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© 2004-2008 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Facing Windows (La finestra di fronte) (Italian, 2003) An outwardly appealing movie that suffers from a lack of focus. A couple in Rome find an old man wandering, amnesic, and take him home. He gradually becomes part of the family. He revives some old dreams the wife has. Meantime, a weird romance blossoms with the man across the street, who is obsessed with the wife. The old man is a Holocaust survivor ... and it never really comes together. IMDb.com

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) For years Lee and I have been devoted fans of documentaries. People don’t make them to get rich, they are almost always a labor of love. But they sneak into art theaters and play for about a week, often in December to quality for the Oscars. Then they’re gone. So you may not have heard of this film, but it’s worth your time. It’s made by an obscure filmmaker from Flint, Michigan, of all places, named Michael Moore. Apparently Mr. Moore doesn’t like George W Bush too much ...

Okay, enough of that. You cannot review F9/11 without revealing your own political positions. You can say a few things about it as art, such as that the recreation of 9/11 in a dark theater with a black screen and surround sound is one of the most moving moments I have ever had in a theater. I wept. You can take him to task for his customary cheap shots. There are some here, not as many as usual. You can argue his facts. You can argue his slant. (My biggest What the fuck? moment was when he said Iraq was a nation that had never killed an American citizen. Tell it to the mothers of Desert Storm dead, Mike. That was a righteous war against an aggressor nation, supported by the whole world.)

Bottom line, I can’t imagine coming out of the theater feeling anything but angry.

Well, I’m angry. And make no mistake, it’s Bush and his thugs I’m angry at. How angry? This being just a movie review, I won’t put my anger here. But if you want to know, go to "By Any Means Necessary" at this website. IMDb.com

Fame (1980) Alan Parker is a terrific director. He is not afraid to try new stuff. This is one of the most rousing films I’ve ever seen, and it came at a time when I was despairing of our school system and how it was leveling everyone out. I am in favor of "mainstreaming," except where it becomes ridiculous. Putting the mentally retarded into regular classes, for instance, as I have heard some propose and which may actually have been put into practice, means only that the teacher will spend too much time with them and neglect everyone else. I am even more strongly supportive of the concept we called "accelerated" classes when I was in school. Put the best students in with the best students; makes perfect sense to me, otherwise they will not be challenged (which, these days, is a code word for "retarded"). This film portrays New York City High School for the Performing Arts where you have to work, or hit the road. IMDb.com

The Family Stone (2005) This is one of those down the middle pictures. There are many things to like, and some that don't make a lot of sense. Mostly, it's the sort of picture actors love. Everybody is talented, and gets to show off here and there. Sarah Jessica Parker shows up for Christmas as the new girlfriend, almost fiancée, of the oldest boy in a large family. Diane Keaton detests her on sight, though she is polite. So does her youngest daughter. It is impossible for Parker to please this family, partly because she is just the wrong sort of person for them, and because she tried so hard she's guaranteed to fail, and in the end, because she's wrong for the guy. Complications ensue, some of them funny, some of them poignant. Soon we discover that

SPOILER WARNING!

Mom is dying of cancer, and I thought, oh boy, here we go again. But I have to say that part wasn't overplayed. The movie was more about love and finding the right person than about death. I guess I'd give it two stars, out of a possible four. Maybe two and a half.

Must add that I am entranced by Rachel McAdams who, last year, sparkled in Wedding Crashers, and in Red Eye, out-did Jodie Foster's Flightplan for thrills and you-go-girl! spunk. Which is really saying something, because Foster's movie was damn good. IMDb.com

Fantastic Four (2005) Second feature at the drive in. IMDb.com

Far From Heaven (2002) The serious side of Down With Love. This also looks as if it were made in the ‘50s or ‘60s, and it concerns interracial love and homosexuality, and does a very good job of it. IMDb.com

Fargo (1996) This film begins with a big lie: “Based on a true story.” Those rascally Coen Brothers just put that in there because they thought people would accept these outlandish events a little better if they thought some idiot had actually done them … and because they’re the Coen Brothers. They thrive on stuff like that. While certain events are based on real idiots, it’s almost all made up, which makes it even more impressive to me.

This is one of the whitest movies ever made south of the actual North Pole. Every outdoor scene is swallowed in fog, with infinite roads and fences stretching out to a mathematical vanishing point. How can people live in an awful place like that? I can sure believe it would make you tough, and Marge Gunderson, one of the most delightful characters ever to appear on the screen, is certainly tough. She’s also one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, in a state known for “Minnesota Nice,” as Frances McDormand termed it. Oh, yah, she is, you betcha! Yer darn tootin’! She is by far the smartest and most capable person we see, completely unintimidated by the lowlifes she deals with … and yet she has no comprehension of evil. When she has the bad guy in her back seat, she wonders how he could do what he did. “And it’s such a nice day, too.” Isn’t that about the sweetest line you have ever heard a cop utter in a movie?

This is one of the finest movies ever made. Every scene is a classic, there is no way it could have been improved. It was much better than the Oscar winner that year, The English Patient, which is already pretty much forgotten while Fargo lives on, and Bill Macy was better than Cuba Gooding, Jr., and should have won. I’m glad McDormand won, and the Coens for the screenplay. And I’m so happy it was the break-out role for Macy, who after finally coming to the attention of the casting directors after almost 20 years in the business, suddenly found himself with more work than he could handle. He is currently listed as having no less that nine projects in the works, and I’d see any of them, just on the strength of his name.

There is a very good 26-minute short on the DVD, “Minnesota Nice,” with all the principles contributing. I said it was a white movie? Ironically, it was the warmest winter in Minnesota in 50 years, they were constantly bedeviled by lack of snow, had to drive all over the place to find country locations with enough, or make their own. And still I’m betting they froze their butts off. I know, my friends, having spent four nights on a hillside just outside Toronto in a not-particularly-cold Ontario February. Movie-making is mostly standing around while somebody else gets a job done, and I thought my feet would never thaw out. IMDb.com

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) Second feature at the drive-in. IMDb.com

Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (Federico Fellini: Sono un gran bugiardo) (2002) Not long before he died Federico Fellini did a longish interview on film. About half of this movie is that interview. The rest is scenes from his films, intercut with present-day shots of the locations, scenes of him directing, and interviews with people who worked with him. It is by no means a biographical movie. Not much is said about his life or career. Instead, it is the creative process that is explored, and Fellini’s was unusual. He mentions several times that he doesn’t view actors as cattle, like Hitchcock, but rather as puppets. Both Donald Sutherland (Casanova) and Terence Stamp (Spirits of the Dead) tell us that this wasn’t always a lot of fun. Since Italian directors often don’t record sound on the set but prefer to overdub later, Fellini can stand by the camera and tell the actors exactly what he wants. You can almost see the strings. It is the antithesis of the Hitchcock method. Hitch never improvised, he had the whole movie, frame by frame, in his head before he even started shooting; he said he found the shooting itself boring. Fellini made it up as he went along, changed things he didn’t like, was much more concerned with the look of it all. Different strokes for different folks. So it’s an okay documentary, if a little long. A lot of what Federico says strikes me as impenetrable, but he did say one thing I identified with. “I’ve accepted an advance to make a film, and I don’t want to give it back, so I make a film.” The pressure of making a living is one of the great unsung causes of great art. Artists like to talk about their muses, their visions, the way the art is pushing to get out of them. It pushes a lot harder when there’s no money in your pocket, and I’ll bet even Michelangelo would have told you that. IMDb.com

What we got here is a film-school double feature: How to write comedy, and how not to write comedy.

HOW TO WRITE COMEDY

FIRST FEATURE: Fever Pitch (2005) The only reason I can see why anyone would not love this movie is that they absolutely hate baseball. Sort of the way Lee reacted to Million-Dollar Baby. That’s cool, but if you like baseball even a little, this is one of the best romantic comedies we’ve seen in a while. If you love baseball, as we do, and if you love the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, the only teams left in the game who play it the way it should be played, you’ll like it even more.

I’ve only been to Boston once in my life, spent only a few hours there, but I’m a Sox fan. You just have to love such a loser. Not that they’ve been awful in recent years, it’s the horrible way they have come so close, so many times, only to blow it in the final stretch. This movie had to undergo some rewrites at the last minute because ... well, it was about a man who had given his life to rooting for the Sox, and it was happening in the 2004 season, so how are you going to end it? You have to end it with him being disappointed yet again, probably in the bottom half of the ninth, to the stinking Yankees. I mean who knew? You simply could not have written that the Sox would come back from three games down to the horrible Yankees in the playoffs ... AND COME BACK TO WIN 4 IN A ROW! The biggest comeback (Sox) and the worst choke (goddam Yankees) in the history of baseball!

If it had just been about that, Fever Pitch would have been fun. But it’s a lot more. Jimmy Fallon is a lifelong Sox fanatic. His life revolves around the team, from spring training to the inevitable collapse in September. He falls in love with Drew Barrymore, who doesn’t even know what a foul ball is. An accommodation is reached, then troubles ensue, then true love finds a way. Standard stuff, but the way you make it work is with clever dialogue, good comic situations and, what so many directors and writers neglect, well-written and acted secondary characters. Fallon’s Red Sox “family,” the people around him in his season-ticket seats, are fun, and Drew’s friends are fun, and it all works just gloriously.

We just about died laughing when Fallon, depressed about the failure of his relationship, is discovered by his friends, hollow-eyed, unshaven, endlessly rewinding and watching the worst moment in Red Sox history: Bill Buckner letting an easy grounder to first bounce between his legs in a game that should have clinched a World Series win. It’s crisis intervention time! One guy brandishes the videotape and shouts “You got any more of these? Where’s your stash?” Hilarious! IMDb.com

HOW NOT TO WRITE COMEDY

SECOND FEATURE: The Pacifier (2005) This is one that’s so bad it should have joined that small, elite selection of movies that are put on the shelf, never released. Vin Diesel tries something that The Governator (Kindergarten Cop), Sly Stallone (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot), and (what the hell were you thinking!) Tommy Lee Jones have tried: playing against the tough-guy type. It can be a funny idea, but you have to have people you care about in some way. Everyone in this is just awful. For some reason, in pursuit of some pointless McGuffin, Vin the Navy Seal is assigned to protect five children. He ends up covered in shit, figuratively and literally. We lasted 40 minutes, but could easily have left in 20. It SUCKED! IMDb.com

Festival Express (2003) This film is like opening King Tut’s tomb. Talk about ancient history. In 1970, or 4000 BC, take your pick, a couple young promoters organized a train trip across Canada with some popular rockers of the time. We’re talking The Band, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Ian & Sylvia, and others. They were immediately besieged by a lot of baby anarchists who were enchanted with the idea that “the music should be free,” that “it belongs to the people.” Sound familiar? It’s exactly what illegal downloaders say to justify their thefts. Hey, Woodstock was free, right? Anyway, the project ran out of money very soon, but the promoters kept it going, even making a special stop in Alberta to get more liquor when the musicians drank the train dry. But when it was all over, they didn’t have the money to make the film they had intended, so a whole lot of footage sat in obscure vaults for 34 years.

Now somebody has excavated it, blown off the dust of centuries, and made it into a 90-minute film, all of it never seen before. As a film, it is inferior to Monterrey Pop or Woodstock, there was a bit too much concentration on the crowds and the train tracks for my taste, though it was weird to think this all literally came out of a time capsule ... but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see it. If you love Rock and Roll, you have to see this movie. If you were there for any part of that crazy time, you have to see it even more.

Part of it is the jamming and partying among the musicians that happened virtually 24 hours a day on the train. It is astonishing. Most of the participants said it was the most fun they ever had making music. These were people who were still relatively new to their giant fame, and as we all know some of them handled it better than others. Lee, who knows rock history a lot better than I do, kept pointing out people who are now dead. Sure, I know about Janis and Garcia, but the sheer number of other casualties was appalling.

The other part is the concerts themselves, and it is very, very good. There’s Jerry Garcia at what I think was the peak of his talents, there’s Robbie Robertson looking oddly professorial, there is Levon Helm singing “The Weight,” there is Richard Manuel (hung himself in a motel bathroom, according to Lee) singing “I Shall Be Released” with the rest of The Band, there is Sylvia outdoing herself with a pick-up group of some of the best talents of the day on “CC Rider.”

But most of all there is Janis. She does two numbers: “Cry, Baby,” and “Tell Mama.” And I found myself wondering again, has there ever been a performer who gave more of herself in performance than Janis Joplin? Is there anyone else in the universe who can make James Brown and Joe Cocker look like Perry Como? J. Hoberman of The Village Voice had this to say of her performance: “Starting with the scream on which a more conservative singer would climax, and then pushing herself to the far side of coherence, our Janis delivers an astonishingly wrenching and immediate performance. The most vivid evidence of her presence ever committed to film, it should re-ignite the age-old question: Was this doomed Port Arthur flower child the psychedelic Judy Garland or the greatest white soul-singer of all time?” To which I would add, How did she learn to sing like that in Port Arthur??? Where did it come from? Wrenched from the bottom of her soul, as far as I can tell. A soul tortured by Port Arthur (which is a shithole, take it from me, I spent a lot of time there), and tormented by sub-humans like the University of Texas frat boys who once voted her “Ugliest Man on Campus.” And once again I ask myself, What would she have done if she’d lived? Or is that a stupid question? Did that intensity have to burn itself out as hard and fast as she did? Was it inevitable?

I wish I knew. Meantime, I can treasure the work she left behind, and Festival Express is a welcome addition. IMDb.com

Fido (2007) The 2nd Occasional Lee's-in-Oregon Film Festival. IMDb.com

The Final Cut (2004) Pretty much a total mess. People have implants which record every waking moment, then these memories are edited after death into a cleaned-up bio to show the relatives. All the nasty stuff is put aside. The memory recording is an interesting idea here and there are a thousand possibilities worth exploring, none of which the writer/director uses. The idea that this is the only use this technology would be put to is ludicrous. There are huge holes, stupid plot points, and then the movie just stops. And one thing is puzzling: the box says the movie is 105 minutes long, and so does the IMDb. But the credits began to roll at 90 minutes. All I can think of is it’s some sort of inside joke. Ten minutes are missing? Well, we left that part on the cutting-room floor of your mind ... That, or the credits rolled for 15 minutes, which is long even for The Lord of the Rings. IMDb.com

Find Me Guilty (2006) Sidney Lumet has a long and distinguished career in courtroom drama, among many other genres, going all the way back to the classic 12 Angry Men. This one is about the longest criminal trial in US history, at least up until then, and most of the dialogue is taken from actual court transcripts. Twenty defendants, 70-some charges. All mobbed up pieces of shit from New Jersey. One of them is Jackie Dee. His entire philosophy of life can be summed up like this: "Don't tell nobody nothing, never." Family is his entire universe. And he's true to his creed. He's already serving a 30-year kick for cocaine sales, has a chance to reduce it to time served and walk on this new charge. He never even considers it. And he decides to act as his own attorney, which throws a mostly comic monkey wrench into the proceedings, which are already a zoo.

The movie is rather shapeless, and throws us some moral conundrums ... and frankly, I felt it was quite a bit too sympathetic to this scumbag. If family is your entire universe, the corollary is that all the rest of us—you and me, my friends—are not even shit on his shoes. We don't exist except as objects to exploit and/or kill, as the need or even the mood strikes them. This is the man-eating toad behind the romantic image of mafias of any ethnicity. It should be legal to shoot them on sight.

But we live in a society of laws, don't we? Only some of the laws (more and more every day) are so broad that virtually any act can be seen as illegal. I was glad to see so much of this human garbage locked up when RICO first came around as a weapon against organized crime ... but by now I'm far from sure it was a good idea. Rest assured, my fellow goombahs, they could throw you in jail under RICO. You have done something in your life that they could trump up into a conspiracy. All they need is the desire to do you, and you're fucking done, paisan. If you are small potatoes, like me, like most of us, if you would not be a feather in a prosecutor's cap, then you're probably okay ... as long as you keep your head down and your mouth shut. Which is the state that all governments aspire to for their citizenry, and this current one more than any other before it.

Enough. Vin Diesel is very good here. He strikes the perfect balance as, in his words, "A gagster, not a gangster." I'm almost ready to forgive him for The Pacifier. I imagine he'll stick with the mindless action pictures because there's so much money in them, but believe me, the man can act. And in a bit of casting genius, Peter Dinklage plays the chief defense attorney. We heard him interviewed by Terry Gross on "Fresh Air," and so I know he wasn't picked because he's a dwarf, the part wasn't written that way, but simply because he's good. And he is. After his breakthrough role in The Station Agent, he's been in demand, and he deserves it. I see he has no less than 8 upcoming projects. IMDb.com

Finding Nemo (2003) Michael Eisner must be out of his jiminy cricket mind; Pixar can do no wrong, and lately Disney animated features have sucked pretty bad. So what does Eisner do? Gives Pixar the boot. They have made what may be the most astounding string of mega-hits I know of. I eagerly await The Incredibles this year and Cars in 2005. IMDb.com

Finding Neverland (2004) My respect for Johnny Depp grows with each movie he makes. Here’s a dude who could easily have forged a career as a romantic leading man or an action hero, he’s got the looks and the charisma. Instead, he chooses odd roles and makes them entirely his own. Not that he hasn’t had a few stinkers; who hasn’t? But the movie never stinks because of his performance. Finding Neverland is one of the sweeter movies I’ve ever seen, and perhaps puts a foot over the edge to become too sweet at the end. But I didn’t mind. It didn’t beat me over the head with it. I’m not going to weigh in on the debate on whether or not JM Barrie was a pedophile. I’d prefer to think he was simply child-like himself, as most biographers seem to agree. And Peter Pan has always been one of my favorite stories, since I was old enough to remember stories. I remember insisting that we buy Peter Pan peanut butter because it had the Disney characters on the sides of the jar, and when you were done, they were drinking glasses. I had them all, and preferred to drink out of Captain Hook. How’s that for nostalgia? IMDb.com

Firewall (2006) It took Hollywood a while, but they finally got it. I'm talking about putting technology, and in particular, computers, on the screen. Remember War Games? Nice little movie, but the computer stuff sucked. Or even farther back, Colossus: The Forbin Project. Computers were never like that, and never will be like that.

Later on they attempted to tackle home computers and the results were disastrous. There was Jumpin' Jack Flash starring Whoopi Goldberg and everything that came up on the screen was bullshit ... but most people didn't know it, because they'd never used a computer. There was one called Sneakers with Robert Redford, and again, I didn't believe it. As late as Terminator 2 we have the kid "hacker" sticking something into an ATM that then pays off like a slot machine. Bullshit!

That state of affairs lasted much longer than it should have. It's only fairly recently that computers have begun to look real, to show things like Windows and programs and password spaces and desktops and email and instant messages as they actually look ... because they had to. Everybody's got a computer now, and everybody knows how they look and what they can do. Nobody's going to put up with a screen that says "DOES NOT COMPUTE!"

But they finally have it down, and now there is a tidy little sub-genre that you might call the techno-thriller, or the cyber-thriller. Maybe the digital thriller. These stories utilize computers as they are used in the real world. They also rely for important plot points on things like cell phones with cameras, pagers, fax machines, GPS devices, IM, iPods ... the whole digital megillah that, believe it or not, was still in its infancy as little as ten years ago. Cellular was a good example. This one is another. There is nothing obviously stupid about it, and much that is ingenious. Could someone really cobble together the reader bar from a fax, an MP3 player, and bit of bubblegum and make something that would use an OCR program to ... well, never mind, I don't want to give too much away, but I'm willing to believe it's possible. And I know that implanting a chip into your pet is a routine procedure now ... and I'll say no more about that, either. Nothing here stretched my credulity, and though the ending fistfight was a trifle overdone (as usual), all in all I had a great time. IMDb.com

The First Amendment Project (2004) Three segments of a program produced for the Sundance Channel and Court TV, each a little over 20 minutes long.

Fox vs. Franken is the best. You may recall that Fox News brought a lawsuit against Franken and his book Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. The case was thrown out of court, but not before Al got enough material for a dozen stand-up routines. Very, very, very funny. The best bit is about the poor lawyer assigned to argue the absolutely insane assertions of Fox, Bill O’Reilly, et al., one Dori Ann Hanswirth. Franken says of her “It was like she was in such a nightmare from the moment she opened her mouth that it was amazing she wasn't standing in her underwear.” Great stuff.

Poetic License. This concerns one Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of New Jersey (sort of says a lot about his poetry right there, huh?), who wrote a “poem” shortly after 9/11 that contained a reference to the 4000 Jews who missed work that day. This is a perfect example, for me, of that old maxim “I totally disagree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it, you unspeakable, posturing, pustulent, reeking unwiped asshole.” Or something like that.

Now, I confess I have a little trouble with government support of the arts. I’m conflicted. There are indeed arts that will never pay their way at the box office or in the bookstores or galleries and are worth preserving. My admittedly unsatisfactory solution is to allow government support for the performing arts because they’re so expensive, but I really don’t think poets, other writers (like myself) or “artists” of any stripe should be allowed to suck at the government tit. I got no problem with Mapplethorpe, “Piss Christ,” the Elephant Dung Madonna, or “performance art.” But pay for it yourself, you pretentious punk, and sell it .... if you can. Same with Baraka and his poetry. You know, my main problem with him has nothing to do with the content ... but simply that he’s a bad, bad, bad poet. Really awful, really pretentious, it totally sucks.

Some Assembly Required. Deals with the massive police presence at the Reptilian National Convention (sorry, I meant Republican) in the Big Apple in ’04. Thousands of blatantly illegal arrests were made, and it was terrible ... but this is a pretty boring documentary. I have to say, liberals on parade can be a pretty nasty sight, not for the squeamish. All that sincerity and “individuality” gets on your nerves pretty quickly. One group was Ukuleles for Peace, or something like that.

And you know what? I’m glad a lot of people got arrested. I wish the news media had covered it better—that’s the real scandal, that America hardly even saw 500,000 people marching in the streets—but there’s nothing to radicalize a comfortable liberal like a few nights in jail. We need more pissed-off people, and the things they did in New York were perfect to hatch them. IMDb.com

Fitzcarraldo (1982) Klaus Kinski has something about him that can make Christopher Walken look as sane as Mister Rogers. Perhaps it really comes from within. I met Mr. Walken once and he was a nice, amiable, humorous guy, but if half the stories about Kinski are true he is a major maniac. Whatever, he's perfect here as a man obsessed with the idea of bringing grand opera to the upper reaches of the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo does his hair in the morning by sticking his finger in a light socket, and always wears a white suit and hat. He is monomaniacal, obsessive, humorless, and pretty much everything I usually hate in a human being ... but by the end of his ordeal I found I'd grown to like him. After all, what's more important in life, great art, or rubber trees? I'll go for art. He must transport a huge boat over a mountain. (Based on a real story, but the real guy took it apart first.) When his crew deserts him he recruits the local "bare-asses," Jivaro Indians, who are also taken by his divine insanity. But they have a hidden agenda ...

No more plot. It reminded me of two other great "river" movies: Apocalypse Now, and The African Queen. All three movies were made by directors obsessed with a vision, in frightening conditions, disaster always hanging over their heads. Werner Herzog has outdone Coppola and Huston, though. Everything you see in the film was actually done. There were no special effects, no huge electric motors out of camera range. They really did haul that honking big boat through the mud using only tree trucks hacked from the rain forest, and actual Indian laborers. It was such an epic ordeal that a separate film was made about the making of Fitzcarraldo ... come to think of it, films were made about the other two films as well: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, and White Hunter Black Heart. IMDb.com

Flags of Our Fathers (2006) For my money, this one is better than the other Clint Eastwood film, Letters From Iwo Jima, the one that made the Oscar ballot. It's a shame they couldn't have made an exception and considered the two films as one, as they clearly are. But I guess that wouldn't have been fair to the other nominees.

Going into WWII we knew of shell shock, which we were then calling battle fatigue. (George Carlin has a brilliant monologue about this.) It wasn't until after Vietnam that the inelegantly named "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" was recognized. Of course, it had been happening all along, in spite of what psychopaths like George Patton maintained. The men who survived the flag raising on Iwo all suffered from it, and from the stresses of being hailed as heroes. The fact is, most of our "heroes" don't feel that way about themselves. They hardly ever talk about it. They feel they were only doing what they had to do to survive, and feel guilt that they did survive, while their buddies didn't.

In A Few Good Men, Kiefer Sutherland has a chilling speech in which he defines his loyalties: "Unit, Corps, God, country. In that order. Sir." At the time that struck me as seriously fucked-up ... but contemplating brutal films like this and Saving Private Ryan, films that take me deeper into a place I've never been—the heart of darkness, combat—and am not at all comfortable about seeing, even simulated, I've begun to see the logic of it. When you're in a shitstorm like that, you don't think about your goddam country. You may pray, but you're not really thinking about God, either. Or the goddam Corps. You're thinking about the guy next to you, and the guy next to him, and knowing you'd do anything to save their lives because you're hoping they'd do the same. And in a good unit, all of you will.

Eastwood does a wonderful job of illustrating PTSD by flashing from the ridiculous and soul-destroying adulation the three survivors got after the wholly random circumstance of raising the flag—which didn't mean a damn thing to them at the time—back to the battle, and showing how inglorious the whole thing was ... and how real acts of heroism were done, some by them, and some by their dead friends. In many ways, the aftermath of the battle was harder on these men than the battle itself. It killed Ira Hayes, that and racism, when Iwo Jima couldn't. It left Rene Gagnon poor and embittered after the hundreds of job offers he got while he was a hero didn't materialize. And to his dying day, John "Doc" Bradley, the Navy corpsman, suffered bad nights over the death of his best friend Iggy, who, from Wikipedia: "had been tortured in the cave by the Japanese for three days, during which time they also cut out his eyes, cut off his ears, smashed in his teeth, and cut off his genitalia and stuffed them into his mouth." My only complaint about this duo of films is that Eastwood chose not to show that little bit of fun in Letters From Iwo Jima. IMDb.com

Flight of the Phoenix (2004) I had slim hopes for this, which sometimes helps. If it turns out to have anything going for it, I’m pleasantly surprised. Another thing it had going for it is I automatically cut some slack to movies about airplanes. I can’t help it, I love airplanes. The one here is a Fairchild C-119 “Flying Boxcar,” which I have a particular affection for because one flew into Mid-County Airport about 3 miles from my childhood home in ... oh, 1959 or thereabouts, and was open to the public. I thought it was really neat, and about the biggest thing going until I got on a C-130 a few years ago, where you could play a decent game of tennis.

And Phoenix turned out to be much better than I expected. It had some clichés, sure, but so did the first version. The crash sequence was a bit more than it needed to be, as things so often are in movies these days, but still harrowing, and probably tough on the actors, as they were strapped into a room that could be rotated 360 degrees very quickly and shaken up and down roughly.

In my review of Sahara I noted that one desert is pretty much like another for cinematic purposes. This claims to be in the Gobi in Mongolia, but was actually made in Namibia. I guess sand is sand.

Fascinating trivia: A stunt pilot was killed flying the original Phoenix, so these people didn’t attempt to fly their version. Play it safe, use a model and CGI. So what happens? They build a big model of the Flying Boxcar to film parts of the crash, and it flies much better than anyone intended it to, overshooting the place it was supposed to stop, right into the cameraman, breaking his leg. Jinx? You decide. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Flightplan (2005) It happens sometimes. In 1995 two Scottish movies came out within two months of each other: the terrific Rob Roy, and that overblown farrago and Mel Gibson ego trip, Braveheart. Unfortunately, the farrago took home all the gold. In 2005 it’s this one, and Red Eye a few months ago. Both take place largely on airplanes. Both involve strong women in an impossible situation. And, happily, both women do everything right. They think, and they act. But you have to compare them, and I’m afraid Red Eye was just a tad better. Which is not to say this one is bad. Not at all.

Jodie Foster is an aircraft engineer. Her husband has just fallen or jumped off a roof in Berlin, and she and her daughter are taking his body home to America. Jodie falls asleep, and her daughter vanishes. It’s a great situation. This is a big, big plane, bigger than anything currently flying, though Airbus has announced a double-decker that should be about this big. But it’s finite, and seems to have been searched top to bottom. Where is she? The question of Jodie’s sanity is raised, and she has to tread a careful line between getting people looking for the girl and appearing crazy. It’s a losing battle. But since she helped build this plane, she knows all its secrets ... and I can’t tell you more.

The director plays fair, mostly, and the explanation holds up, mostly. Well, sure, it’s too bloody elaborate for the real world, but this is the movies, okay? And the airplane set is flat-out wonderful, it becomes a main character in itself. You get to know the plane as well as your own backyard. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: The Skeleton Key (2005) Kate Hudson is tremendously appealing and was terrific in Almost Famous. Since then, she’s been in pretty much nothing but turkeys. She’d better start finding better roles in better movies, or she’s going to vanish.

This isn’t that part, nor that movie. It has its B-movie charms, and most of the drawbacks. I’ll allow a director two or three GASP! moments in a “scary” movie: a cat jumps out, a door slams shut, a hand reaches into the frame and grabs a shoulder, something awful falls out of a closet or pops out of a box. But I counted nine such moments before we were halfway through. These things are dishonest and make me angry. Horror should proceed honestly from the situation, not from cheap tricks and scare chords from the sound track.

There’s a lot of hoo-hah about hoodoo (as opposed to voodoo), and the story more or less hangs together, in its own terms, and I’ll admit the ending surprised me quite a bit, I never expected them to go there ... but it’s not really much of a film. IMDb.com

The Flower of Evil (La fleur de mal) (France, 2003) I kept hoping this would turn into something, but when the violence came at the end it just didn’t add up. The movie seemed to lack a center. I didn’t care for any of the people, for the past sins and mysteries, for much of anything. Moody music doesn’t add up to a thriller. IMDb.com

Flushed Away (2006) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

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

The Fog of War (2003) Most of the film is an interview with Robert McNamara, going back over his career in government, mostly dealing the war in Southeast Asia. He also deals with W.W.II, where he served with Curtis LeMay, the man behind the firebombings of mostly civilian Japanese targets, and he observes that if the Axis had won the war, they would all have been tried as war criminals. True in a sense, though I don’t think either the Nazis or the Japanese would have bothered with trials, they would have simply stood all the generals and political leaders up against a wall and shot them. Ideas of warfare have changed since 1945, there is no way we would do now what we did in Japan unless we had already been hit with nuclear weapons ... I think. Of course, before George W. Bush we hadn’t been all that apt to engage in a war of aggression for a long, long time, either. The film itself is worth seeing, but not great. IMDb.com

For Your Consideration (2006) First he was Nigel Tufnel in the classic rock spoof This is Spinal Tap. Then he took on small-town amateur theatrics, then dog shows, and folk music. Now he tackles the world of small-time movie making. Who? Why, none other than Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest. Yes, he really is a peer of the realm. He got his start with the National Lampoon Radio Hour and comedy records, and at "Saturday Night Live." He makes a movie about every three years, and it's not often enough for me, but if that's what it takes, I'm willing to wait.

His specialty is losers and fanatics. He spoofs them mercilessly, and yet there's always a core of affection for the behavior he's observing. His people are absolutely uncompromising in their pursuit of their dreams, whether it's a blue ribbon at Westminster or the staging of an awful play in a podunk town. These are the marginal people, not very bright, maybe, but dedicated. Spinal Tap never was much of a band, and the film chronicles their slide into even more obscurity; but at the end they are still working at it. In For Your Consideration we watch a bunch of third-rate actors working on a fourth-rate film (Home for Purim, which eventually becomes Home for Thanksgiving after one of the studio shitheads objects to the "Jewishness" of the project.) Through a simple misunderstanding, a rumor gets started that some of the actors are generating "Oscar buzz." Well, just the rumor of a buzz is enough to get a genuine buzz going, with hilarious results. As for the ending ... you don't really need a spoiler warning. Remember, these people are losers.

Of course it's over the top, but I must tell you that I witnessed some behavior very much like what's in this movie during my time working in the biz.

Chris Guest assembles many of the same faces for all his films. It's become a virtual stock company. All of them are very good, but standouts are Catherine O'Hara and Fred Willard, who can play a clueless but genial idiot so well it's frightening. He is particularly good here, especially when he decides to interview the losers instead of the winners. You wince at his appalling insensitivity all the time you're laughing. IMDb.com

Forget Paris (1995) A romantic comedy that works is a pearl beyond price. Hollywood in the ‘30s and ‘40s seemed to churn out great ones effortlessly, perhaps because romance was not sneered at so much back then, and writers knew how to write it, and actors know how to play it, and most of all, great directors knew how to give it just the right touch. These days we’re more cynical, and most of the attempts at this sort of fun yet moving fluff are disasters.

Romantic comedies are also one of the most subjective genres. No two people love the same ones. Lee and I loved Fever Pitch, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle. I can’t think of another fairly recent one, right off hand. A lot of critics didn’t like this one, but we both love it … and take that for what it’s worth. It may be too sappy for you. But I love sappy, if it’s done well. One thing that makes it work for me is the story-telling gimmick worked out by writers Billy Crystal (who also stars in it and directed it) and Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. (Coolest name in Hollywood, don’t you think?) Joe Mantegna and Cynthia Stevenson, two actors I love, are engaged, and in a restaurant waiting for other guests to arrive, as he begins the story of Mickey and Ellen (Debra Winger). There is a highly original and funny and sad “meet cute.” Joe’s fiancée gets very involved in the story. Each time it reaches a seeming disaster, it is continued as each new couple arrives, putting the poor girl on a roller coaster. There is very witty dialogue, smart jokes, even well-done slapstick. This movie worked on every level, the sort of thing I can see every five years or so and discover it all over again.

One more thing: In Fever Pitch it was baseball, and here it’s basketball. This is a little odd, because though Lee and I both like baseball—but really only during the playoffs and World Series—neither of us are sports fans, and I rather actively dislike basketball. But the sports element was of course central to Fever, and it adds tremendously to the story in this movie. Billy Crystal is an NBA ref, and loves his job, though it gets him into a lot of trouble at various points. It is funny in and of itself to see him out there with these beanpoles (and I speak as a 6’6” man who would feel lost among these guys). He’d have to stand on a ladder to punch any of them in the nose. What was unexpected is that such stars as Charles Barkley, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, and Kareem, who all play themselves and seem to be having a lot of fun doing it … are good actors! That is, they’re good when they’re getting in a shouting match or talkin’ trash … and I assume these guys could do both of those things in their sleep, but still … IMDb.com

The Forgotten (2004) ... how odd. I just watched this movie ten minutes ago, and now I can’t remember a thing about it. It’s like it was wiped right out of my memory. Just pulled up out of my mind and into outer space, like I was abducted by space aliens. Ooops! Did I just accidentally reveal the “surprise” ending? I can’t remember. IMDb.com

Forrest Gump (1994) Don’t get Lee started on this one. I enjoyed it, but thought its huge success was weird. Highly overrated, and not one of Tom Hanks’ best performances, much less Oscar-worthy. Morgan Freeman was robbed. I really like and respect the talented Tom Hanks. Maybe he should take lessons from John Malkovich, who knows how to play a believable mentally challenged individual. IMDb.com

Four Brothers (2005) Same old story, starts out good, gets stupid at the end. Most impressive scene: a car chase in the snow on icy streets. This was shot in Detroit and Canada, and the Trivia section at the IMDb informs me that the temperature never rose above 24 degrees during shooting, and that all the snow, including the falling snow, was real. I'm dubious. If it's snowing when you do your master shot, and not snowing when you do your pick-ups, close shots, and angles, or the next day when you reshoot some scenes, you're in big trouble if you don't have a snow machine handy. Lee and I once saw seven gigantic rain machines, each bigger than a railroad tank car, tucked under the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland to provide pressurized water to pipes strung the entire length of the bridge for a scene on top of a hurtling streetcar (which was a bus with a false shell, since there are no streetcar tracks on the bridge) in the movie The Hunted. If you can't rely on rain in Portland, you can't count on snow in Toronto.

Since I've witnessed the obsessiveness and the pitfalls of making a motion picture, I notice these things. Since I've stood out all night in 15-degree weather watching a scene being shot outside Toronto and feeling my toes ice over, I felt bad for the crew setting up all these shots while the stars were toasty in their Winnies. Still ... if these are the main things I'm wondering about in a movie, I know the movie is in trouble. IMDb.com

Four Feathers (2002) Perfectly awful, especially if you’ve seen the classic original. Completely misses the point time after time and omits the best parts of the story. Avoid this at all costs. IMDb.com

The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (1974) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

Frank and Ollie (1995)

          Les Clark

          Ollie Johnson

          Frank Thomas

          Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman

          John Lounsbery

          Eric Larson

          Ward Kimball

          Milt Kahl

          Marc Davis

These are the legendary “Nine Old Men” of the Disney animation department, the ones who gave the films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Rescuers that special Disney magic found nowhere else. I’d always thought Hamilton Luske and the wonderfully-named Ub Iwerks were part of that team, but apparently not. (Wikipedia has the story of his name, and it’s funny. The writer of the article says Ub was born Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, in the Netherlands, but he later “anglicized” his name. Hell, man, you call that anglicizing? “Bubba Edwards” would be anglicizing. All Ubbe did was abbreviate.) As of today only Ollie is alive, and he’s 95. But his life-long friend Frank Johnson was still very much kicking when this sweet little film was made. (He died in 2004.)

I’ve been a fan of animation all my life, but this film made me consider some aspects of it that hadn’t really occurred to me. Think about it. There can be no “happy accidents” in an animated film. Every line, every twitch of a mouth or rise of an eyebrow was thought out in some detail by the people who agonized over every pencil stroke. Often the only role models they have are themselves, studied in a mirror, so they need to be good actors. And any of the nine old men could tell each other’s work with only a glance.

An animated feature like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs runs 83 minutes, or almost 5000 seconds. That’s 120,000 frames, and each frame is a separate work of art. Think about that.

By the time this film was over, I’d learned a lot about the process of character animation. And I’d grown to like these guys quite a bit. Ollie is a train buff, and had at least two trains in his backyard that were large enough to ride on. One was almost as big as the ones at Disneyland. I hope the jolly old codger is still engineering! IMDb.com

Freaky Friday (2003) A re-make that actually works. We laughed. IMDb.com

Fred Claus (2007) First feature at the drive in with Michael Clayton. IMDb.com

Freedom Writers (2007) Here's a heart-warming movie, based on real events (but probably jazzed up a bit, as these things tend to be), that depressed the hell out of me. There's nothing really new here: Hilary Swank, as real-life teacher Erin Gruwell, enters a classroom in Long Beach on her first day as a teacher in 1994, two years after the Rodney King riots ... a classroom I wouldn't walk into without body armor and an AK-47 aimed directly at my "students." Idealistic, naive, perky, yada yada yada. This used to be a model school with high grades ... in other words, almost all-white. Now it's been integrated and these ... minority persons are the majority. Their lives have been almost unimaginably tough, and they have naturally clung to their own kind. There are the spics, the chinks, the niggers, and a few badly outnumbered honkies. (Don't write me to protest; this is how they think of each other.) There is no mixing between the groups, but plenty of fighting. Okay, so you know Hilary will win them over, inspire them, grieve for them when they're hurt, fight for them against an indifferent school administration more interested in moving the little assholes through the system than in educating them. You know her work will wreck her marriage. You know her burned-out liberal father will eventually come back around to the values of his youth. You know the head of the English department will oppose her at every turn, and the teacher of honors English will belittle her teaching methods. We've seen this movie many times since The Blackboard Jungle. Edward James Olmos taught calculus to a bunch of losers in Stand and Deliver. Sandy Dennis in Up the Down Staircase. Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love. You know the drill. Make your own list.

Now, an oft-told story can still work, and I hasten to say that this one works pretty well, both because of the incredible energy and believability of Hilary Swank, and some good performances by the kids (who are all a bit too old for the parts, but that's the problem with a high school movie). When she finds out only one white boy has ever heard of the Holocaust, she sets out to teach them about it. The emotional high point comes when they raise money to fly Miep Gies, one of the people who hid Anne Frank, over from Holland to speak to them.

So what's to be depressed about? Here's a great teacher, here's a class of students redeemed from lives of despair and violence. (Not all of them, surely, but quite a few.) This is cause for rejoicing, not despair, I know that. What depresses me is what's going on in all those other classrooms. Hopeless kids in a hopeless school being moved along whether they can read and write or not, just to fill somebody's quota of "No child left behind." Yes, I know this is before that travesty, but it's been around a lot longer than the Bush Administration.

A good teacher is more valuable than all 100 Senators, all 435 Congress-creatures, and the whole Executive Branch. I've made a list, and found that I had 5 teachers that made a difference in my life. Run the numbers: 6 teachers in grades 1-6, and then 6 teachers for each of the next 6 years. That's 40 teachers. (Well ... 42, actually, but this is New Math, and the process is the thing, not the answer.) Mrs. Rosequist in the 1st grade, Mr. Brown, 7th grade science; Miss Hamilton, junior physics; Mrs. Wolf, senior English; and Mr. Kelley, band director, for three high school years. (So it was 40 teachers.) I've asked many people to come up with a similar list for K-12, and no one has ever beaten that total. Most people end up telling me I was incredibly lucky to have that many. This was in a pretty good, all-white (segregated) school system in Southeast Texas. And one out of eight is a good total? Do you really think so? Thank god for those 5 (and Mr. Green, who was a librarian who constantly threw books at me), but of the others ... there were several who were flat-out awful, actually worse than not going to class at all. There were some who were adequate, and others who were just doing it all by rote.

I know, it's a tough job, and was even back then when more actual education was getting done, before discipline flew out the window and classes were dumbed down, back in the days when coming to school dressed like any of the kids in Freedom Writers would get your butt kicked out of class so fast your fucking head would fall off (and saying "fucking" in class would be a virtual death sentence), back before permissive teenage sex, back when beer was a strong drug that few took until at least the senior year, back when no one brought a gun or even a knife to school. Back in those halcyon days ... one out of eight was good?

It seems we ought to do better than that, but I don't know how. So I found myself studying Hilary as Erin, trying to discount the sheer perkiness and determination—which ain't anything to sneeze at, but couldn't be the whole answer to her success—and focused on the other extraordinary thing about her story. She had these kids in freshman and sophomore years, and when that was coming to an end, they wanted to stick with her as juniors and seniors. And she had done so well with them that the administration and the union (which isn't as interested in actual education as it ought to be) made an exception and let them stay together. She even followed some of them into college, which seems a little extreme to me, but she was an extreme lady.

But how about that? What the kids said was that they had become a family. Many of them had no families, basically, and the longing is so severe that they join gangs just to belong to something, to find people loyal to them that they can be loyal to in return. Channel that, and you've got a powerful force for good. So what's wrong with the idea of challenging the six periods, six teachers model of education? In elementary school it worked to have only one teacher. "Now get out your history books, class ..." What would be wrong with having one English teacher or math teacher shepherd an entire group of damaged, emotionally needy kids through the whole nightmare that is high school? I'm not saying it would work for more advanced students in more sedate schools ... but I'm not saying it wouldn't either. The point is, when you find anything that works with these mostly doomed children, it's worth a look, worth an experiment. Otherwise, our educational system will continue to circle the toilet bowl, as it's been doing for decades now. We need a new system. This one is broken. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Friday Night Lights (2004) God, football is a shitty sport. Brutal, violent, stupid, played by people so padded they don’t even look human anymore. Only ice hockey and boxing are worse, and it’s a close call. This is a movie that is almost overwhelmed by its technique (see The Son). Almost every shot is very close, few shots last more than 3 seconds, many much less than that, and the camera is never steady. If I’d seen it in an indoor theater I’d have had to move to the back row to make it intelligible at all. Now, this works fine for some stuff, when there’s a lot of action, where chaos is the order of the day, as in the many very well-done sequences of football action. But I ask you, is it necessary to jiggle the camera in a shot of the scoreboard at the end of an empty stadium, after the game? Do you really have to focus on the actor’s eyebrow with a moving camera that periodically eclipses everything in the shot by moving around a bedroom where nothing is happening but a quiet conversation? The director will tell you that he was going for a documentary feel, and as I said, sometimes that works, but a movie should vary its pace and shots to really engage the viewer. Or maybe that’s only the fifty-something viewer. The conventional wisdom nowadays is that the computer-game MTV generation has an attention span of about three frames of film, that they won’t watch anything more sedate. Maybe they’re right.

SPOILER WARNING

It’s too bad, because under all the flash, this is a pretty good story. It’s more about the pressure of football, of all sports played by children too young for that kind of pressure, than about the sport itself. The parents will tell you that it’s character-building, and sure, it can be, but not the way most of these parents in Odessa, Texas, go about it. The whole town, for that matter. As a Texas boy, I can tell you it’s all true, though I have no first-hand experience; I was too skinny and slow for football, any predatory coach could see that in half a second. I don’t think I ever played more than ten minutes of football in my whole life. But I saw the madness in my own little home town of Nederland. We won the State AAA Championship the year before I got there, and half the town went way up to the panhandle to lose to those ding dong daddies from Dumas when I was a sophomore.

The best thing about the film is Billy Bob Thornton ... and how many times have I typed that sentence? Off the field he is a quiet man, his gaze saying more than any dialogue could about the utter madness surrounding him. Are these people for real? On the field, he can be as brutal as the situation warrants (after all, the object of the game is to go out there and hurt those bastards on the other side), but can reach for and attain true inspiration in the locker room. This is a true story, and it is a bit shocking when Odessa loses the big final game in the Astrodome. This is not how sports stories are supposed to go. But it is satisfying. Too bad it was so goddam arty. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Taxi (2004) Going to double features, we end up watching a few movies we wouldn’t even have rented, the reviews were so bad (see White Chicks). Metacritic gave this one a 22, just about the lowest score I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t low enough. The premise of the movie seems to be that cars going very fast is funny. Ha. Ha. Jimmy Fallon is an utter stiff, no discernable talent at all, Queen Latifah has nothing but attitude, nothing is even faintly believable. See, Jimmy is a incompetent cop who can’t drive. He stumbles onto a bank robbery being pulled off by 4 Brazilian super-models, which gives us the chance for the second un-funny fast car chase in the first 30 minutes ... at which point we conducted a poll of the occupants of the car, found that neither of us had laughed, neither of us had even smiled, turned on the car and drove away, the sound of idiotic dialogue still playing over the FM radio like something you’ve stepped in and can’t get off the bottom of your shoe ... and I’m not talking about bubble gum. IMDb.com

Fuck (2005) The fucking DVD box and the fucking posters say F*CK or F**K. Nobody can fucking decide how to spell a word you can't fucking say. Of course, you can say it now, but fuckheads like Pat Boone and Michael fucking Medved (both of whom appear here, to present the fucked-up side of the censorship argument, along with many others on the right side) will look down their fucking noses at you for it. Fucking Boone especially is in fucking denial, coming up with multi-syllabic abso-fucking-lutely stupid ways to say words like asshole and shithead. Doesn't he fucking realize that you fucking translate those words in your fucking head? "Oh, he meant asshole! And shithead! But he's too fucking prissy to say it." Oh, well, he's an asshole shithead, what did you fucking expect? I learned some fucking interesting things, including that the f-word is not a fucking acronym, and that the first fucking time the f-word was used in a movie was in M*A*S*H, during the fucking football game, when John fucking Schuck (nice fucking alliteration there, huh?) as Painless the Polish fucking dentist told another fucking lineman "Your fuckin' head's coming right off!" Now that is a fucking honor I'd put on my fucking resume if I was him! IMDb.com

Full Frame Documentary Shorts, Volume 2 We saw Volume One of this series, but it must have been before I started writing these reviews, because I can’t find it. We both enjoy documentary short subjects, a category sadly neglected since multiplexes began showing nothing but one feature, some trailers, and lately a few commercials. Maybe the Internet will give them a new outlet.