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© 2004-2010 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Baadasssss! (2004) The story of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the 1971 Melvin Van Peebles film that was the first real “black” movie. I saw it when it was new, in San Francisco, and I’d like to see it again. I remember that it was hard to watch, as a white person, that it opened my eyes a little to how black people experienced the world. I suspect it wouldn’t look so good today; the bits you can see in the new movie are very raw, no surprise considering the perilous and primitive conditions under which it was filmed. Van Peebles was on the edge of disaster all the way through. The film almost didn’t get made, almost didn’t get distributed, almost didn’t get seen. But the rest was history. It made tons of money, and created a whole new genre which is still thriving today. Baadasssss! is a wonderful look into that moment in time, and a highly personal film, with Mario Van Peebles playing his own father, who was so obsessed with getting his movie made that he became something of a monster for a while. But that’s often the way with artists with a vision, and Mario understands that while never flinching away from the ugliness. IMDb.com

Babel (2006) As I write this, Babel is nominated for Best Picture of the Year, and is considered a favorite. (It won the "Golden Globe," right? And that's a really, really good indicator, right? Not!!!) As I write this, we have seen four of the nominees, all of them except Letters From Iwo Jima, and I hope to see that soon. And as I write this, my own choice for the Oscar is Little Miss Sunshine.

I frankly didn't get this movie. It is a matter of the individual parts being a whole lot better than the sum of the parts. It is beautiful, the acting is great (particularly by Rinko Kikuchi as a deaf-mute Japanese teenager), and each of the four stories is compelling.

1. A goat-herder in Morocco buys a rifle to kill jackals. His sons, fooling around, shoot and injure ...

2. An American woman who is in a bus with her husband. Her life hangs by a thread, while back at home ...

3. Their Mexican illegal housekeeper/babysitter defies the husband's order to stay with their two young children at home, and instead takes them to her son's wedding in Mexico, with near-disastrous results. Meanwhile, back in Tokyo ... (huh?) ...

4. A beautiful young deaf girl struggles with her mother's recent suicide, and her need to be loved and accepted manifests as promiscuity and exhibitionism ...

Huh? Where does that last thread come from? Well, it's not much of a secret, so I'll tell you. Her father gave the gun to the Moroccan goat-herder ...

You will of course be reminded of Crash, last year's Oscar winner (which I loved), in that various threads tie together in unlikely ways. But where Crash had a theme of cultural misunderstandings and racism of all kinds and the horrors it can unleash by pure accident, Babel seems to flounder. The title implies a failure to communicate, but I don't see that very strongly in evidence, except for the Japanese girl who so desperately wants to communicate with her hearing peers. It all seems random, and if that is the intent, it's not enough for me.

I must stress again, each of these four stories is gripping in itself, with the Japanese story the strongest and the story with the biggest stars, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, the weakest. It's just that none of them seem to belong in the same movie. This made a lot of people angry. I wasn't angry, so much as disappointed that it didn't manage to add up some something greater than the sum of its parts. IMDb.com

Babette’s Feast (Babettes gæstebud) (Danish, 1987) First, this goes on my list of all-time great food movies. It’s a small genre, but a delicious one. I have seen movies that glorify Italian cooking (Big Night), Chinese (Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin shi nan nu)), and Mexican (Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate)) ... and another whose title I can’t recall, but it started with a man making squash-blossom soup. Can anybody help me out here?), and make the cooking and eating an essential part of the story, but oddly, this is the first one I’ve seen that does the same for French cuisine. These are movies where they ought to issue you a spoon as you go into the theater, they look so good you want to eat the light coming out of the projector. There is a sensual beauty to food that is prepared with love, skill, and art, and these movies celebrate that.
But cooking isn’t enough to sustain a movie, and all of those mentioned above know that. So does Babette’s Feast, and when we begin, if we hadn’t been alerted by the title, we wouldn’t know that food figured in this story at all. It takes place in the late 1800s, in Denmark, among a dwindling sect of puritans who live bleak, abstemious lives mostly devoted to their religion. The big guru has two beautiful daughters, both of whom end up giving up their dreams to devote themselves to their father.

They grow old. Enter Babette in 1871, fleeing Les Miserables ... or the events chronicled in it. All we know about her is that she is in trouble in France, can’t return, and she begs the sisters to be allowed to live there and work for them, for no wages. She does this for 14 years. These are people whose diet is almost entirely smoked sole, lutefisk and something called ale bread that looks like unbaked pumpkin pie.

Then she hits the lottery for FR10,000. The sisters are about to celebrate the 100th birthday of their dead father. Babette says she wants to cater the dinner. Nobody in the village is thrilled by this idea, even though they have no idea what they’re in for. But they agree, and also agree among themselves not to enjoy this foreign, decadent food. They’ll choke it down and go back to their lutefisk.

Then the ingredients begin arriving. A live turtle big as a station wagon. Live quails. Caviar, sour cream, ice, fruit, truffles, fine wines. Turns out Babette was the head chef in the best restaurant in Paris. The meal begins ... and I won’t spoil it for you. The world isn’t changed, minds aren’t changed but they are opened up a little. And it is all so perfect, so right, that you find yourself nodding and smiling at everything that happens. So it’s a lot more than just another great food movie. It’s a great movie on any terms. Don’t miss it. IMDb.com

Bad Education (La Mala Educación) (Spain, 2004) Pedro Almodóvar is one of the best directors working today, and there’s quite a few of his films I haven’t seen yet. Have to do something about that.

This is a very good one. From the opening credits and music I thought “Hitchcock!” It’s not a thriller but a psychological drama. And, in fact, the story is so complex that it would take half a page just to summarize it and it might spoil your fun. Suffice it to say that there are at least four levels of reality and fantasy and storytelling here, and just when you think you know what’s happening you learn something else that pulls the rug out from under you. It stars Gael García Bernal, the incredibly handsome Mexican actor who can have a big career in Hollywood as soon as he wants it. He’s been very good in The Motorcycle Diaries and Amores Perros. And in this one he is just about the prettiest transvestite I’ve ever seen. IMDb.com

The Bad News Bears (1976) Regular visitors to this site may have noticed that we’ve gone on an October World Series exploration of the world of baseball movies. So far we’ve dealt with the major leagues (Bang the Drum Slowly, The Pride of the Yankees), the minor leagues (Bull Durham), the Negro League (The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings), women’s professional baseball (A League of Their Own), the musical comedy league (Take Me Out to the Ball Game), and even the Woo-Woo League (Field of Dreams). We plan to tackle backyard baseball (The Sandlot) and even Japanese baseball (Mr. Baseball) before we’re done, but right now it’s time for the horrors of … gasp! The Little League! I never played, never even tried out. I couldn’t run, couldn’t hit, couldn’t throw, couldn’t catch. A quadruple threat. In PE class I was one of the schmucks who, when I came to the plate, all the infielders would shout “Easy out!” And they were right! I used to hang around the Little League ballpark at the end of our street in Nederland, Texas, on muggy summer nights and shag foul balls and home runs. If you brought the ball back to the concession stand you got a free sno-cone. And that is the sum total of my experience playing baseball. I love baseball, but I love it from the bleachers.

But for some people, baseball is their life. And I’m not talking about the 13- to 18-year-olds on the field. I’m talking about the parents. Probably the only thing worse than a mother determined that her daughter become the big movie star she never was is a father determined that his son become the big pro athlete that he never was.

Then there’s the Bears. And I take it back, it might actually be worse to be on a ball team and have parents who just don’t care. The Bears are the dregs of this particular Los Angeles area Little League division, the fat, slow, disturbed, angry incompetents that none of the other teams would ever take. (The other teams have sponsors on the backs of their jerseys like Pizza Hut and Pepsi. The sponsor of the Bears is Chico’s Bail Bonds.) How bad are they? Well, I would have looked good compared to this team. That bad. And in the whole movie I don’t think we get a glimpse of a single Bears parent sitting in the stands watching the games. The parents and managers of the other teams are all examples of the corruption parents introduce into children’s sports when they preach the philosophies of win at any cost, and have contempt for losers. I hate them, I despise them, but at least they care. The parents of the Bears apparently use the team as a baby-sitting service. I don’t even want to know what their home life is like.

Walter Matthau, a pool cleaner who used to play in the minor leagues, is hired to manage the team. And much of the movie goes where you would expect. He still drinks beer all day, but he begins to teach them some of the fundamentals. They gradually get better. He brings in two ringers: his former stepdaughter, Tatum O’Neal, who has a mean fast ball, talks tough but yearns to connect with a father figure, and the neighborhood delinquent, who is an all-around athlete. They get even better. Then when it looks like they might have a shot at the league championship, Matthau gets infected with the win at all costs virus. There are a series of moments meant to teach us about sportsmanship, and they are pretty obvious but I still liked it. Will they win the Big Game at the end? I was really curious, and the answer was satisfactory. IMDb.com

The Bad News Bears (2005) One of the Rules of Cinema is that it is always a bad idea to remake a good movie. But one of the Laws of the Universe clearly states that there is an exception to every rule, and this is one of them. If there is anybody in the world who can out-curmudgeon Walter Matthau, it is Billy Bob Thornton. You can’t really compare the two performances, even though some of the dialog is virtually identical; each man brings his own misanthropic character to the part, and the results in both cases are glorious. The writers also eschewed Hollywood’s own Rule of Remakes, which states that Step One in the process is to identify what made the first movie good, and then do your best to eradicate that quality entirely. There was very little tinkering here, the plots of the two movies are identical, except for a few small additions and necessary changes. One is the addition of a ballplayer in a powered wheelchair. At the end, even he gets to play. The writers are the same maniacs who did Bad Santa, and they just toned Billy Bob down a little here. I was laughing at line after line. Billy Bob watching a girl’s softball team: “I never thought I’d ever hear myself say, ‘Look at the ass on that second baseman.’ But look at the ass on that second baseman.” Or “You guys are swinging like Helen Keller at a piñata party.” In the first one the team’s uniforms show their sponsor: Chico’s Bail Bonds. In this one, it’s a “gentlemen’s” club. All the pole dancers are in the stands, cheering for the Bears. Trust me, if you liked the first one, you’ll like this one. IMDb.com

Bad Santa (2004) Double feature with Elf. IMDb.com

The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru) (Japan, 1960) Not one of Kurosawa's best, which just means it's a lot better than 90% of the films you will see this year. There were two alternate titles used in various countries: The Rose in the Mud, and The Worse You Are, the Better You Sleep. I kinda like the second one. It's a bit of Hamlet—son seeks revenge for death of father, but suffers doubts—and a lot of Japanese film noir. There is some of the over-acting (to western eyes, anyway) that you have to get used to if you watch Japanese films, but it all is centered and anchored by the quiet resolve of that wonderful man, Toshiro Mifune, in glasses and a conservative suit, almost unrecognizable here if you only know him from the samurai films. He could teach John Wayne a thing or two about screen presence, plus he could do ironic comedy wonderfully. The ending is the weakest part, not because it is a downer (the title sort of gives that away) but because too much happens off-screen and is related after the fact. My other favorite Japanese actor, Takashi Shimura, has a small part. I'd like to have seen him in the part taken by Masayuki Mori, he'd have done it very well. Not that Mori is bad as the man who will do anything, literally anything, to cover up his crimes. IMDb.com

Baghdad ER (2006, HBO) Instead of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, this is the Combat Army Surgical Hospital, C*A*S*H. They don't operate in tents, but in clean and modern hospital rooms. But the medevacs keep arriving every day with the ruins of American boys and girls and Iraqis, most of them blown up by IEDs. Over 17,000 Americans at this writing. Some of those are simple shrapnel wounds, the guys are back on the line three days later with a purple heart on. Some are double amputations.

The makers of this one-hour documentary were scrupulous in not bringing politics into it, so I will be, too, in the sense that I won't point out that all this death and suffering were not necessary and that it can all be laid at the feet of a small group of cynical politicians in Washington and London ... oops, there I go. Anyway, you can't avoid being political if being anti-war is a political position ... and if you can watch this hour of carnage and not be anti-war, I don't want to know you. In fact, I don't want to be in the same state or on the same planet with you. In fact, I hope you die soon, from an IED explosion, dismembered, blind, skinned alive, and without the heroes of the C*A*S*H around to alleviate your pain. IMDb.com

Ball of Fire (1941) I found this one while looking into Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I’d seen it many years ago, but hadn’t realized that the plot was loosely based on the fairy tale. Not exactly, as there are eight people living together, all scientists and scholars compiling a massive encyclopedia, but the Gary Cooper character is meant to be Prince Charming. He’s younger than the seven, and though he’s just as nerdy, he’s the love interest in the story. Snow White (here called Sugarpuss O’Shea, played by Barbara Stanwyck) is a chantoosie hiding from the cops, who want her to testify against her gangster boyfriend (Dana Andrews). It’s all a lot of fun, with the seven professors played by some of the best character actors working in Hollywood at the time, including Henry Travers, Oscar Homolka, and S.Z. Sakall. The story was remade in 1949 as A Song is Born, with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, and some of the best jazz and swing musicians of all time, including Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Tommy Dorsey. Both films were from a story by Billy Wilder, and were directed by Howard Hawks. IMDb.com

The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) Written and directed by Arthur Miller’s daughter, Rebecca. In 1986 a washed-up hippie and part-time ecowarrior with a bad heart and a teenage daughter live on a beautiful island, but development is encroaching. He decides she needs a family ... so he sort of buys one, and they just turn up one day, a woman and her two boys by different fathers. Surprise! She doesn’t react well.

The acting is good, the script is okay, and I really thought I should have enjoyed it more than I did. But I didn’t. Jack is such a controlling asshole, the girl is practically a wild child, has had practically no social interaction since the other hippies left the commune long ago. Things happen. None of it really came together for me. IMDb.com

Bambi (1942) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

The Bandwagon (1953) Fred Astaire is a washed-up vaudeville and movie hoofer. Tula Finklea (the birth name of Cyd Charisse, and was there ever a more fortuitous name change?) is a much younger étoile de ballet. They are convinced to share the stage in a Broadway musical written by Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant, to be directed by hot-shot Jack Buchanan. Jack decides to take the light-hearted script and turn it into a re-telling of the Faust legend. The show is fabulously overproduced and pretentious. There is a wonderful sequence of an eager, laughing audience filing into the theater. Then we see etchings of misery and damnation, followed by a giant egg sitting on a desolate plain. The audience shuffles out, silent, stunned, looking as if they just learned their beloved dog has died and they have one month to live.

It’s an okay musical from MGM, who seldom made a bad one, but even if it were awful it would be worth seeing over and over again for one sequence of about ten minutes. The set-up: Fred has quit and stormed out. Cyd visits him, and after some shouting, they decide to take a walk in Central Park to see if anything can be salvaged. They board a horse-drawn carriage, and there is no more dialogue from this point. They get off at a place where people are dancing under colored lights. They walk through, watching the couples enjoying themselves. Then they wander into a place with a path and a few benches. Fred assays a little dance step, with a thoughtful look on his face, then stops, and resumes walking. Cyd does the same. They never look at each other. Then—and it’s hard to say just when it begins—they are dancing together in what is, IMHO, the single best romantic pas de deux ever immortalized on film, to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark.” She is wearing a long white skirt that flows magically around her. I have to give a lot of credit to both the choreographer, Michael Kidd, and to Astaire for realizing that this is Cyd Charisse’s moment, her dance. Fred all but removes himself from the scene, never showing off, there only to provide a partner and to lift her now and then. (And yet … he’s Fred Astaire, isn’t he? You’re never going to ignore him.) Every move is exactly as it should be. And though they hardly ever dance closely, most of the time they are side by side, doing the same moves, or touching only at the hands … you can see them falling in love. Every step flows from the one before, and even when they re-board the carriage it is a dance step.

You know, Fred had a lot of dance partners in his career. Fred and Ginger had more romantic numbers than you could count, and in most of them they are dancing, in the words of the song, “cheek to cheek.” But none of them can match the intensity of this number. It’s not steamy, and it’s not in-your-face erotic (that will come later, when Cyd scorches the white off the screen in the final ballet number), but it is so damn moving that I always get a tear in my eye when I watch it, and I’ll bet I’ve seen it 100 times now. If you haven’t seen it, and you love dance, then you must run right out now and get it. It’s also available as one number in That’s Entertainment. IMDb.com

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) Here’s an unusual thing: A baseball movie with very little baseball in it. And something else: A movie about a dying athlete that doesn’t try to wring tears from you in any way it can. What a relief after the bathetic The Pride of the Yankees, which we saw just before. We see action on the field, but it’s single plays, mostly just to establish that these are ballplayers. What we never get is the Big Game, or the Big Win, and what a relief. I mean, I don’t object to sports movies where it all comes down to the last out in the bottom of the ninth in the last game of the World Series, and the last five minutes of the movie. But, lord, haven’t we seen that a few times? This movie is about the men who play the game, how they interact, what it’s like to be on the road. One of these men, played by Robert de Niro before anyone knew who he was, is dying, and his best friend, Michael Moriarty, is determined to conceal that from the team’s manager, Vincent Gardenia (who gives a wonderfully hilarious performance). Some of it is quite funny and some is quite moving. It’s not quite like anything I’ve ever seen in a sports movie, and I’m grateful for that. IMDb.com

The Bank Job (2008) Here’s a pearl beyond price: An action/caper/heist movie without a single car chase, impossible 20-story fall onto a wet napkin, gun battle where 10,000 rounds manage to hit nobody, or chase through a burning warehouse that produces no deadly smoke. Not only that, it’s all true! … well, mostly. It’s based on the Baker Street robbery that happened in London in 1971. It’s not that well-known in the US, but over there it’s sort of like the D.B. Cooper hijacking, the source of endless wild theories, most of them qualifying as urban legends—that is, something that everybody knows is true, but isn’t—about what was really going on. So there are two levels to the movie. Much of it concerns the nuts and bolts of this very lucky band of amateurs, and how they pulled off an amazing tunnel job into the vault of a Lloyd’s Bank and got away with as much as £3,000,000 (about £32,000,000 today) in cash and jewels. This is all a delight to watch, and seems very accurate, as far as I can determine. Then there is the subtext, concerning MI5 (or 6, who can tell?) being behind the whole operation as a means of recovering pornographic photos of … wait for it … Princess Margaret! (Well, you could hardly damage her reputation much more than it’s already been damaged. She was the first in a long line of Saxe-Coburg-Gothas—lately “Windsors”—to figure in the scandal sheets of Fleet Street.) Now, as far as I know, there is little or no evidence of this … but the filmmakers state, afterwards, that 100 owners of safe deposit boxes refused to divulge the contents and thus could not recover anything, even if it was found. This stuff was either drugs, unreported income, blackmail material, or … the possibilities are endless, and easy to believe. So it’s fun to imagine that this part of the story was true, and it adds a lot of great complications, and also provides a means for the bandits (those who survive, anyway) to get away with it, and let’s face it, in a movie like this, don’t we all want them to get away? I sure do. In reality three men served about 8 years each. The pace is fast and it never lets up, with one twist after another, tension mounting delightfully. It does get a little complicated—Lee and I were not quite sure if Major Singer and Bambas were killed by MI5 (or 6) or the Porn King of Soho—but it hardly matters. All the actors are good, including David Suchet (TV’s Hercule Poirot), Saffron Burrows, who may be the world’s most beautiful lesbian, and Jason Statham, who I feel hasn’t hit his stride yet, being bogged down in brainless action pictures like the Transporter series. (Which I admit I haven’t seen, but the descriptions are enough. Hell, the DVD box art is enough.) It has a script co-authored by Ian La Frenais, co-writer of The Commitments and Across the Universe, two of our favorite movies. It’s directed by Roger Donaldson, who did The World’s Fastest Indian. It doesn’t get much better than this. IMDb.com

Baraka (1992) That’s not a typo; this film has nothing to do with our new president. This is a movie of images, some beautiful, some profoundly disturbing. No dialogue at all. If you have seen Koyaanisqatsi and/or Powaqqatsi, you’ll know what I mean. This one is by Ron Fricke, who worked on Koyaanisqatsi and then made this one on his own. Some have seen an environmental message in this film and the others. The best I can do is say there are some obvious themes, chief among them the amazing variety of humanity’s religions and spirituality. We see holy men, holy places, religious rituals from all cultures around the globe. We see terrible poverty and breathtaking beauty, and our crowded, frantic world in time-lapse photography. It’s more like a moving painting than a story, and what I do when I watch it (I’ve seen it twice now), is let it wash over me. It’s 96 minutes long, but seems much shorter than that. Though it might seem to move ponderously at times, with many shots that are virtually stills, the time just seems to zip by. It was all shot with Todd-AO 70mm cameras, and most of the time they are virtually static, with only slow pans or dolly shots, and how refreshing is that in this age of jitter-cams and short cuts? IMDb.com

The Barbarian Invasions (French-Canadian, 2003) Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, 2003. An excellent film that, at some moments, reminded me of Woody Allen at his best: intelligent people discussing ideas and remembering better days. (I don’t quite get what the title means, though it is mentioned a few times. It seems peripheral to the story.) A man is dying, and his estranged son has decided to ease father’s last days. The son is a businessman who is accustomed to spreading money around, getting things done, cutting to the chase with no bullshit. When told that heroin is much stronger than morphine, he goes to the police station to see how to obtain some! And the police, though intrigued, end up advising him. Lots of good stuff here. IMDb.com

Barbershop (2002) One of those weird little pictures that lives or dies by whether you identify with the odd characters in an out-of-the-way little place. This one works, and I’m glad it found an audience. But ... Cedric the Entertainer? He’s a very talented guy, but the name just irritates me. IMDb.com

Barbershop 2 (2004) Not as good as the first one. But it contains a pretty ingenious plug. Next door to the barbershop is the beauty shop, run by Queen Latifah. And before the show there is a trailer for ... guess what? Beauty Shop. IMDb.com

Barry Lyndon (1975) Stanley Kubrick made only 12 feature-length films, and six of them are total masterpieces. The other six are only extremely, extremely good. This is one of the masterpieces, and in some moods it might even be my favorite. Using only available light, he has made a film in which every single frame is unbelievably beautiful, even the ugly scenes. There must have been times when he waited days for the right outdoor light, and I know he helped invent special lenses and fast film to film some scenes in as little light as that cast by three candles. It all pays off. Some don’t like it because it is slow, but to me that is part of its charm. You have to relax, sit back and let it wash over you. I’m not even going to get into the story, but there are deeply shocking scenes, and the most terrible pistol duel ever put on film. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Batman Begins (2005) I go into a comic-book movie with a built-in prejudice. I thought comics were pretty stupid when I was a kid, and while they’ve grown up some, most of them still are pretty stupid. I know there are literate people who love them, but there are many, many more who enjoy them because it’s easier to look at all the pretty pitchers than to actually read a novel. You disagree? That’s your right.

But this one is not bad at all. One thing I always disliked about super-hero movies is ... well, their super-powers. Baloney. But Batman doesn’t have them. He’s just very good at what he does, and this movie shows how he got to be that way. Not only how he trained himself, but his motives, and most important of all, how he got all that cool stuff he uses. In the other Batman movies it’s just there. He pulls a bat-thingie out of his bat-hat. He lives in the Bat Cave. No hint of how long it takes to build all that stuff, or where it came from. Here we see every detail, and it’s almost believable.

Somebody complained that there’s no suitable villain in this movie. That is exactly what I don’t like about most comic heroes. The obsessed/crazy joker (so to speak) running around in a silly suit for the delight of pure evil is so puerile it has almost destroyed even as good a movie as Spiderman for me. Here the bad guys are totally believable, and their motives are ones anyone can understand: greed and corruption and all the nastiness of the real world. Batman fights the decadent political system in Gotham City, and it’s a fight that even he recognizes can’t be won by offing a single criminal genius.

They were very smart to cast excellent actors in the supporting parts, such as Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and especially Michael Caine. And Christian Bale is genuinely menacing in that black Kevlar outfit.

Francine: There are some parts of this movie that are fairly herky-jerky, quick cutting and jiggly camera work, but they are usually over pretty quick, and you can close your eyes and not get motion-sickness and open them when the fight’s over. You know who’s going to win, anyway, and then you can resume with the story. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) Four 16-year-old girls, close friends practically from birth, discover a pair of magical jeans that somehow fit all of them, the tall and thin, the short and chubby. They are parting for the summer, and agree to mail them to each other so each will have equal access to the magic.

Given that plot outline, I expected a fairly dumb result. All of them will get handsome boyfriends, straighter, cleaner teeth, loving parents, lots of Xmas presents, and the fat girl will lose weight. But the pants are just a plot device that takes us into much darker territory than that. There are real issues addressed here: loss of a parent, anger at a parent, death, and how getting what you want can be the worst thing that can happen, among other things that concern teenage girls ... and all of us. The five young actresses here are incredibly good, the script is smart. There are some very moving moments.

Mom: This ain’t your mall rat comedy. These are serious, likeable girls. I’d recommend it to you, but bring a hankie. Many hankies. IMDb.com

The Battle of Algiers (Algerian, 1965) Simply one of the most gut-wrenching, compulsively watchable movies ever made. It looks like a documentary, but no newsreel footage was used; instead Gillo Pontecorvo, the director, used newsreel cameras and non-actors. It tells the story of the Algerian revolution, from both the Arab and French sides. Both sides commit horrific atrocities. He shows all this fairly evenhandedly. You watch this, you recall that it was made in 1966, and you just shiver when you consider how much it is like Viet-Nam, like Israel and Palestine, and yes, like Iraq. Apparently this movie is standard viewing at the Pentagon, and you have to conclude that the generals there know something that George W. Bush does not: That though our army will never lose a battle, just as it never lost a battle in Southeast Asia, it is virtually impossible to win a war like this. And back then they didn’t even have suicide bombers. They will grind us down, my fellow citizens, and we will lose the will to sacrifice so many of our young people, and we will declare victory and go home, just like we did in Viet-Nam. Only who’s running Viet-Nam now, Georgie boy? IMDb.com

Be Cool (2005) Elmore Leonard’s books have been almost as popular as movie sources as Stephen King’s. Many were done for TV and I haven’t seen them. He’s been fairly lucky, too, with a high percentage of decent adaptations like Out of Sight, 52 Pick-Up, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma. There have been some stinkers, too, like the recent The Big Bounce. Be Cool is the sequel to a good one, Get Shorty, and herein Chili Palmer, who was such a refreshing character in the original, decides to get into the music business. I recall the book as being quite good, though not Elmore’s best. The movie is not even close. It all falls flat as a 78 rpm Bakelite platter, and doesn’t even have the grace to shatter interestingly; it just lies there, inert. Travolta seems frozen solid, taking coolness to ridiculous extremes. I know they’ve made massive changes to Leonard’s story, because he would never have written infantile shit like this. I bailed out, having made it about 90 minutes in simply because there was nothing else to watch. I had not a qualm about not finding out what happened. IMDb.com

Be Kind Rewind (2008) Mos Def works in a tiny video store owned by Danny Glover, certainly the last one on Earth that rents VHS tapes. His friend is Jack Black, playing the usual crazy Jack Black verbal and physical volcano. Jack becomes magnetized by a nearby power plant (at which point we abandon all connection to reality, but that doesn’t have to be bad) and accidentally erases all the tapes in the shop. But people still want them, so they set out to recreate movies like Driving Miss Daisy, Rush Hour 2, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others. Oddly, people like this stuff, although some complain that the movie was only 20 minutes long. Soon the whole neighborhood is involved in recreating movies, starring themselves.

This sort of whimsy is very delicate, and the director, Michael Gondry, who was at the helm for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—which I thought was one of the most original and delightful movies of the decade—and the less successful The Science of Sleep … well, he sort of lays it on too heavy. There are some wonderful moments, but in the end it didn’t work enough for me to recommend it. Too bad. I was really looking forward to it.

Nice touch: One of the stars of the first movie they recreate, Ghostbusters, shows up in a bit part as a rep for the motion picture industry, pointing out that they are in violation of copyright. Hey, it’s Sigourney Weaver! IMDb.com

Bean (1997) Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean television series is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Several times I’ve had to pause the tape because I was laughing so hard I hurt. So what happened here? Lack of imagination, I guess. The film consists largely of recycled stuff that was funny on the small screen but just doesn’t work here. See Johnny English. IMDb.com

Because of Winn-Dixie (2005) Second feature the drive in. IMDb.com

Becoming Jane (2007) The problem, for me, with a romance story about an historical figure like Jane Austen is that we know going in that it will come to naught. She never married, so the only question is, what will screw up the great love of her life? In this case it’s class and money. The worthless aristocracy of the day never seemed to consider that they might do some actual work for a living, which is hardly surprising, as they didn’t know how to do anything as simple as hang up a coat. The threat of losing one’s inheritance was like a death sentence. Jane’s paramour here meekly submits to that threat, and then when he reconsiders and wins her back, she ultimately decides it wouldn’t work. She’s probably right. She might be able to support him in later life, but at the time of this story she is just learning. In addition to being predictable, this movie is agonizingly slow to the point of being boring. I just sort of wondered why it was made at all. I guess some writers and directors view a period piece like this as a prestige project, and the actors like to dress up. Poor excuse to make a movie. IMDb.com

Bedazzled (1967) One of my favorite comedies of all time. Peter Cook—who died much too young—co-wrote it with his comedy partner Dudley Moore. Cook is the Devil, and Moore is a schmuck who can’t get the girl he loves to notice him. The Devil gives him seven wishes, each of which he screws up, naturally. (When he’s made a wish, the Devil says the magic words: “Julie Andrews!”) In between wishes they discuss theology, more or less, and why the Devil fell from grace, while Old Scratch does evil—and stupidly juvenile—pranks aimed at making people sin. (He has a warehouse where he scratches new LPs and tears the last pages out of mystery novels.) Of course he has seven Sins working for him, including Raquel Welch as Lust. Most of them are incompetent, and at one point he sighs in frustration: “What terrible sins I have working for me. I suppose it's the wages.” I almost hurt myself laughing the first time I saw the Leaping Beryllians, a silent order of nuns who celebrate Sister Beryl’s leaping out of her boots and straight to Heaven by jumping on trampolines. The image of those nuns doing backflips and somersaults in their habits and wimples … well, it has to be seen to be believed. IMDb.com

Beetlejuice (1988) This was such a disappointment. It started out so fresh and funny, and then got stupid. What I could not abide was that there was a book, a guide to the afterlife, and if the couple had simply read it, as everyone else did, they could have avoided everything that happened to them. Known in the trade as the "Idiot plot," because it can’t happen unless everyone involved is an idiot. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Before Sunrise (1995) Wow. A really different movie doesn’t come along that often. This is one. At first glance it might not seem it. Boy meets girl ... and we’re already off to a clichéd start, right? But then, boy and girl spend the night walking and talking through Vienna, and that’s all the movie is about. No phony action, no lurid sex. Just conversation. They are very young (from my perspective), and have a lot to learn, but they are earnest and interesting, and it reminded me of My Dinner With Andre, though of course with the sex attraction added. Even better ... The two actors here, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, seem to have enjoyed making it enough that, nine years later, they wrote a sequel and got the original director to make it with them. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Before Sunset (2004) It’s even better. The budget is listed as $10 million at the IMDb, and I can’t believe that. The budget for Before Sunrise was $2.5 million, and this is simpler and shorter and has only a few locations and a small crew. Inflation, or star salaries? Whatever ... it was developed by Linklater, the director, and by Hawke and Delpy, rehearsed for two weeks, and shot in three weeks, all in Paris. It is in real time, that is 80 minutes pass on the screen. It is all talk. If you don’t like that, this isn’t for you. The two walk and talk and drink coffee and talk, ride on a bateau in the Seine, and talk. I loved it! It’s like eavesdropping on a wildly interesting conversation, you seem to be floating along with them. SEE THESE TWO MOVIES IN ORDER!!! You will be wondering if they really got together six months later in Vienna. I won’t tell you. You’ll wonder what’s happened to them in nine years. I won’t tell you that, either. In fact, I won’t tell you anything except that, if you don’t really, really, really like these two people on at least some level ... I probably won’t like you. If you haven’t had a night of nights like they have in the first one, you’ve missed an important part of your life. And if you haven’t gotten together with someone important to you after the passage of many years, you’ve missed the bitter and the sweet. These movies are so honest and so charming and so utterly engrossing. They are worth 20 or 30 big SFX movies. Make that 50.

Technical note: making a movie like this is hard! Some of the takes are very long, five or six minutes, lines have to be remembered and delivered the same every take, the light has to match, the steadicam crews and actors have to hit a lot of marks along the way. One screwup and it’s back to square one to do the whole thing over.

I had a thought while watching, and later read Roger Ebert’s review and saw we’d had the same thought. There is a series of films that begin with one called Seven Up, that takes about a dozen kids seven years old, interviews them, then comes back seven years later. There was a 14 Up, and a 21 Up. The last was 49 Up. I’d like to see the whole series in order. What a document of life! And if they make another in this series in 2012 ... nothing could keep me away from it. IMDb.com

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) I’m currently reading Dirty Money by Richard Stark (actually Donald Westlake, one of my all-time favorite writers). His character, Parker, is always getting tripped up by dealing with amateurs at the heist business. This is the story of a heist planned by two brothers with no experience but a desperate need for money. How desperate? They decide to rob their own parents’ jewelry store, figuring they have enough inside information to make it easy and safe. Of course, it isn’t and we watch in horror as they fuck everything up. The story is told in a fractured timeline, so we learn more things about previous scenes as we go along. It’s damn good, but far from Sidney Lumet’s best. IMDb.com

Being John Malkovich (1999) Until Adaptation came along, this movie was in a class by itself. Now there is a genre to itself: Charlie Kaufman movies. And I am a big fan. In only half a dozen movies he has established himself as the most exciting writer working in Hollywood today. I am looking forward to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. IMDb.com

Being Julia (2004) A 45-year-old acclaimed actress is dealing with the fact that her star may be fading. She has an affair with a younger man, he dumps her, and she gets her revenge. The details of the story didn’t go the way I expected, and I liked that. I didn’t believe the ending for a minute, but I didn’t mind that, because it was so clever. Annette Bening is so much fun to watch that she makes this movie work all by herself. IMDb.com

Bend it Like Beckham (2002) Children of immigrants growing up in a different culture has become a genre all to itself, and this is one of my favorites. IMDb.com

Ben-Hur (1959) Yes, adding glorious Technicolor, breathtaking CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound makes for a more exciting movie, but this is really very little different from the original version 34 years before. There were more ships in the original sea battle, but they interacted better in this one. The chariot race in this one is a bit longer, but so is the whole movie, and not to its benefit. If anything, the horses were going faster in the old one. Charlton Heston is a bit better actor than Ramon Navarro, and Stephen Boyd is more believable than Francis X. Bushman, but that was how acting was done back then, and it’s all overplayed, by all four actors, by today’s standards. The new one has less stuff about Jesus, which is fine by me. Other than that, the story is pretty much unchanged, except that here Massala dies after the race, but not before telling Judah that his mother and sister are lepers, while in the original it appears that he survives, but loses everything because he bet too heavily. If I had to choose …? This one, no question, but that’s not to say the original isn’t almost as great … IMDb.com

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) I’d recently seen the one you’ve probably seen, starring Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur, and I wanted to look at this one to see how it compared. The answer is: a lot better than you might expect. Yes, you do have to make allowances for the wild overacting by all the actors, but remember, they had little choice in the matter. A silent movie actor had to convey everything with gestures, body language, raised eyebrows, curled lips, widened eyes. Like Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” And in the end, the stultifying reverence of the whole enterprise killed it for me … but you can say the same thing about the remake. About all they did differently was to remove “A Tale of the Christ” from the title. If you just snooze through the parts about Jesus, there is much to enjoy here.

I have to mention how grateful I am to the film conservators and restorers of the world. Back when I was first seeing these old silents at the Michigan State Film Society or film study classes, we had to be content with flickery 16mm prints from Blackhawk Films and places like that. There was no sound, and often we watched films shot at 16 frames per second (the standard for a long time) at 24 FPS, which, as you can imagine, made things rather herky-jerky. In the last few weeks I’ve watched The Birth of a Nation, Hell’s Angels, and now this, in beautifully restored, orchestrated, and hand-tinted versions, as they were originally shown. Hell’s Angels and this one also include sequences in two-strip Technicolor. Back then it was very expensive to shoot, and took enormous amounts of light, but the results are spectacular. It’s amazing how well you can get along without the color blue. The reds in these scenes are wonderfully vivid, and the greens aren’t too shabby, either.

I had previously seen only short takes from the chariot race, and those were unimpressive, as they usually showed only Francis X. Bushman as the evil Massala, shouting, gesticulating, and endlessly talking—during a noisy chariot race?—in true Snidely Whiplash villain fashion. When you draw back and see the whole thing, it’s a whole different story. For one thing, the arena is enormous, almost the size of the Rose Bowl. I’m not kidding, it may have been bigger than the one they built in Rome for the remake. (This one was in Culver City, where the corner of La Cienega and Venice Boulevard is today.) It was filled with screaming extras. The race is almost as brutal as the remake—more brutal in some ways, as several horses were killed in the collisions, which were not faked. There were sixty-two assistant directors for the race and they shot 200,000 feet of film, of which they used 750 feet! All the sets in this picture were enormous, and filled with 125,000 extras. I didn’t know there were 125,000 people in Los Angeles in 1925! Somewhere in that vast crowd were Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, and Carole Lombard. This was the most expensive silent movie ever made: $3.9 million, which in today’s money is almost the national debt.

Odd fact: There is a color scene with eight or nine girls strewing flowers in the path of the hero of the day, Rebbe Hur, and they aren’t wearing shirts. This was before the Hays Office made prudery the standard in Hollywood, but still … the inexplicable (to me) reason the censors allowed this scene is because it was Biblical. Huh? IMDb.com

Beowulf (2007) Second feature At the Drive In with The Golden Compass. IMDb.com

Best in Show (2000) Lee and I are dog lovers, and have attended several dog shows, which are pretty silly when they are showing them. (We prefer what they called a "benched" show, where attendees can stroll down the aisles and see beautiful examples of 100 breeds.) Chris Guest is the best there is at taking a small, inbred community like this and lampooning it. We laughed so hard it hurt. See Waiting For Guffman and A Mighty Wind. IMDb.com

Best of Anime 2004 (2004) There is a yearly animation festival in Chicago, and this is the DVD of the winners and honorable mentions. There are 23 of them, and I’m not going to review them individually. None are longer than 20 minutes, some as short as 30 seconds, and they are all over the place. There is some whimsy. One of the better ones was written by an 8-year-old and narrated by a 5-year-old.

What I’m struck by is the mind-shattering progress being made in computer animation. Most of these shorts are done by film students, and they don’t need a Cray to accomplish things that would have been absolutely impossible 20 years ago, and 10 years ago would have taken four years and $100 million dollars. Now you can do it on simply hook-ups, with commercially available programs. Many look like class assignments: do reflective surfaces, move the lights around, thicken the atmosphere. Stunning, technically, though most of them leave a lot to be desired story-wise.

The Best Thief in the World (2004) I rented this because I like Mary-Louise Parker on “The West Wing.” Sadly, it’s not much of a movie. A woman in New York is struggling to keep her life together with three kids and a husband turned into a semi-vegetable by a stroke. Her son is badly disturbed, sweet and convincing on the outside, but he has a secret life breaking into apartments. He doesn’t steal much, he just goofs around. Then he starts setting fires. He’s angry at his father. He sets the apartment building on fire, and the family moves back to Michigan to stay with the horrible grandmother. The end. Lee bailed out halfway through, and I wish I had, too. IMDb.com

Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) Second feature at the drive in with Bolt. IMDb.com

Bewitched (2005) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

Beyond the Sea (2004) Bobby Darin was never really my cup of tea. I liked “Splish Splash,” and then he made the choice to leave rock ‘n roll to become what he’d always wanted to be: a nightclub singer. I associate him with Wildroot Creme Oil, glitzy tuxedos, and dry martinis. Back then, before rock came to dominate the world, it was a classy act, following in the steps of people like Sinatra. But he could never be Sinatra, he didn’t have the cool smoothness. There was always more of an edge to him, he was jazzier. I think it was the right decision for him, otherwise his career might have ended in the early sixties along with a lot of other boy rock singers. But eventually taste changed and passed him by.

I gotta give the man one thing, though. He had nerve. Who would have thought somebody could take a song about an assassin, from the old play The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt friggin’ Brecht, and make it into a mega-hit? And if you think that’s ballsy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I had forgotten about “Artificial Flowers.” I’d heard it, I’d snapped my fingers to it, but apparently I’d never really listened to it. It’s from a 1960 musical called Tenderloin, and was meant to be the most sickening possible example of the sort of relentlessly sentimental ballad so popular in the Victorian Era. It’s about a 9-year-old-girl freezing to death on a sidewalk, fer chrissake! And he jazzes it?

I mean, cats and kitties, this is way beyond bizarro, daddy-o!

Okay, what about the movie? The critics savaged it. I kinda liked it, but I’m a sucker for musicals. It deliberately mixes styles, at one time being a flat-out ‘50s An American in Paris fantasy where people start dancing in the street, then becoming a musical biopic like Ray, with Kevin Spacey (who is very, very, very good, both at acting and singing) doing Darin numbers at the Copa and Vegas, then trying to be more modern like De-Lovely, or All That Jazz: a dead man looking back on his life. The styles don’t always mix well, but it was good enough for lounge singing. IMDb.com

The Bicycle Thief (1948) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

The Big Bounce (2004) Bounces about as much as a dead kangaroo. IMDb.com

The Big Bus (1976) Before there was Airplane! there was The Big Bus. Before Speed there was The Big Bus. After Airport there was The Big Bus. As far as I can tell, this was the first spoof of those overblown disaster movies that plagued us all through the 1970s. (Okay, I’ll admit it, I liked a few of them.) A nuclear-powered double-decker articulated bus with a piano bar, a banquet room, a bathtub, and a bowling alley, among many other amenities, sets out to make the first non-stop bus trip from New York to Denver, passing through territory that looks suspiciously like the mountains just outside Los Angeles. But there’s a bomb aboard! And the co-driver is subject to narcolepsy! And the disgraced driver (accused of eating all 110 of his passengers when his bus plunged over a ravine: “I didn’t eat them! I ate the seats, I ate the floor mats, but I didn’t eat a single passenger. … well, except that stew my co-driver made, it had a foot in it. So you condemn a man for one lousy foot?”) is demanding 20 and 20 before he’ll drive it! “Twenty dollars a day and twenty cents a mile!” The gags are thrown out at a terrific rate and a few flop but most work. Every cliché of this sort of movie is lampooned … in short, it’s just like Airplane! but some years earlier. It may not be quite as polished as that movie, but the cast is terrific, and the bus itself is one of the most amazing feats of prop design I’ve ever seen. This largely forgotten movie deserves to be seen. Seek it out. IMDb.com

Big Deal on Madonna Street (I Soliti ignoti) (Italy, 1958) Online translation renders the Italian title as The Unknown Habits. (Habitual criminals? All these people are.) Alternate titles are Big Deal (USA), Persons Unknown (UK), and The Usual Unidentified Thieves. I might suggest The Usual Suspects ... though it's completely unlike that wonderful puzzler. This is an early example of the caper movies I love so much, and is said to be a satire on the granddaddy of them all, Jules Dassin's Rififi. These movies fall into two broad categories, and we could call them the pros and the cons ... in the sense that the pros have a great plan, well thought out (of course it almost always comes apart in an unexpected way), and the cons ... well, they have a stupid plan, or a simple plan, or they're buffoons, and they end up in prison, where they've been before. This one is deeply comic.

By the way, both aspects of this genre reach their highest fruition in the person of one man, Donald E Westlake, who under his own name writes of the John Dortmunder gang, who are by no means stupid, and by no means bad planners, but whose plans go awry in amazing and hilarious ways. And under the pen name Richard Stark he writes of one Parker (no first name), who makes things work by sheer brute force and total ruthlessness.

That these people couldn't caper themselves into or out of a paper bag is abundantly clear in the first five minutes, though they are continually scheming. I'm not giving anything away when I say that the burglary they plan goes comically awry. But this is the first caper movie I recall where they don't even get within sight of their goal. It's as if Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible gets past the first impossible barrier, thinks it over, sighs, says "Fuck this," and turns back. But it is loads of fun watching them. IMDb.com

The Big Easy (1987) Because of recent events we both felt we should see this again, even though we’d both seen it half a dozen times. It’s worth it for all sorts of reasons, including recalling what New Orleans looked like before most of it was underwater. Seldom has a movie captured the spirit of a city, good and bad, as this one. And, of course, there are few cities in the world that are more uniquely themselves than this bawdy, riotous, poverty-stricken, tourist-raddled, below-sea-level place with its own unique music, food, and culture. And that’s just the beginning for this movie. The music is perfect. The story is complex and presented intelligently, as layers of corruption are exposed. At the time, the NOPD was the most corrupt police force in America. They say it’s been cleaned up, but only somewhat. But what makes this one of the best romantic thrillers ever filmed is the incredible, steamy chemistry between Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid. They sizzle in every scene they inhabit, they are utterly convincing. What wonderful characters. My only complaint is that it ends too soon. I want to see more of these people. IMDb.com

Big Fish (2003) Sometimes a director makes a movie where it is obvious it came from the heart. Francis Ford Coppola even called his One From the Heart. It bombed; it just didn’t seem to connect with anyone but him. For Barry Levinson it was Toys, which just plain didn’t work. Martin Scorsese had been planning Gangs of New York for many, many years, and it didn’t work for me. Big Fish is said to be a personal film from Tim Burton, a director I am highly ambivalent about. I hated Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks!, loved Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. This one I just felt sort of blah about, after a promising beginning. It’s too long, and some of the whimsy just didn’t work. IMDb.com

Big Man Japan (Dai-Nipponjin ) (2007) Poor, poor Tokyo. As I’m sure you know, the city has been plagued by monsters ever since Gojira (better known on these shores as Godzilla) kicked it apart way back in 1954. If it ain’t one critter, it’s another, from Ghidorah the three-headed monster, Mothra, and Rodan, to Dogora the space monster, Mechagodzilla, and the worst of the bunch, Hedora the smog monster. There have been many ways to fight these giant menaces in the past, including Raymond Burr and Gamera the giant atomic flying turtle, but decadent Japanese culture has allowed these good guys to dwindle today until only one is left: Daisatô, descendant of a long line of monster killers. The poor man has been reduced to living in a tiny apartment, renting out billboard  space on his back when he fights monsters. His wife has left him and taken their daughter. His agent doesn’t respect him, nor does the public. His TV show has been shuffled back to 2 AM, after a home shopping show. His only friend is his cat, who is a stray.

This movie is a sensitive and heartbreaking documentary about a man determined to uphold the family tradition, even though an overdose of the electricity needed to turn people like him from an ordinary schmuck into a huge, muscle-bound superhero killed his father. We see documentary footage of his grandfather, the Fourth, hob-nobbing with the Emperor Hirohito, and hanging out beside the best geisha houses. (He’s too big to get in.) Now the Fourth is in a nursing home, senile, and when he juices himself, gets big, and runs amok in his demented way, Daisatô takes the blame. But when the old alarm bell sounds, he takes off on his tiny smoke-belching motor scooter or on the train, goes to a power station, stands in the crotch of his pair of giant purple shorts suspended between two flagpoles, and grows into them. He does battle with the likes of the Elastic Monster, the Hopping Monster (just a head and a leg), and the One-eyed Terror, who uses his single giant eye on a retractable stalk (which grows from his crotch) like a deadly bowling ball. And even worse, the Stink Monster, a petulant whiner who smells like 10,000 human feces, and is being pursued by a horny, perverted teenage monster who … well, it’s too disgusting to talk about, but it all goes out on live TV. And what thanks does he get? Stones thrown through his windows. Then, as if things couldn’t get worse, he is being replaced by a family of giant superheroes based on the cheesiest robot toys ever produced in Japan, and their special effects are rotten! IMDb.com

The Big Picture (1989) This 1989 movie was the directorial debut of the guy who turned out to be the best there is at a very small sub-genre, the “mockumentary.” Christopher Lord Haden-Guest (yes, he is a peer of the realm) was a writer for SNL and The National Lampoon during their glory days, then co-wrote the amazing progenitor of the genre: This is Spinal Tap. They were so good they have repeatedly gone on tour, and I think there are still some people who don’t realize it was a joke. (My son Roger, a heavy-metal rocker himself, loves this movie, and he does get the joke.)

Some of the inspired madness we would see later in Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind is in evidence here, but he makes the mistake of trying to graft a serious story onto the satire, and a moral lesson. This is not his metier. The best parts are at the beginning, with excerpts of four truly awful movies up for an independent filmmaker award, and at the end, with a music video for a group called “Pez People,” with the rockers dressed as giant Pez dispensers. If you want to see a masterpiece of the nightmarish process of moviemaking in Hollywood, see Altman’s The Player. IMDb.com

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) The Negro Leagues in their various complicated incarnations were one more shameful Jim Crow remnant of slavery, made necessary by many factors, including the implacable opposition to integrated teams by the scumbag first Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain “Cocksucker” Landis. (I made up the nickname, but he deserves it. He also banished Shoeless Joe Jackson to the bleachers for life.) Thus was the white baseball-fan public largely deprived of the privilege of seeing one of the greatest players ever to walk onto the diamond, Satchel Paige, do his thing. In fact, judging from the complexion of all current Major League teams—not to mention football and basketball—the Hall of Fame would probably have a very different, much darker look today if the stars of the Negro Leagues had been allowed in the Majors from the beginning.

But they made the best of it. Negro League games were just as skillful but not as deadly serious as the Majors. Clowning around seems to have been more accepted. One thing both leagues had in common, though, was the owners were pigs with no principles at all, black or white. No surprise. Pigs is pigs, no matter their color.

It’s 1939, and Bingo Long (Billy Dee Williams) is a pitcher who is frustrated at being screwed over by the avaricious pig who owns his team. He gathers together some of the stars who feel like he does and they go on the road all over the Midwest, barnstorming. They have lots of fun, and give the crowds a good show. (You’ll notice the title has nine words; their uniforms each has one of those words on it, so when they pose for a picture they spell it out.) They find they can do better if they become clowns for at least part of their appearances. They come cakewalking into town, play a game with the locals, and depart in their open-topped convertibles. They have a midget player, and a one-armed first baseman. There’s not a lot of money in it, but at least they’re their own bosses. Naturally, the group of owners who have lost their star players can’t allow this to happen. Our guys win in the end, only to find that a white team is interested in their 19-year-old phenom, which presages the end of segregation, though Jackie Robinson wouldn’t be signed until after the War. (Ironically, the years of World War II were the best ever for the Negro Leagues. They lost some of their stars to the Army, just like the whites did, but now black people had more money to spend because they got good jobs in war industries. They packed the stadiums, while white baseball languished.) James Earl Jones and Richard Pryor are part of a big and very good cast. IMDb.com

Birth (2004) A man dies while jogging. Ten years later, a 10-year-old shows up at his widow’s fabulous New York duplex and announces he is Sean, her husband. Reincarnation. The movie gets off to a good start. The whole family is there, and they are not gullible. They react in the way you would expect intelligent people to react. This isn’t your ordinary junk stupid thriller. Nicole Kidman is terrific in the way she is gradually seduced by this solemn youngster who knows things he shouldn’t know.

But the movie has a basic problem. There are only two possibilities:

He really is Sean. In which case, he’s an asshole, because he gives her no help. He never tries to explain anything, never says “Gee, honey, I know it’s crazy, but how about that time when we greased up with Wesson oil and ran naked down the deserted beach?” In fact, he acts like a kid, though a spooky one. Is there some explanation for this? Is his memory of being an adult spotty? When did he realize he is Sean? We don’t know.

Or:

It’s a scam. The kid is a psychopath. “Psychic readers” know things they shouldn’t know, too, and the principles of such cons are well-known. In which case we hate him, not Sean. What he is doing is extraordinarily cruel. He is threatening this woman’s actual sanity.

I won’t tell you which proposition turns out to be the case, in case you want to see the movie. But I’d advise you not to waste your time. Like I said, it’s a no-win situation. IMDb.com

The Birth of a Nation (1915) One of the best, and one of the worst, movies ever made. It’s always a shock to revisit this movie and see just how horrible it is. The very first shot is of African slaves on the auction block, and D.W. Griffith, that awful man, points to this as the roots of division, or something like that, and seems to be implying that it’s the slaves’ fault. He refers to “The Cause,” i.e., human slavery. (States’ Rights? Fuck that and the horse it rode in on. The Cause the South was fighting for was slavery, pure and simple, the right to buy and sell human beings with a brutality and lack of concern for—or even acknowledgement of—their humanity, in a way the world had seldom seen.) All the main slaves, the ones with names and roles to play, are in fact white people in blackface (and they look it, with the wide white Al Jolson spaces around their lips and their Caucasian features), as if D.W. could not conceive that a black person could actually act, or could not bring himself to work with a black actor. The black extras spend their time either happily picking cotton, dancing happy little jigs in their simple-minded way, leering lasciviously at white women, or plundering the South under the direction of their “scalawag” white Northern masters.

Yeah, Reconstruction was a bitch, and it sure could have been handled better—and probably would have been except for that evil, evil man, John Wilkes Booth. But when the downtrodden former ruling class don their white hoods and heroically ride to the rescue of white womanhood … you just gotta puke. You want to dig up D.W. Griffith and slap his corpse around a little, and piss in his grave.

And yet … and yet …

It is a masterpiece of cinema. To this day it has the power to move me. IMDb.com

The Black Book (Zwartboek) (2006) Paul Verhoeven has directed and co-written a real old-timey war movie, refreshingly seen not from the American viewpoint, but that of an occupied country, Holland. There’s lots of action, some of it fairly improbable, but as long as you can keep moving with characters I’m interested in that’s okay. Rachel (Carice van Houten) is a Jew in Holland in 1944. Trying to flee to allied lines with her family, she is the only survivor of an SS massacre. From there it’s a mile a minute. She’s plucky as hell, a little flighty, but able to do what has to be done when it’s needed. She joins the resistance and is asked to sleep with the commander of the Dutch Gestapo (or the S.D., the Sicherheitsdienst, I wasn’t clear, though it hardly makes any difference), and finds herself falling for him. He seems to be a good man. Hell, he collects stamps. This is the only part of the movie that didn’t ring true for me. Not that he might have some decency—though that quality was as rare as ethics in Congress in the Gestapo—but that she could overlook his job, which was rounding up Jews. Whatever. It’s true that Rachel does seem to have a sixth sense as to who she can trust. The only time it fails her, the untrustworthy one took in everyone else in the Resistance, too. It’s a well-made, good-looking, exciting and old-fashioned (in the best sense) war movie. And it has one of the more satisfying endings I’ve ever seen. Nasty, but satisfying.

One thing irked me. At the beginning we get 5 minutes of Rachel on a kibbutz in Israel in 1955. Then we flash back. My feeling is, you need a really good reason to justify doing this, because it removes any tension you might feel as to whether or not she will survive. There was no reason that I could see. I would have cut it.

Carice van Houten is just as cute as can be. She’s mostly worked in Holland so far, but had a breakout role (as far an international recognition goes, anyway; I don’t mean to belittle the Dutch film industry) when she played Tom Cruise’s wife in Valkyrie. It seems to have gotten her some notice, as she now has five English films in various stages of production. (Like most Dutch people, she is fluent in English … and German and French. You know, we don’t teach our kids shit here in the USA.) I think she could be a big star.

And I keep coming back to that SS business. In my opinion, the SS was possibly the most purely evil organization ever invented by man. They were the ones in charge of the death camps. If I had been Eisenhower in 1945, liberating the camps, I would have taken the SS, every man Heinz of them, lined them up from Berlin to Paris and then asked for Jewish volunteers to shoot them in the head. Every one, from PFC to Supreme Obergruppenfuhrer. No Nuremberg trials, no lawyers, no nothing. Shoot ‘em dead. I would have let their corpses rot by the side of the road, and marched the whole German population down that road and to the mass graves at Dachau. But then, I guess that’s why nobody ever suggested I be Allied Supreme Commander. I don’t have the political will to forgive top Nazis when it’s expedient. Hell, I don’t have it in me to forgive any aspect of the Holocaust. IMDb.com

Black Sheep (2006, New Zealand) The 2nd Occasional Lee's-in-Oregon Film Festival. IMDb.com

Black Snake Moan (2006) What this movie ‘bout, it be ‘bout de blues, dog! One man, his baby done lef’ him … for his younger brothah! I ax you, there be anyt’ing more likely to give a niggah de blues dan dat? And dis girl, she sleep around, don’t get no respect, and get whup upside her head. An dis other dude, his woman sleep aroun’ on his sorry ass, he don’ get no respect, and it tearin’ him up inside, like a Mason jar full o’ gasoline. ‘Bout all dat don’ happen here is ain’t nobody’s dog up and die.

Seriously, it’s hard to know what to make of this movie. It was made by the guy who did Hustle and Flow, which I had serious reservations about. But I have to admire his balls. That movie was about a pimp, and this one is about the town pump. Naturally, she’s a nymphomaniac because she was abused, and the only way she knows to get love is by fucking everybody in sight. Samuel L Jackson finds her left for dead on the side of the road, and ends up putting her through a sort of backwoods intervention, thinking he can exorcise the evil from her. This involves chaining her to the radiator. And damn if she doesn’t look evil sometimes. You almost expect her head to turn around as she gushes green vomit. The imagery here is right out of those old Erskine Caldwell paperbacks, God’s Little Acre, or Tobacco Road, with a touch of B&D thrown in. And it’s very powerful. Christina Ricci spends half the movie in nothing but panties and the suggestion of a T-shirt. Pretty much just the T part. It is a gutsy performance, from a woman who has shown her willingness to take on gutsy parts. Jackson plays the guitar and does his own singing, and he’s good. The music alone is enough reason to see this, no matter what you think of it.

And I still don’t know. These are severely damaged people, and the stock answers and solutions to their problems just wouldn’t help them much. Maybe the old bluesman does the right thing, though you cringe when he chains her up. This is not the material for happy endings, but somehow the writer manages to get one, or at least as happy as could be credible. IMDb.com

Blackadder Back and Forth (1999) The ever-craven Blackadder family has its last hurrah in this modern-day incarnation, made to be shown in the Millennium Dome in London. Intending to scam his friends, Edmund has Baldrick build a replica of Leonardo Da Vinci's model for a time machine. But the blasted thing works! The first thing they see is a T. Rex eager to eat them. They slay it by slinging Baldrick's filthy underdrawers into the Cretaceous, thus apparently killing all the dinosaurs. Along the way they manage to kill Robin Hood and, more seriously, the Duke of Wellington on the eve of Waterloo. Naturally, when they return to present time, they find England is French. That will never do, so they go back and try to set things right. They overdo it a little. Would you believe King Edmund the First, and his loyal Prime Minister Baldrick?

If none of this is making any sense to you, you must ... I mean must, must, MUST, run out this very moment and rent the entire Blackadder series, which, with "Mr. Bean" and "Fawlty Towers," are the funniest series ever made for television by the BBC.

They began in 1983 with "The Black Adder," set in the Dark Ages, in which we meet the sniveling little twit who founds the Blackadder family. There are 12 episodes, I believe, and they are very, very funny, and this is the weakest of the series.

In 1986 Rowan Atkinson and many of the same crew came up with "Blackadder II," set in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, who it turns out is mad as a hatter. This series sets the pattern for the rest, with the same people with the same names, descendants of the originals, and always still pretty much in the same social positions as their ancestors. The exception is the brilliant Miranda Richardson, who isn't known for comedy but who is a total riot as the Queen, and doesn't appear again in the series.

On to "Blackadder the Third," in 1987, where Edmund is the butler for the Prince of Wales, the man who will become George IV, who sets standards in stupidity not touched until 2000, by another George (the second) on this side of the Atlantic. And finally, there is "Blackadder Goes Forth," set in the trenches of World War I. In all of them but the first, Blackadder is scheming, ruthless, amoral, and the total master of the sarcastic insult. Those around him are, by and large, too stupid to understand that they have been insulted. These 30-minute gems are among the funniest things I have ever seen. The humor is broad but somehow sophisticated at the same time, in the way that only the British seem able to do.

In addition to the millennium reunion, there is another stand-alone episode, "Blackadder's Christmas Carol," where what has to be seen as the black sheep of the family is the kindest man in Victorian, Dickensian England ... so naturally everyone takes advantage of him. Standing the original story on its head, he has an epiphany one night as he is visited by three ghosts who, inadvertently, show him he should change his life and become a stingier man than Scrooge ever was. Hilarious. IMDb.com

Blade Runner (1982) I hadn't seen this since it was new, in theaters. The chief reason I rented it is that we've now visited some of the locations they used, including the fabulous Bradbury Building where Deckard killed Pris and fought it out with Roy Batty, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis-Brown house, which now sits forlornly atop a hill only a couple miles from our apartment, derelict, crumbling, waiting for the next big landslide or quake to finish it off. The interiors of the house were used for Deckard's apartment. The production designer "moved" the Bradbury several blocks south and constructed a false entryway; the building does not face the Million Dollar Theater. And it is far from derelict today. It's a wrought-iron wonder, and when you come to LA you really ought to drop by and see it.

(Oops! I have been informed by a Faithful Reader that the Million Dollar Theater IS directly across from the Bradbury. I believe I must have confused the Los Angeles Theater marquee with the M$. The facade in the movie WAS phony, though.)

Now to the movie ... which I notice rates #95 on the IMDb's Top 100 list. I can see the attraction. Blade Runner is sumptuous to look at, almost on the scale of Barry Lyndon as an art object. Every frame is spilling over with visual detail, and is composed with the care of a great painter. It stunned me when I first saw it. Ridley Scott was on a roll in the '80s, with two of the seminal sci-fi spectaculars right in a row: Alien, and then this one. These films are still exerting a Jovian gravitational pull on set designers.

The SFX look good ... but I began to realize we were lingering on them a bit too long. It's easy to forget, in these days of CGI, just how hard it was to put something like that on the screen. I was working with Doug Trumbull as Blade Runner was being produced, and got to see the gigantic models of cities, and the aircars, and Syd Mead's drawings and all the rest. This was expensive stuff. The state of the art for traveling mattes at the time was something called "motion control," where a computer made possible an exactitude never achieved before, and it was slow and hard work. A spaceship model would be stationary and the camera would move around it to simulate motion. If you put half a dozen of these traveling matte elements into a single shot, you'd performed a miracle. Now, Lord of the Rings and its ilk put 100,000 elements into a shot simply as automatic sub-routines. So, what was happening there, in Blade Runner, was the old principle of "put your money on the screen." You spent a lot of money on that shot of an aircar zooming between two towering buildings. You're not going to use only 3 seconds of it, you're going to linger.

Trouble is, that slows the film down, and this one is quite slow in spots. There are places where it needs to be slow, I'm not complaining about that, but pacing is a problem.

The second problem, and it was apparent to me even on the first, awed viewing, is ... the story sucks. Scott doesn't really do much with the awful moral conundrum of creating human life with an expiration date, and with no civil rights. It's find 'em, shoot 'em. He creates some sympathy with the replicants' dilemma, but not enough, because Rutger Hauer overplays his role outrageously. I never understood why a powerful police force would send one man to bring down 4 superhuman androids. Why not storm the building with a tac squad? Why not blow up the whole building? Nobody seems to care much for human life. Then it degenerates into a mano-a-mano slugfest lasting 15 interminable minutes. Harrison Ford dangles by his fingertips. Ho-hum.

I'm afraid this movie is all surface and no center. But what a surface! IMDb.com

Blades of Glory (2007) Second feature at the Vineland Drive In; first feature Shrek the Third. IMDb.com

Blame it on Fidel (La faute à Fidel!) (2006) What a find this movie was! It’s directed by Julia Gavras, daughter of the radical Greek political filmmaker Costa-Gavras, best known in the West for Missing and Z. One of the stars is Julie Depardieu, daughter of Gérard. But these offspring of famous people aside, this movie belongs to 9-year-old Nina Kervel-Bey (video). She plays Anna, who lives with her moderately well-to-do family in a wonderful old house with a garden, and is well on her way to being an insufferable upper-class bitch princess. Suddenly, events in her extended family cause her parents to reassess their lives. They become radicals, working for the poor and for political change in Chile. They move into a smaller (but still quite nice) apartment in Paris. They are visited by odd people. Gypsies? Communists? Anna hates all this. She is at the age when she wants to feel in control of her life, and now everything is running away from her. (Her younger brother is at the age where he’s up for anything, so long as Mom and Dad say it’s okay.) She’s inquisitive, and won’t take “You wouldn’t understand” for an answer. The truth is, she wouldn’t understand, not at first, anyway, but she is tenacious, she keeps chewing it all over until she gets answers that make sense. Her parents are not very good at this, either; they don’t seem to see how deeply upsetting all this change is to her. They have her taken out of Bible studies classes at her Catholic school, which is devastating to her. Dad tells her Mickey Mouse is a fascist.

There is a great tension set up here, because I am mostly in agreement with her parents’ politics, and I know Gavras is, too, and I know Anna will one day be grateful for the new experiences she’s having, and the new viewpoints she’s being exposed to … but for right now, it sucks, okay? Why do we have to worry about poor people? Can’t we just send them some food, or some money? Why do we have to march in the streets? Why do we have to care about Chile? There is a terrifying sequence when the family is in a crowd that is being tear-gassed, and she gets separated from her father. It’s all filmed from a 9-year-old’s viewpoint, seeing only the lower parts of people in the crowd. In fact, many shots in the film show adults only from the chest down.

She gradually begins to make some sense of her new life, seeing some of the contradictions and hypocrisy of the old life, but there is no moment of epiphany. We just get the impression that a line has been crossed, and though she has learned some sobering things, they are all part of growing up. “All children are conservative,” someone says, and it’s true. They don’t want things to change, but we all soon find that everything changes, that you can’t go back because that place doesn’t exist anymore … and you must move on and make the best of it.

I have to mention that the DVD extras are some of the best I’ve ever seen. There are three short films, and they concentrate on the problems of working with children in films. The little boy admits he thought it was all done in one day, he didn’t know you had to do things over and over and over until you got it right. Little Nina almost seems like an adult when she’s talking about her work, about learning her lines and focusing on her character, and then there will be a burst of 9-year-old devilment. I fell in love with her almost from the first frame, where she was teaching a table full of other children the “proper” way to peel fruit. The little bitch. IMDb.com

Blind Horizon (2003) I kept wondering how and why a film like this got made. Terrific cast, looks good, keeps you wondering for almost an hour ... then falls apart into tripe and foolishness. The answer is it was funded by a New Mexico film program that Val Kilmer is involved in, so when he signed on the money was there. But it was shown only at a film festival in the US, and then went direct to DVD. Don’t waste your time. IMDb.com

The Blind Side (2009) First feature At the Drive In with The Box. IMDb.com

Blockheads (1938) Like most people of my generation, I grew up with B-western cowboy heroes like Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson and Bob Steele, and comedies from the Little Rascals and Laurel and Hardy on the black and white TV. I think it was because they were out of copyright, in the public domain, and so the stations could fill their after-school hours until the local news with stuff they didn’t have to produce or pay for. I thought the cowboys were okay, but I loved the comedies. Unlike some of the other, more academically studied comics, they made the transition from silent to talkies easily. In fact, they were probably better with sound---though I once watched a compilation movie of their best silent moments and it was terrific. They were at their peak in this one. They are soldiers in the trenches in WWI. Ollie goes over the top, and Stan is told to stay there and guard things until relieved. Twenty years later he’s still there, shoots at a passing plane, and the pilot informs him the war is over. (It was kind of poignant, I thought, that in another year another “Great War” would begin, even worse than the first one.) He’s reunited with Ollie, and there is a very funny bit concerning Ollie’s misunderstanding, thinking Stan has only one leg. A truck dumps a load of dirt, burying Ollie up to his neck in his convertible. Then there’s shenanigans at Ollie’s apartment. As usual, when Ollie is married in a movie, he’s the one that wears the apron in the family. Stan sometimes lives in an alternate universe and is able to do things other people can’t. The best bit of that sort is when he forms a pipe bowl with his fingers, stuffs some tobacco in there, lights it with a match, and then sucks on his thumb and blows smoke. Hilarious! IMDb.com

Blood Diamond (2006) This movie suffers from not being able to decide what it wants to be. It effectively exposes the terrible human cost of that rock on your finger, showing how diamonds prop up the sort of "revolutionaries" that are the only thing on Earth worse than the governments they plan to overthrow. But it is so overloaded with the sort of wildly overdone action scenes that we could accept in a James Bond or Dirk Pitt movie--because they are mindless action pictures—that we begin to wonder about the reality of the real atrocities. We begin to wonder if this is really nothing but just another action picture where the hero is immune to bullets that are killing everyone all around him. So how real is the rest of it?

All too real, I'm afraid, so the framing of the human story is cheapened by all this phony slam-bam ker-pow ker-blooey shit. The most dangerous weapon in the world is an ignorant, blood-crazed, conscienceless twelve-year-old with an AK-47. The movie tells us there are 200,000 child soldiers in Africa, and I'd rather play catch with a bottle of nitroglycerin than ever meet any one of them. They will kill you not only for looking at them funny, but just for fun, or for no reason at all. The most frightening sight in Africa is a "technical," which is defined as a pickup truck with a 50-caliber machine gun on the roof and ten psychopaths in the back. Too bad the movie couldn't have found a way to dramatize the awfulness of so much of Africa without the melodramatic and implausible plot device of the pursuit of the Big Pink Diamond. IMDb.com

Blood Work (2002) Good movie based on a good book by a writer I read, Michael Connelly, who was first known for his series of cop novels starring Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch. However, a year later, I can’t remember much of it. IMDb.com

Bloom (2003) This is the third attempt that I know of to film James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve never read it, but there are scholars who have devoted entire careers to it. Just Google the title and you’ll find some fascinating sites that map out the day’s journey of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin, and long analyses and comparisons to The Odyssey, upon which the book is loosely based. If you want a quick summary of the book, the most engaging one I found is here: (If you visit that site, stick around for Disney’s Inferno and other classics as summarized for the Disney treatment.) My feeling is that just because it’s a great book (and I offer no opinion about that) doesn’t mean it will make a great film, or even that it should be filmed at all. Ulysses is largely internal monologue, so we get endless shots of people looking pensive while voice-overs detail their stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Doesn’t add up to much, cinematically. O Brother Where Art Thou was also loosely based on The Odyssey. I’d recommend you see that film instead of this one. The rest of the story is dreams, or drunken fantasies, or something, very little of which made any sense at all to watch. It was all very pretty, and well-written, and well-acted, but I didn’t get much from it. Only the very last of the book’s 18 chapters moved me at all, when Molly is in bed with the sleeping Bloom, and we hear her thoughts. These were voiced by Angeline Ball, an actress we first encountered in one of our favorite films, The Commitments.

I must add that it might just be possible to do justice to the book. I would not have thought that anybody could make a good film from Joyce’s “Dubliners,” it looked really unpromising material for the screen, but John Huston proved me wrong with The Dead. So who knows? I’m waiting for the musical version of Finnegan’s Wake, a book I did read ... well, three chapters of it, anyway. No one could ask for more. IMDb.com

Body Heat (1981) A mournful saxophone. Lots of cigarettes. The tinkle of ice in a cocktail glass. Mist, smoke, fog, long shadows … a sultry woman, a world-weary, cynical man. Faces half in darkness. Venetian blinds … (Why Venetian blinds? Because of the way they throw shadows, I guess.) And sweat. Buckets and buckets of sweat. There you have Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan’s homage to film noir.

Robert Mitchum once said that, back when they were being made, they didn’t know from film noir. “We called them B pictures.” They were made on low budgets and starred the lesser contract players on the lot. Then the French discovered them and gave them a fancy name, and now you study them in film school. Which is not a bad thing. This time the French got it right, these wonderfully trashy films are worth seeing, and imitating. (They had to get something right, eventually, after two big strike-outs with the cult of Jerry Lewis and the auteur theory. “The director of a film is the ‘author’ of the film.” What rubbish! He’s only the author if he writes it as well.) These days film noir imitations are mostly made in color, like this one, because it’s real tough to sell a B&W film. There are exceptions, like the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, but most “neo-noir” employ a slightly faded color palette, like L.A. Confidential (the opening scene which was shot practically in our front yard, just two doors down!) and Chinatown. That’s okay, since noir means, literally, black, but it really refers to a mood as well as an absence of light, and shadows work well in color, too, in the hands of the right cinematographer.

Maybe somebody can help me out here. There was a scene in a movie—I can’t remember the title—where some guys were trying to name the sweatiest movies of all time. I think some action films were mentioned, maybe Rocky and Predator, and also some erotic ones. When Body Heat came up, everybody agreed that was a pretty sweaty one. No kidding! Everybody sweats in this small Florida town. Nobody’s air conditioner seems to be working well. It’s all part of writer/director (auteur!) Lawrence Kasdan’s schtick, of course, but it works pretty well. Kathleen Turner as Mattie Walker makes sweat look good, and that’s fortunate, as for about half the movie about all she’s wearing is a coat of sweat. (Any male would like to lick it off of her.) This was her first movie role, and only the third for William Hurt (as sleazy lawyer Ned Racine), after Altered States and Eyewitness. These two stars are astonishingly willing to do nude scenes, love scenes, and snuggle-naked-after-sweaty-sex scenes. There is everything but full frontal nudity. Their affair is the very definition of torrid, right from the moment they meet and exchange wonderfully wicked banter (“You’re not very smart, are you? I like that in a man.”), to the iconic scene when he hurls a lawn chair through French doors to get to her.

And you soon suspect that she’s the one in control here, and that her plans for him might not be entirely in his interests. In case you don’t get it, at one point she leads him through a scene by pulling him by … well, by a body part that’s often used as a metaphor for a woman controlling a man. (This happens just slightly below the edge of the screen, but there is no doubt that Kathleen actually had William by the … you know. There would be no way to fake that. Rather astonishing that, so far as I know, they did not have an affair.)

But, oh my, is she bad! She’s bad in a way that leaves me shaking my head in admiration. She may be the baddest woman in films until Linda Fiorentino redefined bad in the ultimate bad-girl movie, The Last Seduction. There is something enticing about badness on that scale, and it goes beyond admiration. In the last scenes, when Ned is laying out just how devious Mattie was in landing him in jail and getting off scot-free, I believe he still admires her. And further, I think if she were to show up again and grab him by the same handle, he would willingly be led, even though he knew it would come out bad in the end. Hell, I might, too. IMDb.com

Body of Lies (2008) First feature at the drive in. Second feature, Righteous Kill. IMDb.com

Body Snatchers (1993) Review in VarleyYarn: Son of the Bride of the Movie That Wouldn't Die, IMDb.com

Bolt (2008) First feature at the drive in with Beverly Hills Chihuahua. IMDb.com

Bon Voyage (2003) A delightful French bon-bon. It reminded me most of those sophisticated Hitchcock thrillers of the ‘40s, such as Foreign Correspondent, with people running all over the place, plenty of comic relief, glamour, Nazis ... the whole magilla. There is even a Macguffin in the form of some bottles of heavy water. It stars Gerard Depardieu, who apparently is in every French film these days, and Isabelle Adjani, who looks like she could be in her late 20s but is actually 49! IMDb.com

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (БОЯДГ: Культурное Изучение Америки для Делает Выгоду Великолепной Нацией Казахстана) (2006) So, is it as funny as all the hype made it out to be? Audiences love it, except those who hate it. Critics love it (89% positive at Metacritic, 92% at Rotten Tomatoes). We had to see, despite severe misgivings on both our parts. And I have to say, I didn't find it funny at all ...

... NOT!!! I laughed my ass off. I would never recommend it to anybody, because this is really, really a case of something that will make some folks laugh and leave others either cold, or revolted. But I had a good time. It's not as good as they're saying it is (it's almost impossible that it could be), but it is the most irreverent, iconoclastic, boundary-pushing, balls-out comedy I've seen in a long time.

And I don't normally care for this type of ambush reality-television stuff, I really don't. But in every case, the people who look like assholes look like assholes for one simple reason: they are assholes. I simply can't believe that those college pricks in the RV are suing Cohen for making them look silly. He didn't make them say a single racist, anti-Semitic, anti-female word. All that stuff came pouring out of the toilet bowls they use for mouths of their own volition. And the people from that Romanian village that stood in for Kazakhstan, they're pissed off, too! I can see why Kazakhs would be pissed (though they've taken a new tack now, and are advertising for tourist dollars and will probably get them). Of course, anybody with half a brain knows Kazakhstan isn't like that. And Cohen put those Romanians on the map, too. What are they bitching about?

It's disturbing, too, you feel very uncomfortable laughing as Borat drags these cockroaches out into the light and lets them put on their little racist tap dances. The only people who don't seem to be pissed at this film are Americans, who come across as boobs. And by golly, some of us are! Big surprise!

The most disturbing part of it all, to me, was when Borat went to a big Evangelical revival meeting. I've seen it before, on television and in real life, but it never fails to be puke-worthy in my eyes. People speaking in tongues, leaping around like spastics, lying on the floor in epileptic fits. These folks are one step up from snake handlers, my friends, and they are not rare! This is happening in your community. Look at them for five minutes and you suddenly understand Jonestown. You realize that, in the grip of religious frenzy, they are capable of anything. Literally anything. These are very sick people. They are suffering from a disease, and I'm not speaking metaphorically here, I mean a literal disease. They frighten me a hundred times more than al-Qaeda does, because they attack my precious country from the inside. They're in Congress, they're in the White House. And all they really need is a leader to tell them what God wants them to do. (We can be thankful that George W. Bush is not that leader. He couldn't lead a turd out of his own asshole.) Robert Heinlein predicted a religious takeover of the United States in his "Future History" stories. He predicted it for about 1980, but he knew what he was talking about, and if someone comes along with the charisma of Nehemiah Scudder, this nation is in deep shit. These people are exactly like the Shiite and Sunni death squads we've unleashed in Iraq. They would be capable of finding sinners and drilling holes in them with their power tools (as they are doing in Iraq, where the favored instrument of torture now is the Craftsman electric drill) until they die, beheading them, dragging their corpses through the street, and then coming home to dinner with the family, prayers, and a sound night's sleep. If God or the Prophet asks them to.

Sorry about that. They just give me a severe case of the creeps.

Finally, a word about Kazakhstan. I looked it up and read a little about it, and found that it is a prospering country with a government that is a little suspect (may have stolen the last election; thank god that can't happen here!), that is mixed in terms of religion and ethnicity, and where Jews are not persecuted. It is rapidly modernizing, and is emphatically not the shit-hole depicted in this movie. However, I delved a little into their national cuisine, and was fascinated to learn that the national dish is something called Besbarmak. It is served on the national day, December 17, and other festive occasions. I even found the following recipe (which was entirely too small for a major feast, so I increased the quantities so there'd be enough to feed a large crowd). Lamb can be substituted for the meat in question, but I swear I'm not making this up. Well, only a little of it.

With Thanksgiving coming up, I offer it to you as a welcome alternative to another goddam turkey. Try it! We're going to, as soon as we find out where the nearest knackers is in Los Angeles! (There is quite a bit of protocol as to who eats what when it's served at a wedding, which I'm including at the end of the recipe.)

Proper wedding service of Besbarmak:
Horse's liver goes to the fathers of the newlyweds to bind the promise that will keep the marriage bond intact. Young boys are given the ears to remind them to be careful; girls get tongue so as to be diligent. The most respected guest are given gammon and shank. The young bride gets brisket; married women, instead, take neck-bones. Children are given kidney and heart, which makes them mature. Never serve horse's brain to kids - it makes them weak-willed. Knuckle should never be served to a young girl; otherwise she might forever remain an old maid. IMDb.com

Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids (2004) Best Documentary Feature Oscar, 2004. The director, Zana Briski, went into the red light district of Calcutta to photograph the women of the streets. Lee and I felt that, at first, she was sort of slumming, hoping for some really cool shots of degradation and misery. But the adults (surprise!) didn’t want to be photographed much. And as time went by, she was moved by the plight of the children who were growing up there. She came up with the idea of giving cheap cameras to the kids and letting them capture their environment themselves. Eventually she founded Kids With Cameras, which does the same thing in other slums around the world. She organized art shows of the best of their photographs, some of which are stunning, and then it got more personal with her “stars,” the best of the group, eight or nine kids entering their teen years. The girls were certainly destined for prostitution themselves, the boys destined to be pimps or drug dealers. She battled the Indian bureaucracy, which seems to exists solely to send people all over town for months getting the right stamps on endless reams of paper. This is a highly personal film, and you realize that maybe she’s not showing us her failures ... but the kids we do see are managing to pull themselves out of the slime. A DVD extra returns a few years later, and the outlook for all the kids seems good. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

So it’s eight kids, right? What about the thousands of others? Well, how much could you do, living and working in that hell-hole? Myself, I’d take one Zana over a thousand Mother Teresas, that sanctimonious shitbag. Sure, she gave the lowest of the low a cot to die on ... but by her idiotic and implacable opposition to birth control she made sure she’d never be out of a job, never lack for poor starving masses to take care of. She also didn’t approve of medicine or pain killers, except for herself. Screw Mother Teresa, and hurrah for Zana! IMDb.com

The Bourne Identity (2002) Above average spy thriller. The fights and car chases are believable, it’s exciting, and I didn’t see a lot of plot holes. You can hardly ask for more than that these days. IMDb.com

The Bourne Supremacy (2004) A real rarity, a sequel that lives up to the first one. What a pleasure to see smart people in a thriller. Jason Bourne reacts with lighting speed to absolutely anything the hostile world throws at him. A little too fast to be strictly believable of course, but that’s what you go to a movie like this. As long as it doesn’t insult my intelligence, I’m willing to go along with stuff. The technology is amazing, and all off the shelf. The stunts are awesome, and none of them are CGI, including an extended car chase in Moscow. The movie manages to get right to the edge of being over the top without ever setting a foot too far. You go to a picture like this for quick action, neat tricks, and exotic locales. This one starts in Goa, for crissake, and goes to Naples and Berlin on the way to a Russia that, since the fall of the USSR, is a very different place than we used to see.

One caveat: I’m almost glad I didn’t see it in a theater. I like fast cutting and loose camera work, to a point, they can be very effective, but some of it would have been hard to follow on a big screen. One the other hand, there wasn’t a wasted second in the movie. The director showed us things in 30 seconds that another director would have spent 5 minutes on, to be sure we got the point. I like having my intelligence respected like that. I’ll look forward to a third installment, if they can keep up this quality.

And by the way, if you ever get in serious trouble in Moscow, need to make a fast getaway, I’d recommend you steal a little yellow Russian-built taxi called a GAZ 3110. Lord, those things can take a lot of punishment! IMDb.com

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) First feature at the drive in with I Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. IMDb.com

Bowfinger (1999) Shortly after seeing the perfectly awful Norbit, I was browsing through Eddie Murphy’s credits for the titles of some of the almost equally awful movies he’s made recently, and I came across this. How I missed it when it was new I don’t know. I mean, Eddie Murphy back when he was often funny, Steve Martin back when he was still doing good work, and Frank Oz? Sounds like a sure thing. Oz directed some our favorite movies, including Little Shop of Horrors, HouseSitter, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and last year’s hilarious Death at a Funeral, in addition to being the voice of Yoda and Miss Piggy.

And though this movie isn’t quite in that league, it’s a winner. Martin plays Bowfinger, a fifth-rate director down on his luck, like so many Hollywood wannabes. (A poster in the background shows a car and the title The Yugo Story, which may be his only screen credit.) He gets a script for something called Chubby Rain, which he thinks is pure genius, and sounds to me as if it would make Plan 9 From Outer Space look like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he’s determined, and not without guile. He comes up with the idea of having Eddie Murphy, the biggest action star in Hollywood, star in his movie … only he won’t know he’s in it. He hides cameras, has his actors sneak up on Murphy and play their scenes. It doesn’t hurt that Murphy is crazy as a shithouse rat and already thinks he’s being chased by aliens. These odd happenings fit right into his paranoia. He’s also a member of a weird cult that will surely remind you of Scientology, or maybe Werner Erhard’s EST Training. (Remember him? Me, neither.) Some very funny stuff here, including how Bowfinger gets his crew. He backs a van up to the Mexican border and simply rounds up the first four wetbacks to come his way. Soon they are expert in the movie biz, getting phone calls from their agents. Then there is the wide-eyed, cute little girl from Ohio who gets off the bus and before long has fucked anyone who has any chance of making her a star. I mean, she’s so determined she even goes to bed with the writer, something that has never happened in Hollywood unless the writer is also the producer and director. IMDb.com

Bowling for Columbine (2002) I can hardly express how much I hated this movie. I should first say where I’m coming from. I do not like firearms. I’ve never owned a gun. I’ve fired a shotgun once, and a .22 rifle once. I believe the Second Amendment provides for "a well-regulated militia," not the right of every 9-year-old or psychotic yahoo to own artillery pieces. I am in favor of gun control; I believe we are the horror of the western world because of our absolutely insane insistence on Wild West laws in the 21st century. So I should love this movie, right? I loved Michael Moore when he did Roger & Me, but I began to admire him less as the years wore on. Why? because he lies, and lying, even in a good cause ... especially in a good cause, is anathema. Moore has become the Ann "Treason" Coulter, the Michael Savage, the big fat lying hypocritical junkie crybaby Rush Limbaugh of the left. In Columbine he presents half a dozen mutually contradictory explanations for guns and gun violence, and for the whole atrocity of Columbine. He tries to tell me that people in Canada do not lock their doors. And he manages to make me feel sorry for Charlton Heston, a man I would not piss on if he were on fire. This is the man who went to Columbine the day after, brandished a rifle, and shouted "I’ll give up my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hand!" But you do not ambush a man, even as poor an excuse for a man as Charlton Heston, in his own home. Not a man known to be suffering from Alzheimer’s. No, Michael. Shove your Oscar up your ass. Sideways. IMDb.com

The Box (2009) Second feature At the Drive In with The Blind Side. IMDb.com

The Boy Friend (1971) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

The Boys & Girl From County Clare (2003) The box just said “The boys ...” but the movie started with the title above, so I’m going with that one. In the UK it was released as The Great Ceili War. Ceili is a type of Irish music.

Two brothers who haven’t seen each other for 20 years bring competing bands to the Isle of Man for a competition. They have issues going way back. Who will win? It doesn’t really matter. Movies about people who feel passionately about what they’re doing have an edge with me from frame one, especially if that passion is music ... or dance, too, I guess. Hell, almost anything, even if I don’t care for it myself. And I’m not too much for Irish music except the jazzed-up variety like Riverdance, which these people would hate ... but the music isn’t the problem, it’s the clichéd story. Nothing is a surprise, everything is by the book. In fact, only the music kept me going. If you want to see a good movie about musical competition, try Brassed Off ... unless you hate brass band music. IMDb.com

The Boys of 2nd Street Park (2003) Engrossing small movie about a group of mostly Jewish boys who grew up in Brighton Beach in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Nothing too surprising; they go through the changes we all went through in that generation: hanging out together, high school, getting into drugs and/or Vietnam, marriages, breakups, tragedies. It’s all handled very well, and though the urban setting is totally alien to me, a small-town boy and non-basketball player, I have much more in common with them than differences from them. IMDb.com

The Brave One (2007) Second feature at the drive in with The Heartbreak Kid. IMDb.com

Braveheart (1995) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him while painted blue and wearing a kilt. The worst Best Picture ever. IMDb.com

Brazil (1985) Terry Gilliam’s best film, and that’s saying a lot. I totally loved it. IMDb.com

Breach (2007) Robert Hanssen has been described as the most damaging spy in our country’s history. He worked for the FBI for 25 years, and for 15 of those he passed information to the Soviets, then the Russians. Several people died when he exposed them. He was very canny, very paranoid, and at one point was put in charge of the investigation to find the mole … himself. The exposure of Aldrich Ames turned the heat away from him, and we went on for more years. He was also seriously weird. A devout Catholic, a member of the nutball Opus Dei … how did he justify his actions? I guess we’ll never know, as he is rotting in 23-hour-per-day solitary confinement at the Supermax prison, with an injunction to keep his filthy trap shut. It seems to have been mostly about money.

Chris Cooper is one of the best actors currently working. I’ve loved him in everything he’s done since playing July Johnson in Lonesome Dove. He really deserves an Oscar nomination for this role, but probably won’t get one since Academy memories seem to reach back only two or three months. This is an excellent film. Rent it. IMDb.com

Breakdown (1997) Begins well, with a spooky atmosphere reminiscent of the classic Duel. Tension builds as Kurt Russell’s wife vanishes, as ransom demands seem to leave him no options. But it loses its way at the end, as so many films do, going for the cheap car chase instead of remaining as hard-headed as it began. There is a scene where Russell is confronting the kidnappers who have left his wife to suffocate, has the drop on them with a gun, where three shots would have solved all his problems, one shot into each of their chests. He doesn’t shoot, thereby putting his wife in more danger and lengthening the move another 15 artificial minutes. Too bad. IMDb.com

Breakin’ All the Rules (2004) Reviews were not very good, and I was dubious. But this little trifle is fun. The key is to appreciate it as farce. With different language and a cast of aristocracy, this story would not be out of place on the French stage in the 18th century. Sure, the characters are all shallow and one-note. So is everyone in The Importance of Being Earnest. I’m not saying this is Oscar Wilde caliber, but it’s swift, and complex, and had a lot of good laughs. And I have to say a word about the editing. This is one of the tightest movies I’ve ever seen. If something can be shown in a quick shot, instead of explained, that’s now it’s done. A glimpse, just long enough to get the information the director wants us to see, and then the movie leaps right onto the consequences of that glimpse. There is not a wasted shot, not a wasted frame. So it manages to tell a very complex story of mistaken identity, wrong assumptions, betrayal, and cupidity in only 80 minutes of screen time. IMDb.com

Breathless (A bout de soufflé) (1960) Some films are timeless, and some are of their time. I never saw this one when it was influencing every filmmaker on the planet; we only rented it this year. And I have to say, it’s of its time. Watching it, I can see that it would have blown my mind in 1960, but it doesn’t now. All the things that made it so startling then have become total clichés by now, they’re been overused so much. The jump cuts, the nihilism, the amorality ... try Bonnie and Clyde, or Badlands. But that’s not to say it’s not worth seeing. Belmondo and Seberg are outstanding, and Godard broke all the molds. It truly is one of those films, like The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane, where you can say there were all the films before, and all the films after. IMDb.com

Breezy (1973) This was Clint Eastwood’s third time out as director, a role which I now think he’ll be will be remembered for even more than his iconic roles as an actor. It’s not as good as Play Misty For Me, but it’s not bad. It takes place in Los Angeles and features the usual hippies like no one I ever knew: Hollywood movie hippies. Breezy (Kay Lenz) is 19, and gets involved with William Holden, who was 55 at the time. It leads to love, and unlike most of these May-December stories, it ends well for both of them. I’ve always liked William Holden, and he’s very good here.

Personal note: Several scenes are shot at the Laurel Canyon Country Store, which is still there at the bottom of the Hollywood side of Laurel Canyon, and looking a lot more psychedelic than it did in the actual days when hippies used to hang out there. It was the gateway to the houses in the hills where many people, including some big musical stars like Joni Mitchell (who wrote “Ladies of the Canyon”), had their pads. I was one of those hippies. The Canyon Store was a good place to find a place to crash for the night or the week, and about 4 or 5 houses up was the home of my friend Peter Brocco. I stayed with him often in his decaying old house on the hillside (which is worth $900,000 today). Peter made a living in Hollywood for 60 years in bit parts, ranging from a Francis the Talking Mule picture to two of his last roles, in The War of the Roses and Throw Mamma From the Train. He did a ton of TV work; the IMDb lists 257 appearances. If you’re over 40 you’ve almost certainly seen him on several TV shows as “elderly man” or “minister” or “hotel desk clerk.” He was blacklisted for a time during the commie hysteria, so some of his ‘50s appearances were uncredited. Peter died in 1992, aged 89. He was always so generous to me and my friends. I was proud to know him, and I miss him. IMDb.com

Bride and Prejudice (2004) Wow! Uh ... gee! You’ve probably heard of “Bollywood,” the term for the Indian film industry based in Bombay (Mumbai). They make more films in India in a week than Hollywood makes in a year. My understanding is that most of them are very cheap and very formula, and don’t travel well. Here in the west we seldom see them. But there are also big-budget musical extravaganzas, which are catching on in England and a few other places. Some are made in both Hindi and English versions. This one was clearly made for the international audience by Gurinder Chadha, who made the delightful Bend It Like Beckham. She’s a frankly commercial director, with no deep aspirations, though both these films explore cultural differences and clashes. B&P is loosely based on the Jane Austen novel, and it’s a musical. It stars the incredibly beautiful Aishwarya Rai, apparently the superstar of Bollywood.

I love musicals, and this one had me at the start. It is a riot of color, dancing, wonderful rhythms and music that is a blend of east and west. So who cares if the plot is obvious and clichéd?

Well, that’s the problem. When the music stops, the plot plods. There were a lot of musical numbers up front, and not many at the end. To push a musical forward without letting the audience worry about how dumb it all is you have to dazzle them with song and dance every ten minutes or less, and Chadha forgets this. When they get on the plane and leave for London and Los Angeles, the movie pretty much loses it. But before that, it was as colorful and inventive as anything I’ve seen since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

By the way ... You may not notice it at first, but there is no kissing in Bollywood. There are long, soulful stares, some chaste embraces, and several times they seem ready to kiss ... but they don’t. Indian movies are amazingly prudish, considering this is the civilization that wrote the Kama Sutra, and that Hindu gods do things that would gag a maggot. I don’t know why this is, but it is. IMDb.com

The Bridge (2006) The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most beautiful, most perfect large objects ever made by humans. I lived in San Francisco for five years, and I never got tired of seeing it, or crossing it, in a car or on foot. Every picture of the bridge is a postcard; it doesn’t have any bad angles. It spends half its time shrouded in fog, partially visible, and it’s just as beautiful then. It’s beautiful in the sunshine and in the rain, in daytime or night. And since it opened in 1937 about 1300 people have jumped off of it. (They stopped counting, officially, in 1995, as the number approached 1000, thinking some poor soul would want to become the 1000^th. But the average is one jumper every 15 days. Very few of them survive.) It is literally the suicide capital of the world.

Twenty-four jumped in 2004, and most of them were captured on film by Eric Steel and his dedicated crew of camera operators, who were out there at all daylight hours when the bridge was visible at all, scanning back and forth with long lenses, trying to spot the jumpers. He was there under false pretenses, having told the Golden Gate National Recreation Area officials he was shooting a documentary about the beauty of the bridge. Actually, this was only a partial lie, as he did do that; this film shows the old orange lady in all her glory, in one of the most spectacular settings in the world. Steel explains that, if it became known that he was out there to film suicides, it might actually attract more jumpers because of the well-known notoriety effect … which, it seems to me, is one of the reasons some people decide to off themselves there in the first place. And of course the GGNRA people had to know that if a crew spent a year out there filming, they were certain to catch some jumpers. A bit more problematic to me is that Steel didn’t inform the friends and family he interviewed that he had footage of their loved ones’ last moments of life. That is the bulk of the film, the loved ones left behind trying to make sense of what their son/daughter/friend/sister had done. Most seemed resigned by now. It wasn’t like it was a surprise to any of them, these jumpers were people who had been talking about suicide for years, who had made attempts before, who were off their meds or just generally hopeless. A few of the interviewees seemed at peace with it. One friend was really pissed off. How could you do this to me? Steel claims that afterward, when he revealed his secret to these people, they were all okay with it. Who knows? I would have been okay with it, I think.

Many ethical questions arise, of course, and I find that I’m okay with most of them that concern the actual filming. The camera operators all had the bridge patrol and the Coast Guard on speed dial, and would call when they knew someone was about to jump, and several lives were saved that way. But this is a documentary that you could easily make several other documentaries about, and the DVD includes a short one, where the camera people talk about what it was like, how it affected them. As you would expect, none of them were untouched, and all said the things they saw would stay with them for the rest of their lives. In a way, I guess it was like being a combat photographer. You see awful things, you record them, and you get up the next day and do it again.

You could also compare it to a wildlife photographer, who sets up in a place that might be miserably uncomfortable for a long period of time in hopes of catching a certain animal behavior.

But in other ways it’s not like either of those things. It’s a lot tougher. Such as, you can’t sit there and hope for the behavior you’re looking for … and yet, how could you not? I mean, it is what you’re looking for, right? In a nature documentary you sit and sit and sit, and suddenly there’s two minutes of action with a group of lions pulling down a baby elephant, and it may make you sick, but the prime directive is Don’t Interfere. Let nature take its course. This weighed heavily on the camera operators. When humans are involved, you have to interfere, if you can.

There’s another tough one, too: When do you call? Somebody throws a leg over the rail. That’s when you definitely call the bridge patrol … but plenty of idiotic jokers throw a leg over the rail, some even get up and stand on it, so a friend can take a picture, yuk, yuk, yuk. How many times can you cry wolf? And before that, what are the signs? All the camera people talk about body language, but in the end they’re all in the dark. They follow somebody walking back and forth for half an hour, thumb poised on the speed dial, and then he simply walks away. And another guy who made three calls on his cell phone, laughing, suddenly set the phone down, takes off his sunglasses, and he’s over, he’s leaning, he’s falling, he’s gone. So quick no one on the bridge itself even saw it, and the Coast Guard never found the body … so did I really see what I thought I saw? Yeah, there it is, on camera.

A lot of your reaction to this film will depend on your attitude toward suicide. Most of us have come around to the idea of voluntary suicide for people in intractable pain. I’m sure in favor of it; I may need it myself, someday, and I’ll get it, with or without the help of a doctor. But what about intractable mental pain? Many believe that most suicides are cries for help. I don’t know. I know that plenty of attempts are gestures like that. Usually these people leave themselves an out, do it in a manner where they’re likely to be discovered and stopped. Lots of these bridge jumpers stand on the ledge below the rail for quite a while before being able to take the leap. Are they waiting for help? We even see one very dramatic rescue of a woman, pulled back from the brink by a photographer. And one survivor is interviewed, the only person who can report what it’s like to take that last step. He says that the instant it was too late to turn back, it came to him in a flash: “I don’t want to do this!!!!” The very definition of an oh, shit moment, huh? He twisted around, landed feet first, and broke his back. A good argument for trying to stop these people, right? But that was only his reaction. Watching some of these people go, in particular the last one who went off backwards and made absolutely no struggling movements … this dude was committed, I really believe that. And I say, let him go. There is such a thing as unendurable mental pain, and there is a right to end your life when you reach that point.

Over the years there have been many attempts to erect a suicide barrier on the bridge. I’ve always been against it, and after seeing this I still am, just as strongly as ever. It would be ugly, and I don’t think you fuck with perfect beauty. Most San Franciscans agree with me, so far. Let the poor battered souls, the ones with malfunctioning chemicals in their brains, the tired, the defeated … let them come, and for four seconds enjoy a moment of perfect release. IMDb.com

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) I read this book in high school. Actually, I was forced to read it in high school. Weren’t you? I’m not saying it was a bad book, I’d probably enjoy it today, but I only read enough to pass the tests back then, and all I remember is a bridge collapsed and killed some people. It was filmed twice before, in 1929 and 1944. Now here comes this glossy, gorgeous version, filmed in some of the great locations of Spain (filling in for Peru), with a really terrific cast ... and it’s strangely unaffecting. I guess I just didn’t believe Kathy Bates, Robert De Niro, and Harvey Keitel as early 18th century people, but that’s not all of it. I checked a couple of online summaries, and apparently this is a quite faithful adaptation, so that’s not it, either.

You know how when an airplane crashes, or a building falls down, or a hurricane sweeps away an entire town, a handful of dazed survivors struggle from the wreckage, toward the mikes and television cameras and always, always, have this to say: “God was watching out for me!” For me! For little ol’, God-blessed me! This is a horrible statement, when you think about it, but I forgive them, because of what they’ve just been through. And I suspect that a lot of them, when they have time to think about what God had in mind when He stomped so enthusiastically on the hopes and dreams and lives and children of all those people who died, why He had such a hard-on for them ... they suffer from survivor guilt, which can be summed up as: Why me? Am I really that special? Am I a better person than that mother of three and her kids who burned to a crisp in Row 14? What about the guy next door, crushed and drowned in the storm, who was always ready to help anyone in the neighborhood while I sat on my complacent ass? Good can come of this, people can change their lives, rededicate themselves to something larger than themselves, as they struggle to come to terms with that awful question.

Why me?

That’s the central question in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Why those five people? Franciscan Brother Juniper spends a good part of his life trying to construct a theological calculus that would answer that question. He gets nowhere, but attracts the attention of the Church, of the Inquisition, and the Church doesn’t want questions like that asked, much less answered. Presto! Auto de fe, starring Brother Juniper. My own answer is that there is no answer, that it’s all random, but lots of people can’t accept that.

I guess my problem with this story, or at least this telling of it, is that there should be some emotional involvement as we ponder the baffling unfairness of the world, and this just didn’t get to me. Maybe I should try the novel. IMDb.com

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) 2003 was Oscar time for our little Renee. 2004 is paycheck time. Lee and I both saw Bridget Jones’s Diary, and neither of us can remember a thing about it except a vague feeling that we had a good time. I don’t say that as a putdown; I like being entertained by well-done fluff as much as the next guy. Maybe more than the next guy, as I often enjoy those movies put down as “chick flicks.” But this one ... what a load of crap. It reminded me of the worst of those Doris Day/Rock Hudson titilaters of the ‘50s and ‘60s, only worse. All the music is done by somebody else, familiar tunes that could have come up when someone punched a particular emotion into a computer program. Same with the script. All the situations are awesomely standard and predictable. All the slapstick is depressing and foolish. How many times can you get a laugh out of Bridget humiliating herself? Not even once, in this movie.

And I’m vaguely alarmed at Renee’s weight. Gaining weight for a movie role seems to me a dubious proposition, and I have been told that ballooning up and then dieting down is not a good idea, even if you’re not doing it on purpose. So Renee bulks up for Bridget Jones, gets ripped for Roxie Hart, and then lards it on again for Bridget II. What’s next for Ms. Zellwegger? Karen Carpenter? IMDb.com

Bright Young Things (2003) Lovely to look at, but when all is said and done, this is nothing but Party Monster with Benny Goodman music instead of disco. It may take you a while to see that, as we’re trained to think the Brits are so, so sophisticated, but this group in 1938 are fully as shallow and empty and repulsive as Michael Alig and his Club Kids. Since it is based on a comic novel by Evelyn Waugh and directed by the naughty Stephen Fry (who is marvelous as various clueless upper-class twits in the Blackadder series) there is some wit here, some funny situations, and we are not meant to like these people, but it is a tedious exercise. I’d prefer my upper-class satire to have a few more actual laughs in it, and some sharp dialogue. Try Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. There’s a good version of it from 1952, and another made in 2002. IMDb.com

Bringing Down the House (2003) Everybody tries very hard to be funny. Too hard, especially Steve Martin. IMDb.com

Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935. No, really!) This was the second of a series that wasn’t really a series, as all they had in common was the titles. The first was in 1929 (Best Picture Oscar!), then this one and ’38 and ’40. They’re all about putting on a show on Broadway, and the last three star Eleanor Powell. This one and ’38 star Robert Taylor—real name, Spangler Arlington Brugh—not a guy known for singing and dancing, but he does okay in his one number here. Top billing goes to Jack Benny, who looks a little uncomfortable as a nasty gossip columnist. But this is really all about Eleanor Powell, who was already a big star on Broadway and was reluctant to get into the movies. She named a price she thought was astronomical, and to her surprise, MGM paid it. So this was her first starring role (she had appeared in a specialty number in George White’s 1935 Scandals). Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and there are certainly numerous contenders for the title, but it is my opinion that Eleanor Powell was the greatest tap dancer ever to appear on film, male or female. She is not as well known as, say, Ginger Rogers or Cyd Charisse, both of whom certainly had their own strengths, and I think it’s mostly because her most amazing numbers were solos, and most people prefer to see a couple like Fred and Ginger or Gene and Cyd. But for sheer tapping talent … well, put it this way, Eleanor Powell was the only dancing partner who intimidated Fred Astaire. He knew she was a better dancer than he was! She could spin so fast that you could barely see her face as it whipped around time after time, and keep it up apparently forever, tapping a complicated rhythm all the time. During one number I tried to count, and got lost around 26. She could move sideways across a stage, tapping out a riff that was so fast it was almost like a drum roll but much more complicated, and if you looked at her just from the waist up, she might have been sitting in a chair … and again, she could apparently do that forever. She was simply awesome. She has three amazing tap numbers here, plus a ballet sequence.

This is a very good film, but really only for the musical numbers. The plot is okay, but often seems to slow everything down. The choreography is by Dave Gould, who I’ve never heard of but who was obviously influenced by Busby Berkeley. There are the geometrical chorus girls, and the amazing sets (in one, furniture pops magically out of the dance floor, unfolding like flowers), the top hats, tuxes and blondes in gowns. This film and Singin’ in the Rain share at least three songs, including “Broadway Rhythm” and “You are My Lucky Star.”

There are several featured performers, all of them great dancers, but the only one I know about is Buddy Ebsen and his sister, Vilma. They really were a vaudeville act, known as “The Baby Astaires.” I guess most people today know him from that awful show “The Beverly Hillbillies,” or “Barnaby Jones,” but he was one hell of a dancer. His style was loose-limbed, rubber-legged, slightly corny but a lot of fun to watch. He danced with Judy Garland and Shirley Temple. He would have been perfect as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, maybe better than Ray Bolger, and in fact he was cast in that role, but then switched over to playing the Tin Man, which was a catastrophe for him. He suffered a severe allergic reaction to the metallic make-up, something that bothered him for the rest of his life … which was a long one, 1908 to 2003. IMDb.com

Brokeback Mountain (2005) So at last we see the movie that stirred up so much fuss last year. The "gay cowboy" movie. And what do we see? Well, they were actually herding sheep. Does that make them sheepboys?

The movie is solemn, and overlong. And about halfway through you realize that, without the gay element, which I quickly began to regard as a gimmick, you've got a really conventional story of frustrated love. The gay element wasn't the gimmick; we've seen plenty of homosexual love stories by now. It was the cowboy thing. Was it a secret, somehow, that tough guys can be gay? Plenty of leather boy bikers are. Plenty of macho prisoners are, no matter how much they may protest that it's just a stopgap until they can get some pussy. And as Willie Nelson told us shortly after this movie came out, "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other." So what's the big deal?

It's not just sex. These men were obviously deeply in love with each other, but felt they had to conceal it publicly. Again, not a new story. If it was just sex they needed, there were 10,000 sheep available, and the occasional Basque to show them how it was done. No, it was genuine passion ... but I got to thinking of something else. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. They saw each other once, maybe twice a year if they were lucky. Passion is easier to sustain that way. What would they have been like if they'd been able to live together? Bliss? I doubt it. But who am I to say.

I'm not saying it's a bad movie. It's quite good, for what it is. Heath Ledger was impressive, playing a character who made Woodrow Call seem like a chatterbox. Everybody wondered why there was this apparent backlash on Oscar night against this seemingly invincible front runner. Prejudice? I don't think so. I think it was the voters stepping back, taking another look, and realizing that aside from the sensationalism it just wasn't Best Movie material. High-brow critics loved it for its literary antecedents: Annie Proulx (and would somebody tell me how to pronounce that?), Larry McMurtry, and critical darling Ang Lee. But when all was said and done, Crash was just a better movie. Much better. I have now seen all 5 nominees, and Academy, you done good. I'd put Munich in second place, followed by Capote, and Good Night and Good Luck. Sorry, Brokeback, you're not even really a strong 5th place. IMDb.com

Broken Flowers (2005) There's not a lot I could say about this without a spoiler warning, so here it is:

SPOILER WARNING

An "aging Don Juan" (Bill Murray) gets a letter from an ex-lover who says he has a 19-year-old son he hadn't known about, and the son may be seeking him out. He doesn't want to get involved, but his nosy neighbor pushes him to the point they get a list of 5 possibilities, one of whom is dead. He sets out to find out which woman is the mother of his child.

This could be the set-up for a dozen comedies I've seen, such as Flirting With Disaster, or considerably darker things. It could be a detective story. It could make you chuckle, it could make you weep. But Jim Jarmusch, director of the brilliant little Coffee and Cigarettes, isn't interested in stuff like that, and neither is Bill Murray, anymore.

You've got to admire Murray. He could be like Steve Martin (I'm sorry to say), cranking out Stripes Goes to Iraq or Caddyshack VII. But he seems to be done with that sort of thing (unless, I hope, a really good script comes along). He used to be the master of laid-back comedy; now he's going for almost catatonic comedy. This is risky. He has already lost part of his audience, the short attention span folks who want a pratfall every 30 seconds, the ones who won't study his motionless, almost Zen presence to see what's really going on in the scene. And he could go overboard on it, if he's not careful. But so far, it's working for me. He was great in Lost in Translation, and he repeats a lot of that here. He can barely talk, barely move, he is so tied up in angst. He takes off on this journey not from any enthusiasm, but because he has nothing else to do, his latest girlfriend has left him and he's not going anywhere. He seems to know, down deep, that it will be a disaster.

And it is. He meets the four women. We see from clever little clues that any of them might be the mother, but none of them are saying. Maybe it's someone else entirely. Maybe it's the son of the dead woman who wrote the letter. Maybe it's the girlfriend who just left him, trying to shake him up. Maybe he has the wrong list, maybe he's forgotten someone. Maybe it's just an ugly prank from who-knows-what in his past. But there is no neat conclusion, no scene of reconciliation ... in fact, no solution. And yet he has been moved by the journey. To his own surprise, he wants to know this son, as shown in a very subtle, very well-done scene with a boy who might be his son ... but there's a very good chance he never will, or even know if he has a son, which would be even worse. By being so emotionally dead for 90% of the film, Bill Murray is able to make this scene carry an incredible weight of emotion simply by trying to speak of his feelings for the first time, awkwardly, and tragically, and then he is standing there in the middle of the road, alone, still with no place to go. If it reminds me of any film, it is Blow-Up. Things happen, the hero flounders around for a time ... and is left without even the assurance that anything happened at all. IMDb.com

Broken Wings (Israel, 2002) I couldn’t dislike this movie. It deals with an harassed family, mother and 4 children, dealing with the death of the father 9 months before, from a bee-sting. They react in different ways, and in the end are somewhat drawn together by a near-disaster. But it wasn’t all I’d hoped. Maybe it was just too much suffering, or maybe some element I can’t put my finger on was missing. Not bad, but not memorable. No kidding. Two weeks later and I can’t remember what the near-disaster was. IMDb.com

The Brothers Grimm (2005) Second feature at the drive in. IMDb.com

Bruce Almighty (2003) I’m not a big Jim Carrey fan. I’ve liked about half his movies. This one is in the good half. Some great sight gags. I laughed. IMDb.com

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) See, Elvis Presley, in an aluminum walker, and JFK (played by Ossie Davis) are in a nursing home in Mud Creek, East Texas, when it is threatened by an ancient Egyptian mummy who sucks souls. He can suck them from any bodily orifice, but prefers to take them out of the asshole. It being a nursing home, the souls are small, practically used up, so he needs a lot of them. Elvis and the president must stop him. And believe it or not, not only is this pretty damn funny, it manages to be touching, heroic, and even a little scary here and there. Recommended for those who like the off-beat. IMDb.com

Buck Privates (1941) This was Abbott and Costello’s second movie, but the first where they got top billing. They were big stars on radio, and had been big stars in vaudeville, and with this picture they became big movie stars. It was a huge hit, one of the top-grossing films of 1941. And it’s really not much of a movie … in movie terms. But if you look at it as a vaudeville show, it’s damn good.

There are really three parts to it, shown episodically. Least important is the “plot,” which is pathetic, starring two handsome second bananas, one a square joe, the other a spoiled millionaire playboy who is only in the army because his dad thinks it will make a man out of him. Both want to make time with a B-list studio contract player whose name is now as obscure as the two rivals. Naturally the cad reforms himself—with absolutely no reason to do so except that the plot requires it. You can easily snooze through these parts.

The second element is the musical interludes starring Patty, Maxene, and Laverne, the incomparable Andrews Sisters! They give A&C some serious competition for your attention, doing four numbers including “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” The audience we saw it with at the Million Dollar Theater broke into enthusiastic applause at the end of that one. (Something I hadn’t realized: Those gals could dance! Just watch them stepping out as they sing “BWBB.”) They also do a terrible number called “You’re a Lucky Man, Mr. Smith,” which extols the virtues of the good ol’ US of A in a way more suited to a government recruiting film than a motion picture that seeks to entertain. But the whole movie is like that. Since it was made before Pearl Harbor I had thought it might be a little less relentlessly patriotic than the movies of the next four years, but I’d forgotten that it was the time of the first peacetime draft—the whole reason the picture was made, apparently—and the studios wanted to help out by showing what a grand, hilarious time you’d have in the army, with the Andrews Sisters serenading you every evening, lots of high-quality jitterbugging, and pretty hostesses passing out free cigarettes! C’mon, guys, join up! It’s only for a year! Except, of course, in the event a real war breaks out …

You’ve probably figured out that the third element is A&C, who reprise some of their best radio and vaudeville routines, integrated into what little story is here, and do a considerable amount of improvising. They are brilliant as usual. “Hey, loan me fifty dollars.” “All I got is forty.” “Well, give me the forty and you can owe me ten. Now, here’s the forty you loaned me. Now you only owe me ten. Give it to me.” And it gets wackier from there.

There are some passages intended to show our military might, with wave after wave of planes passing over, and hundreds of tanks rolling by. It’s rather heartbreaking, looking at those pathetic World War One tanks. Pretty soon they would be facing Rommel’s Panzer divisions in North Africa, where they might as well have been made out of tin foil and armed with BB guns. Lots of American boys roasted alive in those death traps. IMDb.com

The Bucket List (2007) First feature At the Drive In with National Treasure: Book of Secrets. IMDb.com

Bug (2006) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

Bull Durham (1988) If there is a better baseball movie than this I don’t know what it would be, and I’m looking at a list of 31 of them, culled from the IMDb. Like most of the best sports movies it doesn’t concern itself with the Big Game, but with the game itself. In this case it is minor league ball, the AAA team known as the Durham Bulls. There really is such a team. Baseball is different from the other two of the Big Three American team sports, basketball and football, in that they seldom get their players directly from colleges, which function like free farm teams for the NBA and the NFL. College baseball is not a big sport. I don’t know why. So this elaborate system has evolved over the years where all the Major League teams have lesser ball clubs in smaller cities where talent is developed. There is Triple-A, Double-A, Class A, Rookie League, and others, each with divisions like the International League, Pacific Coast League, Texas League, etc. It used to be even more complicated; Lee used to watch games of the North Bend Lumberjacks, a team so obscure we can’t even find it on Wikipedia. Who knows what league they were in? This system seems old-fashioned, but it’s still surprisingly vital. Games for the Eugene Emeralds (Class A) and the Portland Beavers (AAA) were well-attended when I lived in those cities, frequently sold out.

These teams play a game with somewhat less pressure than the Major Leagues, and they’re fun to watch. Frankly, I have always had a little trouble getting really excited over which team of multi-millionaires will beat another team of multi-millionaires, though I still root for the Dodgers. Minor league players are hungry, usually poorly paid. They play ball for the same reason a dancer dances: They have to. They love the game, and of course they dream of one day being called up to The Show, as they call it in this movie. There is a great scene where players are gathered around Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), who once spent 21 days in the Majors. They want to know what it was like. “In the Show, they take batting practice with white balls.” Oooooooh! You know these guys are used to playing with balls that might have been in play when DiMaggio was in the minors.

No other film is as wise about baseball as this one is. We never see a complete game, but we see a lot of plays, a lot of pitches, a lot of at-bats. Usually we hear the pitcher or hitter talking to himself or thinking, and it is fascinating. The writer/director, Ron Shelton, was a minor league player for a while, so I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. The story is that Crash, a man nearing the end of his playing career but with vast reserves of smarts, has been summoned to catch for “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins; Nuke picked his own nickname), a rather dim kid, full of himself, who happens to have a 95-mph fastball. But it’s about an even proposition as to whether he’ll throw it over the plate or into the dugout. Even if he can throw strikes, in pitching it’s not just a matter of throwing strikes, it’s very complicated strategy, mixing pitches. He just wants to throw heat, so Crash has to educate him as to just how helpless a pitcher is if he refuses to throw what the catcher wants. Crash does this by telling a few batters which pitch is coming next. Whack! Outta the park! Nuke eventually gets it.

We see the players in the locker room, on the bus on road trips, in bars. We get an excellent feel for what the life-style is like, and what ballplayers are like. Many are intensely superstitious. Even Crash says “Never fuck with a streak.” He has an ulterior motive, but he also believes it. If you haven’t shaved during your ten games with an RBI, then don’t shave! If you haven’t had sex with your girlfriend, then don’t have sex with her! And by golly, if tapping voodoo bones on your bat to drive away the strike demons seems to help your hitting, then tap away.

If the movie was just about baseball it would still be a damn good movie. But it is much more. Susan Sarandon plays Annie (an “Annie” is what ballplayers call baseball groupies), who picks a player every season to shack up with. Crash decides not to play her game so she chooses Nuke … and Crash comes to regret it. She is as smart as he is, though considerably goofier in a delightful way. Sarandon is just wonderful in this film, and so are Costner and Robbins, and all the supporting players. The only reason I can see that someone would not like this movie is because they hate baseball. IMDb.com

Burden of Dreams (1982) Criterion Collection DVD. Recounts the epic tale of the making of the epic movie Fitzcarraldo. We don't get to see Werner Herzog pulling a gun on Klaus Kinski (which he is rumored to have done), but just about everything else that could go wrong, does go wrong. It's mostly because of Herzog's obsession with filming a thousand miles up the river when he could have done it just outside of town, and with pulling a 320-ton boat intact over a mountain, when even the crazy guy whose story this is based on took his boat apart. But God seemed to have it in for Herzog, too. When he needed rain to float the boat they got the driest season in recorded history. When they needed dry weather, they got such deluges that the ground turned into knee-deep slop. There were wars between the Indian tribes, and ... hell, you name it, it went wrong.

Fitzcarraldo was originally going to star Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, and we see a few shots from that early production, which was about halfway done when Robards got a bad case of the Brazilian Boogaloo, or the Peruvian Poops, and had to go back to New York, where his doctor forbid him to return to the jungle. Good career, move, Jason. Then The Mick had to drop out, too. By the end of the film Werner was muttering about evil in the jungle, crazier than Marlon Brando at the end of Apocalypse Now.

Two things. One, in my review of Fitzcarraldo I said they moved the boat with only human power. Not true. They had a huge bulldozer ... but it was pretty much useless most of the time, unable to climb out of the muck. Two, Herzog took what were, in my opinion, unconscionable risks with the lives of his Indian extras. The original engineer hired to figure out how to do this insane thing threw up his hands in disgust and walked off. Herzog went ahead anyway, aware that at any moment the whole stupid cat's cradle could snap and send cables flailing into the crowd, killing who knows how many. This is not right, this probably could not have happened in the US or Europe or Canada, where safety standards are pretty high. He has the right to risk his own life, but not the lives of people who are earning $3.50 a day ... and view that as a fortune. Shame on you, Werner.

(People died in the making of this movie, and were badly injured, but that was in a plane crash and I don't hold Herzog responsible for that, though he does. A plane crash can happen in any human enterprise, ditto a car crash. But people shouldn't die just to produce an image on a movie screen.)

In spite of the above, I still like Werner Herzog, the crazy fuck. And I think he learned his lesson. IMDb.com

Burn After Reading (2008) It must be tough to do the next movie after No Country For Old Men. No matter what you do, it is unlikely to be as good. The fabulous Coen Brothers have elected to make this dark and mysterious spy comedy, and it’s a dandy, one of those movies that never goes where you expect it to go. And really, what Coen Brothers movie has ever gone where you expected? I see they’re doing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which was a good book. I’m looking forward to it. IMDb.com

BURN-E (2008) How many Pixar animators does it take to change a light bulb? Thousands, apparently …

Normally I wouldn’t review an 8-minute short here, but this is special. It’s included on the DVD of WALL-E (or at least on the version I bought, which is the 3-disc edition; it’s on the first disc, with the feature), a little bonus for the buyer. And it is absolutely brilliant. BURN-E is a little robot character you glimpse a few times during the feature film, carrying out some chore around the gigantic spaceship where the elephantine remnants of humanity live, just one of thousands and thousands of such specialized robots. An extra, in other words. This is his humble story. What he’s doing, we quickly learn, is replacing a burned-out light bulb on the exterior of the ship. (Hey, we’re not all cut out to be big-shot navigators; somebody’s got to do maintenance.) He is very dedicated to his work, very conscientious. We quickly begin to root for the industrious little bugger. Then what happens is, we see scenes from the movie, only from BURN-E’s point of view. He has no idea what’s going on, he’s just trying to change the fercocketa light bulb, but all the ruckus is thwarting him every time. He loses the bulb into outer space. He gets locked out. He … well, I won’t give it all away, but he keeps persevering all the way back to distant Earth, and the ending just made me howl. I’m not kidding, it’s worth buying the DVD just for this short, even if you hadn’t intended to get it for the pleasure of seeing WALL-E again. Plus, there’s another animated short about a hungry rabbit and a magician and two magical hats … IMDb.com

Burnt By the Sun (Утомлённые солнцем ) (1994) It’s 1936, not long before the world would begin the Great Patriotic War. But in Russia another horror is well under way: the Great Purge, when Stalin eliminated most of the Red Army’s officers and as many as two million others. Basically, anyone who had any chance whatsoever of challenging the paranoid, psychotic monster. Colonel Kotov (played by the director, Nikita Mikhalkov) is a hero of the revolution, retired now to a dacha in the country with his much younger wife, his six-year-old daughter (played by his real-life daughter, Nadezhda), and other family members. They have a picnic and a row on the river, eat meals, sing and dance, and do all the other things people used to do before there was television and when there was nothing on the radio but lies about the glorious completion of the latest five-year plan. The Young Pioneers gather to serenade him, there is a gas-mask drill, a grapefruit-sized fireball drifts lazily through the house, they play a game of soccer, and … wait a sec, rewind there … a fireball, did you say? Well, yes, when it hits a tree it sets it on fire. What’s a fireball doing in this scene? I have no idea. Let’s just let it alone, okay? Let it drift into whatever place obscure cinematic symbols go to die …

There’s a weasel in the peaceful Bergman-esque henhouse, though, in the form of Mitia, a former lover of the Colonel’s wife, and now an agent for the NKVD. There is apparently a lot of back story here, and I didn’t get it all, but the outcome is that Mitia had come for Colonel Kotov. There will be no charges, no trial, he will simply be beaten until he admits to something, and then executed. That’s how it was done. His row of medals from the Revolution won’t protect him. He takes it like a good soldier, not telling his family they won’t be seeing him again. It’s very sad.

But the best parts of the movie are the scenes with the little girl, who is a wonder, particularly the ones with her father. I see that she’s currently at work on Burnt By The Sun II. It doesn’t really seem like a film that cries out for a sequel, but maybe there’s something there. She’d be about 20 by now. IMDb.com

Bus 174 (Brazil, 2002) Documentary. In 2000 in Brazil a man took over a bus after a robbery went wrong. For most of the day he held 10 hostages as crowds swirled around, completely uncontrolled by the police, whose ineptitude is astonishing. All this was covered live by every TV station in Rio. The movie shows all this, and the conditions that produced this poor, confused, drug-addled young man, who saw his mother murdered at the age of 6 and spent the rest of his life living on Rio’s mean streets ... and if you think you’ve seen mean streets in America, you haven’t seen anything. The third world is absolutely jammed with forgotten people like this, and corrupt and overworked institutions are utterly failing them. There seems to be no hope. A sobering movie, maybe a bit long at 120 minutes, but I recommend it. IMDb.com

Busy Bodies (1933) Laurel and Hardy in a sawmill. The mind reels at the havoc they could wreak in such a place, and they find every possible way. This is one of the films where they famously destroyed cars in interesting ways. I have seen them driving cars that have been squished almost flat from front to back, or from side to side. One car was twisted in such a way that it was bent into an arc and could only drive in a circle (see County Hospital). In this one, they drive the car through a huge band saw, and it falls into two equal halves. But the record player under the hood still works! IMDb.com

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