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© 2004-2008 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Earthquake (1974) A pretty shaky story. IMDb.com

Eastern Promises (2007) I met David Cronenberg in Toronto while I was working on Millennium and he was doing Dead Ringers. Both production companies were using the same screening room for dailies. He seemed nice enough, not what you’d imagine if you’d seen any of his films up to that point. He was an early explorer of the goo school of cinema. Things like exploding heads in Scanners, and all sorts of liquid fleshy goo in Videodrome and The Fly. I liked the latter, didn’t care for the first two. I’d forgotten that he made The Dead Zone, one of the better Stephen King adaptations. He didn’t really get my attention again until A History of Violence, which I thought was one of the best films of 2005. In that film he managed to avoid all the clichés of violent films, the slow motion, the lingering close-ups of gore. The violence was quick, deadly, no-nonsense, and believable. Hardly ever see that in a movie. In this new one, there is a harrowing fight in a sauna between two men in leather, wielding knives, and Viggo Mortensen, stark naked. This is no Psycho shower scene, though, where the slashing was just artfully implied, and yet, there was no thirsty lingering on the blood, either. It simply made your skin crawl. How vulnerable can you be? (This is the second fight we’ve seen recently where a naked man was involved, but Cronenberg didn’t Beowulf the naughty bits like Robert Zemeckis did.)

This wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped, though. It concerns the Russian Mafia in London, and you get the impression they could eat the Sicilian Mafia for breakfast, followed by the Cali Cartel lunch. A 14-year-old pregnant girl dies in childbirth, leaving behind a diary that the midwife who saved her baby keeps, and gets translated from the Russian. The most heartbreaking moments are hearing this girl tell her sad story, of how she thought she was being taken to London for a better life, singing in hotels. Right, honey, now spread your legs … these gangster animals use these girls with about as much regard as they use a roll of toilet paper. It gets very tense, but the revelation near the end wasn’t that big a surprise, and the film seemed to lose focus. I don’t demand a resolution, and certainly not a happy ending, but this one sort of left me hanging. IMDb.com

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (2003) A nice little chronicle of that magic moment, from the late '60s to the late '70s, between the collapse of the old studio system and the rise of the new order, when everybody was able to try just about anything. The '60s were littered with mega-flops, studios were on the brink of bankruptcy, back lots were sold off and re-developed, sound stages gathered dust. Then the "indies" showed the studios how it could be done, mainly by appealing to the youth market. Hard to remember now, but they didn’t used to be very important, except at the drive-ins. Now, of course, that’s the only market that matters. And, when you think about it, what studios largely produce these days are $100,000,000 B-movies, suitable for the drive-in crowd. Once Jaws and Star Wars, which are B-movies, opened, it was all over. That, and the fact that cocaine led so many of the new crowd into creative catastrophe. But for one brief shining moment that was known as Malibu, you could find them all at Michael and Julia Phillips’ beach house, movie nerds talking movies. IMDb.com

Eat Drink Man Woman (Taiwan, 1994) This is a literally delicious movie. Don’t watch it, as I did, just after you’ve eaten a can of beefaroni. Don’t watch it when you’re hungry, either. In fact, when is a good time to watch it? Maybe after a Thanksgiving feast. It’s about an aging Chinese master chef and his three grown daughters who still live at home, and it is full of wonderful food. I wanted to taste it all. The story and the acting are great, too. But it’s worth it all just for the food. IMDb.com

Echo Park (1986) If you've read my epic account of our walk on Sunset Boulevard, you'll know that Echo Park is one of our favorite neighborhoods. It's an old place, for LA. It was the original center of the film industry; Mack Sennett's Keystone Studio was there when the neighborhood was called Edendale. In the '30s it was known as Red Hill because it was full of political radicals. I lived there in the '60s, and so did Tom Waits and Frank Zappa. I returned to it in the '70s to see it had become a very bad neighborhood, and now it is on the rise again, full of what you might call Bohemian types.

I saw this film when it was new and remember liking it. So I rented it ... and either it doesn't hold up, or my tastes have changed, because I didn't see much there. It's episodic and rather pointless. The script could have used some tightening, and though I liked Tom Hulce's performance, the other parts weren't very interesting. And we didn't even get to see very much of Echo Park.

There were some interesting trivial things about it, though. This was Hulce's first movie after his Oscar nomination for Amadeus, for which I wish he could have shared the award with F. Murray Abraham. I guess it was never in the cards that either of them would be giant movie stars, with Hulce's goofy face and Abraham's terminal case of acne, but they are both very good. Cheech Marin is here, billed as Richard Marin. Susan Dey is halfway between The Partridge Family and L.A. Law. All through the movie I kept wondering where I'd seen the woman playing the receptionist at the gym. The reason I couldn't place her is that I'd never seen her out of character: She is Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Elvira. She's neat. And last but not least, there is Timothy Carey, a seriously scary man both in the parts he played and, apparently, in real life. He was more than a little bit crazy. He was excellent in two early Kubrick films: The Killing, and Paths of Glory. Coppola wanted to cast him in the Godfather films, but he was too erratic and frightening. Same with Tarantino. He's had a cult following since his death 12 years ago. Take a look at his picture at the IMDb. Would you want to meet this guy in a dark alley? IMDb.com

Ed Wood (1994) Probably my favorite Tim Burton movie. It’s clearly a labor of love, about the weirdest guy who ever directed in Hollywood, and until Mark Borchardt came along (see American Movie), the worst filmmaker ever to actually get a film distributed. IMDb.com

Edward Scissorhands (1990) I’m so happy we have Johnny Depp. He could easily have been a romantic leading man, phoning in his roles. Instead, he consistently chooses oddball projects like this one. IMDb.com

The Eiger Sanction (1975). It’s fun to read a book and then see the movie a day later. Even if you’ve done both before. But it’s been 30 years in this case, so it’s all new to me!

This was Clint Eastwood’s 4th directorial outing, and shows what he demonstrated in Mystic River, that he is very dedicated to the books he buys. Small changes were made, but only one seemed to make no sense. The book itself is fabulously over the top, never meant to be believed, and works mainly because it is so outrageous, bitingly satiric, and sheer fun. The movie captures as much of that as it can, and uses a great deal of dialogue straight from the book. But when the book gets into the mountain, the fearsome Eiger, it is dead serious, and wonderfully vivid. Eastwood worked very, very hard to match this and gets some stunning shots, mainly by doing his own pretty perilous stunts (a stunt climber was killed by a falling boulder, in a spot where Clint had been standing only minutes before). This was before you could cheat with CGI to attain vertiginous perspectives easily and without risk, and as such, the movie is probably the best fiction ever made about mountain climbing. But the technology of the time was not good enough to reproduce the awesome power of the storm on the mountain—hanging your ass out there was dangerous enough without wind and fog machines and freezing sleet—and time constraints meant that you couldn’t really convey the long, wearisome, and ultimately soul-killing slowness and fatigue that are shown so powerfully in the book. Still, it’s a fun movie to watch, and a terrific effort. IMDb.com

Elephant (2003) A very interesting but maddening film. Gus van Sant has made a documentary-like portrait of one day at a high school that ends very much like Columbine. His point, and it’s a good one, is that it was an ordinary day, and we see ten or twelve students of different types. Who will live and who will die? There is no rhyme or reason behind any of it; some got lucky and some didn’t. They ran into a pair of monsters who looked like human beings, and whose idea of morality was based on video games. Not that van Sant blames video games for the violence. His point is that we don’t know why they did it, and we’ll never know. He offers no answers, and that has pissed off some reviewers. But what the hell did they expect? Is it guns? Violent movies and television? I think it was caused by something simpler: a lack of a soul. But I say it is maddening because of the endless, interminable tracking shots behind people who are doing nothing but walking from point A to point B. And walking, and walking, and walking ... Still, it makes you feel detached, which is what he wants, like a floating angel, a disinterested observer.

SPOILER WARNING

And when the killing begins, that’s when it hits you in the stomach. Not because he dwells on it; exactly the opposite. The camera never moves to follow the action. Someone is hit, and they fall out of frame and are never seen again. The randomness of it makes you sick. And van Sant even toys with your expectations, the ones you have because you’ve seen a thousand movies with a hero, and this one doesn’t have a hero. This muscular black student walks the halls, and something in his body language makes you just know he’s going to take care of business, he’s going to stop these monsters ... but he doesn’t. He never even gets to say a word. Bang, and he’s dead. This is far from a total recommendation, but from the length of my review you can tell that it fascinated me, and it’s only 80 minutes long. I’d suggest you try it. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Elf (2003) is a wonderful idea: a man raised by elves at the North Pole, until he grows too large and sets out to discover his real father (James Caan). Bob Newhart and Ed Asner as Santa do a good job, but the movies lives or dies with Will Farrell, who is delightfully wide-eyed, apologizing when he’s hit by a car while jaywalking, or falling afoul of the world’s nastiest kids’ book author in the person of Peter Dinklage, the dwarf from The Station Agent. However ... it loses its way toward the end, getting so sweet that a diabetic, like me, begins to think of taking a double dose of glucophage or maybe mainlining a bit of insulin. But no need. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Bad Santa (2003) is the perfect antidote. From the very first scene when Billy Bob Thornton, as the world’s worst Santa, turns the tables on the little brats he can’t stand by (not voluntarily; he’s very drunk) pissing on one of them. He and his dwarf partner (the hilarious Tony Cox, and has there ever been a better year for performances by little people?) do this every year, working as Santa and his elf so they can rob the department store on Xmas Eve. Billy Bob is interested in only two things: getting very, very drunk, and buggering fat women when he’s sober enough to perform. ("You won’t shit right for a week!") Now this is the perfect setup for redemption; surely BB will see the error of his ways, sober up, and go out doing good works. Not a chance. He does sort of take a loser little kid under his wing, and there is a small triumph at the end (which involves BB beating the crap out of a teenage bully half his size!), but you know his misanthropy is completely untouched. This is not a movie for everyone. All the rest of my family hated it, can’t understand why Lee and I loved it. I just like to have my Xmas nog served up with a big dash of bitters and almost no sweet vermouth. IMDb.com

Elizabeth I (2005) Is there a better actress working in the movies and television today than Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov?

What's that? Never heard of her? Try Helen Mirren. We were stunned by her presence in The Queen, for which she is certain to win an Oscar nomination, and which she stands an extremely good chance of winning, this time. (She was nominated for Gosford Park and The Madness of King George.) I really hope she does win, if only for the joy of seeing someone stand up there who has been quoted about the Academy Awards thus: "It's the creme-de-la-creme of bullshit." I'm sure she will be polite and humble in the face of the great honor, but still ...

Elizabeth Tudor and Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha could not be more different, and yet she totally inhabits both roles. This four-hour series begins with the Virgin Queen in her forties, since someone Mirren's age can't play a child queen. It covers familiar territory, but then, it's history, what are you going to do? (Well, once more invent a meeting between Elizabeth and Mary, as in Mary, Queen of Scots with Glenda Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave, for one thing. Writers of historical fiction cannot seem to resist this particular fiction.) This series concentrates on her unrequited loves, but doesn't stint on her role in governing. She is simply one of the most fascinating figures in all English history, in all history of any kind, and of historical women only Joan of Arc could rival her, and Joan was nutty as a cacahouète du gâteau. The first part deals with Elizabeth and Leicester, played very well by Jeremy Irons, and the second with Elizabeth and Essex, who as written by Nigel Williams and played by Hugh Dancy, is really reprehensible and a fool.

But it's Mirren's show, and she brings Elizabeth to life better than anyone ever has, and considering how many great actresses have played her, that's saying something. She won an Emmy for it.

I was wondering where in Merry Olde England they found the fantastic, huge sets. The palaces ran on and on, and were used to the fullest in long steadicam shots, and the outdoor scenes were stunning and looked authentic. Well, it seems they found them in the Merry Olde Town of Vilnius. Vilnius ... er ... Lithuania. Actually they built them there, almost certainly because labor is cheap in the former SSRs. Such a job! And more well-deserved Emmys. Ditto the costumes, especially Mirren's. As I pointed out to Lee, in some of those dresses you had to be sure of hitting a doorway dead-center, or your elaborate shoulder and head pieces would bump the jambs in a rather undignified way. IMDb.com

Ella Enchanted (2004) A thoroughly charming movie aimed at teenage or younger girls but enjoyable by anybody who isn’t a grinch. It uses the techniques of Shrek, mixing fairy tale tropes with modern references to good effect. First time we’ve seen Anne Hathaway, since we didn’t see either of The Princess Diaries movies. Maybe we should. She’s very appealing, and I can see her paired with Julie Andrews. She’s just about that wholesome. I see she’s slated to play Jane Austen. Should be interesting. IMDb.com

The Emperor’s Club (2002) Basically a re-make of Dead Poets Society. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad (see Mona Lisa Smile). Just not one I’ll want to see again and again. IMDb.com

Empire Falls (2005) There are a lot of things I could say about this HBO miniseries, now available on video. The great cast. The Pulitzer Prize book it was based on, and how well the longer format fits a mostly quiet story like this. The big surprise near the end, that startled me and Lee. But what I kept coming back to, watching it, was growing up in small towns, and either leaving or sticking around. Miles is a guy who should have left. There’s a guy in Empire Falls, a cop, who says that he has never wanted to be anywhere else, not for one second. He knows Miles would rather have been almost anywhere else, but was trapped by circumstances as binding as those that kept George Bailey in Bedford Falls. He still dreams of getting away, but it’s really too late. Once you get set in a place like that, you probably lose your ability to really fit in anywhere else. The sad thing is, Miles will never really fit into Empire Falls, either.

This story line resonates with me. I knew from an early age that the thing I wanted most in the world was to shake the dust of my dreary little hometown and go out and see the world. I’ve roamed ever since, and have been damn glad I did. I’ve only been back to that little town two or three times since, once for a high school reunion, and was amazed to see how happy the folks who stayed seem to be. I’m happy for them, but I know I made the right choice. I would have suffocated there, like Miles.

Sorry, this is not much of a review, I know, but it all felt so personal to me. IMDb.com

Employee of the Month (2004) What a mess of a movie. We gave up at the 1-hour point because we simply weren’t interested in what it seemed to be. Then I read a little of the very sparse reviews and found out it was not what it seemed. I collect movies about capers and cons and treasure the good ones. So we started it up again, and sure enough, there was a twist ending. In fact, there were about six twist endings, which is at least three too many. In fact, it was so muddled that they were still inserting scenes of what you didn’t see, what they withheld from you, while the end credits are rolling.

The problem here: you’ve got to have the audience with you in the first act if they’re going to stick around for the surprises in the third act, and they didn’t do it. We were bored by these people. It was far too tedious. I don’t know a solution to this script problem, because their blandness was part of the trick ... but somehow they have to be made bland in an interesting way, if you know what I mean. Joe vs. the Volcano comes to mind, or Fight Club. IMDb.com

Enchanted (2007) Every once in a while a movie manages to navigate the tricky shoals of sentimentality without ever running aground on the reefs of schmaltz. Amelie was one. This is another. I have no problem with sentiment, if it is laid on with humor and artistry. This movie pokes delightful fun at almost every animated Disney movie ever made, while at the same time being true to itself, and never getting snarky or condescending about it. It’s one of those movies that exist only to make you grin for two hours. What more could I ask of such a picture? If you can watch the music/dance number in Central Park and not have a smile on you face, I probably don’t want to know you. As for the “Whistle While You Work” sequence, where all the creatures of the forest help Snow White clean up the cottage … only it’s a New York apartment, and the critters are rats, pigeons, and roaches … must be seen to be believed! I loved it! In fact, I had only one complaint, and that is we didn’t get to see enough of Susan Sarandon as the Wicked Witch. She was having such a great time in the role, and she is so good … a little more of her would have been nice. But that’s a small cavil. See this, and enjoy. IMDb.com

The Endurance (2000) An excellent documentary about the ill-fated voyage of Captain Shackleton to Antarctica, back when it was almost completely unexplored. It is almost impossible to believe, but after incredible hardships over the course of a year, including the loss of the Endurance, crushed by pack ice, he lost not one man. Best of all, he had a cameraman aboard, and much footage was taken until all the film was gone, and was brought back intact. But they ate all the dogs. Sad. IMDb.com

Enduring Love (2004) This movie has an absolutely stunning opening, and then sort of petered out. A couple are having a picnic in an open field. Suddenly a hot air balloon hits the ground. A man falls out, the balloon starts up again, the man grabs a rope. There is a boy inside. Other people appear, and five of them wrestle the balloon to safety ... but then a wind rises, the boy accidentally turns on the gas, and the balloon rises again. Four of the men drop away in time, but one holds on too long. He dangles. He falls. We see his body, which is horrible, sitting upright but utterly destroyed.

The man who was first on the scene is troubled, thinking if they had all held on the man would not have lost his life. Was he the first to let go? He begins to obsess about it. Then this is all complicated by one of the other would-be rescuers, who is a flat-out psychotic stalker. And I somehow can’t make the two things fit together. Is this an examination of our obligation to our fellow man, or a psychological thriller? The last part doesn’t work, because at any time the stalkee could have called the cops, or taken other steps. Too bad, because the movie had me going real well for the first hour.

Oddly, the stalker is played by Rhys Ifans, who also starred in Danny Deckchair, about a guy who went on an adventure involving balloons. IMDb.com

The Enforcer (1951) Today this would be an episode of "Law & Order" or "CSI." Not a particularly good one, either. It's hard to swallow, at first, that these cops and DAs would be utterly baffled by words like "contract" and "hit." I suppose all slang terms had to be new and mysterious sometime. And you have to keep reminding yourself how unsophisticated audiences were in those days about things like police procedure. Most of what they knew was wrong, fed to them by B movies like this and cheap tabloids. And I know we've become used to a much higher level of security in things like, for instance, transporting prisoners who are in danger of a mob "hit." But in the opening scenes we are told that Rico, who is turning yellow, has been the subject of three assassination attempts ("contracts," in that mysterious lingo of the bad guys!), we see him surrounded by cops ... and then bedded down for the night on a cot in the DAs office with a single guard who is nodding off and the window wide open. Can anybody say sniper? Ka-POW! "Ah, it's nothin', just a flesh wound!" says the wounded cop, valiantly holding his bloodless shoulder and in no pain at all. The story abounds in crap like this. I know, it was a different age ... but this was two years after White Heat, and had none of the psychotic edginess of that one. I figured out the mystery 15 minutes before Bogart did. Acting is bad, except for Zero Mostel. Much of the dialogue consists of somebody grabbing somebody else by the lapels. But there were some moments, particularly in the photography department. Still, there many better examples of film noir; try one of them instead of this. IMDb.com

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) What a coincidence. This week "Kenny Boy" Lay and Jeffrey Skilling went on trial in Houston, and Lee and I watched this video, which at least gives me some idea of what the hell they were doing. That they were and are scum, that they cheated, lied, bribed, stole, and fucked old ladies and poor children is a given in my mind; what I wasn't too sure of was how they did it. This movie will give you chapter and verse.

I don't usually watch horror movies, but I had to make an exception for this one. And as usual, the scariest horror movies are the ones that don't feature monsters with weeping sores on their pustulent faces, or wear hockey masks, or stomp the crap out of Tokyo. No, for my money, Hannibal Lector and Norman Bates are the scary SOBs, because they have two arms and two legs like the rest of us, faces that seem human-like, and can speak well. The monsters at Enron even dressed well. But there is nothing human inside of them. This movie is a bit like one of those old '50s flicks, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, maybe, except these guys weren't replaced by pod people, they never had a human soul in the first place.

The key to the whole Ponzi scheme was deregulation of utilities, apparently. Once the Senior Bush took off the controls, the candy store was wide open for these looters. It took about fifteen years for the whole thing to unravel, as these things inevitably do, and before it came apart uncounted numbers of employees and stockholders had been impoverished at the same time the corporate buccaneers were unloading their own stock, which they knew to be worthless, making hundreds of millions of dollars off the backs of the workers and investors. So far as I know, they still have most of that money. Jeff Skilling has paid his lawyers a $26,000,000 retainer, and if they need more, he's got plenty. This is the guy who practically sobbed in his sincerity before Congressional committees, swearing he had no idea what was going on as he was quietly gutting pension and retirement funds and stuffing his off-shore bank account.

And it keeps getting worse. Lee and I didn't live in California when the Enron boys looted the entire state in the phony power crisis that got Gray Davis booted from the governor's office and replaced him with a grinning, jut-jawed mannequin, but we and everyone else in the new Cahleefornia are still paying for it. There never was a power crisis in California. There was plenty of power, there is absolutely no question about that, but for the sole purpose of inflating their worthless stock Enron power traders deliberately shut down power plants and jacked up the price of the available power a thousand times. You think I'm kidding? See this movie. People died from this scam, my friends and neighbors. In a sane society Lay, Skilling, and several hundred others would be standing trial for first degree murder, and I couldn't be more serious. You could stand George W Bush beside them in the dock, too, for my money.

So how is the trial going to come out? What will happen to these walking toxic waste dumps? Don't bet against them. We're all entitled to justice in this country, and rich men are entitled to more than the rest of us, plus bail, so Lay and Skilling are golfing around, free men. And $26 million buys a lot of justice. (Ask OJ Simpson, while he's teeing up.) Martha Stewart went to jail for diddling a few grand. These guys stole more money than that while brushing their teeth every morning, and they did it by taking it directly from the pockets of people who couldn't afford to lose it. They were obscenely rich, they are still filthy rich, and they will be fabulously rich even after they serve a year or two in jail and pay their mouthpieces. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they got off scot-free.

In conclusion, if you still think de-regulation and the drastic cutback of government controls and oversight is a good idea, I'm going to give you the Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay, Enron treatment. Just turn around, drop your pants, and bend over. This won't take long, and I'll even convince you it's good for you ... IMDb.com

The Entertainer (1960) Tony Richardson was one of the hot young British directors in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. He made one of my all-time favorite movies, Tom Jones, among many others. This is from a play by John Osborne and stars the great Lord Olivier as Archie Rice, who is usually described as an aging vaudevillian at the tail end of the age of vaudeville, but to my mind the traditional British music hall is quite a bit different than American vaudeville, and quite alien to us Yanks. That’s not really important, but I thought I’d mention it. Olivier is stunning here, as he usually is, but at least part of the attraction is seeing him step out of his usual gravitas to play a rubber-legged, smirking, heavily made-up song and dance man who is only really alive on the stage. He is very good at it; who knew? The film is also noteworthy for first movie roles for Alan Bates and Albert Finney, and a very early role for Joan Plowright, who Olivier married a year later, his third marriage, and one that lasted until his death. IMDb.com

Envy (2004) The reviews of this one were so abysmal that we’d never have rented it if we weren’t subscribing to the Hollywood Video MVP program, where you get unlimited rentals for $10/month. If it sucks, you’ve only wasted the 30 minutes or so it take to decide it’s a turkey. (Movie freaks, check that one out!) So we were surprised to be laughing. Jack Black makes a spray that makes dog shit vanish. Ben Stiller misses his chance to invest. Black gets very, very rich, Ben gets very, very envious. Complication ensue. I’m not saying it’s great, or even that it is real good. Many opportunities are missed. (I kept waiting for all that missing shit to come back in some comic way, according to the little-known Newton’s Law of the Conservation of Excrement; i.e., shit can be created but never destroyed.) It gets pretty dumb in places. Still, I’ve bailed out of comedies that were a lot worse than this one. IMDb.com

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Just what I’ve come to expect from Charlie Kaufman, that is, a mind-stretching exercise in fractured reality. This is even better than Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in The Chicago Reader: “Only once in a blue moon does a screenwriter who isn't a director become known as an auteur. Plenty of distinctive movie writers have reputations as actors or as actor-directors, starting with such giants as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich von Stroheim, but they're rarely celebrated for their writing. You have to go back to Robert Towne, who's done only a little directing, and Paddy Chayefsky, who never did anything but write and produce, to find auteurs known mainly as writers.” He’s right. I’d add Preston Sturges to the list, known for his scripts before he became director. You look at a movie written by Sturges, Chayefsky, or Kaufman, and you know it right away.

SPOILER WARNING

I’m not going to reveal the many plot entanglements that will be delightful for you to discover yourself, if you haven’t seen the movie. The premise: It is possible to selectively erase memories of people or events you no longer wish to remember. Joel finds that the woman he has loved and broken up with, Clementine, has done that. She no longer knows who he is. Enraged, he decides to have it done himself. One of the best lines: “Is there any danger of ... brain damage?” “Well, technically, the process is brain damage. About like a bad weekend drunk.” In the middle of the process (carried out by a crew of negligent technicians in Joel’s home), he changes his mind. His universe is vanishing, and he tries to retreat with his memories of Clementine into his childhood. But at last his memories are wiped.

Then, each of them finds out what has happened, each of them hears the other one’s tape of all the things they hate about each other. Joel still wants to try again. Clementine points out that they know they are wrong for each other, they’ve already proved it. Their love is doomed to failure.

Joel says, “Okay.” Clementine says, “Okay.”

In other words love, even doomed love, is better than the alternative. IMDb.com

Europa, Europa (1990) You have to be reminded of The Pianist, the 2002 film by Roman Polanski. That was the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who, with a great deal of dumb luck, managed to survive the Holocaust without ever being sent to an extermination camp, largely by living like a cockroach in the walls and crawlspaces, to the extent that he was barely human at the end of his ordeal. Europa, Europa is the true story of Solomon Perel, a much younger man who also survived, with even more dumb luck.

By dumb, I don't mean that either man was stupid. I mean that they were the playthings of fate, like leaves drifting along in the gutter toward the sewer. Some will survive, but most won't. And there is almost nothing they can do about it. Polanski's is the better film, because it dares to show the claustrophobia, helplessness, and just plain day-to-day boredom of being in hiding, totally dependent on the few honest Christians of the underground. Europa is more a "Perils of Pauline" thing, a bit melodramatic, with a lot of narrow, last-minute escapes. Solomon uses his wits as best he can, but he, too, is largely helpless.

His moral dilemma is far greater, however. He begins as a Jew in Germany. When his house is invaded and his sister killed, he flees naked from the bathroom, and is forced to wear a Nazi coat complete with swastika to return home. Then he and his family flee to Poland, then he flees to Russia. For a while he is a good communist. Hey, he's 15, what does he know? He learns to be a chameleon, so that when the Germans invade he quickly becomes a Nazi, a Hitler-Jugend, at an exclusive school in Berlin. But he can never really be Aryan, because of that tiny bit of skin he lacks and which he must go to great lengths to conceal. (It's odd. I know it's that way in Europe, but in Texas, where I grew up, over 90% of the boys I saw in the locker room were circumcised, and we didn't have any Jews in that school.) And that pales, really, in comparison to the self-loathing he begins to feel. Who am I? What am I? I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's best book, Mother Night, in which a racist radio broadcaster is actually a spy for the Americans ... but does his racist job so well even his handlers don't trust him ... and he doesn't even really trust himself. Moral of the story: We must be careful what we pretend to be, because we may become what we pretend. IMDb.com

Evan Almighty (2007) As is usually the case with a movie I’ve seen only once, I’m a little vague on the details about Bruce Almighty, the predecessor to this movie. As I recall, Jim Carrey wished he was God, and God took him up on the offer. God took a vacation, and left Carrey in charge. Chaos ensued. What I remember clearly, though, is that the movie was fun. Fun from beginning to end. Evan Almighty is fun, too … for about half its length. The animals assembling two by two: that was fun. Evan’s beard and hair growing: that was fun. Then it got ridiculous. Bruce could get away with a lot of stuff because … well, because he was God. People didn’t notice his miracles. Evan is just Noah, and when miracles happen around him people behave stupidly. I mean, would you calmly watch a pair of bears standing beside a pair of horses? When thousands of animals appeared miraculously in the Senate chambers, would you be pissed off that Evan has caused it, or awed and amazed? When even more animals gathered in a big field and started filing aboard this huge ship Evan had built, would you ridicule him? Me, I’d beat feet toward the ramp, because I’d have a sneaking suspicion that some serious water might be coming. I hate it when people behave stupidly or illogically. This movie could have been much more effective if, for instance, Evan had shared what was really happening with his wife and family, as Kevin Costner did in Field of Dreams. Evan’s increasingly silly attempts to cover up what’s happening to him and his refusal to simply speak up got very tiring. Then it all collapsed into a giant SFX flood that would have killed thousands and thousands of DC residents (not a bad thing, if they were all elected), and nothing at all is made of that. Final verdict: Stupid, a waste of your money. And get prepared for Leroy Almighty, where Chris Rock plays Moses. IMDb.com

Evelyn (2002) There is now an entire genre of movies detailing the horrors of the Catholic church and the Catholic-influenced legal system in Ireland. This one describes a man’s struggle to get custody of his daughter and it is okay, with Pierce Brosnan trying hard to stretch himself beyond Bond, James Bond. But a better one is The Magdalene Sisters, which will absolutely boggle your mind. Hard to believe that the brutality and injustice of the Magdalene laundries persisted right up to 1996. IMDb.com

eXistenZ (1999) I met David Cronenberg in Toronto when he was filming Dead Ringers and he and the Millennium sound people were using the same mixing studio. He seemed like a nice guy. You'd never suspect he made those gooey, ghastly movies where heads exploded and flesh was creepily malleable. Since Alien there is a sub-specialty of SFX that I call meat sculpture. Remember the scene where they dissect the first-stage critter that had attached itself to the guy's face? We'd never seen anything like that before. Now, with plastics and actual meat, movie-makers can do some pretty amazing things, and not all of it is stuff you really want to see. There's a lot of that in eXistenZ, and it's about the only stuff of interest here.

It's about virtual reality games, where you plug in to an organic brain module and go on adventures. But what's real, if reality can't be distinguished from games? (I have to mention here that I wrote a silly little short story called, unimaginatively enough, "Virtual Reality," that explored the same theme. Layer upon layer of reality.) Here, it's telegraphed that things are not what they seem when the characters in the "real" world pull up to a place called "Country Gas Station." Right, like anyone calls their place of business that. I'd insert a spoiler warning here, but if you haven't caught on to what the ending will be by the first 30 minutes you're too dumb to need one, you'll just forget all about it in ten minutes. So the movie "ends" ... and then it ends again, as we find out all the preceding was just a game. And then it ends again ... or does it? Remember the end of The Blob? The frozen creature is parachuted into the Arctic, and we see the words THE END. And then a big question mark? That's okay in a fun little dumb drive-in movie, but I expected better from Cronenberg.

Oh, yeah, one final note. A plot point is that the game designer has only one copy of her game, and it just got fried in her organic game blob. And Lee said, "Didn't she back it up?" Roger Ebert asked the same question. So did I. Idiot plot ... but of course it was only a game. IMDb.com

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