D

Movies we've seen ê  Back to Index ê HOME

© 2004-2008 by John Varley; all rights reserved

The Da Vinci Code (2006) One of the nice things about living in Los Angeles is that everything plays here. The most obscure art movie, the latest epic from East Timor ... everything. We stumbled on this one at a little neighborhood theater in Los Feliz Village, bargain matinee $4.50, and thought, what the heck? Okay ... it's kind of long, and it's mostly about people standing around solving puzzles, at least when other people aren't chasing them and shooting at them. There's some nice location photography; you'd almost think they'd got permission to shoot in the Louvre! But under it all there is an interesting theological theme. Myself, I don't care if Jesus left little bastards all over Palestine and was crucified because he didn't pay child support. But if the Catholic Church ever gets wind of this theory ... hoo boy! Somebody ought to write a book about this. IMDb.com

The Dancer Upstairs (2002) Directed by John Malkovich, book and screenplay by Shakespeare. No, not Will. Nicolas Shakespeare.

The story is based on the Shining Path anarchist/communist/guerillas who terrorized Peru for many years, as depraved and murderous a group as anyone since Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Malkovich has a good directorial eye and he avoids a lot of plot clichés, but he needs to learn a thing or two about pacing. It dragged at times, and was at least 20 minutes too long. And in the end it didn’t amount to much. IMDb.com

Danny Deckchair (2003) I don’t know how you pronounce “Capra” in Australian, but that’s the word here. Some people can’t take Frank Capra’s corny populism and eternal optimism. To me, it’s a tough trick to turn, but if you can do it, I like it. I’m not saying I believe it; I just like to think for the length of a movie that the world might be that way, every once in a while. This story was inspired by actual events. It really is possible to soar into the air by tying enough helium balloons to a lawn chair and survive it. Other than that, there’s no connection with the dude who actually did it in Long Beach. I liked Miranda Otto (Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, soon to be in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds) and Rhys Ifans. IMDb.com

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) I know things aren’t going well when I begin mentally writing my review 30 minutes into the film, and leafing through my mind’s thesaurus seeking synonyms for pretentious, boring, and just plain bad. This is written and directed by Wes Anderson. I liked his The Royal Tenenbaums well enough, and thought Rushmore was very good. Then we rented The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (one of the all-time worst titles) and thought “What the fu-….???” This is another one of those.

Story: Three brothers are on a train in India, seeking spiritual enlightenment. Like so many idiots who go to India, they seem to think they can walk into a temple and order some, like at Starbucks. “I’ll have a double enlightenment, please, in the tall urn, easy on the spirituality.” People seem to think Indians are a particularly spiritual people. Let me hip you to something, my friends. Indians aren’t any more spiritual than anybody else. It’s just that their vast zoo of belief systems is so exotic-looking to Westerners that we feel they must have something special going. Not so. They’re just as fucked up and clueless as we are.

Oldest brother (Owen Wilson) starts every other sentence with “Let’s make an agreement.” Translation: “Here is what I want to do, and therefore you want to do it, too.” The other two schlubs go along, as they have all their lives. And that’s about it. If they were amusing I might enjoy watching them, but they’re not. Here’s the kind of people they are: When they are thrown off the train for entirely good reasons (I wouldn’t have stopped the train before I threw them off), they throw rocks at it. I disliked everything about them, on every level. Here’s just one example. The chances of me liking a man who wears $3000 shoes to the incredible poverty of India are very slim. The chance of me liking a man who tells me his shoes cost $3000 is zero. The only thing that kept me going was the sights and sounds of India, and of the train, which is very nice (much nicer, I suspect, than any real train in India). But I could have gotten that from a travel film, and probably had a more congenial host. And take it from a guy who’s been to India … that is by far the best way to see the place. IMDb.com

Dark Blue (2002) A slightly better than average veteran cop/rookie cop story. But just slightly. IMDb.com

Darwin's Nightmare (2004) Oh, Africa. What in the world is to become of you? For hundreds of years the white man fought over you and plundered you for everything from slaves to ivory to diamonds. Europeans drew lines on maps with total disregard to tribal enmities, either unable to understand that Africans can be as different as Italians and Lapps, or Portuguese and Bulgarians, and can hate each other as much as Sunni and Shiite … or just not caring. Then they buggered off—they called it giving you “independence”—and left you to sort out the mess. Mostly you’ve done a terrible job of it, and that should come as no surprise to anyone. Most of your leaders are worse crooks than the white imperialists, and when the situation becomes intolerable you spawn “revolutions” that almost always replace the rascals you had with an even worse set of rascals. The wars in the region of the Congo have claimed more than 4 million lives, and every year that passes brings a new horror, from Biafra to Somalia to Rwanda to Darfur. I, frankly, don’t have much hope that things can ever be reversed.

This movie caused some controversy that I’m not knowledgeable enough to resolve. Here’s what I know: In the 1950s somebody introduced Nile perch into Lake Victoria. (Why? Dunno. Just for the heck of it, I guess.) When I hear the word “perch” I think of the little fish my grandmother and I used to pull out of the lake in Corsicana, Texas, fishing from the old boathouse. A big one would be eight inches long. Put that picture out of your mind. These monsters grow to be six feet long and weigh 200 pounds. Other than sturgeon, you pretty much have to go to the ocean to find another fish that big. They promptly ate everything in sight, virtually destroying over 20 species of native cichlids that the locals in Tanzania and other states bordering the lake had relied on for generations of subsistence fishing.

Ah, but Nile perch are very tasty, and one fish can feed an awful lot of people … in Europe. That’s right. Tons and tons of frozen fish filets are shipped out every day on fleets of aging cargo planes that often drop into the lake because the greedy owners have overloaded them, or they haven’t been maintained well. These planes may (or may not) be carrying arms to Sudan and Congo and other hellholes on the way in, so as to not fly empty.

They are fishing the lake so heavily now that, ironically, the perch may soon be extinct there. Good news, right? Well … not much happens in Africa that can be seen as unqualified good news. The perch industry is Tanzania’s main source of export income. What happens when they’re gone? I don’t know. There was much passionate argument about this film when it came out. Still is, I gather. Some say the director, Hubert Sauper, shaded the facts, some say he outright lied about some stuff. Sort of a Dutch Michael Moore. I can’t comment on that; I don’t know enough.

There was famine in the hinterlands of Tanzania while the movie was being filmed. It truly was a disgusting spectacle seeing all that frozen fish being shipped to restaurants and markets in Europe while not far away people were starving … and yet, what good would a truckload of frozen fish do to those people? There isn’t enough infrastructure to get the fish to them; what they needed was air drops of longer-lasting foods, like grains.

In the meantime, those not in the famine area are surviving by eating offal. Yes. You filet a fish, what you have left is the head and the backbones. Tons and tons and tons of this maggot-infested garbage, which the locals put on racks to dry out a little (you can’t dry Nile Perch like they used to dry native fish, it’s too fatty), then boiled in cauldrons that look to have been imported direct from Hell, and then … you eat it. I can’t imagine what it smells like, and don’t want to think what it tastes like. Not only do you eat it, you are glad to have it, and to have a job wading in the white man’s rotting garbage.

And human ingenuity seems to know no bounds. The swarms of street children (all too many with only one leg, from landmines) have figured out how to distill something from the fish heads that seems to work pretty much like airplane glue. You huff this stuff and feel no pain at all, which is no small thing if both your parents are dead from “the virus” and you’re sleeping on concrete. Meanwhile, a Christian preacher tells his flock not to use condoms because it’s a sin. Meanwhile, the wars go on …

Oh, Africa. IMDb.com

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) If you ignore the fact that it is relentlessly stupid, poorly written, scientifically laughable, and totally predictable ... it’s actually kind of good. By that I mean that sometimes I’m in the mood for a big, mindless adventure on the big, big, big screen, and today I was in that mood. This is a throwback to the old days of the big "disaster" movie, which was begun by The Poseidon Adventure, which I also liked. It’s like those movies: big and dumb, but with SFX that actually convince, rather than looking like models filmed in slow motion, as in Earthquake. A smarter script and characters you can believe in wouldn’t have hurt, as in, say, Deep Impact, but you can’t have everything. And any way you look at it, it’s a better use of $100 million worth of CGI than Van Helsing. IMDb.com

Day For Night (La nuit Américaine) (French, 1973) “Day for night” is the term for shooting through dark filters to make it appear that it’s nighttime. Unless you have a really good cinematographer, it looks really crappy. The French call it “La nuit Américaine,” a tribute to Hollywood, which invented the technique.

This movie is quite simply the best ever made about the process of moviemaking. It shows all the minutiae, from trimming lots of cigarettes to one inch lengths for retakes, to foaming an entire outdoor city set when it’s decided the scene would shoot better in snow. It even tackles the greatest truth about filmmaking that is never addressed: That it is the most boring activity imaginable 90% of the time. Most of the time, everybody is sitting around waiting for someone else to do his job. That’s a tall order, portraying the great stretches of inaction without being boring yourself, and Truffaut manages it wonderfully.

So why do people do it? Ah, Truffaut knows the reason for that, too, and shows it brilliantly. When it is operating, a film set is the most exciting place on Earth, short of the front lines of a war. You live for that rush, for wrapping a scene, for the frantic running around to get something someone has forgotten. For the insanity of trying to get a kitten to lap at a bowl of milk in just the right way. Truffaut understands actors, but more important to me, he understands crew, all those hundreds of people behind the camera who work like peons to put the magic on the screen – the grips, the focus pullers, the prop men, the script girls. The assistant directors, without whom no “auteur” director would last three hours on any movie set in the world. All of them are problem solvers at heart, quick and adaptable, ready to turn any reverse into a challenge.

And it’s funny! These are volatile people. Egos clash, romances abound, betrayal is always only a moment away. It is clear that the movie the director (played by Truffaut himself) is making is a piece of shit ... but he works just as hard as if he was making Citizen Kane. The process of making a great film and making a stinker is exactly the same, as I learned to my dismay. You would not work in this business unless you truly, truly loved it, which is another thing I learned. From top to bottom, movie people love their trade and their craft. If they don’t, they don’t last long. As one girl says to a newcomer who is running away with a stuntman, “I’d dump a man for a film, but I’d never dump a film for a man.” She’s got it right. When you’re a part of that tight, temporary little family that gathers to make movie magic, the film is everything, more important than love, much more important than sex and food and shelter.

God, I love the movies. IMDb.com

A Day Without a Mexican (2004) We were looking forward to this one. It’s a great idea: All the Hispanics in Cahleefornia disappear one day, and the state is cut off from the rest of the world. It’s a situation ripe for satire, and there are a few laughs here and there. But the execution is dismal. The acting is bad, the cinematic technique is non-existent, and it switches right in the middle from light-hearted to soapy drama. The message is driven home with a sledgehammer. The movie literally stops to deliver facts and statistics. A real stinker. For a more thoughtful examination of the Hispanic situation in the US, I’m waiting for The Tortilla Curtain, based on an excellent novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle. IMDb.com

The Dead Girl (2006) Toni Collette finds the body of a girl who has been raped, mutilated, and murdered in a field where she is walking. She reports it to the police, earning a blistering scolding from her bedridden, crazy mother, Piper Laurie, who is basically channeling her own performance in Carrie. There is a deep, dark secret in this household. Toni wants to be tied up and raped … maybe. We never find out anything more about her, as we quickly jump to another character, an assistant coroner who, in her examination of the body, thinks it may be her sister who vanished from a park 15 years ago. Her mother will “never give up hope!” though it’s obvious the sister is dead, and it’s tearing the family apart. And that’s how it goes, as we see different people whose lives are affected by the death of this young woman. The acting is very good, and so is the writing, and some of it is deeply affecting … but it began to seem like a film school exercise, albeit with some real acting talent on board. IMDb.com

Dead Like Me (2003, DVD) This is on Showtime, and it’s killing me that the new season is starting in a few weeks and we don’t get it. The first season is on 4 DVDs: the 75-minute pilot on the first one, and about a dozen 45-minute episodes on the others. George (Georgia) Lass is an 18-year-old girl who is killed by a re-entering toilet seat from the Mir space station. This is only the first of the unlikely ways to die in this show. She finds she’s become one of the undead, whose job it is to take the souls out of people just before they die. They meet every morning in a waffle house where Rube (Mandy Patinkin) gives them post-it notes with an initial and a last name, an address, and an ETD (Estimated Time of Death). Turns out being dead is just another job, and a lousy one at that: you don’t get paid, you have to loot corpses and live in dead peoples’ apartments, and you probably need a day job. You can’t be killed again, but you sure can be hurt. This series mixes very black humor with real feeling. You have to laugh, death is inevitable for all of us, but the tragedy of it is not ignored, particularly the horror of still being around to see the effect your death has on your own family. I haven’t begun to tell you how much fun this thing is. A must see. So must see that we switched to Showtime just in time for the new season. IMDb.com

Dead Poets Society (1989) I remember I liked it at the time, but don’t remember much. Not a good sign. IMDb.com

Deadfall (1968) I’ve been trying to recall why I ordered this movie, what attracted me to it, and other than the fact that Michael Caine is in it, I just can’t remember. And now I regret it. He and the director, Bryan Forbes, had worked together two years before in The Wrong Box, a neglected gem. Forbes did some quite good movies in the ‘60s, then his career sort of petered out. This movie is derivative in almost any way you can look at it. The music is by John Barry and Shirley Bassey, and is so reminiscent of the James Bond films of the time I kept expecting somebody to order a martini, “shaken, not stirred.” (Yeah, right, James, as if you could tell the difference.) Jewel heist movies were in vogue at the time, so maybe I was hoping for Gambit or Topkapi. This one gets the heist out of the way at the end of the first hour (it happens during a guitar concerto recital, evoking—not to its credit—Hitchcock’s second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much), and then descends into an incomprehensible love affair and wildly unsatisfactory ending. IMDb.com

Death at a Funeral (2007) Frank Oz (the voice of Miss Piggy) in his other life as a director, has given us Little Shop of Horrors and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, two of my all-time favorites, and HouseSitter, another good one, though not quite on a par with the first two. This movie is more on that scale. We laughed a lot. No point getting into plot, as there isn’t much of it, only set-up and elaboration. A group of family and friends get together at a very nice country cottage in England for the funeral of the father of two brothers who don’t get along well. It starts slowly, but that’s all right, you have to get to know this large cast of people, each with his or her own agenda, and this is done smoothly in a series of small sketches. Then the fun begins. Who is that dwarf, and why is than naked man standing on the roof? There’s a certain amount of gross-out humor, but nothing like we’ve seen in other recent comedies.

I have to mention Peter Dinklage. I have liked this little dude every since his starring role in The Station Agent and hilarious turn as a very angry elf in Elf. He just keeps getting better. He is so expressive with his face, and can make the smallest shrug or gesture carry a lot of weight. He is very good here. And I was so happy to see him, a few years ago, playing a part that had absolutely nothing to do with being a dwarf. This was in Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty, where he played a defense lawyer. Kudos to Lumet for his casting wisdom.

One aside: Jane Asher plays the mother of the two sons. Both Lee and I were sure we’d heard the name, and we were both right, in different contexts. She impressed me with a small, poignant part in the original Alfie (the only one worth seeing). And she was engaged for a while to Paul McCartney. Some even called her his muse. They say “Here, There and Everywhere” was written to her.

Second aside: There is a fair amount of whispering early on in this movie. Whispering in the movies is never my favorite thing, unless the sound engineer understands that it should be a stage whisper, that is, one that can be heard in the last row of the balcony. Such a thing is possible, just ask any good stage actor. Alas, whispering in a British accent becomes damn near indecipherable to me. I had to turn on the English subtitles. IMDb.com

The Death of a President (2006) This mockumentary is rated PPP, for Pure Progressive Pornography.

I like porn. Any guy who tells you he doesn't is either a eunuch or a liar. In porn, all girls are young and beautiful, perpetually horny, and willing to jump into bed in a split second and do a threesome and beg you to give it to them in the ass. What's not to like? The director here, Gabriel Range, has made what is essentially political porn. (The "Progressive" label is the currently fashionable word that I guess best describes my politics, though I have a libertarian bent, too. I'm sure not a Democrat anymore, and Liberal seems to have fallen out of favor. I can't imagine why.)

If you are a progressive, too, you've thought about it. Don't lie to me, you've thought about it! What if, instead of the 645 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes and 18 seconds (by the Bush's Last Days countdown clock on my refrigerator) Monkey Boy still has left to inflict more death and destruction—maybe even a shot at genocide!—on the people of the world and more damage to our democratic institutions ... what if, instead of all that time for mischief on a scale the country has never before seen, he were to die ...

RIGHT NOW!!!

Wouldn't you get a charge out of that? I would. Doesn't that ... you know ... arouse you? It sure arouses me. So lay it on me, Gabe!

And there he is, arriving on Air Force One, working the crowd, plowing through the crowds of demonstrators in his black stretch armored limo, giving another lying speech ... coming out of the hotel in a scene that is lasciviously reminiscent of Ronald Reagan exiting another hotel on another day ... oh, yes, yes, I'm getting excited, where's that lotion?  ... there is the head of the Secret Service being interviewed later, saying he just "had a feeling" ... oh, yeah, baby, give it to me ... there's Monkey Boy in his last minutes of life, working the crowd again ... and suddenly, two muffled gunshots! ... oh, Gabe, give it to me! A little lower ... that's right, that's it, harder, harder, harder! ... Monkey Boy looks puzzled, and is thrown into the limo, which streaks away into the night ... oh god oh god oh god I'm cuuuuummmmmiiiiiing!!!

Oh, jeez. Was that as good for you as it was for me? (Well, it was pretty damn good, my hand replies.) The "money shot" wasn't all it could have been, there wasn't much blood and I'd hoped we'd see it again from several angles in slow motion, but you can't have everything ... you have to leave room for a sequel! Yes! Gabe even worked that part right. The downside of Monkey Boy getting offed is, of course, that Dick "Short Dong" Cheney becomes the president ... but this was all taking place on October 19, 2008, only weeks away from the election, and though Short Dong quickly finds an Ay-rab fall guy and seems prepared to nuke Syria, he'll only be in office a short time. So I think Gabe really ought to make this into a trilogy. Part Two: The Death of a Vice-President by Extremely Painful Impacted Bowel Before He Can Be Sworn in to Succeed George W Bush. Part Three: The Inauguration of the First Female President. (Okay, the titles need some work, but you see where I'm going.) After that, who knows? Through the magic of CGI we could have a whole genre of Monkey Boy assassination movies:

Dubya Does Dallas

Squeaky Fromme Gets it Right

An Evening at Ford's Theater

John Hinckley Finally Impresses Jodie Foster

(So, is there anyone out there I haven't offended yet? Write me, and I'll see if I can come up with something. If I have offended you, don't bother to write; It means you accept Monkey Boy as your president, and I've done my job. I don't need to hear from you.)

Now, how does this work as a movie, aside from all the fun stuff of seeing Monkey Boy bite the big one? I'd have to say, damn well. First I applied an acid test: Would I feel differently if the subject of the movie had been Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter? The answer is no. This movie has been carefully thought out and impeccably staged. I had to keep reminding myself that the people in it were actors, not actual participants. I think Short Dong Cheney's reaction to the events is pretty much exactly the way he would react. The "Bush" people interviewed seemed sincerely moved, to have really loved the man. (I know it's hard to believe, but I know some people do.) It even has a twist ending, where it turns out what we thought we knew isn't actually the truth ... and even better, the twist affects nothing, as the powers that be are already too deeply invested in their version of the "truth," so that to go back now would mean losing face, admitting that the system sometimes does not work, and blowing a yummy opportunity to once more stick it to innocent Arabs and make tons more money in the oil bidness. It all rings true.

There is one disturbing scene that I suspect will pass right over the heads of many people because we're so used to it, but that sums up, to me, much of what is wrong with the country. As the ambulance is arriving at the hospital the SS is already at work "sterilizing the environment," providing the level of absolutely insane security that has become the norm in this country. This means immediately evicting all the people waiting for treatment in the emergency room. We see them shambling out, bleeding, on crutches, dazed, confused. One man, interviewed later, says the SS was screaming "Get out! Get the fuck out!" These are injured people ... but the fuckin' PRESIDENT is coming, and he is so vastly much more important than they are.

Take a hypothetical case. Say there's a gravely injured 5-year-old girl on the operating table in there. Doctors are working feverishly to save her life. The SS arrives, tells everybody to fuck off, all doctors are to get to work on saving the life of Monkey Boy. Do I think they would shove that little girl out onto the street? You bet your ass I do. Garbage, that's all we are to them.

Ah, you say, but the fact that Monkey Boy is in there, dying, proves we don't have enough security around him. What he needs is more security. And I say to you, So fucking what? Dead presidents is the price we pay for being the most bullet-riddled and gun-poisoned society in the Western World. We don't need no steenkin' Ay-rabs; all our dead presidents have been cut down by good ol' American boys! Even the folks who missed (some of them women, and who says we've made no progress in sexual equality?) were American! We should take some pride in that. Goddammit, we take care of our own! And what's so important about a president anyway? We've had four of 'em blown away, and the Republic resumed its work after only a brief hiccup. Those founding fathers knew what the were doing when they provided for a spare.

Assassination is merely an extreme form of dissent. I think presidents ought to walk to work, like Harry Truman did, with maybe half a dozen DC cops. I don't think airports and freeways should be shut down when the prez comes to town. Let him sit in rush hour traffic, like the rest of us. You don't think that's a good idea? Then wall him up in the White House and don't let him leave until the end of his term. If he has something to say to us, he can say it on TV.

And one more gloomy thought occurred to me about an hour later. Monkey Boy has just been foully murdered by a steenkin' Syrian Ay-rab on October 19, 2008. (That's their story, and they're sticking to it.) Do you think that would be enough to push tough-on-terror Rudy Giuliani, or stay-the-course John McCain, or whatever pathetic tool of the oil companies the Republicans nominate next year over the top 18 days later, on Tuesday, November 6, 2008?

Probably. IMDb.com

Deep Crimson (Profundo carmesí) (Mexican, 1996) A fat, schizoid woman meets a penny-ante, bald, vain, grifter lothario and she moves in with him, going so far as to abandon her two children because she “loves” him so much. Either of these two, alone, would have been relatively harmless. The woman would have continued to cluelessly raise her kids, the man would have continued to steal money from lonely women like her. But every once in a while a combination of people is a lot more than the sum of the parts. Sometimes, the result is very bad. A combination of self-obsession, jealousy, and god-knows-what pathology results in serial murders, including the drowning of a little girl because she witnessed the murder of her mother.

This movie is strongly based on the “Lonely Hearts Murderers” of the 1940s, except for being transplanted to Mexico. I have read that the director, Arturo Ripstein, is probably the most respected director in Mexico ... by the Mexicans. Apparently few of his movies have crossed the border; I haven’t seen a one of them. If this is a typical example, I’m not too surprised. It is not cheerful. It is quite funny at first, then whipsaws you into horror. The camera moves constantly, but not in a distracting fashion, no jiggling or quick cuts, just enough motion to make you edgy. The color is fantastic, as is the writing and acting. The scenery is as bleak as these people’s minds. There is surely genius at work here, but not a genius that everyone will appreciate. I’d like to see more movies by Ripstein. IMDb.com

Deep Impact (1998) I liked this movie, though apparently I was one of the few. Sure, it’s a formula disaster picture, but I’m a fan of Tea Leoni, and Morgan Freeman is very good. Usually you don’t much care for the characters in a film like this, but I did this time. I was touched, and awed by the special effects, which were on a whole new level for the time. Of course there’s better now (see The Day After Tomorrow, above), but this had a better story and better science, if you ignore the ridiculous spaceship stuff. IMDb.com

Deep Water (2006) In 1967 Francis Chichester became the first person to sail solo around the world (by one definition of circumnavigation, anyway). This feat so enthralled Britons and the world in general that The Sunday Times soon announced The Golden Globe Race (Spoiler Link). Chichester had made one stop in Australia. This race was to be non-stop. Nine boats entered. Only one boat completed the trip.

I had expected this to be about the physical rigors of such a voyage … and it is, but that’s not the main focus. The sea is a formidable adversary, but your own mind can be much worse. One of the racers was Donald Crowhurst (Spoiler Link), a weekend sailor who had no business leaving the Thames, much less entering the Roaring Forties around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. He soon realized this. If he kept on, he was a dead man. But if he turned back he was not only disgraced but financially ruined, too. So he began faking it, intending to hover off the coast of Argentina until the others came around, then fall in behind them. He didn’t intend to win, he just wanted people to think he’d finished. But oh, how fate has a way of fucking us up when we least expect it … That’s all I’ll say. You know, going in, that he’s not going to survive, but the manner of his downfall is the stuff of Greek tragedy. IMDb.com

Delicatessen (1991, French) Jean-Pierre Jeunet got his start in commercials and music videos, where visuals are everything. He made five films in about a decade, none of which got any distribution in the US, none of them available on DVD, and then he made this one, then City of Lost Children, then Amélie, then A Very Long Engagement. (Somewhere in there he also, unaccountably, made the execrable Alien: Resurrection. I have to assume it was because he needed the money. That's okay; most artists, from Michelangelo to William Faulkner to Orson Welles have worked for paychecks. I know I have. The key is not to do it too often.) We saw the last three in order, then went back to pick up this one. Taking the four movies together, it's an interesting evolution, and boy, do I hope Jeunet continues in the direction he's been going, because it would mean we have some amazing stuff to look forward to.

The first two are startlingly original in their looks, and in many events, which are comic and complicated and often involve wonderful Rube Goldberg-type devices or concatenations of events. Both of them exist in alternate universes. They are audacious, brilliantly designed and lit and imagined ... but both of them forgot two things that are really needed: a bit of a plot, and a bit of rooting interest. Delicatessen is about a post-apocalyptic world where nobody has enough food, and a butcher is providing human meat. Old idea (Sweeney Todd, Eating Raoul, The Green Butchers, and that's just off the top of my head), but handled with wit and Jeunet's own very weird take on things. But it really has nowhere to go, and though the final scenes are amazing, they don't add up to anything.

Then he made Amélie, and people started to pay attention, because suddenly he got it right. He got everything right. He throttled down the weirdness and created a Paris that was cleaner and brighter and sweeter than any "real" Paris ever was, and Audrey Tautou created a character I loved instantly and will always love. It is simply one of the best films ever made, and I'm not alone in that estimate: It's an amazing #29 on the IMDb's Top 100. A Very Long Engagement was more of the same, not quite as good (it will be hard to match Amélie), but wonderful and touching and inventive. His next project is Life of Pi, due in 2007, and I will be at the head of the line to see it. IMDb.com

Deliver Us From Evil (2006) I'd better warn you. This is going to get nasty. If you are a Catholic who believes the church hierarchy is somehow above you, better than you are (which is what they believe, it's doctrine; look it up!), then I'm giving you an especially strong warning. Get out of here while you can, before I insult everything you believe in. Go somewhere else. (I recommend Agnus Dei.) Of course, if your faith is strong, if you believe that what the high men of the church do is invariably for the good, if they truly can do no wrong, as is said of the Pope, and you have a thick skin about it ... well, then, tighten up your cilice, get your scourge handy, and hold onto your rosary, because it's going to be a bumpy review ...

I despise the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Let me add two caveats to soften that just a little. 1) I despise a lot of churches. Practically all of them. 2) I have nothing against individual Catholics, the laity. I judge them as individuals, as I judge anyone else. Don't shove your religion in my face, and we'll get along fine. It's the hierarchy, from the priesthood, to the bishop-pricks, to the Kollege of Kardinals, to the Pimp himself (sorry, I meant Pope), that I abominate. I am willing to admit that there are probably a great number of truly good men on the priestly level, but by the time you get to be a bishop you are, by definition, an ass-kisser, political, corrupt, and willing to lie and cover up for "the good of the Church," and individuals be damned. And the priests, even the good ones, take orders from these shitheads, so how good can they be?

It is the Roman Catholic Church, with the emphasis on Roman. Never forget that. Rome began as a republic, and ended up a dictatorship. The early church, with a small c, was believers getting together and worshipping. Then some people got the idea of patterning Christianity on the most successful institution of its day: The Roman Empire. The Empire was organized from the top down. Emperor, Praetorian Guard, legions, cohorts ... I'm no historian, I don't know the chain of command, but the Empire was clearly the model for the Catholic Church. It is paternalistic, absolutist. It brooks no argument, no dissent. It is, literally, infallible! There is nothing, not one word, in the Bible about any of this. It was all evolved in the first few centuries AD. You don't question orders from the top, and you do anything and everything to preserve the Unit, the Corps, and God. Wait a minute ... isn't that the Marine Corp ethic? Well, it should sound familiar, as the Church is a profoundly military organization. There is another organization that the Church very much resembles, also patterned on the Roman Empire. That organization is the Mafia.

One of the most peculiar institutions of the Church is celibacy. Again, there is nothing in the Bible about this. Jesus did not advocate it. In fact, for the first four centuries of its existence, priests were allowed to marry. Then some enterprising Pope (I don't know which one) had a brainstorm. Priests were leaving their estates to their eldest sons, just like everybody else did. But if they couldn't marry, couldn't reproduce ... hmmmm. The Church could get all of it! Which is precisely what they did, and began amassing wealth that, 1600 years later, is obscene ... and all un-taxed in the USA!

I mention all this to get to the core of the problem, as laid out in this excruciating film. What sort of Army of Christ do you get when you only allow celibate men into the ranks? You get men who know nothing of sex, nothing of women, nothing of relationships between the sexes. You get Church doctrine that views all sex except that between husband and wife as equally sinful, whether it's a roll in the hay with a pretty secretary, "sodomy" between two consenting men, bestiality ... or raping a nine-month-old infant. All the same sin, all forgivable. You get a large complement of homosexuals, who enjoy the company of other men and who must suppress their natural urges just as their straight brethren.

And you get pedophiles. Of course you do, just as you get them in the Boy Scouts. Pedophiles go where the children are, and there are children in parochial schools and in the church itself. Any rational organization would be on the lookout for these monsters, and would have evolved ways to deal with them. But though the Church (any church) is not rational, by definition, they have evolved a way to deal with these situations, and it's a simple one:

1) Cover it up.

2) Never talk about it.

3) Move the offender to another parish.

4) Praise God!

Yeah, I hear they have a special retreat or two where they send baby-raping priests, where they can contemplate their sins, confess, get right with God ... and then what? Back to another parish? Very likely. In fact, few priests get sent to these places. Most are just shipped off to another unsuspecting congregation, with no warning from the diocese, which has full and certain knowledge of the man's crimes.

It all worked pretty well for a long, long time. Now it's blowing up in the Church's face like a nuclear bomb filled with pigshit. Can you say hallelujah!!!

This movie centers around a piece of human garbage named Oliver O'Grady, who molested children all over Northern California from 1971 to 1991, with the full knowledge of the diocese, which kept shuttling him from church to church. His victims included, by his own admission, a nine-month-old girl. Three victims and the family of one victim were willing to come forward and tell their stories, and they are heartbreaking beyond belief. O'Grady himself agreed to be interviewed, and he admits everything, almost cheerfully. He is living well back in his native Ireland, with no restrictions whatever on his behavior, on a pension provided by a beneficent Church. He is sorry for "what happened." "It never should have happened," he says. They should have stopped him. This passive voice is common among sociopaths who have done the unthinkable. Something "happened." It happened to me, as much as it "happened" to my victims. I believe that once, once, in this whole film, he actually steps up to the plate and says "I'm sorry for what I did." Must have been a slip of the tongue. He even writes letters to his victims, inviting them to Ireland to discuss how he ruined their lives. I assume he expects to perform an act of contrition—a few dozen Hail Marys, maybe—and then there'll be hugs all around! His victims are way beyond revolted by his gesture. They see it—properly, I believe—as just one more attempt to get under their skins, to twist the knife one more time.

In the reviews I read much is made of the horror, the supreme ickiness, of watching this man talk about what "happened" to him and the children he raped. And it's true, it is stomach-turning on a level Hannibal Lector never achieved. But most of the reviewers seem to have missed, or minimized, the true horror scenes here, and that is the spectacle of seeing the higher-ups in the Church—only two of them, and in the form of depositions that are on the public record and thus beyond their control—testifying in the civil cases brought by the families ... and lying, lying, lying. The liar-in-chief is a man who, in my book, has committed crimes that dwarf the things done by that pathetic turd O'Grady, and that is then-Bishop, now Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, His Eminence Roger Cardinal Mahony. He has lied to his parishioners, to police, in depositions, on the witness stand, to reporters (when he will talk at all), and to the families of victims. The only person he has not lied to, it seems, is then-Cardinal Ratfucker (now Pope Benedict), and in the LA Times this very day I find this, concerning the on-going and (I hope) everlasting shitstorm surrounding all Catholic affairs in the US:

Lie, lie, lie. Still lying, still Cardinal. This is a holy man? This man, my Catholic friends, is somehow better than you? I submit that he is worse than O'Grady and Caffoe, because we presume that these sick men were unable to stop their vile compulsions. But Mahony simply covered up their crimes and sent them off to rape more children ... knowing that these creeps would do so! Which is the greater crime? Which makes your skin crawl more? It's no contest with me. It is the sick old men who run the Church who have committed the deed, just as if they themselves had shoved their atrophied old pricks up the ass of that infant girl ...

Having said all that, I guess I'd better establish my bone fides. I was raised Protestant. Lutheran, in fact. You know, the church named for that troublesome fellow who caused all that ruckus back in the 16^th Century, when the Catholic Church was engaged in some practices that now even they admit were a bit extreme, perhaps a tad corrupt. Luther shook things up, and many atrocities were committed by both sides. The protesters split off and became many sects, while the juggernaut of the Church rolled merrily on, a bit smaller but hardly less powerful, though its territory was halved. So I was brought up to be deeply suspicious of popery, graven images, mass, confession, nuns. Does this color my thinking? Possibly, a little, but I must add that I despise many Protestant denominations as much as I do the Catholic Church, though in different ways. The difference is, if you're Protestant there is a range of options open to you, from the unbridled bigotry of the Southern Baptists and Evangelicals, to the easy-going Unitarians. If you're Catholic, you obey all Church doctrines or get excommunicated, end of story. Nowhere else to go.

It's all coming home to roost now, though. These serial scandals, from Boston to Portland to Los Angeles—well, there is no diocese that isn't in deep trouble—have cost the Church billions so far, with no end in sight. The Diocese of San Diego had to declare bankruptcy. There are 500 lawsuits in Los Angeles alone. With punitive damages now authorized, the awards could be in the millions for each plaintiff.

I tell you what, boys. It's time to come clean, it's time to do the right thing, all the way up to Rome. It's time to cleanse your souls, and maybe—just maybe—St. Peter will go easy on you. It is said that the various diocesan treasuries are cash-poor, but rich in land. I know what the Church's knee-jerk reaction will be when faced with multiple billions in settlements: Hell, just ask the peons in South America to double their contributions. A few years of that, we'll be sitting pretty again. That's what your wealth is built on these days, anyway, the sweat of the poor.

Not this time. It's time for the world's biggest garage sale. Hang a sign on the Vatican:

LOST OUR LEASE!

CRAZY BENNY SEZ "EVERYTHING MUST GO!"

NO REASONABLE OFFER REFUSED!

Put it all out there on the piazza on card tables. The vestments, the mitres, the crowns, the jewels, the picture frames, the Swiss Guards, the Pieta, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the extensive collection of pornographic sno-globes, the 24-carat bingo cages. When you're cash-poor, you sell your stuff, and the Catholic Church has one of the world's most impressive collections of stuff. Lease the Vatican to Disney for 99 years, let them develop Inquisition World and keep a portion of the gate. Sell cathedrals and churches around the world. Buy some old tents, do like the southern revival preachers do. Rent the pope a 5^th-floor cold water walk-up on the Via Veneto, or in Rome, Georgia. Let him get back to the people, see what they think about shielding child molesters.

Okay, I shouldn't have played it for laughs there, but I couldn't resist. But I am dead serious. Make the sons of bitches pay. It's the right thing to  do.

Oh, and the movie? ... it's damn good. You must see it, if you can stand to. IMDb.com

De-Lovely (2004) When I heard they were making a movie about Cole Porter I thought, How bad can it be? The answer is, it can’t be bad, not with all that delovely music, but it can sure fall short of what it might have been. There is a big problem with Cole Porter’s life, which is that the first and second acts are fabulous, but the third act is awful. He had everything: huge wealth, wit, talent, acclaim, a loving and supremely understanding wife, and all the boys he could ever wish for. About the only problem he had was that homosexuality was ... er, frowned on in those days, but he didn’t seem to worry too much even about that. Then he fell off a horse and crushed his legs, and his remaining days were agony. Even then he had it all, until one of his legs was finally amputated, and he never wrote another note.

The film itself is Porter reviewing his life in an empty theater, which was done much better in All That Jazz. And, for my taste, entirely too many of the numbers are sung by Kevin Kline, and not well. Apparently this was done because Porter himself was no great singer. Kline could have done better, I’ve seen him do much better in The Pirates of Penzance.

However, bottom line, there are still all those wonderful old tunes, of which there are none better. I’ll watch it again, and fast forward through the talky parts. IMDb.com

The Departed (2006) First feature at The Vineland. IMDb.com

The Descent (2005) A truly scary movie is a pearl beyond price. That's because there's so few of them. I, myself, have only been truly frightened at the movies three times: with Psycho, Jaws, and Alien. Oh, I've jumped now and then, when the pet cat leaps out of the darkness, the sign of a true asshole director. Repulsion and The Exorcist came close to making the list. Rosemary's Baby and Open Water had a few moments. That's it. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

My standards are very, very high. Nightmare on Elm Street is not scary. I repeat: there is nothing scary about Freddie; Freddie is a yawn. Halloween is boring. Slasher films, gorefests, dead teenager movies ... I can go soundly to sleep. The entire genre of "horror" is the most stultifying, least original, most by-the-numbers there is. I long ago gave up even looking at even a few of them. Saw? Fuck Saw, I didn't bother. Fuck Saw II twice, fuck Saw III thrice, and when Saw IV gets here, fuck it, too.

So when I noticed the almost universally good reviews for this one, I decided to give it a chance. And I'm sorry to report that it is two films, cut almost exactly down the middle: A fine, claustrophobic, truly tense thriller; and a stupid blood-squirter, beginning at about minute 45 of this 99 minute story.

We've had a fair number of good mountain-climbing films. Acrophobia is one of the most common fears. Lee can't watch films that have characters dangling over the edge of a cliff. Probably the next most common fear is claustrophobia, so why haven't we have more movies about caving? Offhand, I can't recall any. I've never done any spelunking myself, but I've read about it, and the first half of this movie captures the insanity of wiggling along a tiny passage through solid rock as well as anything I've ever seen. (Lee had to leave when they went underground.) Caves have big rooms, with flattish floors, sure, but much of the underground world is a crazy jigsaw with ups and downs and sideways, and huge jumbles of fallen rock, and it's just not a very inviting place for human beings. You bring a lot of equipment, and you'd better bring a lot of nerve, too, and physical strength is a necessity. The Descent shows the real caving experience very well ...

... until minute 46 or so. Then the spooks arrive, in the form of blind, mutant, subterranean Gollums who exist solely to kill and eat our six intrepid heroines (who really had been smart and intrepid up to that point), as they could not possibly have fed themselves for the thousands of years it would have taken them to evolve like that. It's as if Jason in his hockey mask showed up halfway through Jaws and started killing people on the beach. Suddenly the cave looks like rubber and papier-mâché, and there's plenty of room for the actresses to run foolishly around and bump into monsters. Plot logic flies out the window, and we're left with a dead twenty-something movie where the only question is who gets her throat ripped out next. It wasn't a question I was at all interested in by then. IMDb.com

The Devil Came on Horseback (2007) Brian Steidle isn’t your usual world-saving Peace Corp member, not the kind of guy you might expect to make a movie like this. He’s an ex-Marine, and got a job with the African National Congress to be an unarmed observer in the south of Sudan, trying to keep the peace. Later he gravitated north and west, toward Darfur, and the things he saw there changed him forever. I put off watching this because we often watch DVDs as we’re eating dinner, and I didn’t relish stuffing my face while looking at skeletal African children. Well, there weren’t any of those. The displaced people we see in Chad look adequately fed and sheltered, though they have nothing but the clothes on their backs. It’s the 100,000 to 500,000 left behind (who really knows how many?), burned alive and butchered by a bunch of thugs called Janjaweed, armed and supported by the Islamic regime in Khartoum, who don’t look so good. There are plenty of pictures of those, and don’t bring a weak stomach. Steidle tries to shows these pictures to people in the west, who are properly disgusted. Some actually try to do something about it. To no apparent effect. International organizations spend a lot of time trying to define “genocide.” Does all this sound familiar? Can there be such a thing as genocidal burnout? Just in recent memory there has been Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now Darfur—which is happening as I write this, ladies and gents, while our “leaders” sit around with their thumbs up their asses. The only one anyone did anything about was Bosnia/Serbia, and that was too little and too late for many thousands. (That was white people. Coincidence? Discuss …) And guess who controls the oil in Sudan, the oil that—this time—is badly wanted by China and Russia? Why, it’s those lying Islamic cocksuckers in Khartoum, who see the mostly black, Christian or animist southerners as less than human. Jeez. I’m so tired. IMDb.com

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) I'll admit it, this movie started out with 4 strikes against it, because it asks me to accept that the world of fashion really matters. It's basically the old Cinderella story girls love so much, because it tells them that if they just put on some pretty clothes and have a fashion make-over on Oprah they'll stop being the boring, ordinary women they actually are. Only these days, of course, Cinderella finds out that Prince Charming is really a snake, and goes back to her boring, ordinary original boyfriend. I'd have liked it more if Anne Hathaway had just said Fuck it, and fallen for the whole empty lifestyle that included $1900 handbags pulled out of the garbage can ... and I suspect many of the women for which this garbage was made would like it better that way, too. The people in this movie are so shallow they don't need to open doors, they can just slide right under them, and so superficial they dare not go out in the rain or their faces will wash off. Not their makeup, their faces. Meryl Streep plays (excellently, as always) the Osama bin Laden of the fashion world, a person who treats everyone else in the world as objects with no actual reality. A sociopath, basically; if she were a man she'd be a mass murderer on the order of Ted Bundy. There is the obligatory scene where it is revealed that she actually does have a heart, or at least a spleen that takes the function of a heart, and I didn't believe a moment of it. They try to have it both ways, as a satire of the vicious world of fashion, and as a glorification of it. Don't think so? I know that a million little female hearts went pit-a-pat at Hathaway's caterpillar-into-a-butterfly transformation (which we saw coming from way down Broadway, like every other scene here), and the way the jaws dropped on those anorexic bitches she works with. It doesn't work, because Hathaway looks fine in rags. Stanley Tucci is good, as always. Otherwise, a big zero. IMDb.com

Les Diaboliques (France, 1955) One more gap in my cinema knowledge filled in. There are still a few real classics out there I haven't seen, but now there is one less.

Henri-Georges Clouzot was the French Hitchcock, though with less of a sense of humor and the absurd. In fact, Hitch wanted this script, and Clouzot beat him out by a matter of hours, or so the legend goes. Before this he made Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), absolutely one of the most suspenseful movies ever made, and part of a really rare twosome: William Friedkin remade it—almost always a bad idea—and Sorcerer was almost as good as the original. Better in some parts. (Sorcerer is my nominee for Worst Movie Title of All Time, in the sense that it would have been a great title for a swords and dragons epic, but totally stinks as the title of a movie about men driving trucks full of unstable dynamite through the jungle. People didn't know what they were being asked to shell out money for, so it never found its audience. Even worse, it began with four subtitled sequences, deadly in the US at that time. People were walking out, indignant. The producers even went back and added a card in front assuring the audience that this was an English language film. Didn't work; the film still laid an egg.)

I won't even get into the plot. Clouzot included a plea at the end, basically "Don't tell your friends what happens!" Again, he was ahead of Hitchcock, who didn't allow anyone to be seated in the theater during the last half hour of Psycho, a revolutionary idea back then, when people often wandered in at any time, watched the end, then stayed for the cartoon, newsreel, short subject, the second feature, and the beginning. Suffice it to say that the surprise ending carries a lot less fright value today than it did back then, when it must have been awesome. Today, a writer would have added two or three more "surprise" twists. That's not a bad thing, I guess—we're a lot harder to surprise now than we were in 1955—but it's so seldom done well.

Stylistically it's very noir, very deliberate in building its suspense, and very well acted by the icy Simone Signoret, the loathsome Paul Meurisse, and the scared-shitless Vera Clouzot, the director's wife. I will be haunted for a long time by Mme. Clouzot's final scene. I do, however, have a big question concerning the end. Unfortunately, I can't ask it here without revealing way too much. So if you've already seen the film, click HERE to see the question. IMDb.com

Diamond Men (2000) Robert Forster is one of the most under-appreciated men working in movies. Maybe some day he will get his big break, like William H. Macy did in Fargo. This might have been a routine "old pro teaches a lesson to the young upstart" formula, but it is much more than that. Excellent. IMDb.com

Dirty Pretty Things (2002) I’ve now seen Audrey Tautou in four movies, and she was excellent in all of them. In fact two of them (Amelie, and He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not) are among the best films I’ve seen in years. See all of them. IMDb.com

Distant (Uzak) (Turkish, 2002) Shot one: A guy is walking across a snowy field toward the camera. This takes two minutes. He passes out of camera view. Shot two: a bus appears in the far distance. It approaches. This takes one minute. Now we see the credits, black with unintelligible noises over it. We’re six minutes into the film, 8640 frames of film have been wasted, and nothing has happened! Nothing continues to happen for 110 minutes. At one point two guys watch a boring movie on the TV, and it’s better than the film they’re in. A strong candidate for a Gerry award. The only thing of any interest to me was the little car they drive, which is a Smart. It’s cute. And it has more personality than anyone in the movie. I liked it. Depressing movies about depressed people always make me feel so fortunate. IMDb.com

Disturbia (2007) Second feature at the drive-in with Next. IMDb.com

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004) This movie is big, dumb, over-the-top, crude, and obvious. That’s okay, so am I, sometimes. Or sometimes I’m just in the mood for something big, dumb, etc. I was predisposed to like this movie for one simple reason: I was a killer dodgeball player in high school. I was okay at volleyball, and hopeless at everything else. I can’t account for it, but in the gym with the balls flying around I attained an agility I never knew I had, and an arm that could have pitched a world series game ... if the major leagues used dodgeballs. It was the only sport where, when the team captains were choosing up sides, one of them would soon say “Let’s choose Varley, he’s pretty good.” We played with 40 or 50 on a side, and dozens of balls in play. If I survived that first minute of total mayhem where there was very little skill involved except trying to hide behind a fat guy, I had a good chance of being the last man standing. I was skinny and hard to hit, and I could scoop those balls in like nobody’s business. And I had a fake-out move that would get a guy going one way and then POW!!! Right in the kisser. Aim low? That was for sissies. The best hit was a head shot!

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, the movie. It has some laughs. IMDb.com

Dogville (2003) I was stunned to find this movie is rated #120 on the IMDb list of the Top 250 movies. It’s 3 hours long, and Lee and I could only make it through the first 60 minutes. It was so pretentious, so uninteresting, so dull ... It's a bit like Our Town, with lines drawn on the floor to represent houses and rooms, a few props here and there. The cast is fantastic: Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Patricia Clarkson, James Caan (we didn’t even wait around for him to appear, at the end). I read a few reviews, and apparently it gets even worse. Of course it’s an allegory, not my favorite form of drama, and there is a vigorous debate as to whether it is virulently anti-American or simply anti-human. I didn’t really care. All I can think is that it has to do with the cult around Lars von Trier, whose work I don’t admire. There were plenty of reviewers who agreed with me, but an equal number who saw it as a total masterpiece. I just don’t get it. IMDb.com

Don Juan DeMarco (1995) The idea that craziness might be preferable to sanity goes back at least to Cervantes, and probably a lot farther. It can be a fetching trope for the movies, affording lots of opportunities for satire and wry reflection of the "Who's really the crazy one here?" type. The cult classic King of Hearts comes to mind, where the inmates of an asylum briefly take over an empty town, then voluntarily return to the nuthouse when the "sane" people come back, in the form of soldiers. There's also They Might Be Giants. Of course, crazy people are almost never the engaging, sweet, smart people we see in these movies ... but never mind, a pumpkin seldom turns into a coach, either, but that doesn't stop Cinderella from being a good story.

This one might have been all those things, but for the presence of gigantic, shambling, disconnected Marlon Brando. I was looking over his credits and found that, aside from a goofy little turn in The Freshman, you have to go all the way back to the '70s to find a good performance by Brando. He spent the last years of his life picking up paychecks when he needed them. Here he is totally unconvincing in every aspect of his performance. As the psychiatrist who is being won over by Johnny Depp, who thinks he is Don Juan, he just has nowhere to go. He begins already entranced by the boy. We need a little time to establish that he's in some way disconnected from his life and his wife, so we witness some sort of change. He's just a big, roly-poly collection of tics and mannerisms here, and it's very sad. IMDb.com

Don’t Say a Word (2001) Don’t remember a thing. IMDb.com

Donnie Darko (2001) Huh? IMDb.com

Dont Look Back (1967) (No, we didn’t forget the apostrophe; that’s how the title is spelled.) You’ve probably heard of that silly old theory that somebody else wrote all of William Shakespeare’s plays. Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth, Jack the Ripper, PeeWee Herman ... I dunno. Stupid. But I kept thinking, watching this for the first time since it was new, that you can’t listen to Bob Dylan talk and not wonder: Could this sneering, shallow, rude, petty, egotistical asshole really have written all those beautiful lyrics? The flaw in the argument is that, if somebody else was writing them, why would he choose this little nasal shrimp to sing them? (He claims to sing better than Caruso, and it’s true that Enrico would probably have been lousy at the blues, you just can’t picture him getting down with “Maggie’s Farm,” but still ...)

And yet, how was he supposed to be? He didn’t have the wit of the Beatles, or the will to suck ass and smile of most other singers of the time, and he was living in that insane world of celebrity, besieged by crazed teenaged girls and the press, surrounded by butt kissers, seeming never to be alone, never to be in a situation where there weren’t people asking him idiotic questions or people for whom he could do no wrong.

He is a hugely inarticulate man when he speaks, and an awesome poet when he writes. And eventually I get an idea of what he’s trying to tell these people who want him to give them words of wisdom so they can pigeonhole him. He knows they are all full of shit. He denies being a folk singer, a protest singer, any genre of singer or songwriter. He is who he is, and that’s all he wants people to take him for. He has no message. (He wrote some “protest” songs, and I feel they are his least interesting efforts.) He deals in imagery and irony, and yes, plenty of anger, but it belongs to him, he will make no attempt to explain it. We’re lucky that he chooses to share it with us, and we should leave it at that. So, in a sense, this movie should never have been made, but he does have an ego, and it’s so powerful that he doesn’t care that he looks like an asshole. IMDb.com

The Door in the Floor (2004) This movie has so much going for it, mostly in the acting department, that it’s a shame that it really doesn’t amount to much in the end. A couple has lost two sons in some sort of accident, and their marriage is coming apart. They’ve had another child, a girl of 4, but the mom (Kim Basinger) is too deep in her grief to have bonded with her. Her husband is Jeff Bridges, and he’s a writer of children’s books, and a real bastard. He hires a student who hopes to learn about writing but ends up just driving the guy all over town for his sexual affairs. The kid looks very much like one of the dead sons, and he has his own affair with the wife. And then the story of the horrible accident is revealed, and it just doesn’t measure up. The film is based on the first third of a book by John Irving, and the rest of the book apparently is about the little girl, so I don’t quite know why this bit was carved out and made into a movie. IMDb.com

Down With Love (2003) I’m sort of surprised at how much I liked this movie. I mean, the main thing it has going for it is the perfect way it replicates those awful Doris Day-Rock Hudson oddities of the early ‘60s, with their gigantic Technicolor sets with no shadows, the costume changes in every scene, and the coy sexual humor. They weren’t very good even at the time, and they haven’t aged well. However, it is funny, if you can go along with the gag. And I always enjoy Renee Zellwegger. IMDb.com

Downfall (Der Untergang) (2004) The story of Hitler’s last days in the Berlin Bunker. This story has been fictionalized at least once before in 1973 with Alec Guinness playing Der Fuhrer, in Hitler: The Last Ten Days, and in countless documentaries, and though the reviews were way beyond excellent (it currently sits at an astonishing #59 on the IMDb’s Top list), I kept wondering: What new could there be to say about this sorry final chapter of the Third Reich?

I’m still wondering. The sort-of main character is Traudl Junge, who typed and took dictation for Adolf for about three years, beginning when she was 22. Frau Junge went on to make a good living in documentaries. I first saw her telling her story in Thames Television’s excellent World at War series. She’s in most of the other major retrospectives, and even had a movie made all about her: Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary. The real Traudl appears in this film, now in her 80s (she died in 2002), at the beginning and at the end. She says she excused herself for years by saying that she was young and stupid, as we all are at 22. But she say’s she no longer thinks that is enough. I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have behaved any better, but that doesn’t make me like her. Lay down in pigshit, don’t be surprised if the stink clings, I say.

In fact, the central problem here is the absolute, total lack of rooting interest. That, and if you know any history at all you know exactly how it all comes out. It takes two hours to get to the good parts, where Hitler and Eva kill themselves, and we don’t even get to see it. Then there’s still half an hour to go. While it’s fun to see Nazi soldiers blow their own heads off, it’s not enough.
I’m kidding, a little ... but I sure could have done without the scene where