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© 2004-2010 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) In 1944 everybody was making patriotic movies, so why shouldn’t Preston Sturges? But being who he was, he made a movie a little different than the gung-ho battle epics starring draft-dodgers like John Wayne. Eddie Bracken plays a guy whose father was a Marine hero, and all he’s ever wanted to be was a Marine. But he’s got chronic hay fever and is given a medical discharge. A group of real Marines takes pity on him, dresses him in a uniform, and more or less force him to return home, where he’s given a hero’s welcome. Soon the town has him running for mayor. He never wanted any of this, and he missed his chance to nip it all in the bud … so the question becomes, as in all these comedy of errors stories, how long can it go on, and how can he get out of it and still give us a happy ending? The answer is maybe not as satisfying as in other Sturges movies—it’s reminiscent of some of Frank Capra’s more far-fetched endings … but heck, I like Capra, too. IMDb.com

Hairspray (2007) This is the best 2007 film I’ve seen so far, and it’s late July. Of course, there are many current films I haven’t seen yet, and many more to come, including the “Oscar contenders” bunched up as they always are late in the year, but this will do for Best Picture for now, until something better comes along. (Possibly the much-awaited Sweeney Todd?) There is only one reason I can think of for someone not to love this movie, and that is if you hate, just simply hate, musicals. I know there are such creatures, and I feel sorry for you. What do you do for fun? This movie rocks. It rocks and rocks and rocks, and then it rocks some more. The story is totally unbelievable, and who cares? That’s what musicals are about, they’re fantasies. Wouldn’t it be nice if fat girls could win dance contests? Wouldn’t it be nice if black and white could come together over the music we all love? I will buy the DVD, and these days that’s a pretty high compliment. IMDb.com

Hallelujah! (1929) Here’s some of the publicity from the trailer of the original release. It really ought to be in one of those giant, dramatic, 3-D typefaces they used to use in those days:

REALISTIC! EARTHY!...it pictures in dialogue and heart-stirring song the reckless love and the gripping drama of the Southern Negro...come to the dusky cabarets....the revivals and the baptisms!

And on and on in that vein. It was re-released some years later and they made a new trailer, which is included on the DVD:

THE FINEST ALL-COLORED DRAMA EVER MADE!

Wow. Have things changed, or what? Back then there was a tiny niche for “ALL-COLORED” movies, and they were made for “ALL-COLORED” audiences. But King Vidor, one of the great early great directors, had a passion for making this one, which was designed to be seen by whites as well … and from that description (and I suspect it was the publicity department that came up with it, not Vidor), it sounds like a trip to darkest Africa to see the strange wildlife, doesn’t it?

Which, in a way, I’m sure it was for most white viewers. Previously they had only seen blacks in supporting and usually patronizing roles. But for all its faults—and make no mistake, you will cringe many times watching this—blacks had never been portrayed so sympathetically for a white audience.

I thought to myself, early on, “Damn, these Negroes sure do a lot of singing and dancing.” They sang in the fields, and they sang back at their shacks, and I’m sure they would have sung while eating tons of watermelon, but Vidor doesn’t go there. (They eat a lot of chitlins, though.) Then I realized this really was intended to be a musical,, with all the suspension of disbelief such a genre entails. Most of the music is worked into the plot, happening at times when people really would sing, but from time to time the hero, Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes) does a solo like Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River.” Zeke is a sharecropper and a world-class fuckup. He loses a whole year’s cotton profits in a crooked dice game, gets his little brother killed, finds Jesus and becomes a very successful preacher … and then throws it all away again when Chick shows up. Chick (Nina Mae McKinney) is the shill who got him into the crap game in a first place, and when she wades into the river to be baptized with hundreds of others, Zeke’s eyes glaze over and he stumbles after her like Frankenstein’s monster, away from his church, his wife, his kids … jus’ cain’t resis’ dat evil woman, lawd!

Okay, it’s offensive, it’s over-acted and over-written … but take a look at Vidor’s masterpiece Our Daily Bread, which is just as goofy and operatic to our eyes. That’s just what they did back then, they were still playing to the back rows of the Vaudeville theater, and vamping for the silent camera.

So there are the usual stereotypes and unconscious racism you would expect in a film from this period, even a well-intentioned one. But the virtues of this film are many, as well. Chief among them is McKinney, who could have been Lena Horne if she’d had some better breaks. As it happened, she fled to Europe, like Josephine Baker, where they appreciated colored people. (She is actually “high yellow,” as several people in the film point out.) Her career in Hollywood was going nowhere, but in Europe she was appreciated as a singer, and was known as the Black Garbo. Also very good is some of the photography, most strikingly a chase through a swamp in the night. Amazing dramatic lighting. And don’t miss Zeke’s sermon at the outdoor revival. But all in all, for modern audiences it is mostly interesting as a period piece, something that, if it hadn’t been a “first,” would probably be forgotten.

EXTRAS: There are two two-reelers on the DVD, the first one very good. They are both directed by Roy Mack, who did 114 of these things. I was unable to determine if Mack was white or “colored.” I suspect he was white. I doubt there were any black directors around back then. They are:

“Pie, Pie Blackbird” (1932) Nina Mae is in this one. The idea is she bakes a pie, and it bursts open to reveal Eubie Blake and his band, all dressed in big floppy chef’s hats, playin’ up a storm! Not quite four-and-twenty blackbirds, but almost. The best thing here is the fabulous Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, who just may have been the best dancers ever to appear in a Hollywood film. I’m not kidding! They didn’t have Fred Astaire’s grace, but they could do things neither he nor Gene Kelly could do. I’d seen them before as adults. Here they are much younger, and already their talent was enormous. Look them up, you won’t believe it.

“The Black Network” (1936) A trifle about a black radio station. Again, the Nicholas Brothers tear up the place … on radio! Reminded me of an old Stan Freberg skit, “The Zazaloph Family,” acrobats on the radio! “I wish you could see this, ladies and gentlemen, they’re forming a human pyramid …” IMDb.com

Hamlet (1990) Mel Gibson kicks the shit out of Shakespeare. IMDb.com

Hancock (2008) A total waste of time. It’s hardly worth mentioning how many ways this imbecilic movie goes wrong, but to name just a few … Will Smith is all wrong for this part. They seem to have started shooting without a viable script; I had the distinct impression that they were making it up as they went along. When does he have his superpowers, and when doesn’t he? No one seems to know. Bullshit explanations are made up, then discarded when inconvenient. It’s another technological marvel … but what isn’t, these days?

However, unless you work in the industry and know all about this stuff, I recommend you rent the DVD, because the extras are really worth watching this time. I’m always a sucker for behind-the-scenes stuff. It’s always funny to see just how narrow the focus is when you're getting a shot. Put all your money on the screen is the adage, and the real pros do just that. If it’s an inch outside of camera range, it’s just not there. It’s all in the cutting, and these days, in the post-production SFX.

So I’m sure we all know about the flimsiness of sets, breakaway props, flying by wire now that computers can make wires vanish. All very fun to watch. But the mind-blower was something the SFX man, John Dykstra, had to say. Technology is moving so fast, according to him, that he now makes plans to use devices, software, and techniques that don’t exist now, but will probably be on line by the time the principle photography is finished. Imagine that! Sort of like setting out to drive to San Diego with no brakes, trusting that you’ll invent something to stop the car before you get there.

There are two things in these extras that blew me away. The first was what amounts to 3D animated storyboards. Storyboards have been used for a long time, not just in animated films, but in any action film. Now they’re not just pen and ink sketches, but very detailed action sequences. They showed the animated action side by side with the action as it appeared on the screen, camera moves, cuts, everything, and it was exactly the same.

The second thing was something I knew was being done, but I’d never seen it done this way before. I’m familiar with motion-capture suits and masks. They have reference points in the form of little buttons that a computer senses, and then constructs a simulation which can then be fleshed out to look real. A lot of stunts are done that way these days, with people performing before a green screen. I believe Gollum was done this way, and many other characters that can’t be played by a regular human being in make-up. But the method they used in this movie was stunning. They were going for photo-real, moving faces, and to do that they covered Will Smith’s and Charlie Theron’s faces with tiny little white specks, then sat them in the center of a geodesic framework that had maybe 40 or 50 strobe lights pointed at them, 360 degrees around, above, and below. They turned the device on and it was exactly like some mad scientist’s wacko machine from some B SF movie of, maybe, the ‘60s or ‘70s. It was more interesting than the actual movie, Hancock, by far!

It is already possible to dispense with sets. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and The Polar Express were filmed entirely against green screens, and there have been others. Combine these two technologies and you can see that we’re not far away from being able to dispense with actors, too. Once you get Will Smith’s or Tom Cruise’s or Angelina Jolie’s (who was motion-capture animated in Beowulf) face into the computer they can give up all that rough and tumble stunt work that actors have to train for these days. (Wire flying looks like fun, but you have to learn some acrobatic tricks of balance, and it can be hazardous, as Charlize Theron learned on the set of Aeon Flux.) Then the big-name stars would only have to show up for a couple of weeks of the quieter scenes, the non-SFX scenes (if they’re still making movies that have non-SFX scenes), which would probably still be cheaper to do on actual sets that don’t have to explode. Nicole Kidman or any other bankable star could make a dozen movies per year, like the major studios used to do with their biggest stars. Even better, they wouldn’t have to get old! It should be child’s play to turn, for instance, an 80-year-old Cate Blanchett into young Queen Elizabeth again. Harrison Ford could do a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, looking 20 years old. The possibilities are endless, and you’ll soon be seeing them in your Cineplex. IMDb.com

The Hangover (2009) Second feature At the Drive-In with Public Enemies. IMDb.com

Hannibal (2001) One of the all-time great let-downs, both book and movie. IMDb.com

The Happening (2008) M Night Shabadabadoo is the George W Bush of movie directors. Remember in 2001, Bush’s ratings were sky-high, up in the 90th percentile? Then began a steady decline, as everybody learned what smart people (like me and everyone I know) already knew: that he was a disaster at everything he ever attempted. M Night (I wonder what his friends call him?) began in the stratosphere, with The Sixth Sense, a brilliant, genuinely startling movie. People were talking Polanski, or maybe even Hitchcock. Then he made an okay movie (Unbreakable), then a stupid movie (Signs, which was nevertheless a big hit, so those of you who liked it and spent your money on it are responsible for M getting the funding for future crap, and aren’t you sorry now?), then a damn awful movie (The Village), then a movie reviewed so badly I didn’t even bother to see it (The Lady in the Water), and then this … abomination. From the heavens to the toilet, just like W. (Say, M is W upside down …) Only difference is that M deserved his initial adulation, and W did not.

I wouldn’t have seen this one, either, except that I’d recently seen Speed Racer because one lonely critic liked it. (He was only part right; it is visually stunning and worth seeing, but sucks in most respects.) In this case it was Roger Ebert, who said he liked the development, the fact that we don’t see any screaming crowds in this disaster film, just small groups of people trying to survive. Well, I should have known better. Usually, when Roger is a minority of one, he’s wrong. This time, he was at least partly right, but it was such a small part that I can’t forgive him. M is very good at setting the scene, at giving us some bits of business that work. Here, groups of people are suddenly coming to a halt, then walking backwards, and then calmly killing themselves, sometimes in bizarre ways. This is eerie. But even this loses its power when we begin to discover the so-called “reason” this is all Happening. (And is that a lame title, or what?) The hero figures things out, stupid as these “things” are, quite handily and with no evidence whatsoever. There’s no need to go on. The movie becomes so dumb on so many levels that there’s no point in discussing them. If you make the mistake of watching this turkey your only possible amusement will be counting the idiot plot points. I can find only one good thing to say about this movie: It’s only 91 minutes long, and at least 7 of those are end credits. Would that it had been shorter. IMDb.com

Happily Ever After (Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants) (French, 2004) A completely humdrum French adultery comedy. They used to do these things a lot better than this. There seemed no point to anything, just some people I didn’t like very much either cheating on their spouses or thinking about it. A waste of time. IMDb.com

Happy Endings (2005) I have to put this movie on my list of things I've seen because I try to be complete. But I can't review it. Professional reviewers aren't supposed to admit stuff like this, but I'm just a guy who writes what he thinks about movies, and I'm going to admit that when we saw this last night I was feeling exhausted and a bit depressed and I'd had a mild headache for two days. I kept thinking I should be liking the movie more than I was, that it just wasn't coming together for me though all the elements were there. That could be because the movie wasn't assembling it all well, or it could be because I was just feeling lousy. I'm not going to bad-mouth a movie I saw under those circumstances, so take this as an entirely neutral and useless "review." (I will say that I found the auctorial asides revealing future events and the screenwriters' opinions seemed lame, and a distraction.) Maybe Lee will have something to add. She seemed to be enjoying it. It wasn't THAT bad. The characters weren't very engaging, except for Jude, played by the always amazing Maggie Gyllenhaal. We talked about her a lot afterward. IMDb.com

Happy New Year (1987) ... is a remake of La bonne année, a 1973 film by Claude Lelouch that is, by all accounts, a lot better than this one. But since I haven't seen that one, I came to this one unprejudiced, and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit. It begins as a simple heist movie, which isn't bad at all, but in the middle it turns into something quite different, and that's even better. It's a showcase for the talents of Peter Falk, and who doesn't like Peter Falk? I loved him as Columbo, and the funny thing is, I have never seen an episode of "Columbo" in its entirety. Imagine that, learning to love a character through simply glimpsing little bits of business here and there while the TV happens to be on. If you haven't seen it already, check him out playing himself in Wim Wenders's brilliant Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). There is also Charles Durning, one of my favorite character actors, and Wendy Hughes, a cool Grace Kelly type who should have been better known by now. IMDb.com

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) Every once in a while a movie comes along and it’s met with almost universal acclaim … and I don’t like it. I’m not talking about overblown comic book movies like Sin City or The Dark Knight, because I don’t care why anyone could (inexplicably) like them. The former was beautiful but crap, and the latter was just vastly overrated. I am confident in these judgements. You may very well disagree with me (most movie-goers apparently do), and that’s fine, but I won’t lose any sleep over it, because I’m right and you’re wrong! But here’s a small, thoughtful, heartfelt movie on a human scale, dealing with human beings. It got an 84 on Metacritic, and a 93% at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s exactly the sort of movie I should like. And I didn’t. This is the sort of viewing experience that does make me doubt my own opinion. Was I just in a foul mood?

But then I found the minority opinion, expressed … guess where? In the viewer comments section at Metacritic. There were a lot of people who felt the way I did, so at least I know I’m not crazy. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is without a doubt the happiest, bubbliest, most positive-thinking little imp ever put on the screen. Very soon, I wanted to kill her. She makes Pollyanna, Pangloss, and Candide look like pessimistic, sour old grumps. (Gee, putting it that way … how could I not dislike her?) I was with her, more or less, when she tried to brighten the day of a few grumps early on, and reacted to the theft of her bicycle with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. Oh, well! It would be nice if we could all rebound from something like that so easily. After all, it’s just a thing, right? No big whoop. I think she would have the same reaction to World War III.

But it went on and on. She ended every sentence with a giggle that soon had me gritting my teeth. Then she started in on driving lessons with a man who was obviously seriously disturbed. She seemed absolutely incapable of taking him seriously, which is all he wanted from her. Okay, maybe she can’t take anything seriously … and yet, soon after, we see that in her job as a primary teacher (which she is good at, I’ll give her that, kids that age respond well to over-the-top behavior) she takes it very seriously when one of her pupils is acting aggressively, and helps a social worker discover that it’s because the kid’s mother beats him. But I began to wonder if she was intentionally needling the crazy driving instructor, knowing that her ditsy affect would drive him nuts … which was a dangerous game to play. I finally concluded that she was one of the most egocentric movie characters I’d ever seen.

No point in going on. Chances are you will like Poppy. I didn’t. Ditto. IMDb.com

Hard Candy (2005) There's a lot I'd like to say about this film, but I can't get started without a small

SPOILER WARNING!!!

I say small, because I think just about everybody knows about the twist that occurs about 15 minutes into the film. Hell, it's given away even by the picture on the DVD box. Which leads me to muse ... in these days when so many more people are paying so much more attention to movies many months or even years before their release, is it still possible to spring a real surprise on the audience? I guess it is, but it's a lot harder, and you almost have to close your ears to be unaware. And the studios even help you out, with things like the box cover. I mean, I get the feeling that if Psycho were released today, instead of saying "Do not reveal the ending! No one will be seated during the last half hour!" the posters would say "Janet Leigh dies halfway through!" And "Tony Perkins is really his dead mom!" When was the last time I was really surprised in a major way, not just little plot twists? Well, there's been a couple of times. I didn't know in The Usual Suspects that Kevin Spacey was really Keyser Söze (oops! Hope you didn't know that already!). And I also say small because the surprise really comes early, so the movie is not spoiled by knowing that she is stalking him rather than the other way around. But it would have been nice not to know ...

This is a real thought-provoker. There are so many things to think about here, from gut reaction to intellectual exercise. Is it really believable that a 14-year-old girl could be as smart and cunning as portrayed here? Not really, but hey, 99% of criminal masterminds in the movies are way smarter than just about anybody in real life. I can accept it as a fictional device.

What are your thoughts about torture? I'm agin it ... except in those very, very, very rare instances when it might become absolutely necessary to get some information very, very, very fast in order to save a life. The sort of situation in the original Dirty Harry movie, for instance, where a woman is buried alive and only one asshole knows where she is. I'd have gutted the sonofabitch slowly and fed his intestines to him ... and I would have expected to be fired and probably indicted for it later, as would be only proper. Or the sort of once-in-a-lifetime situation Jack Bauer apparently encounters at least once every hour in the TV series "24." (I've never seen it, but that's what I hear.) Or for being Iraqi and living in Baghdad ... wait a minute, that's Dick Cheney's standard for legitimizing torture, not mine. Most people I know are solidly against torture, usually without even the above exceptions ... except in one case.

Pedophiles. Child rapists and murderers. I have lost track of the number of times I've heard otherwise peaceful, loving people—the majority of them women—recommend cutting their fucking dicks off and/or castrating them, with or without anesthetic.

This movie makes you confront that ethic. It grabs you by the nape of the neck and thrusts you face-first right into the scrotum and let's you watch ... though there isn't a speck of gore in it. There doesn't have to be. Showing Patrick Wilson's face as he is subjected to the procedure (or is he?) is graphic enough. Still want to castrate 'em? Hell, I still do, but is Ellen Page as the 14-year-old surgeon having maybe a little too much fun as she cuts? Is she enjoying it as much as the baby-raper enjoyed his underage sweeties?

As if all this weren't disturbing enough, there is another creepy thing going on, as Roger Ebert pointed out. Some men like being tied up and hurt. Do you think they might get their rocks off on this film? Personally, I doubt it. Bondage is playing-acting, usually, and the guys who like it want to be screamed at, dominated by an older woman with whips and chains and leather, not toyed with by a barely-pubescent girl. And yes, there are guys who are turned on by castration, and not even the fantasy of it but the real deal (there are actual websites devoted to this, believe it or not), but that's a very small and very sick minority.

One review said this is one of the movies that when you leave it, you'll be talking about it with your friends for a long time, and you probably won't come to any easy answers. I agree. It challenges you, again and again and again, as you learn more about the pedophile (and, at first, you aren't even sure if he's a pedophile or just a slightly creepy voyeur) and more about the girl. I'll say no more about that. See it and decide.

There is only one flaw in the pic. The movie is a verbal and physical duel between two people, and it should have been left at that. There are two other people who appear briefly, and they were entirely superfluous to the relentless thrust of the story of the two. It was a waste of screen time and a distraction to bring in the outer world. The only world that existed, for these two, for a short while, was the house and their anger and fear and the past that was dragged out like a bloody testicle or a monster baby, kicking and screaming. Patrick Wilson is very, very good here. He is called on to do some suffering most men don't even want to imagine, and do it for long periods of time. But he is totally eclipsed by Ellen Page, who was 17 at the time but looks 14. She makes Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction look like Glinda the Good Witch, and she never has to scream and froth at the mouth to do it. There's not even a hint of insanity. She knows exactly what she's doing, and why, and she stays three steps ahead of her quarry most of the time. Even when he seems to gain a momentary advantage, she turns out to have been one step ahead of him. This has got to be one of the most empowering roles ever for a woman. IMDb.com

Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth (2008) Harlan and I had been corresponding for some time—this was back in the late 1970s—when my travels on the way to a convention took me through Los Angeles. I arrived at LAX only to find that my connecting flight had been cancelled, and I had seven or eight hours to kill in one of the world’s most boring places. I decided to call Harlan, just to talk for a while. “Hop in a cab! I’ll pay for it! Come see me!” (Harlan always speaks in italics, usually with an exclamation point.) I had to explain that I was dirt poor, didn’t have enough cash on me for a cab. “Rent a car!” he said. “I’ll pay for it! Come see me!” I had to tell him that I didn’t have a credit card. “No problem, here’s my Hertz number, go to the desk and they’ll give you a car!” I did, and they wouldn’t. No way, no how. They had to have the card in hand. No exceptions, never, never, never. I called Harlan back. By now he was seeing this as a challenge, almost an insult, and you do not insult Harlan Ellison. “Go wait by the Hertz desk,” he said. About half an hour later a slightly dazed looking supervisor beckoned me over. (Harlan has that effect on people.) I’ll never know what charms, threats, bluster, or magical spells he used on the poor woman; I don’t want to know. And this was on the phone, mind you, where he could only use a fraction of the sheer force of will available to him. Here, take the car! Just take it! So I signed the papers, took the car, drove to Harlan’s fantastic house in the hills of Sherman Oaks, and spent a pleasant several hours being shown around, dining on ribs from a joint down in the Valley. Then back to the airport and on to Phoenix on the late flight.

That’s my favorite Harlan Ellison story. I have others. There are many more Harlan stories in this excellent little movie, filmed over the course of almost 30 years. Absolutely a must see movie! Buy it! If you can’t afford to, rent it! IMDb.com

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) H & K smoke some really good dope, get a gigantic case of the munchies, and nothing will do but that they consume mass quantities of sliders at the grease palace we don’t have out here on the Left Coast. It becomes a quest, which takes them through Princeton University, jail, and a ride on a wild cheetah which they turn on to some dope they’ve stolen from the police. That’s right, a cheetah, in New Jersey, and it’s not explained, it’s just there.

There’s a certain kind of stoner-type movie that I usually don’t like. I think it’s because the stars are usually not only stoned, but dumb as rocks even then they’re straight. There are exceptions, like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where the guys are stupid, but so endearing and basically good-hearted that I don’t mind it, and the script was smart. Harold and Kumar are pretty bright guys who just like to get really baked on the weekends. They are very different, but alike in one crucial way: they are neither white, nor black, nor Hispanic. They are the neglected minority, guys from overachieving cultures: Korean and Indian. This provides a base for the looniness that follows. You’re not expected to believe any of this, and yet you can like the characters and laugh at their ridiculous adventures. Some of it didn’t work, but enough of it did that I had some good laughs. Recommend you skip the movie and go directly to The Art of the Fart (see below), the ONLY good thing about HAKGTWC. Watching Varley having a major laugh attack for ten minutes was pretty funny, too. IMDb.com

The Art of the Fart (2004) I was about to put the disk back in the box when I noticed this. What the heck. Ten minutes later I was hurting from laughing so hard. It’s funnier than the movie! There is a gross-out farting / diarrhea scene in the film, and this is a short that purports to be the story of the sound engineer and the director and how they struggled, artistically, to get the sounds just right. It is solemn and self-important, just like most of these DVD “extras,” and it actually had me fooled for maybe a minute and a half, as my jaw kept dropping lower and lower. Okay, maybe two minutes. Then I realized just how hard they were pulling my leg, and I was off on a giggle spree. DON’T MISS THIS!

Harry Potter and the ... (2001/2002/2004) #1, excellent. #2, good. #3, the best of the bunch. Hermione is particular is a delight, she’s much smarter than Harry, and really controls the action. It is a delight to see expensive CGI put to use making magic rather than violence. IMDb.com / IMDb.com / IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) This is that rarity, a series that gets better as it goes along. Even The Lord of the Rings didn’t do that; though none of them are bad, I felt the first was the best. For what it’s worth, here’s my own personal ranking of the four Harry Potters to date, best to least best:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (4)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (3)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2)

Not exactly a linear progression, but close. There have been three directors so far, and a fourth one is at work on Order of the Phoenix. It’s a little confusing, with four movies and six books out. Watching this one, if you’ve read the next two you know a lot more than the people in the film do. But it doesn’t affect your enjoyment.

Anyway, it’s certainly not a matter of the directors that makes these films so good. And it’s not the special effects, which started out excellent and just gets better all the time. And it’s not the acting, though all the children are competent and the supporting cast is a who’s who of the English cinema. No, it’s JK Rowling, who has made a long, long, long story that hangs together, that matters, oddly enough, even in this obviously fantastical universe. All of us remember being children, and remember the particular horror of adolescence, and that really comes into play in this movie. Sure, there’s all the dragons and death eaters and other adult games, but there’s the awful stress of your first big dance. There is true horror! Harry and Ron Weasley both flub it badly, and Ron behaves like a real asshole. Just like I was at that age. Only Hermione handles herself well, as usual. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Zathura (2005) Based on an illustrated children’s book by Chris van Allsburg, author of Jumanji, which was only a so-so fantasy film, and The Polar Express, which was a damn good one. I’ve never seen any of these books, so I don’t know how faithful the movie versions are. I didn’t realize it, but this is a sequel to Jumanji.

There is a central problem with this film, at least for me and Lee. Two brothers are seriously pissed off at their parents for divorcing, and behave even more like assholes than boys their age typically act. For more than half of the movie, as their house crumbles around them when they play this mysterious game that leaves them floating in some outer space universe with breathable air, they bicker, they shout, they whine, they rail at each other. Obviously the lesson will be that they have to learn to work together to survive ... but in the meantime, they are as obnoxious a pair of little pricks as I’ve ever seen in a movie. I worked up such a serious dislike for these rugrats that it was hard to try to like them when they began to learn the lesson. But it did perk up a bit toward the end. Look for the arrival of the “stranded astronaut” for things to start to look up. If you can make it that far. For us, it was a close thing. IMDb.com

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) First feature at the drive in. IMDb.com

The Haunted Mansion (2003) Not funny, not scary, not imaginative. Three for three. The ride at Disneyland is actually funnier and scarier, and much shorter. Which ride is next? Big Thunder mountain railroad? The whirling teacups? The Main Street streetcar? IMDb.com

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (French, 2002) Telling too much about this one would spoil the surprise, and it’s a big surprise, and very well done. Jaw-dropping, with Audrey Tautou playing completely against the type she established in Amelie. Very highly recommended. IMDb.com

Head in the Clouds (2004) I was left wondering why this film got made. It cost $43 million, and made back less than half a million. One weekend gross was listed as $72. Not thousand dollars. Dollars! All I can figure is that Charlize Theron wanted to make another film with her boyfriend, who co-stars. But did she have that kind of clout when this pic was lensed, as they say in Variety? Whatever. It’s a routine steamy romance set in pre-WWII Europe and the war itself, which serves mostly as background. Theron’s character is fascinating but not anything we haven’t seen before. The rest is oddly lifeless. The outdoor city sets are awkwardly lit and as unconvincing (purposely?) as, say Irma la Douce or An American in Paris. Old-fashioned Technicolor palette, harsh artificial light coming from all the wrong directions. Streets end in poorly painted panoramic backdrops. Charlize gets to wear some really great clothes, and is stunning in all ways, as always. If it hadn’t been for goggling at her, though, I’d have been bored mindless. IMDb.com

The Healer (Australian, 2002) Got off to an interesting start, but quickly became very soapy, overwritten and overacted. When it began to look like a Christian thing, a tale of a woman who regains her faith through a miracle, we bailed out. Maybe we were being unfair, but the fact is we just weren’t that interested. Don't you think there should be a separate section for faith-based movies? Or at least a warning label? IMDb.com

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

Heights (2004) Lee pretty much summed it up: Forgettable. I just know that if you ask me about this movie a month from now, I won't have a clue what it was about. It's based on a play by Amy Fox, a first-time playwright, and some of the cast are great. Glenn Close (no surprise) and Elizabeth Banks are very good. It's nice to see George Segal again ... whatever happened to him? (I heard coke.) Isabella Rossellini makes an appearance for about sixty seconds. The rest of the cast all look like generic New York male models, I had a hard time telling one from another. The plot was some ho-hum business about a man trying to deny his homosexuality. Sorry, my gay friends, this situation has been done to death, and Ms. Fox has nothing new to say about it. IMDb.com

Hellboy (2004) Seems to me there’s entirely too many comic book movies lately. Maybe because that’s I’m not a fan of comic books. However, if you’re going to make one, it seems best to have reasonably good source material, and this is superior. Hellboy is a troubled and witty and flawed hero, his origin is imaginative, and the movie is well-executed. Nothing is going to make this seem like a serious movie, or even a great action movie, but of its type it’s not bad. Good for a brainless evening. IMDb.com

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) First feature At the Drive In with Wanted. IMDb.com

Hell’s Angels (1930) The story is ludicrous, the acting laughable, and the American accents of these British upper class people are way beyond hilarious … but boy oh boy, those airplanes! Never before or since have so many authentic aircraft been assembled and flown with such derring-do. Howard Hughes himself flew the final scene, when his stunt pilots refused to attempt it. He crashed the plane, but he got the shot. Very little of this stuff is faked up against a rear projection screen, folks, almost all of it is real cameras bolted onto real airplanes trained on actors and/or pilots who really are up there in those rickety old crates, many of them probably wishing they’d worn diapers. The final dogfight is probably the best recreation ever made of what it was like to fly during WWI, and we’re unlikely to see anything like it again. Oh, yes, I know Martin Scorsese recreated some of the dogfight flying in The Aviator, but ironically, that was all jazzed up with CGI and way beyond the capabilities of actual airplanes; we are now in the age beyond reality, and into hyper-reality. Now you can locate a virtual camera high in the air and motionless and have a plane come zooming by within a few feet of your viewpoint. Hughes had to put his actual cameras on actual planes which, for me, makes it much more exciting than the hyper-real, or, to put it another way, over hyped.

The stories of the making of this film are almost impossible to credit. Hughes had the film in the can as a silent, then decided to just junk all that and remake it with sound. The actress who had played the floozy was Danish, and her accent made it impossible to believe her as a British aristocrat, so Hughes replaced her with … Jean Harlow, who has undeniable talents, but a British accent isn’t one of them. She is unintentionally hilarious.

But if you can ignore all that—FFing through most of the story elements isn’t a bad idea—you will be rewarded with much more than just the dogfight. The first action sequence involves a German zeppelin attacking London. The model work here is extraordinarily good for the time. The fiery crash of this aerial behemoth has to be seen to be believed, would do credit to a modern SFX model shop, and pre-dated by seven years the explosion of the Hindenburg. And it looks very much like the real crash, which is astounding. Smoke, water, and fire are the hardest things to do in miniature; this model must have been enormous. (There are also ludicrous elements, as when the Germans determine they must lighten the ship to rise above pursuing British airplanes … so almost the whole crew line up, shout “Für Gott, Kaiser, und Vaterland!” and jump calmly out the bomb bay doors.) (Also, I defy anyone these days to watch the final scene, with a man holding his dying brother—who he has just shot to keep the yellow-bellied little coward from spilling his guts to the Germans—and not laugh.)

The DVD we watched was restored by UCLA from the last surviving print, which has many hand-tinted scenes, and one eight-minute sequence in two-strip color that is surprisingly good. It takes place at a fancy dance in a mansion, and I understand this is the only color footage of platinum blonde Jean Harlow in existence. IMDb.com

Helvetica (2007) If you can make a whole movie about a typeface, I guess it’s true that you can make a movie about anything. Helvetica is the ubiquitous typeface of the modern age. It’s everywhere, and believe me, after you’ve seen this movie, you’ll see it everywhere. It was designed in 1957 in Switzerland (Helvetia, as I learned as a young philatelist, is the name on Swiss stamps) as a reaction to the more flowery scripts in use at the time. It is no-nonsense, san-serif, and whether skinny or bold it is easily readable. It also happens to be proprietary. I looked into buying it, and was horrified to see it would cost between $600 and $900, depending on how many dingbats you wanted. I suspect it’s available somewhere online for free—practically everything is—but I don’t have the time to search for it. So, I won’t be able to publish this review in Helvetica, as I had intended. But all the other reviews here are in Ariel, which is indistinguishable from Helvetica to anyone but a type designer. Helvetica/Ariel looks like this:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

That’s straightforward enough, don’t you think? Where it gets mysterious to me is when you get into the lower case letters:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

What’s the deal with that a? The circle part is sort of squashed, saggy on the top. It looks like a kidney bean. How does that fit with the symmetry, the sharp edges and geometric curves of all the caps? The g, as well, looks sort of hinky, when you consider it with all the others. Something about that hook at the bottom just seems to me to be up to no good. The f and the r and the j seem a little subversive, too.

These are the sorts of questions the people in this movie think about, things that you and I would be unlikely to notice. I was fascinated by typefaces for a while, a few years ago, and lamented the loss of the of the wonkier ones from the 19th century, which have to be seen to be believed. There are literally thousands of typefaces—millions, if you count the ones cobbled up for basically one-time use—and it is true that what you think about what you read is influenced by how that reading matter is presented. You wouldn’t have felt the same about a San Francisco Family Dog concert poster from the ‘60s, for instance, if it had been simply a typed list of bands, instead of a barely-comprehensible explosion of odd shapes and psychedelic colors. Those old posters are collectible now. A typed list wouldn’t have been.

The experts and artists interviewed here seem largely satisfied to let Helvetica remain the unchallenged king of the hill. It has obvious advantages. But there are some dissenting voices, reacting to the rather fascistic (to my way of thinking) pronouncements of some of the Old “Modern” Guard, who rail against Post-Modernism. I tend to side with the rebels. Let a thousand typefaces bloom, say I. Keep Helvetica for street signs and cold corporate logos. Elsewhere … experiment! IMDb.com

Hercules (1997) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

Hero (Ying xiong) (China, 2002) It is not possible to debate the incredible beauty of this film. It is one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen. Scene follows scene of awesome beauty, color, movement, incredible landscapes. It is not possible to debate the grandeur of it, either. There are scenes with many thousands, and not all of it is a CGI crowd, though some of it is certainly augmented that way. It is not possible to fault the ... choreography, is the only good word for it. People fly through the air, climb walls, walk on water, all in balletic splendor. I’m sure every martial arts fan who sees it will leave in a state of ecstasy.

I’m not a martial arts fan. To me, it’s a lot of sound and fury, signifying crap. A genius director like Quentin Tarantino and, here, Yimou Zhang, can keep me watching it right to the end ... but I get up feeling I’ve just watched a lot of nothing much. There is almost no blood in this movie, unlike Kill Bill, but it is just too much to swallow. I try to look on the story and the action as mythic, like some of the best American westerns where people shoot better than anybody can really shoot, but it doesn’t work. Watching people run on water is pretty and interesting, but just doesn’t do it for me. There is a cultural thing at work here that I just don’t get. I don’t understand the connection between swordsmanship and calligraphy, don’t see the point of a roomful of calligraphers sitting and working as a solid wall of arrows kill them.

Frankly, I don’t understand any of it. If you do, don’t try to explain it to me. Just enjoy yourself. IMDb.com

Heroes (2006) Over the last five years or so I have managed to get my regular television viewing down to approximately 0 (zero) hours per week. By that I mean sitting down on the couch on Sunday at 9, for instance, to see a regularly scheduled show. (Lee has the TV on all day to a news station, or sometimes a movie, but I don’t watch or listen … and actually, neither does she. She likes it in the background. And she often watches Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, but I hardly ever do.) I mean, what’s the point? I cannot abide commercials anymore, so if I decided I did want to see something, I’d tape it (don’t have TIVO) and time shift so I can FF. But I don’t even do that anymore. These days, anything that has any quality at all will be showing up on DVD within a year. By renting them, we can watch a whole season in a few nights and not have to wait a week to have cliffhangers resolved. Everything stays fresh in your mind. I really doubt that I will ever watch another TV show the way I used to watch “Hill Street Blues.” And I do not miss it one bit. I don’t have an office water cooler to hang around and discuss last night’s episode of whatever; I don’t care if I’m a year behind the times. Thus, we have not yet seen “The Wire,” and several other shows that might be worthy of our attention. We’ll get to them, there’s no hurry.

So, I had heard from several sources that “Heroes” was a good one. This week we started renting them, and have now zipped through all of the first season. My verdict: Tightly written, very imaginative, inventive, mostly intelligent, with appealing characters and great pacing. Insanely complicated plot lines, which is another reason I’m glad we viewed them one right after the other.

I have only one problem with the series (granting them the license to create any damn improbable/impossible “power” they want to dream up), which is, unfortunately, at the very center of the concept, and that is its view of evolution. It’s no wonder that so many people have bailed out on the whole idea of evolution and taken refuge in that idiot’s delight, “creationism,” or even worse, “creation science,” when you get crazy takes like this on evolution. Much is made here of concepts like “the evolutionary imperative,” as if it is a process with a goal, and “the next step up the ladder,” as if the billions of years of evolution life on Earth has undergone has resulted in organisms that are somehow “superior” to those that went before, and that the future holds more advances.

Not true, my friends. Evolution does not have a purpose any more than gravity does. Gravity does not have a “goal” of attracting other objects; it is merely a property of matter that leads to the formation of stars and planets. Evolution is merely the result of chemical reactions that produced what we call “life,” and the endless variations the environment works on those chemicals. Some are better suited to their environment than others, and those survive. Changes are always happening. 999,999 times out of a million, those changes are disastrous for the individual; it dies, and the species is strengthened. Once out of a million times a change is beneficial, and sometimes, if it is beneficial enough, it spreads though a species, which is now marginally better adapted to its environment. Add many millions of these changes together over many millions of generations, and new plants and animals are created in a very, very, very slow process.

It is true that complexity has increased as evolution moved from proto-life to single-celled and then to multi-cellular animals, but complexity is not, in and of itself, necessarily a survival characteristic. Right now there are literally thousands of very complex species that are on the brink of extinction because they have been unable to cope with an environment in which humans control the entire planet. But most bacterial species are not in any danger. We tend to view humans as somehow at the apex of a process, and it just ain’t true. We are no more complex than, say, a gerbil, we just have a more versatile brain. Whether that brain will turn out to be a positive thing is still very much in question. Ask me again in 100,000 years. (My current guess? On good days I see humanity spreading to the stars. On bad days, I see a scorched, radioactive Earth, or one where all humans died of a plague caused by our tampering with DNA. And you know what? The well-adapted species, like the cockroach, the alligator, and the shark, will still be there, and evolving to fill the environmental niches left empty by our brief but disastrous reign as kings of the planet.)

So, I have to ignore all the twaddle about how these mutated people, these “heroes,” are the “next step up the ladder.” There is no ladder. But it’s not hard to do, because the writing and the plots and the acting and the characters are sufficiently well-wrought that I can enjoy the rest of the show without worrying too much about the New Agey bullshit. In short, one of the best new TV series I’ve seen in a long time. I’m looking forward to Season Two, the one cut short by the writer’s strike. I understand Season Three will start in September … and I’ll wait a year for the DVD. IMDb.com

Hidalgo (2004) ... is a horse. He is way more intelligent than any real horse, also much tougher and stronger. Yet, if you don’t worry too much about that, it’s not a bad movie. But I am, frankly, surprised it got made. It is a supremely old-fashioned adventure movie: a cowboy and his mustang racing across the Arabian desert (the same Empty Quarter that almost killed Peter O’Toole; we even have Omar Sharif in the cast) against the finest Arabian bluebloods. No special effects to speak of, except a dust storm and a plague of locusts. Only one real over-the-top action sequence, with lots of ridin’ and shootin’ in some nameless Casbah with lots of ayrabs getting knifed and shot. Still, though this is not really a recommendation, I have to say I was happy to see it. Compare it to the ridiculously overblown crap that passes for action adventure these days, and you find it’s mostly honest, except of course the sprint for the finish line at the end. You probably need to be in the right mood to appreciate it. IMDb.com

Hide and Seek (2005) Double feature with Coach Carter.

The High Sign (1921) Buster Keaton two-reeler. It’s a great little film that is memorable chiefly for the amazing chase near the end, through a two-story, four-room set, where you can see all four rooms at once. There has never been a better movie acrobat than Buster. You wonder how he survived it all. IMDb.com

High School Musical (2006) I first heard of this when the buzz started building for the sequel, and I learned that it had been a monster hit on TV, sold a zillion DVDs, and spawned a best-selling album, a theatrical tour and an ice show, for chrissake! It has millions of devoted teenage fans. As a lover of musicals, I had to see what it was all about.

The bad news is … it’s not much. The music is undistinguished, and there’s not enough of it. (Oh, right, I hear you say: “The food here is terrible!” “Yes, and such small portions!”) What I mean, smart-ass, is that if you’re going to make a musical, you need more numbers than are on display here. The dancing is only so-so, and again, not enough. The plot:

Zac Efron is a jock, Vanessa Anne Hudgens is a brainiac, two well-known high school slots that one dares not transgress. But they both reluctantly discover that they like to sing and dance, and defy tradition by trying out for the yearly musical production, against long-time song and dance king and queen, Lucas Grabeel and his sister, Ashley Tisdale, the class bitch. Naturally Z&V win the parts, the championship b-ball game, and the college bowl. Ta-da!

Aside from the above problems, the film has a glaring flaw: Ashley and Lucas are much, much better singers and dancers than Zac and Vanessa. Their characters are solidly grounded in Broadway traditions. It appears they actually rehearse! (What a concept, you’re supposed to just let it all hang out, I mean, really!) In fact, Ashley is by far the brightest, funniest, most talented person in sight. The bad girl always get the good lines.

So okay, this is Broadway 101, right? And that’s not all bad. In fact, I see a couple silver linings, for lovers of musicals. (Musicals always have a silver lining, right? Well, except for Sweeney Todd …) The message of this piece is to break out of your limitations, not run with the herd, to go for your dreams. Will this change the rigid caste system of the horror show that is known as “high school?” No … but it can’t hurt. And beyond that, this is probably the first exposure a million teens have had to a story where the characters can suddenly break into song to express their feelings, except for Disney animated features like The Little Mermaid. I see that as a good thing, too. Maybe their next exposure will be to West Side Story, and after that, maybe Romeo and Juliet. And then, who knows? La Boheme? … naw, you’re right, probably not. But maybe Chicago. IMDb.com

The Hills Have Eyes II (2007) Double feature at the drive in with Grindhouse. IMDb.com

Himalaya (2004) The six comic geniuses of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (1969-1974) transformed television and then moved on to other careers, though they got back together to make three films: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983).

John Cleese is probably the best known. He's had a big career as an actor in movies and on TV. He helped create one of the best situation comedies of all time: Fawlty Towers. He also made a series of video shorts "designed to teach management and trainees how to handle stress and unusual situations." They are supposed to be very funny and I'd love to see them. (For a while, he inserted a made-up film title - "The Bonar Law Story" (1971), "Abbott & Costello Meet Sir Michael Swann" (1972), "The Young Anthony Barber" (1973) and "Confessions of a Programme Planner" (1974) - in every new edition of Who's Who, just to see if anyone would notice. Apparently no one did.)

Terry Gilliam made a series of fantastic movies, including Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Twelve Monkeys (1995), and The Fisher King (1991), usually after great travail.

Terry Jones is probably the least visible ex-Python, but it's mostly because he's been behind the scenes. He's worked a lot.

Eric Idle turned Monty Python and the Holy Grail into the Broadway smash hit Spamalot.

Graham Chapman has, of course, been kept pretty well occupied with the business of being dead.

Michael Palin has acted, as well, but his chief job since Python seems to have been ... traveling around a bit. It all began in 1989 with Around the World in 80 Days, in which he attempted to duplicate the feat of Phileas Fogg. Could one circumnavigate the globe in 80 days, without flying? So far as was possible he followed Fogg's route, and it was a close thing; he arrived back at London's Reform Club in the middle of the night of the 79th day, only to find it closed. This was an absolutely fascinating series, I loved every crazy minute of it.

Then the BBC challenged him again, and he made Pole to Pole in 1992, again flying as little as possible, trying to stay close to one line of longitude, which took him through Eastern Europe and Africa, into some very dodgy places.

You'd think that might be enough travel for anyone, but in 1997 he did an even longer journey in Full Circle with Michael Palin, where he circumnavigated the hard way, starting at the Bering Strait and encircling the entire Pacific Ocean. I'd love to see this, but it's not available on DVD yet. What's the deal, BBC?

Shortly after that he did a more personal one. His favorite author was Ernest Hemingway, and thus: Hemingway Adventure (1999. I haven't seen it (are you listening, Beeb? Where's the DVD?), but he visits all the important places in Hemingway's life.

Next, Sahara (2002), in which he encircled the desert of the same name. It's coming out on 4/18/06, and it's at the top of my Netflix queue.

So, on to Himalaya. Thought I'd never get to it, didn't you? Well, in a sense this is a review of all the Palin series I've seen, and they can be summed up like this: You can't go wrong with Michael Palin. Whether the road is easy or hard, his charm and good humor guarantee that you'll have a good time. You may be oozing sympathy as he oozes something else during a spectacular attack of diarrhea aboard an Arabian dhow, where the only solution is to hang your butt over the side, or gasping for breath as he battles altitude sickness at 18,000 feet, at the foot of Everest, and he'll still keep you amused. More often, he will show you the world and its wonders. He will take you into the planet's odd corners and meet some very nice people along the way.

I mean, can you beat it? Could anyone who likes to travel not be envious? Going to Tibet and Nepal and India can be fun, and it can be full of hardships (as I found out during 4 days in Bombay), but it wouldn't hurt to have a retinue of lackeys to carry your stuff, book all your flights and hotels (even if the hotel is a shack on the slopes of Annapurna), and set up appointments with local movie stars. His team locates wonderful guides, and there is always time to pop by and have a nice little chat and tea with folks like the Dalai Lama and the King of Nepal.

The humor is gentle. He never pokes fun at the locals, and he's willing to try any trek and sample any food. Oh, he does little comic bits here and there, but they are never the point of the show. He doesn't play much on having been a Python; the only time I can remember it is when he sings "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay!" to a Bhutanese poet, who seems to like it. At the utterly bizarre flag-lowering ceremony on the border between Pakistan and India (and honestly, it has to be seen to be believed, you would NOT believe me if I described it) he passes up a perfectly good chance to make a reference to the Ministry of Silly Walks. No, he's just a traveler ... albeit one who trails a film crew of from six to a dozen, and who spends a certain amount of time setting up shots.

Michael Palin has a wonderful website that covers all these trips in great detail, with maps and pictures and all sorts of extra stuff. It's called Palin's Travels. What a lucky, lucky man, to have a job like that. IMDb.com

His Girl Friday (1940) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

A History of Britain (2000) Our tour guide in this series, one Simon Schama, is not known to me, though he's apparently written a number of popularized history books and is well-known on the BBC. He insisted it be called "A" History of Britain, not "The," and that was wise of him. Though it runs 18 hours, you can only say so much on television, particularly when a fair amount of time is devoted to things like shots of falcons, deer, water crashing on rocks, and the white cliffs of Dover. (While I think this stuff could have been dispensed with, I realize you have to fill in the blanks with something; a man talking through an entire hour would be too much like a lecture, and would turn viewers off. It's necessary, and handled reasonable well.)

Schama is a slightly disheveled fellow who looks the part of an Cambridge don; you wonder where he misplaced his mortarboard and robe. Maybe it's because he had professorships for a long time at Harvard and Columbia. Though he appears frequently in the settings he's describing, as is standard in these sorts of series, and he doesn't have the loopy enthusiasm of our old friend Sir David Attenborough or the polish of Sir Kenneth Clark, I find he's growing on me. This is a personal take on England, and he has some insightful and funny things to say. IMDb.com

Volume One:

Volume Two:

Volume Three:

Volume Four:

Volume Five:

A History of Violence (2005) This has to be one of the best movies of the year. How rare to see a thrilling movie that doesn't exploit its violence, that doesn't follow the tired old formulas. Tired? Hell, most of the shoot-'em-ups we see these days are so phony, so predictable, so paint-by-numbers that I'm amazed they have the energy to stumble into the last, stupid reel with any pulse at all. In fact, most are brain-dead on arrival at the screen.

Not this one. There are four violent scenes, and each of them is over in less than a minute. (I'm not counting the masterful, horrific opening scene, the most disturbing in the movie, where the bloodletting happens entirely off-screen.) Do you know how much courage that takes in these days of 20-minute shoot-outs? When the violence comes it is quick, brutal, no-quarter, deadly, heart-stoppingly fast. David Cronenberg doesn't slaver over it, he never gives us slow-motion, multi-angle hails of bullets, or any of the nauseating auteuristic show-off clichés of recent action movies. Nor does he stint on the blood. A bullet enters a guy's head, it's going to make a mess coming out, and this is shown unflinchingly.

I can't go much farther without letting a whole lot of kitties out of the bag, so ...

SPOILER WARNING!

... though if you follow movies at all you will know that the mild-mannered diner owner (Tom Stall AKA Joey played by Viggo Mortensen) is living a 20-year lie, that he used to be a mob killer and he was very, very good at what he did. But if you came to it totally blind, it wouldn't be until more than halfway through before you were sure about what his wife and kids are so desperate to find out: Who is my husband/dad?

This movie works on so many levels. First, the aforesaid depiction of violence. I am not a violent man, but I'm not a pacifist. I don't believe that "violence never solved anything." Violence has solved a lot of things, throughout human history, but never without a price, as it so often does in the movies. Because I am not a violent man I know a hundred ways of avoiding violence, from simply submitting to a bully, as the son does in this movie, to running away as fast as you can. But when you can't run away from it, when you see that all alternatives have been exhausted, you must strike. You must fight dirty. If it is worth fighting about at all (and I'm talking personal or familial life or death, not politics or warfare) then it is worth fighting dirty for. You always hit below the belt, in the soft, vulnerable places. Stomp on a man's throat while he's down, and I guarantee he will not get up and attack you again. (He won't get up again, ever, which must be your goal. We see this done in this movie, and it's over in three seconds.) If you have a gun, you shoot to kill, not wound, and you keep shooting until you're sure. If you have to cut, don't stop cutting until the head comes clean off. Tom/Joey knows all these things, and when he has to fight, you don't want to be in his way because he won't hesitate.

Second, the effects on Tom's family are believable, they ring true. The son is tormented by bullies of the type we all knew in high school, and he submits to them. His girlfriend is right: they are Neanderthals, and not worth his time and skinned knuckles. But after his dad kills two would-be robber/rapists, he suddenly finds himself capable of absolutely destroying the two meanest junkyard dog assholes in the hallway. If he hadn't been pulled away, he would have killed them both with his fists. This is profoundly satisfying (unless you are a true pacifist) ... and also profoundly disturbing. We don't like to think about it, but this level of violence resides in all of us.

Maria Bello plays it letter-perfect as the wife. At first she does all the expected, futile, law-abiding things. Calls the police chief, a friend. Gets a restraining order. But when she realizes killers may be coming to her home, she doesn't hesitate, she breaks out the double-barrel streetsweeper and gets ready to blow some heads off. Then when she realizes her whole life has been based on her husband's lie ... she is pissed. Who wouldn't be? And yet she supports him. She lies, and hates herself for it. She fights off the husband's desperate attempts to hold on to her ... and then she responds, in spite of herself, and they have violent sex on the stairs. (Both actors became pretty bruised filming this scene. It isn't tender, it isn't loving, but seldom have I seen such passion on the screen.) There is something primal going on here, and Cronenberg shows it to us, and all the conflicts it brings to our "civilized" minds.

Third, the movie never goes where we have become conditioned to expect it to go. It opens with two extremely creepy guys, takes its time to establish their utter ruthlessness. Any other movie, these are the guys who would take part in the final, epic shootout through the abandoned factory/hero's home/freeway chase. But these guys are eliminated with shocking speed. Next we get the loathsome Ed Harris and his brutal crew. Surely he'll be around for the climax, he'll be the second-to-last to die in horrible vengeance, just before Mr. Big, the man behind all the evil. And yet, before we know it ... but I'm telling too much, even with a spoiler warning. And if you're expecting a Mexican standoff with Mr. Big, and then a twenty-minute fight with bullets spraying and fists flying in a pouring rain, a la Lethal Weapon ... forget about it! The violence is economical and instantaneous, and real.

If this movie reminds me of anything else, it is Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. In that one Dustin Hoffman was a mild-mannered mathematician forced to defend his wife, himself, and his home against a bunch of yahoos. Against all odds, he finds these depths of violence in himself to prevail. Tom/Joey is different in that he already knows all the tricks, but on the other hand Joey is so deeply buried that Tom doesn't really know who he is, either, and Joey's sudden appearance when he's needed is almost as big a shock to him as it is to his wife.

I was very nervous as we came to the end. This is where so many pictures blow it. You figure the good guy will prevail, but will the movie lose all credibility in the process? No, it will not. It strikes just the right note, the perfect note, by not spoon-feeding us a "message," by not having things suddenly be "all right." Things will never again be all right, or at least not much like they were before. More violence might be in store, but for a moment there is peace, and we are left to ponder ... can this family survive? IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Hitch (2005) With some movies, it’s a matter of expectations. You don’t go to see Animal House and come out saying, “Well, it wasn’t as good as To Kill a Mockingbird.” You go in expecting a romantic comedy, which is a genre that is tough to do and hasn’t worked for me much lately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m not as romantic as I used to be, or if Hollywood has lost the knack of making delightful froth like It Happened One Night. This movie is far from the best romantic comedy I’ve ever seen, but it worked for me, mostly. It got a little slow at times, but Will Smith is appealing, and so is Eva Mendes. They have chemistry. Kevin James as the fat, shy nerd hopelessly in love with the beautiful celebrity is very, very good. He could have been simply a foil for Smith’s wit, but he manages to make the character his own.

One sad comment. I read that, in casting Mendes as the object of Smith’s affections, studio wonks used this reasoning: casting a white woman would have pissed off black audiences, and casting a black woman meant that white audiences wouldn’t have gone, because they are widely believed to be not interested in romances between two black people. I don’t know if either of these things are true. It is sad that these things still have to be considered, but maybe I can take a little heart in observing that, when I was young, casting a white woman would have been absolutely out of the question, and in fact Will Smith would have been unlikely to be a star at all. Two black actors won Oscars last night, and that’s progress. But it’s so damn slow. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Constantine (2005) As a young man, John Constantine tried to kill himself. He was dead for two minutes, and went to Hell. Asked about it later, he says something like “Two minutes in Hell is like a million years.” Well, what reviewer could resist a straight line like that? So ... watching Constantine is sort of like two hours in Hell. It seems to take a lot longer than it really did. This piece of horse poop is a waste of the talents of Rachel Weisz and Tilda Swinton. As for Keanu Reeves, I wish he’d go back to his roots and make Bill & Ted’s Heinous Hellboy, or something. It couldn’t be dumber than this movie. I yawned, looked for falling stars, visualized rain, watched other cars leaving, whined, and still we stayed to the end. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) Believe it or not, I have never read Mr. Adams' wildly popular books. My understanding is that the whole Hitchhiker phenomenon was born from a BBC radio series, which I never heard, later became 4 or 5 books, a TV mini-series which I never viewed, a record album which I never spun, several stage adaptations which I never attended, and a video game which I never viddied.

I only became aware of it all when I began to see people wandering around science fiction conventions in bathrobes and slippers, and carrying towels. I thought they got lost on the way to the pool. I picked up the book, read a few pages, didn’t laugh, and put it down. Maybe I was in a bad mood, maybe I took SF a lot more seriously in those days, or maybe it just wasn’t my brand of humor. But it makes me the perfect audience to judge this film solely as a film, with no reference at all to how well it captured the book. I know almost nothing about the book except the business about needing a towel, and the phrase DON’T PANIC!

So I drive into the theater with Lee, eat half my Subway sandwich, watch a few dumb commercials and half a dozen noisy, jerky trailers, and settle back, my mind a blank slate, ready to be entertained.

I was underwhelmed. Seriously let down. Now I’m going to have to read the book, if only to discover whether A) this is a terrible adaptation of the book everyone loves so much, or B) the book was really awful, stupid, and obvious.

The movie opens lusciously, with leaping dolphins, who, we learn, are one of the three intelligent species on the planet. (A faint bell is ringing in my mind. I’ll deal with that later.) Then we meet Arthur Dent, played as a clueless everyman by Martin Freeman, who played an everyman with more clues than the rest of the cast on the wonderful British TV series The Office. The Earth is destroyed. Arthur survives, and begins a bewildering odyssey. Bewildering to me as well as him, unfortunately. Buttons are pushed. Odd things result. More buttons are pushed. The action is interrupted for animated disquisitions on what we’re seeing that are meant to be ironic. More buttons are pushed. Forms are filled out. Vast vistas are revealed to be goggled at. Things are brightly colored and brand new, unless they are gray and depressing and funky. Earth is re-created, boy gets girl, the end.

None of it worked for me. Okay, I tell a lie, I liked the idea of the POV gun. You shoot someone with it and they instantly understand where you’re coming from. That was a new one for me.

Nothing else was. Big ideas are discussed in a hopefully humorous way. The galaxy is a vast bureaucracy. Humans aren’t very important on the galactic scale. Groovy! But ... been there, done that. In fact, I’ve written that. Several times. In fact ... (Ah ha! The bell’s ringing again!) I wrote a whole series of stories and novels beginning in 1974, at least 4 years before THGTTG, whose premise was that aquatic mammals were the only intelligent species on Earth.

When we met the world-builder, one Slartibartfast, the bell was ringing again. In 1968 I read a novel by the great Robert Sheckley called Dimension of Miracles that dealt with just about every theme in this movie, from planet construction crews to wild improbabilities coming to pass through quantum randomness. Plus much, much more. As I recall, it also had an everyman caught up in events beyond his comprehension, but I don’t think he brought a towel. Bob has been writing biting satires like that since the 1950s. I have a copy on order from Amazon right now, so I can enjoy it again and compare it to Adams when I read THGTTG.

Now, I’m not saying Adams stole from me or from Bob or from anybody else. Nobody “steals” things in science fiction, not really, or in literature in general. We borrow. We use ideas that are out there. If we waited for a truly original idea, there would be precious little SF, I promise you. Truly new ideas come along only a few times in a century, such as the theory of relativity, the idea that Pauly Shore is funny, or the mind-boggling concept that a life-long loser and stumble-tongued idiot from Texas could be cleaned up and sold to the American people as presidential timber.

David Gerrold has written of how he inadvertently used an idea in “The Trouble With Tribbles” that bore a striking resemblance to something in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones. Heinlein said no harm, no foul, he stole it from Ellis Parker Butler’s “Pigs is Pigs,” (which Walt Disney also borrowed, though he paid for the rights) who stole it from Noah, who got it directly from God, who probably picked it up in the remainder bin at His local CreatorêMart. And I’ll have to wait to see if Adams handled these ideas better than Bob or I. In a book like THGTTG style is everything. Wit rules. I’m perfectly prepared to discover that Adams took ideas that Bob and I had used and created the masterpiece that Bob and I and others failed to deliver on.

But not the movie. The movie is a mess. Sam Rockwell as President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the voice of Alan Rickman as Marvin the depressed robot were two of the most annoying characters I’ve ever encountered in a movie. I gritted my teeth every time they spoke. Poor Arthur Dent never managed to generate an instant of sympathy. Zooey Deschanel is cute as a button and not much else.

People are comparing this to Monty Python, saying it’s all peculiarly British humour. Beeblebrox! There is no bigger fan of the peculiarly British humour of John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, and their peculiarly American colleague, Terry Gilliam, than I. THGTTG doesn’t even come close. The people who made this peculiar piece of shit are not qualified to hand the slapsticks and pig bladders and cream pies to Monty Python.

And what’s the deal with the towels? A small detail but an annoying one. Arthur never uses the towel for anything. I’ve hitchhiked thousands of miles, and I never felt the lack of a towel. I’ll tell you what I’d bring if I only had a moment to grab stuff before the Earth was destroyed. I’d bring a Swiss Army knife. I’d bring duct tape. You can never have enough duct tape. (I'm currently reading a book titled A Short History of Nearly Everything, 544 pages long, that endeavors to explain the formation of the universe, galaxies, the Solar System, and the Earth, etc. Duct tape is mentioned on page 11 as instrumental in discovering the radiation left over from the Big Bang, so you can see how handy it is!) I’d try to grab some warm clothing. A ball-point pen or a pencil. Hitchhiking is fun! The only scary-making thing is in the first few minutes, while you’re trying to figure out if the driver really wants to take you where you’re going or if he only wants to suck your dick.

Hitchhiker Redux ...

I have now read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and re-read Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley. Bob’s book was just as good as I remembered it, so good in fact that I checked out Mindswap, a similar novel, to read again, too.

My verdict on H2G2, the movie? Simple. These guys really blew it. The book is very funny, I wish I’d read it years ago. Not often laugh-out-loud funny, like Donald Westlake’s books are, but wickedly funny, ironic, biting, and satirical. Some parts of it are indeed Pythonesque, or Montyistic, or Flying Circusish, or whatever. The producers or Adams himself (he’s listed as co-writer) carefully hunted out those parts and excised them. They went for spectacle, and overblown silliness, and managed to miss everything appealing about the book. Shame on them. It is just possible that this book should never have been made into a movie, anyway, especially in this era of gigantic CGI movies with no heart. Even if so, shame on them.

Yes! They do play that song at the drive-in in San Luis Obispo, with the same partially-fossilized strip of film with dancing popcorn boxes and soft drinks and candy that they were showing at the Don Drive-in in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1963 when Calvin, Jan, Phil and I would pile into the old 53 Hudson for a dusk-to-dawn 5-movie marathon! It’s like going into a time warp! IMDb.com
SECOND FEATURE: Sahara (2005)

Now, as to the movie ... One thing that even a very bad movie like this can use to earn points with me is to take me to exotic locations. Places I’ve never seen. I wasn’t optimistic with Sahara. I’ve seen sand. In fact, I’ve probably seen every desert in the world, from the Gobi to the Sahara to the great outback of Australia. Of course, many of those were actually filmed in the Mojave or Death Valley or even in the dunes I can almost see from my front door. (Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments was filmed ten miles from here.) What I hadn’t seen was Lagos, Nigeria, the Niger River, and the ancient mud cities of Mali. Cool! I enjoyed that part. I was only a little disappointed to get home, go to the IMDb, and discover I was actually seeing Morocco, Spain, Shepperton Studios and Hampshire. Oh, well, that’s show biz! IMDb.com

The Hoax (2006) What are you going to believe about a movie made from a book written by one of the biggest liars of the 20th Century? Clifford Irving was damn good at it, and it’s a pleasure to see him putting a world-class snow job on some supposedly smart, savvy New York publishers, never backing down from his ridiculous assertions, always upping the ante. The first half plays light-hearted, and I think it would have been better if it had stayed that way. But it shifts into an examination of lies, and the lying liar who tells them, and how difficult it can become for such a man to distinguish between truth and lies … and it’s really not up to that. I don’t care what happens to Cliff; he’s a jerk, though an amiable one. It would have worked better if it was all played for laughs. After all, who but the publishers really cares if he bilks them for a million dollars? It was a weird little incident, no more, and can’t really bear a lot of philosophical weight. I also wonder if someone born in, say, 1980, would have any idea what’s going on here. The movie seems to assume we know a lot, and though I followed the scandal at the time, I wasn’t able to fill in some blanks. IMDb.com

Hobson’s Choice (1954) Directed and co-written by David Lean, starring Charles Laughton. What more could you possibly ask for? It’s based on a 1916 play set in the late 19th century. Hobson is a blowhard tosspot of the kind Laughton can do better than anyone. He has three daughters, who pretty much run his boot shop for him, and he’d be happy to keep it that way. But the eldest has other ideas, and she’s way smarter than him. She takes a trembling nebbish (John Mills), who happens to be the best cobbler in town and the real reasons for Hobson’s success, and sets out to marry him and transform him into a man. She could have been a nightmare harpy, but it’s clear she loves him. At one point she says “You’re the man I made you, and I love you.” As an added bonus, the youngest sister is played by a very young-looking (she was actually 22 at the time) Prunella Scales, one of those British actresses who has had a long and distinguished career but would probably be unknown to Americans except for her brilliant stint as Sybil Fawlty opposite John Cleese in “Fawlty Towers.” IMDb.com

Holes (2003) A very odd little film. I enjoyed it. Sigourney Weaver is the nasty warden of a desert work camp for wayward or just awkward boys. IMDb.com

Hollywood Homicide (2003) Totally blah Hollywood formula. A waste of Harrison Ford. Ron Shelton has written and directed some of the best sports movies of modern times. He should stick to sports. IMDb.com

Hollywoodland (2006) Here's a film that tries to connect on several levels, and doesn't work on any of them. It's two movies, really, one about George Reeves, who took the part of Superman for a paycheck and then got typecast and blew his brains out. The other is about a two-bit private eye hired by Reeves' mother who says she thinks he was murdered. We cut back and forth, so we only get a hour for each story. Ben Affleck is stiff and uninteresting as Reeves, and Adrien Brody ... what can you say about this guy? He got a lucky break when he was cast in Polanski's The Pianist, and won the Oscar. Before that, he was a bit player. Now they're trying to make him into a leading man, and it's not working.

This is the first feature written by a guy who's done a lot of TV, and also for the director, who did some episodes of "The Sopranos." They bit off way more than they could chew. Maybe the story of Reeves, told sequentially could have had some wit, brightness, plenty of humor. But the only thing interesting about him was “Superman,” and we see very little of that here. Before that he was in Gone With the Wind ... for about 2 minutes. He was a bit player, and then an aging has been pretty boy.

As for Brody ... damn, he was awful. He is such a one-note sad sack. He must have been born looking tired and defeated, and that gets old fast. You keep expecting him to fall asleep. There is one incredibly ironic line in the movie. Brody is talking to Reeves' agent, who says George was a great guy, an actor's actor, handsome, always saying his lines well, “Not like these new guys, all the squinting and mumbling.” He's talking about Brando and James Dean ... but he's looking right at a real 2006 actor who can't do anything but squint and mumble. IMDb.com

A Home At the End of the World (2004) A rather unusual movie made from a novel by the author of The Hours, and quite a departure for Colin Farrell, an Irishman we had just seen playing a tough guy in Intermission. Before this he’s done mostly action pictures, much more macho things, including Oliver Stone’s Alexander, which we haven’t seen yet. Here, he is Bobby, a flower child whose brother gives him his first LSD trip in 1967 Cleveland, then walked through a glass door and dies. His mother is already dead, and soon his father dies, too. He goes to live with the family of a friend who is gay, and turns his mother (Sissy Spacek) on to marijuana. Years later, Bobby meets his friend in New York, where he is living with a woman (Robin Wright Penn). An odd ménage forms. Bobby can’t bear to see anyone unhappy, and for a while it all works, they have a child, but eventually he can’t make everyone happy and has to make a choice. Not entirely successful, but worth seeing. IMDb.com

Home From the Hill (1960) When I was looking up the film career of Luana Patten, who starred in some Disney films when she was a child, I found that she had a part in this movie. I had never seen it, which is odd, because the book it was based on was written by a relative of mine. William Humphrey, author of this story and The Ordways, among at least a dozen other books, was Dad’s cousin. That’s about all I know. I never met him. Actually, I don’t think I ever met a lot of my extended family. Granddaddy Varley had 15 or 16 siblings (I’m not kidding!), I’m not sure which, and I can’t think of a single name. I guess we weren’t a close bunch. Anyway, I had a LaserDisc copy which I’d never gotten around to seeing, so I decided now was the time.

This movie was quite a big production. It’s two and a half hours long, in ultra-widescreen, so much so that when letterboxed on our widescreen TV, there was a lot of space above and below it. I don’t think it was a reserved seat roadshow, which were popular at the time, but it was a major release. It suffers some from old age, old movie-making techniques and acting styles—Luana Patten is, sadly, not a very good actress—but George Peppard is very good, and Robert Mitchum is always worth watching, in my opinion. George Hamilton was 21 and playing 17; he scowled a lot. But the strength here is the story, which is powerful. I recommend it to classic movie fans. IMDb.com

Home Front (2002) Originally titled The Scoundrel’s Wife. The director, Glen Pitre, is an actual Cajun who has made several good movies in the region, some of them in Cajun French. So why does nobody in this film sound like a Cajun? (I grew up in southeast Texas, I know what they sound like.) It starts out interesting, but gets more and more unlikely, and finally loses it entirely. Pretty bad acting, dumb script. Give this one a miss. IMDb.com

Home Movie (2001) This is from the IMDb, and it sums up very well: "Director Smith visits five unusual homes and talks to the people who built or adapted them. His subjects include an alligator wrangler who lives on a houseboat in a Louisiana bayou; an American actress who made her fortune on Japanese TV and then built a treehouse getaway in Hawaii; an inventor who automated his entire home; a family who converted an abandoned missile silo into an underground abode; and a pair of cat-lovers who renovated their house with dozens of feline-friendly features." It’s by the director of American Movie. We enjoyed it, but it’s not a biggie. IMDb.com

Home of the Brave (2006)You want to like this movie because everything it has to say is the truth … and yet all points are driven home with a hammer until you begin to wish some of these people would just shut up and get on with their lives. Irwin Winkler has been the producer of some of the best films ever made, including Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? His handful of directing credits is not nearly so distinguished, and he has no business at all trying to write a movie. This one needed at least two more re-writes.

The first 20 minutes are good, showing harrowing combat in Iraq. I suppose each war has its signature horror. As one who never went to war, I’ve spent a lot of time imagining these things and how I’d have coped. (My conclusion: Not very well.) In WWI it was somehow getting up and out of the trenches and charging suicidally into withering machine-gun fire, and gas. In WWII, for Americans, it was storming those beaches in Normandy and the Pacific, absolutely no cover, might as well be naked. For the Japanese it was dying in a hole, cooked by flame-throwers; for Germans and Russians, it was freezing to death with no food. In Nam, it was the goddam jungle. In Iraq, it seems to be the sheer claustrophobia of the streets, where every window can hide a sniper, and every garbage dump can suddenly explode and take off an arm or leg. This movie does a good job of showing that. I felt the claustrophobia.

Then we follow four vets as they come home and try to re-adjust, and it just gets overblown. You want to see a good movie about PTSD (combat fatigue, shell shock), see In Country. One of the vets has lost her right hand. Confession: I know nothing about Jessica Biel, didn’t know she is sort of a star, and had thought she might be an actual disabled vet who had turned to acting … because frankly, her acting was not very good. The CGI “amputation” of her hand is that convincing. But that pissed me off, too. Why not try to find an amputee actress? I’m sure there are some out there, maybe an actual veteran. You’ve got Samuel L. Jackson as a “name” on the marquee, you don’t need Jessica Biel. The far, far better movie about vets coming home is The Best Years of Our Lives. Harold Russell won an Oscar as the Navy man who came home with no hands (in fact, two Oscars, the only actor ever to do so; one was honorary, for being an inspiration to the troops), and at least he came by his amputations honestly, not in a computer program. Sure, it was a sympathy vote, he was not an accomplished actor, but it worked. It worked very well. IMDb.com

Home on the Range (2004) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

Horton Hears a Who! (2008) Second feature At the Drive In with Nim's Island. IMDb.com

Hostage (2005) Robert Crais is one of the best writers around. I’ve read all his books, including the one this movie was based on, and they’re great.

Bruce Willis is one of my favorite action-movie stars. His everyman looks and his attitude are just believable, even though the stunts may not be.

This movie gets off to a great start. Even the opening credits are arresting, and the story development is first-rate. It’s all wonderfully done ... until the end. (God, I’m tired of writing that sentence.) It gets a little crazy, a little drawn out, and adds silly Hollywood stuff that wasn’t in the book.

You know, I’m convinced that movie execs are convinced that audiences demand this sort of overblown climax ... and I think they’re wrong. Look at the Bourne movies. Smart, fast, high-tech, ruthless ... and audiences loved them.

And I’m sitting here trying to decide an adequate punishment for a director who uses slow-motion for more than, say, two shots in an action movie. How about ... they are tied to a chair with their eyes propped out like Alex in A Clockwork Orange and fed caffeine intravenously while watching Andy Warhol’s 8-hour epic Empire, which consists of one continuous, static shot of the Empire State Building ... in s s s s s s s l l l l l o o o o o o o w w w w w w w m m m m m m o o o o o o t t t t t t t i i i i i i o o o o o n n n n n n n n.

Make it last about a week. When they get out of the mental hospital point out to them that slomo, while it has its uses, is the refuge of the incompetent ... and that Andy Warhol made another 8-hour film, called Sleep. IMDb.com

Hot Fuzz (2007) The last two films we saw (Hard Candy and Deliver Us From Evil) prompted reviews from me that were more like essays, since they both punched a lot of my rant buttons. Both concerned child molestation, oddly enough. What a relief to be able to write a short rave, about a film containing nothing more than buckets of old-fashioned blood and gore. This is the second effort by the writing/directing/acting team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, that brought us Shaun of the Dead, one of my favorite spoof comedies. They bring the same sensibility to this send-up of cop/action films, parodying every cliché in those stupid car-chase endless gunfight extravaganzas. As in the first film, it's not for the squeamish, but it's hard to take the bloodshed seriously.

Apparently Lee did. She hated it. Lee? Gratuitous violence in the name of spoof is still gratuitous violence. IMDb.com

Hot Rod ( 2007) The second feature at the drive in with The Invasion. IMDb.com

The Hotel New Hampshire (1984) John Irving novels are big, complicated, full of quirky characters and bizarre events that come at you out of the blue. This works okay in a novel, because someone of Irving’s confidence can sell me on it. In a movie, too much summarization and simplification is necessary. The World According to Garp worked pretty well for me, but this doesn’t. It just feels rushed and disjointed, and I found it hard to care for the people in it. IMDb.com

Hotel Rwanda (2004) This is a hard movie to watch and a hard movie to review. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this all happened just a decade ago. I don’t know just why it should be hard to accept; it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, it’s not like it’s not happening right now, in Sudan. Maybe it has something to do with hanging on to one’s comfortable faith in the very, very thin veneer we call “civilization.” It can happen here, and if not here, somewhere else, and we can continue to either ignore it or simply deplore it and do nothing, as has worked so well in the past.

The United States went into Somalia in a half-assed way, trying to stop another killing fields, and we got that half of our asses handed right back to us, and we scuttled. We were still smarting from that when the Rwandan genocide came down, so we—and everybody else in the world, don’t forget that—stood by while one million people were butchered, mostly with machetes.

Who is to blame? I don’t know. The UN pussyfooted, no question. Basically, those niggers didn’t have any oil, so fuck ‘em, was the underlying but never spoken argument, and look what happen when we tried to help out those savages in Somalia. Historically? It was surely caused at least partly by European Colonialism, the Belgians favored the Tutsis, in part because of the racist theories of John Hanning Speke and others, who considered them more-evolved Hamites, over the more monkey-like Hutu. When the Belgians left, the Tutsis kicked a lot of Hutu ass. Then the situation went to hell and the Hutu majority started 100 days of systematic slaughter that surely are among the bloodiest days in world history.

But that’s not all the story. Africans were fighting Africans before the colonialists ever arrived, just as American Indians were enthusiastically slaughtering each other long before Columbus arrived.

In the end, it is all of us to blame. Red and yellow, black and white, all are racist shitheads, goddamn right. In the movie, a white guy asks two similar girls which tribe they belong to. One is Tutsi, the other is Hutu. Here in the USA, where skin color is all important when it comes to hatred, we just don’t get it. A white American couldn’t tell one from the other if his life depended on it. Hell, I doubt there are many black Americans who could. Tutsis tend to be taller. (It was a popular sport to cut off Tutsis’ feet before hacking them to death.) Rwandans themselves had to look at identity papers which were prominently stamped with your tribe before they started swinging their machetes.

Ah, it all just makes me want to puke. I can’t think of anything intelligent to say about it.

So what about the movie, as a movie? It is extremely powerful. Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo are heartbreakingly good. The producers wanted Denzel, among others, and I think that would have been wrong, good as Denzel is. He’s too much the handsome leading man. Cheadle is an everyman, a hard-working administrator who is scared shitless all the time but still finds the strength to do what has to be done. Very effective. Odd that an American and a Brit play a Hutu and a Tutsi, but that’s Hollywood.

If you have avoided this for fear of blood, you shouldn’t. It is not a bloody movie. The slaughtering takes place off camera, and we see the results from a distance. Some critics thought this was dishonest, but I don’t see how. As Roger Ebert said, you can’t make a dramatic film about a million murders. You can make a movie with a background of a million murders. The only way to really capture the historical reality of a holocaust is in documentary form, such as Night and Fog, and Shoah. IMDb.com

Houdini (1953) As is typical for biopics like this, they get the broad strokes more or less right, but fudge the details for dramatic reasons. Like … Bess was not a wide-eyed innocent, she was a fellow carny. Many of his escapes from jails were the result of simple bribery, or were set-ups of one sort or another. Though he may have begun visiting “mediums” in hopes of contacting his beloved mother, I don’t think he held to that hope after exposing everyone he visited as a fraud. He never sought the “dangerous” secret of dematerialization, nor was the Chinese Water Torture Chamber a jinx of any sort, nor was it particularly dangerous. He had done it frequently, and many people do it today. Most importantly, he didn’t die onstage in the water torture. But what the heck. You don’t go to the movies to learn history … or at least you shouldn’t. All that woo-woo spookiness makes for a pretty good drama. Tony Curtis, though a lot taller and much more handsome than Houdini, does a great job. IMDb.com

The Hours (2002) A 3-part film, told simultaneously. Some parts work better than others. I’d have given the Oscar to Rene Zellwegger instead of Nicole Kidman which doesn’t mean she’s not good here. The Meryl Streep part is the one that worked best for me. What about Julianne Moore? IMDb.com

House of Sand and Fog (2003) Very moving story of how a small dispute can get out of hand. Ben Kingsley is always good, but Jennifer Connelly moves to a whole new level in this one. Excellent. IMDb.com

The Housekeeper (French, 2002) Finally, a movie that is honest about the very common older man/younger woman story so beloved by aging male directors and stars. The movie is sly and funny, and finally sad, and I liked it. IMDb.com

Housesitter (1992) Here’s of those romantic comedies Hollywood used to be able to do so effortlessly, but mostly does badly these days. I wonder if we’ve seen half a dozen of them that actually worked in the last decade? Maybe. This one works gloriously. Goldie Hawn is one of our favorites, dating all the way back to the days of “Laugh-in.” She doesn’t work enough; she hasn’t had a screen credit since 2002. Maybe it’s hard to find the right vehicle for her particular talents, so if she’s just waiting for the right part, I’m willing to wait with her. I had forgotten she won an Oscar way back in 1969.

Steve Martin, on the other hand, works way too much, and for a long time has picked more turkeys than winners … by that I mean aesthetically, I suppose some of them have made a lot of money. But there was a period where he could do no wrong, and gave us some of my favorite comedies of all time: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; L.A. Story;  All of Me; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; and Roxanne (though I could never buy Darryl Hannah as an astronomer). These were funny movies, but with a lot of heart. During that time he also took parts in some more serious films, like Grand Canyon, Pennies From Heaven, and Leap of Faith. So what is he serving up to us these days? Cheaper By the Dozen 2 and The Pink Panther 2, sequels to films that were pretty standard or pretty bad in the first place.

But here, directed by Frank Oz, everything works. Steve does bewildered better than anyone alive, and this story leaves him plenty to be bewildered by, as Goldie moves into his life and catches him up in her effortless web of lies. “You’re the queen of crap,” he tells her, admiringly. “You’re the Ernest Hemingway of bullshit.” And she is, and if she wasn’t so charming she’d be very like a stalker … but she’s Goldie, and we believe it all and the only question is, how long will it take this idiot to fall in love with her, as we did five minutes into the film? IMDb.com

How To Draw a Bunny (2002) Ray Johnson was a member of that group of beatnik avant-gardists that began as starving artists in the early ‘50s and eventually ended up millionaires like Roy Lichtenstein and Christo, who appear in this film, and Andy Warhol, who doesn’t, being dead. Johnson never achieved the success of his peers. He was primarily a collagist, and his work is interesting, but way too deliberately dense. He also seemed to view his entire life as a piece of performance art, to the point that his death by suicide was viewed by his friends as simply another piece of it. Maybe he thought so himself. Dying was a bad career move for Warhol, who was already filthy rich, but probably a good one for Johnson. Suddenly he has attention. Good for him. Didn’t really care that much for the film, though. IMDb.com

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967) The 1960s was a transitional time for Broadway musicals. In the past was the work of Rogers and Hammerstein (Oklahoma, The Sound of Music), Lerner and Loewe (My Fair Lady, Camelot). Soon to come were musicals by Kander and Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago), Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George), and Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, Evita). Quite a bit of difference there. In between were some things that were very much of their time, like How Now, Dow Jones, and Promises, Promises, and this one. Hit musicals used to be pretty much guaranteed to go to the big screen sooner or later, but after some spectacular flops, that was no longer the case in the late sixties and seventies. There was a gap of six years between the Broadway and film versions of How to Succeed, from 1961 to 1967. This was even though it was huge success, running for 1417 performances, and winning seven Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. Movie musicals continued to get made, here and there (Sweet Charity), but many big hits did not. It wasn’t until the original screenplay Moulin Rouge in 2001 and the long-delayed Chicago the next year that some said a revival was under way. I’m still dubious. Mamma Mia! made good money, and so did Dreamgirls and Hairspray, but The Phantom of the Opera didn’t do that great, and The Producers flopped. Both of them monster hits on Broadway. Among the major Broadway hits that still haven’t made it to Hollywood: Cats, Miss Saigon, Wicked, Sunset Boulevard, and Les Misérables.

Okay, back to this one. Like I said, very much of its time. (For instance, look in vain for a black face in these huge offices. Don't tell me affirmative action was a failure.) Gray flannel suits, office politics, advertising, company culture … these were the things a lot of people were thinking about in the early ‘60s … though perhaps not so much in the rest of the country as in New York City. In the story J. Pierpont Finch (Robert Morse) reads a book which tells him how to make it in the business world. There really was such a book, a satirical guide to success by Shepherd Mead. His rise is way beyond meteoric: within about a week he moves from window washer to Chairman of the Board. The story could actually be called something like How to Get to the Top by Kissing Corporate Ass, because that’s what Finch mostly does. It’s pretty sickening. That little gap-toothed leprechaun with the rapid vibrato, Robert Morse, is probably the most irritating musical star ever, with the possible exception of Tommy Steele, who also enjoyed an inexplicable vogue around the same time. Their problem, I think, is that they were like Ethel Merman, way too intense for the big screen. You probably needed a little distance to appreciate them … like the last row of the balcony. Morse seems to think he’s adorable, going so far in scene after scene as to lean his elfin little head on the person he’s trying to charm. It wears thin pretty fast.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010) First feature At the Drive In with Alice in Wonderland. IMDb.com

Hula Girls (Japan, 2006) Change a depressing, failing, industrial, Thatcherized city in the English midlands to a failing, depressing coal mine in a cold part of Japan. Change overalls to grass skirts. Change striptease to hula dancing. Change out-of-work factory men to out-of-work coal miner’s daughters. Finished? What you’ve done is change The Full Monty to Hula Girls. Nothing else is really needed but English subtitles, if you don’t understand Japanese. It also has things in common with a movie we liked even more than The Full Monty, which is Brassed Off. A bit of Calendar Girls in there, too. In fact, you’ve seen this movie many times, if you go to the movies at all. The New York Times reviewer said this: “You’ve seen this film many times. It always works.” Well, yes, but sometimes it works better than others. It’s impossible to dislike this little bauble, for me, at least, but it could have used another edit. The sentimental scenes drag on too long, and I always resent that, the director trying to wring one last tear from me, to the point that the tears just don’t come. I liked these shy and (eventually) spunky girls, and I liked their washed-up dance teacher who (what else?) redeemed herself by bringing hope to these girls and their village. And I’d have liked them more if the pace had been a little sharper.

I was dubious about the story. Sure, you want it to be a cock-eyed plan, and this is one of the more cockier-eyed. It’s 1965, oil is replacing coal, the mine is going to close. The idea is to build an indoor Hawaiian resort heated by the thermal springs in the area, to give jobs to the miners. To do this, the girls have to learn to shake their booties. Shaking one’s booty just ain’t a very Japanese thing to do. They are hopeless … and yet, of course, by the last reel you’d think they were born in grass skirts. They get down with it, haole! Seemed unlikely to me. However, I learned that this was in fact based on a true story, and that none of the actresses in this movie were dancers, and that they spent three months learning how to dance … so if these girls could do it, why not the village girls? IMDb.com

The Human Face (2001) This is a 4-part BBC mini-series hosted by John Cleese. Pardon me, it was hosted and written by Cleese. Some people at the IMDb discussion of this series were grumping that any science series these days has to be hosted by some "big name" who probably knows nothing about the subject. Aside from a great big "Who cares, if he makes it interesting?" that's a slander to Mr. Cleese.

And I got news for you: it is well-known that you remember stuff a lot better if it is presented in an entertaining manner, and you can't beat JC in that department. Sure, a bit of it is a little over the top—he was a Python, after all—but most is right on target; I laughed a lot. He spends one entire episode one inch tall and standing on Elizabeth Hurley's face. I can think of worse jobs.

When the funny business stops, Cleese is a sympathetic and insightful interviewer of several people with either facial disfiguration or problems in facial recognition, like the man who can no longer recognize the faces of his family, or the guy who was convinced his mom and dad had been replaced by impostors. This is Oliver Sacks territory, and endlessly fascinating and horrific.

There are several famous faces involved in the project besides Hurley, and my favorite was our old friend David Attenborough. Here is a man who knows how to make documentaries—we've seen just about all of his, and are currently half-way through his 8-part The Life of Mammals—and knows the value of inserting himself into the shot, both for his own recognizability and to make the material intrinsically more interesting. He has a lot to say about the face, from a scientific point of view, and about fame, from a personal angle, as do Pierce Brosnan and Candice Bergen, who discuss the ups and downs of being gorgeous. William Goldman weighs in on movie stars and fame.

And how nice to see the wonderful Prunella Scales, Basil Fawlty's wife Sybil on "Fawlty Towers," after all this time! I just wish there had been more of her. IMDb.com

The Human Stain (2003) Two students have never shown up for the class taught by a respected college professor, Anthony Hopkins, who idly wonders aloud, "What are they? Spooks?" The missing students are black, which the prof didn’t know, and they take offense. He is brought up before a committee, and resigns in a rage. His wife dies that very day from an embolism brought on by the stress. But he has a secret, which I won’t reveal. He begins an affair with a woman, Nicole Kidman, half his age. She was molested by her stepfather, her children died in a fire that might have been her fault, and she has a psycho wife-beating ex ... it all begins to seem too much. It all begins to detract from the central problem of this story, which I can’t really discuss. Kidman whispers too much. The story wanders around, is never really resolved. The central conundrum of the story really is an awful situation, and it should have been a lot more poignant than it is. IMDb.com

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

The Hunted (2003) An almost complete abomination. I say almost, because it got off to a good start, so when it degenerated into a mindless slugfest with men doing things men simply cannot do, when it turned into a comic book like so many movies these days, it was even more of a letdown. This movie was shot all around Portland while we were living there so we had high hopes. And it really, really stunk. IMDb.com

The Hunting of the President (2004) This is basically the story of Whitewater, the biggest non-scandal of the 20th and maybe any century. There was never anything there, not a shred of evidence of anything, and yet the radical right spent $80 million of your money to find that out, and finally got one little scrap of red meat after about 5 years of turning over rocks and listening to the worms that crawled out, and used that to spend more of your money impeaching Bill Clinton. If there was any justice in the world Ken Starr would be indicted on multiple counts and put in the slammer for 20 years. Chubby-cheeked, sanctimonious, small-minded punk that he is, I’m sure he’d be welcomed heartily on the block at San Quentin, and have some very interesting experiences. Sadly, it will never happen. IMDb.com

The Hunting Party (2007) Simon Hunt (Richard Gere), a down-at-heels reporter, and his cameraman, Duck (Terrence Howard), set out to find and interview one Radoslav Bogdanović—known as "The Fox"—in the Bosnian enclave of Srpska (no wonder the fought a war; there must have been a severe vowel shortage in Yugoslavia, and everybody wanted to get as many as they could). The war is over, but most of the worst war criminals seem to be able to mysteriously avoid the UN agencies charged with bringing them in … and it turns out that no one wants to capture them, for political reasons, even if they have a $5 million price on their heads. Simon has a history with this butcher, and Duck and a hapless network executive’s son (Jesse Eisenberg) who is trying to get some credibility as a producer, gradually learn that Simon has an insane plan to capture The Fox and bring him in. The movie begins well, but sort of peters out. I felt sorry for Eisenberg, whose role here consists mainly of shaking, puling, whining, and all but pissing his pants. IMDb.com

The Hurt Locker (2009) At Metacritic, where the pros rated this 94 and the viewers 8.4, there were some dissenting voices that gave it a 1 or a 0. Some of these were soldiers serving in Iraq, and some even served in the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) unit depicted here. They said the movie is bullshit, doesn’t show real life, and some felt it was insulting to the troops. In particular, they noted, the EOD hardly ever defuses an IED, they almost always blow it up in place. Safer that way. And you know what? I don’t give a shit. This movie felt as real to me as any war movie since Saving Private Ryan. Sometimes there is a higher reality that may not jibe with the sometimes actually rather prosaic reality on the ground. As I’ve heard many ex-soldiers say, war is a matter of a hell of a lot of boredom and bullshit, and then periods of action. I’m sure it’s that way in Iraq, even at the height of the tensions (this takes place in 2004). And I’ve even seen some documentaries that show how most soldiers spend most of their time back at the base, doing nothing much. And in fact, the movie opens with a team doing precisely what those dissenters pointed out: they are trying to place an explosive package on a buried artillery shell, using a remote-controlled robot. Naturally, this being drama, something goes wrong, and he has to place the charge by hand.

The movie also makes it clear that it takes place over a space of around 40 days. The EOD was called out pretty much every day. What, are you going to show them routinely disposing of IEDs by robot? Of course you aren’t. You’re going to show the tense moments, when some poor schmuck has to actually get up-close and personal with a ton of TNT or plastique or whatever the fuck the bomb-making bastards are using. And all that time you’re surrounded by Iraqis who may be just looking on, or who may have a cell phone that will blow the charge up in your face.

Some of the nay-sayers pointed out that the main character is pretty much an out-of-control cowboy, and that he does things that no soldier would ever do. I can’t express an informed opinion on that, never having been in combat, and I damn sure would not have wanted to serve with the idiot, but I saw him as something like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. Not the gung-ho aspect, but the … the invulnerable aspect. Soldiers talk of guys who just have no fear, and who seem immune to getting shot. Like they are charmed or something. Remember Duvall standing there on the beach, impatient because everybody else has hit the ground when a mortar round lands nearby? Duvall knows he won’t get hurt, it never even enters his mind. He may be wrong, but he’s not uncertain. Now, that may be entirely mythical, but it’s an interesting myth if it is, and it is the sort of character that gets written about in fictional books and movies. It’s damn hard to make an exciting movie about a dull, by-the-book soldier.

I realized something early on, in a scene where a lone Iraqi taxi driver speeds into a restricted zone and the bomb guy (Jeremy Renner, who most people expect will be getting an Oscar nomination any day now) confronts him with a pistol. (A scene that may actually have been over the top; it dragged out longer than I believed it would have in real life.) What I realized was that I would have made a terrible soldier. If I had been in Vietnam, I’m pretty sure I would have been trigger-happy. What would I prefer, would be my thinking, mistakenly shooting an innocent villager, or having my parents collect me in a body bag when that villager turned out to be Viet Cong? I’d shoot on suspicion. And there in Iraq, do I really want to wait and see if that guy with the cell phone is about to blow me to bits, or should I “accidentally” shoot him? Better to face a court martial—which, let’s be real, would never happen unless I was involved in something as big as My Lai, and probably not even then. I’m sure a lot of innocent people died in Southeast Asia, shot by soldiers as nervous and incompetent and terrified as I would have been. I don’t doubt a lot of Iraqis have died that way, too.

This is a hell of a good movie, made by the only female director I know of who makes action pictures, Kathryn Bigelow. It was written by Mark Boal, who spent some time embedded with the EOD. But it’s not for the faint of heart. The tension becomes almost unbearable at times.

Bigelow does something very unusual here, too. The three leads are all relative unknowns, but there are some more recognizable names in the cast, including Ralph Fiennes, in small parts. I heard an interview with her, and she said that was done deliberately, to throw us off balance. You see a “star,” you unconsciously assume that he will live until the last reel. That’s just the way it is in Hollywood. People like Fiennes and Guy Pearce seldom take a role that can be finished in a day or two. But fair warning: Just because you recognize the face, don’t assume he’s going to be around, alive, for long. IMDb.com

Husband and Wives (1992) This was the last movie Woody Allen made with Mia Farrow, before he went insane and married his step-daughter. (Yeah, I know, he never formally adopted her, but he was certainly a father figure.) I remember I liked it quite a bit. I didn’t like it as much the second time. I’m hoping it’s not because I’ve lost my respect for Woody as a human being. I try to not let that interfere with my admiration of an artist, and in that respect, he’s great. But … I’ve long felt that New York City is a lot better place than New Yorkers deserve. I’m talking about the Manhattanites Woody writes about, mostly. Cocktail parties, intellectual discussions, backbiting. People eternally “working on their relationships.” Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. They seem incapable of doing anything without consulting their analysts. I find these people infinitely boring. The only thing that can save a movie about incessant self-examining, relationship-examining intellectuals is a whiff of satire, a few jokes here and there. There weren’t many moments like that here. IMDb.com

Hustle & Flow (2005) Right off the bat I have to say that I don't believe the central premise of the movie for a minute. You can say, rightly, that socio-economic pressures drive young black men into poor career choices such as dealing drugs and being in gangs. But I believe that being a pimp requires a rottenness of the soul, a deep-down hatred for women, and thus, practically by definition, you can't be a pimp and a decent man at the same time. You are highly unlikely even to be capable of redemption as the man in this film clearly is. My point: if he had any decency, he'd never have become a pimp in the first place. You may not agree with me, but I believe this deeply. Hear! Hear!

However, set that aside. Grant the premise that he somehow stumbled into it, and just has never had the moral courage to reject the lifestyle because he doesn't know what else to do with his life. (And clearly he's not very good at it. His ride is a piece of shit. He's got no fine clothes or an ounce of bling-bling. Hell, what's the point of being a pimp if you can't wear about fifty pounds of gold chains?) Allowing the writer that rather large point ... this is a fine little movie. I'm remembering that I didn't believe Risky Business or Pretty Woman for an instant, either, but had a good time.

It is true that anyone can have a dream, even a pimp. So we follow Djay in pursuit of his, and this middle part is the best. I'm a sucker for watching the creative process, even if the art being created is not exactly my cup of hip-hop. (For me, the big surprise of Oscar Night was not Crash beating Brokeback Mountain, but "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" taking Best Song ... until I recalled the spiritless crap it was up against. Congrats to the academy for having the stones to chose something with some energy in it.") Terrence Howard is the heart and soul of this film, and he is very, very good.

I also liked the way the movie wrapped up. (SPOILER WARNING) Djay's demo has gotten some airplay, and people seem to like it. He may be on the way to big-league stardom ... and we know from seeing his old "sort of" friend (played by Ludacris) that it may be more soul destroying than pimping. Making music is magic. Marketing it, complete with your own armed posse, shootouts with other crews, Mac-10s blazing between black Mercedes SUVs, the lure of cheap and easy drugs and pussy, selling yourself out ... shit, it's hard out there for a superstar rapper. Ask Tupac. IMDb.com

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