peasants grow better crops, but who gained fame as a radio owner and personality who stood up to the Duvaliers and later to the military juntas. He was a moral, gentle, intense man who spoke the truth, so naturally he had to be killed. He is profiled wonderfully in this little documentary by Jonathan Demme. He’s one of those guys whose eyes can bore right through you, whose passion is always right out there on the surface. What a shame.

Idle observation: Dominique was a light-skinned man. So was his wife. So was everyone in a position of power that I saw in the black nation of Haiti, except maybe Papa Doc. Most of the peasants were black as ink. It’s that way pretty much throughout Latin America. You think slavery hasn’t left a legacy? IMDb.com

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes) (1972) So far, November 2006 has been the month of big let-downs for me, movie-wise. First there was Rebel Without a Cause, which even most critics would agree that, though iconic, was not a very good movie. Then there was L'Avventura, which all the discerning people love, and I pretty much hated. Now this. Not only beloved by critics, but placing #227 on the IMDb Top 250, with an 8.1 rating by the viewers. And I thought it was pretentious and pretty dull. Sure, there are arresting visuals, including hundreds of tiny monkeys on a raft at the very end, but it's one of those movies where you know the ending, and it's just a matter of slogging through all the moves until you get there. I am sure it is crammed full of metaphors about savagery vs. civilization, and the folly of colonialism, but I can only watch so much slogging through swamps carrying aristocratic women in sedan chairs, or drifting pointlessly down a river searching for a phantasmal El Dorado. IMDb.com

Aimée & Jaguar (Germany, 1999) In 1943 in Berlin, there was apparently an underground resistance of Jewish lesbians ... I know it sounds unlikely, but this story was based on an autobiographical book that was a major bestseller in Germany. This is the third German film about the war we’ve seen recently, after the rather odd Rosenstrasse and the critically acclaimed Downfall, which dealt with Hitler’s last days in the bunker. Those two films each have one of the stars of this one; Juliane Köhler plays Eva Braun in the latter, and Jaguar in this one. The other star is the radiantly beautiful Maria Schrader. Schrader is a lesbian and a Jew, Köhler is the mother of four, married to a German soldier at the Eastern Front who somehow manages to get leave and pop up in Berlin at inconvenient times. They fall in love. With a WWII movie, you always find yourself noting the date, knowing what is coming up. When the radio announces Hitler is dead, you know it’s 1944 and it’s a false report. When someone says the war will be lost in 5 weeks, you know it still has 11 months to drag on. You know Berlin is in for a much worse pasting than it’s already getting. And ... truth or fiction, you know it will end badly. This takes something away from the story for me. The only question is how and when the Jewish girl will be shuffled off to a concentration camp. The movie is well done and acted wonderfully, but I can’t say I liked it very much.

What I did like, a lot, was Maria Schrader. She writes screenplays and directs as well, and maybe she doesn’t speak English, because all her credits are in German films. But if she ever wants to come to Hollywood she could have them eating out of her hand She is as appealing as Audrey Tautou, without the little-girl innocence, and our little Audrey has landed the plum role of the decade, alongside Tom Hanks in the mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code. I think Schrader could easily do as well. IMDb.com

Air America (1990) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him in Vietnam. IMDb.com

Akahige (Red Beard) (1965) Between 1948 and 1965 Toshirô Mifune made 16 films with Akira Kurosawa. They were the Japanese equivalent of John Wayne and John Ford, though the Japanese pair had more range than the two Johns. (This is not a put-down, but a simple observation; I love the Wayne/Ford movies.) Red Beard was their last collaboration. The split seems to have come about because Kurosawa, a perfectionist to rival Kubrick, insisted Mifune have a real beard for the two years it took to shoot this movie, and that meant Mifune couldn't take another part in all that time. It almost ruined him financially, and though Red Beard was a great success, it marked the beginning of a long and terrible career decline for both men. Kurosawa might never have made another movie—he made an unsuccessful suicide attempt—if not for foreign admirers and investors like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. What an idea, to think the world might have missed Kagemusha and Ran. Thank you, George and Francis.

You learn so many interesting facts researching these movies at the IMDb and elsewhere online! I didn't know Mifune was born and raised in China. He was a fluent speaker of Mandarin, and although he was pure Japanese, he never set foot in Japan until he was 21. And this quote:

Of Akira Kurosawa: "I am proud of nothing I have done other than with him."

In my personal ranking, I'd put Red Beard somewhere in the upper middle of Kurosawa films. I think it's a bit long for its subject matter, which is of a young, cocky doctor forced to work in a charity hospital run by a cranky older and wiser man, near the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, early 1800s. Bit of a cliché story, actually, but as always there is much more to a Kurosawa film, including the delights of his long-lens photography and superb lighting, great performances by Mifune and Yuzo Kayama and Terumi Niki, and his willingness to let a scene play much longer than is usually possible in Hollywood, to get at the real emotion. (Okay, I take back that crack about it being too long.) This is a very bleak-looking film, I can hardly recall seeing a growing thing in it and most of the people in it are dying. But the message is of service to a greater good, and of hope. IMDb.com

Akeelah and the Bee (2006) Yes, it's the classic underdog story so beloved of Hollywood, and yes, you can tell just about everywhere it's going to go after the first ten minutes ... and yet, sometimes that just works. It could have been about football, or chess, or swimming, or just about any competitive human activity (or horse racing), but it's about spelling, and it manages to pull a rabbit out of the hat at the end, reminding us that it isn't all about winning, and that, in some contests, there is an alternative to winning or losing ... think about it, you'll come up with the answer. Hint: Win, lose, or ...

The movie works best because it is set in Compton in the African-American community, and it knows that just about the only thing that can be as frightening as fear of failure can be ... fear of success. The underprivileged, black or white, begin with a sense of failure, and most of them never achieve anything because they never even get started. Add to that the certainty that, unless you're an athlete, any accomplishment will be disparaged by your peers who aren't trying and hate you and are jealous of the possibility that you might succeed. "Good student" is an epithet among the brainless in their endless attempts to bring you down to their level. I know from personal experience, being a life-long nerd and "brainiac" ... and proud of it! IMDb.com

The Alamo (2004) In Texas, when I went to school, the entire 7th grade history class was devoted to The Great and Glorious Lone Star State. It was taught from a silly little comic book that, for all I know, is still in use in the 7th grade, because when I visited the San Jacinto Monument in Houston with my dad a few years back we saw a copy of it in a display case, and Dad said they used the same book when he was in the 7th grade.

So I know a little about Texas history.

Actually, I doubt that little book is still used. It was biased, no question. So now, in 2004, I was far from sure about the accuracy of the history I was taught. I mean, the Battle of the Alamo has been hotly debated since the day it ended, and there’s been some revisionism. It wasn’t emphasized to us, for instance, that one of the things the Texians were fighting for was the right to own slaves, outlawed in Mexico. There are historians who argue loudly that David Crockett tried to surrender there at the end. Estimates of Mexican dead range from no more than 200 right up to 1600. What with Hispanics gaining recognition and political clout in Texas, the Mexican side has been told much more sympathetically, as I discovered on my last visit to the Alamo, earlier this year. That’s all well and good.

There have even been attempts to rehabilitate that murderous poltroon, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and that’s where I draw the line in the sand. Remember the friggin’ Alamo! sez I.

Anyway, I did a little reading of the best current thinking on the subject after I saw this movie, to check my memory. Sure enough, nobody has suggested that Crockett survived the battle long enough to figuratively spit in Santa Anna’s eye and get bayoneted for his insolence.

Gee, where do I begin?

First, calling this movie The Alamo is not really accurate. It begins roughly with the formation of the Republic of Texas, and ends with the Battle of San Jacinto. The Alamo is the centerpiece, sure, but more accurately one might call it ... oh, say The Birth of a Nation, maybe. Uh ... well, that title’s been taken, and the associations are not pleasant. Maybe Texas! Or The Texians. But, taken as an account of how a handful of former Americans and rebellious Mexicans wrested Mexico’s largest province from the sort of strutting dictator all of the Americas below the Rio Grande has been burdened with for hundreds of years, this movie falls miserably short. A multi-part TV series might have handled the story better. And it should have begun with the siege of Bexar, when the Texians took the Alamo and sent the Mexicans packing. As it is, events are too compressed to make sense. The scenes of the legislative meetings seem detached from everything else. There is lots of declamation, lots of heat, lots of screenwriterly pomposity.

It’s too bad, because this movie’s intentions are good. They spent $90 million, and made one of the largest and most historically accurate outdoor sets ever built, including not only the Alamo compound itself (correctly showing it without the hump that was added later), but the nearby town of San Antonio de Bexar. They wanted to get it all right this time, according to the director.

But historically speaking, they screwed the pooch. The temptation to hype the material was too strong. It is true that Bowie and Travis didn’t like each other, true that there were conflicts as to who would command, true that Travis was young and inexperienced ... but if the two men had said the things the screenwriter has them saying to each other in this film, in 1836, it would have ended with pistols at dawn. Bowie loved to duel.

No way the Mexicans “crept up” on the Alamo before dawn while all the sentries were sleeping. I watched these scenes, of row after row of troops stepping off as a unit, soundlessly, with no commands whatsoever, and I just sighed. Plain stupid.

Also, the Mexicans weren’t waiting at their barricades as the Texians charged across the fields of San Jacinto. They were sleeping in their tents: Siesta time, 3 PM. Sam Houston took a huge chance, attacked before Santa Anna was ready, and 18 minutes later it was over and Buffalo Bayou ran red with blood, almost none of it Texian.

And the whole movie is too damn solemn. Sure, they were facing certain death, but few of the scenes played true to me. In this movie, nobody in the Alamo ever smiles. 13 days, and not one smile. Crockett tells a story of an Indian massacre he was involved in, and the young troops look solemn. Not a racist among them. Not one shout of “Yeeee-haw!!! Serves ‘em right, damn redskins!” which is how most of them would have reacted in that day and age. I didn’t buy Jim Bowie as a brooding, muttering Marlon Brando type. I frankly liked Laurence Harvey as Colonel Travis in John Wayne’s hokey 1960 The Alamo better than this mope they got to play him this time. I just hate it when movies insist on putting characters with modern sensibilities into historical settings. People thought fighting was glorious back then. Most white men didn’t like Indians; most of the men at the Alamo had certainly fought with Caddo and Comanche, no quarter given, awful atrocities on both sides.

The best I can say about Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett is that he was interesting. This portrayal is a far cry from the coon-skin cap hillbilly of my youth, and is certainly more accurate, but not convincing. Like everybody else, he broods a lot. One thing I did like, and a lot of critics didn’t, was his first reaction when arriving at the Alamo. Looking puzzled, he says, “I thought the fighting was over.” And why shouldn’t he? Mexico had surrendered the town and the compound a few months earlier. It was winter, and Santa Anna was not expected for quite a while, certainly not until Houston and Fannin could bring up troops from Goliad and other places.

And while we’re at it, if we’re going to cover the whole early history of Texas, which seems to be the intent here, why leave out Goliad? Nobody outside of Texas has ever heard of it, but more men died there than at the Alamo, 400 prisoners of war executed after surrendering honorably, on Santa Anna’s orders. If anything, the fighters at San Jacinto were more pissed off about Goliad than about the Alamo. The Alamo defenders knew they were going to be killed to the last man. James Fannin’s men expected to be treated according to the rules of warfare of the day, which did not include killing prisoners. It was a disgrace. IMDb.com

Alexander (2004) It had to happen, after Gladiator (the most overrated film since that piece of crap Braveheart, in my opinion) won the Best Picture Oscar. The lemmings of Hollywood immediately put a series of sword, sandal, ‘n’ toga pictures into production.

Even HBO got the fever, recently opening a new series called “Rome.” I looked at the first episode, decided it was basically “Deadwood” in drag, and haven’t bothered since. I admit I’m a little prejudiced. When I was growing up there were tons of these turkeys: Quo Vadis, The Robe, Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, culminating in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Of them all, only Spartacus and the chariot race in Ben-Hur were worth a damn.

So we got Troy, which didn’t break even, and then Oliver Stone gave it a shot with this turkey, which totally tanked at the BO. I mean, the battle scenes are enormous, just like in Troy and the Lord of the Rings trilogy ... and who gives a Phoenician fart? Big battles are meaningless unless you care about somebody in the picture, unless you have someone to root for. They worked in LOTR; they don’t work here, simple as that.

At the one-hour point I gave up, but I’d seen a fascinating battle with elephants in the trailers, so I skipped ahead. Started out fine. All these guys on foot and on horses, and here come the battle pachyderms. Whoa! Can you imagine? They’re plenty scared, but bold Alex charges ahead. Trusty horse Bucephalus is hit by a spear, and Alex catches an arrow in the chest ... and Oliver Stone resorts to the most horrid cliché of action movies, slow motion. It takes him twenty minutes to fall off the goddam horse. And it gets worse. The whole slomo scene gets red. That’s right, monochrome and slomo at once.

Lord, it’s awful. I kept hitting the NEXT button, and kept getting dancing girls, vast palaces, subtitles like TEN YEARS PREVIOUSLY ... $150,000,000 worth of overblown crap. Sure, Babylon looks great, sweeping CGI vistas, but what doesn’t look great these days? It’s not enough, people. Take a look at Intolerance. To me, those scenes in the B&W silent Babylon are infinitely more impressive than this baloney, because old D.W. Griffith built the place ...

What was Stone thinking? The very first battle he seems to be attempting to show the troop movements, the ebb and flow of the actual fight. I remember Stanley Kubrick tried for years to make a film about Napoleon. He wanted to show this kind of stuff, how it all went down at Austerlitz, Borodino, Leipzig, and Waterloo, but back then you couldn’t order up 100,000 CGI extras, the cost was prohibitive. I’d like to have seen that picture; I’ll bet Kubrick could have pulled it off, like Kurosawa did in Kagemusha and Ran. Stone just doesn’t have the chops for it. IMDb.com

Alfie (1966) Anticipating that Alfie, The Remake might leave something to be desired, we rented both of them and watched the new one first. This review will refer to both of them, as after watching the new one I was inspired only to a jape, below.

I’d forgotten just how good this movie is. Alfie Elkins is one of the most fully-realized and complex characters ever to appear on the screen. At first he seems a likeable rogue, who “never means to hurt anybody.” His treatment of women is a mixture of gentleness and depersonalization; he often refers to them with the pronoun “it.” In spite of this, you can’t help liking his wry cockney observations on life in general and on birds in particular. In fact, I’m ashamed to admit that when I first saw the movie I was pretty much in complete agreement with his outlook. What can I tell you? I was 19. I’d read the Playboy Philosophy, I wasn’t all that interested in seeing women as people. Neither is Alfie ... yet he sees them that way when he least expects it, and sometimes even seems to realize that his outlook is stunted and will lead only to an empty life. He travels a long way down that road in the course of the movie. He has the capacity for love, but will only allow himself to become that vulnerable with his illegitimate child, who he loses. He can feel empathy, as during the absolutely harrowing abortion scene, and by the end, he certainly knows regret. What’s it all about, Alfie?

Alfie in 2004 hasn’t got a clue. By that, I mean the movie, the actor, and the character. They’ve tried for a softer, cuter Alfie, and ended up totally cutting off his balls and turning him into a cipher I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes with, much less two hours. And how very, very odd that, in 2004, the girlfriend fakes an abortion, apparently just so the screenwriter can wring a little phony emotion from a scene late in the movie. Come to think of it, we hardly ever see a movie or TV show these days where a woman gets an abortion. Too politically charged, I guess, though it’s legal now and wasn’t in 1966.

Michael Caine lost the Oscar that year to Paul Scofield, in a very good but standard portrayal in A Man For All Seasons. Caine should have won. I mean, the movie lives or dies with whether or not we buy him talking directly to us, and from his very first lines I do buy it. It’s a proposition Jude Law never sold me on.

But I can’t end without mentioning two Oscar-worthy supporting roles: Vivian Merchant tore my soul to shreds with her agony, and Denholm Eliot somehow managed to create one of the most horrid characters I’ve ever seen on the screen, the back-alley abortionist, without me ever knowing quite how he did it. Amazing. IMDb.com

Alfie (2004) This movie just makes me want to ... break into song, like a movie musical! Pretend I’m Howard Keel. First a song to the writer/director, Charles Shyer, and then to the star, Jude Law. Ahem ... do re mi fa sol la ti do! Mi mi mi mi mi mi ... IMDb.com

♪♫♪♪♫♫♫♪♫

Sooooooooooooooo ........ ♪♫♪♪♫♫♫♪♫ (musical segue ... )

Alien Nation (1988) What a promising idea, and what a mess. What if the first aliens we meet are interstellar Okies, sort of trash that nobody else wants (Morons From Outer Space handles the same basic idea comically) ... and it is utterly destroyed by the sheer stupidity of the idea that they can’t stand contact with ... water! (See Signs.) IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Alien vs. Predator (2004) One of the worst movies we’ve ever seen. What a crapulous, brain-dead, festering hemorrhoid of a movie. If Hollywood had a great big pimple on its face, and you squeezed it, this is the movie that would come out. I’d hate to have to pay the Vaseline budget for this atrocity. Slime city!

Thirty or forty people (who’s counting? not even the SFX and stunt people who will be killing them like ducks in a shooting gallery) set off across the Antarctic ice to find some sort of giant Rubik’s Cube 2000 feet down. They are led (hah!) by Sanaa Lathan, who everyone ignores. I’ve seen Raggedy Ann dolls who can act better than Lathan. No "character" is distinguishable from any other "character," except for Lance Henriksen, who looks dead before he’s even killed, and a cartoon Scotsman. Boy, was I glad when that sucker was killed.

The Rubik’s Cube begins to shift around for no purpose other than to split people up. The movie was so dark I seldom had any idea who was doing what to whom ... and I never cared. I’d compare this movie to a video game, but that’s an insult to video game writers.
I can’t believe anybody wrote this film. I mean, actually sat down at a word processor and wrote down the awful, stupid dialogue. I really wonder if a computer program wrote it, from a list of bad lines and cliché situations.

It’s a sad commentary on the wretched state of the action film in America today that this waste of celluloid and electricity took in $40M its first weekend. They seem to think we’ll go see anything ... and apparently they’re right. (By the way, I’d never have seen it myself, except it was the first feature I had to suffer through, for 101 minutes that seemed much longer, at a drive-in with Collateral. So I only wasted half my admission.) IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Collateral (2004) There is more character development in the first five minutes of Collateral that the whole putrid mess of AVP. It’s fast, it’s smart, it’s good to look at, the music rocks. I applaud Tom Cruise for taking the role of a very, very bad man, though an interesting one.

SPOILER WARNING