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© 2004-2008 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

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

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

Baraka (1992) This is by Ron Fricke, who was listed as a "writer" of Koyaanisqatsi, which had no dialogue or story. Go figure. But he has made an even more striking film than his mentor, one of the most stunning series of images I have ever seen. This is an absolute must-see film for anyone who loves the movies. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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