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© 2004-2010 by John Varley; all rights reserved

I Capture the Castle (2003) One of those quirky British movies I find irresistible. Movies like this are seldom made by the Hollywood sausage machine. If you want something a bit different, this is a good one. IMDb.com

I ♥ Huckabees (2004) A total disaster by the director of the wonderful Three Kings. He also directed Flirting With Disaster, which we liked a lot. This time he flirted too much. It ês Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin as “existential detectives,” a promising idea, and the ubiquitous Jude Law, so I stuck it out to the end, hoping to strike a ♦, but ended up with only crude oil. The movie has no ♥, and very little brain, despite endless jabber about existence. Somebody should have ♠ this bow-wow, or ♣ed it to death before it even left the litter. IMDb.com

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) Second feature at the drive in with The Bourne Ultimatum. IMDb.com

I, Robot (2004) Everything about this ho-hum thriller goes for the safe and totally predictable and awesomely boring. We are way, way past the point where seeing thousands and thousands of robots on the attack is mind-blowing.

But the heck with it. It’s what we know how to do.

Let’s see, a film about robots ... I know! They run amok! There’s some flaw in the programming ... or, wait, no, it’s a big corporation trying to screw everybody and something goes wrong! And let’s have a big computer in it, and that computer uses ... uses cold, emotionless logic to explain her actions. (Let’s call the computer VIKI! Remember Hal in 2001? Like that!) Dr. Susan Calvin is one of the most famous characters in classic SF. But she’s short, tubby, and ugly, and too damn smart! Let’s make her a babe, and lots dumber than Will Smith, can’t have a woman smarter than Will in the movie, it says so right here in his contract. So let’s make her emotionless, too. She can say things like “that isn’t rational,” or maybe even “that doesn’t compute.” Sort of like Mr. Spock, only dumb.

And Asimov invented those Laws of Robotics, he must have been plenty smart, but face it, he wasn’t a man of action. His stories don’t have any violence in them, they’re sort of ... cerebral. (Sorry, didn’t mean to use a dirty word.) They always involved some sort of ... well, thinking about stuff, and working out a problem that way. Offhand, I can’t recall a single scene he ever wrote where trucks and cars crash in big tunnels with bullets flying. Will’s gotta carry a big gun, he’s done with the Tommy Lee Jones Men in Black shit, where it was funny who had the bigger gun. Will’s got to have the biggest gun, and he’s got to fire it a lot.

Will Smith can snooze his way through a standard smart-ass Will Smith part. He could phone it in by now. How about ... a cop! And this cop ... has an attitude! And, and ... he’s the only one who sees the danger of robots! “You’re off the case, Will! Hand me your badge!” There’s a scene you haven’t seen enough times, right?

The sad thing is, there was the potential here for something at least a little bit interesting. When Asimov came up with the “positronic brain” (an example of what every science fiction writer will instantly recognize as “a device that does what I say it can do, even if I have not a clue in the world how it does it”), he and everyone else were unaware of any of the real problems that face fantastically complex computers. Nobody knew what a computer virus was. Nobody had envisioned computer warfare. And I know, there’s been plenty of that sort of stuff in movies, usually handled stupidly, but maybe some exploration of the Three Laws vs. computer hackers?

No. Too intelligent. Come on Will! Fire your big gun, dude! IMDb.com

I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) (Czech Republic, 2006) Sometimes I see a film and enjoy myself quite a lot … and afterward just don’t know what to say about it. I’m not even sure I understood what it was doing. This one is like that. It concerns a little go-getter in Czechoslovakia in the pre-war years. He aspires to get rich, gets a Nazi girlfriend, there is a war, he gets rich, then the communists make it a crime to be rich and he goes to jail for 15 years. We move back and forth between his youth and his life after his release from prison. He is pretty much apolitical, he never seems to really react to his girl’s Nazism, and the film doesn’t seem to be making much of a political statement, either. It merely observes, and I guess that’s where the fun is. Our little hero is a waiter in fancy restaurants, where he can observe the behavior of the dirty rotten filthy stinking rich. One thing he learns is that if you drop a handful of small change on the floor, billionaires will get down on their knees to gather it in. Which, I guess, is the reason why they’re billionaires and I, who would not bend over to pick up anything less than a Kennedy half, am not. It is lovely to look at, and I had a good time but, like I said, I’d have a hard time telling you just why. IMDb.com

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003) Dark, grim revenge story that gets off to a good start and then doesn’t know where to go. I hate it when that happens. IMDb.com

I’m Not There (2007) About halfway through this “rumination on the life of Bob Dylan,” I asked myself, what would be the point of making a standard biopic about the former Mr. Zimmerman? I mean, it would be largely guesswork. No one has worked harder to be obscure in all aspects of his life, to be incoherent and stumbling in interviews to the point that we wonder, could this disheveled, muttering homunculus really have written all that amazing stuff? (Maybe Joan Baez wrote those songs, huh?) I guess that maybe 50 years from now someone might make a straight bio, like the recent ones of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, but it would be purely for educational purposes. All it could do is recite events, and aside from the infamous Showdown at Newport his life doesn’t seem to have been all that dramatic, film-wise. It wouldn’t tell you anything about Dylan, because he refuses to really tell us anything about himself.

And why not? If you’ve seen the horror of the adulation, and then the angry rejection, of all the people who wanted to pound him into a mold of their own expectations, as shown so brilliantly in Don’t Look Back, how could you fault him for mumbling non sequiturs, for endlessly putting on all the earnest interviewers who can only relate to a genius by finding the right pigeonhole for him so they can write a newspaper article or a doctoral dissertation? (I can hear Dylan chortling at that idea.)

So now we have this cinematic meditation, approved by Dylan—that is, he gave the okay to use his own performances of his songs in it. I have no idea if he read the script. And, to me, it’s about a third of a great movie. I suspect it’s a different movie to every viewer, because it’s stream of consciousness and makes little attempt to make sense, like Dylan himself. We have six people playing “Dylan,” (though none of them are named that).

1. Marcus Carl Franklin, a black boy who looks about 10 but I suspect may be older, and who calls himself Woody Guthrie. This is the blues aspect of Dylan, his perceived wish to be a hobo, a troubadour, a rolling stone.

2. Ben Whishaw, who is being interviewed or testifying, and whose segments made very little sense to me.

3. Christian Bale, who is a folk singer who finds Jesus.

4. Heath Ledger, an actor, whose story is about marriage, infidelity, and divorce, and for the life of me I can’t think of why this is in the movie.

5. Cate Blanchett, the only one of the 6 who attempts an impersonation, and who absolutely freaking nails the part, recreating the era of Don’t Look Back in black and white.

6. Richard Gere, who is … no kidding … an aging Billy the Kid, living in a surreal western town with surreal people and a giraffe I half expected to burst into flames, like a Salvador Dali painting. I have very little idea what this segment is doing here, what it is trying to suggest. “Desolation Row?”

So the only parts that worked for me were #1 and #5. Some of the others had things to recommend them, but ultimately pretty much wasted my time. (The film is 2 hours and 15 minutes long, and might have worked better at 90 minutes.) But the part that works the best, and is worth seeing the whole movie just for these nuggets of brilliance, is #5. It is absolutely uncanny. She even does her own singing, and though it is just a little bit higher pitched than Dylan, it doesn’t matter, because she has his nasal enunciation. I’m still glad (and amazed) that Tilda Swinton won the Best Supporting Oscar last year, but it was a close one, my friends, it was a close one. IMDb.com

I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime) (2008) Two women meet awkwardly in an airport in France. It’s obvious they haven’t seen each other for a long time. Soon we discover they’re sisters, and the older one is going to be living with the younger one and her family for a short time. It’s obvious she’s just gotten out of some sort of institution. Prison, or the looney bin? Prison. She has done fifteen years, for murder. … and that’s about all I can tell you, as the discovery of who she murdered is a real shocker. For the rest of the movie you wonder, how in the world could she have done this and still be a good person? Because she seems good, we want her to be good, but the nature of her crime … it would be impossible to like her unless there is something we don’t know. And there is, of course, and it’s pretty shattering. Bring a handkerchief.

I have learned that Kristen Scott Thomas, who I would have said is about as British as an actress can be, though she is fluent in French and speaks French in this movie … actually thinks of herself as more French than English, as she has lived more of her life in Paris—since she was 19—than in England. Just think of her in Four Weddings and a Funeral, or The English Patient. But she’s made quite a few movies in French. It must be nice to be able to have a career in two countries. IMDb.com

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) Second feature At the Drive In with Aliens in the Attic. IMDb.com

The Ice Harvest (2005) Directed by Harold Ramis, who co-wrote and directed the staggeringly good Groundhog Day, screenplay by Robert Benton, starring Billy Bob, John Cusack, and Oliver Platt ... how bad can it be? Not too bad, but not very good, either. It's not a caper where everything goes wrong; these guys have already stolen $2,000,000 in the first scene. Then things go wrong, of the sort that happen when you're dealing with low-life scum. The thieves are in over their heads, there are betrayals surprises and some good scenes and good performances ... but I couldn't help comparing it to another movie about the ultra-sleazy side of life, a much better movie also starring John Cusack: The Grifters. See that one and leave this alone. IMDb.com

Ice Princess (2005) Hollywood churns out about a dozen sports movies a year, and the most you can expect of most of them is a mild rush of euphoria when the underdog wins. They take the same basic plot, file off the serial numbers, and make the same movie whether the sport is football, baseball, golf, tennis, arm wrestling, badminton, ping-pong, or barrel jumping. I think it’s time for a curling movie, myself. I can just see the tense final scene, the guys walking down the ice, frantically sweeping and scratching, sweeping and scratching, until ... YESSSSS!!! He shoots! He scores! A rousing rendition of “O Canada ...” Tears, hugs, big mugs of Molson ...

This was obviously made for teenagers and skating maniacs. It is possible to make a film that appeals to adults as well as teens, but this doesn’t bother to try. Everything about it is pedestrian. You can anticipate three scenes ahead, and chant along with the dialogue before it’s read by very bad actors. But that pales after a while, so we bailed out about 40 minutes into it. IMDb.com

Identity (2003) Seems to be a rather bloody variant of the English drawing room mystery, with 10 characters stranded by a storm at night in an isolated motel. Then they start dying gruesomely. Can’t say much more, but all is not what it seems, and the ending will leave you looking back over the whole thing in a different light. It worked for me. IMDb.com

Idiocracy (2006) I was wondering why many of my favorite SF movies lately are comedies, or even more to the point, parodies. In fact, just about all of them. It’s been a long time since there has been a “serious” SF movie that I could take seriously. What’s going on here?

I recall that the two SF movies that rocked me the most were 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Wars. One obsessively realistic, and one nothing but pulp nonsense … but fun! I got over Star Wars after the first film; the rest kept the nonsense and though they were great to look at, I just didn’t care. I never, not for a millisecond, took any of the many incarnations of Star Trek seriously. Back to the Future was a comedy, though not a parody. A Clockwork Orange worked as real SF, though it was largely satirical and was quite a while ago. Miracle Mile was near-future, apocalyptic SF, and worked well and played fair, and so did Deep Impact, more or less. Terminator was time-travel SF, and worked, but it was a rockem-sockem action pic, mostly. Frankly, I can’t think of an outer-space or time-travel movie in the last 20 years that I’ve both believed and enjoyed. Not one.

I’ve developed a theory, and it may be an odd one, since I make a living writing this stuff, and it is this: True, hard outer-space or time-travel stories work better on the page than on the screen. Take my own private disaster, Millennium (please!). The short story it was based on, “Air Raid,” was a trifle, a kick in the gut and then over and out, and worked pretty well, I think. It was nominated for a Hugo. The novel I made from that worked okay, too, I was able to sustain my suspension of disbelief so vital to a story like that. But when it got onto the screen, it looked ludicrous … and I’m not talking about critics (who almost to a man and woman ignored it), but to myself … and I wrote it!

Take another example of serious SF translated to the screen: Barry Longyear’s Enemy Mine. The story worked very well, but when it came to the big revelation in the movie, audiences laughed. Was it just that they weren’t sophisticated enough for “serious” themes in an outer space story? (And if so, what’s the point of making big budget space films that ask deep questions, if all the audience wants is more Star Wars?) I heard Barry bemoan that the director and screenwriter fucked it up, but I was watching, and I thought the scene was handled fairly well. But it didn’t work for me, either, and I knew what was coming and had liked the source material. Would they laugh at The Dispossessed, one of our iconic books when we talk about serious SF? I think they would, and I’m wondering if it’s the fault of the big screen. I know this is a radical notion and I’m not saying it’s true, but I keep thinking about it. If it’s true, then no amount of great screenwriting—not even Bill Goldman or the ghost of Paddy Chayefsky—would rescue a proposed HBO series of my Gaean Trilogy from looking foolish. (Which is not to say I wouldn’t happily sell them, if we can come to terms with the guy who wants to do them.) But Red Thunder and Red Lightning would translate well, I think, because they’re light-hearted, if not exactly comedies. More in the vein of Back to the Future.

It’s a puzzle. But the fact is that the SF movies that I’ve enjoyed the most, with the fewest reservations, in the last 20 years or so have been comedies or parodies: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Galaxy Quest, Tremors, Sean of the Dead, Morons From Outer Space.

Which is a very long-winded and not particularly relevant way of getting around to this film, Idiocracy, which I thought was very funny, and is SF, no matter how you may hate the way it sends up SF conventions. The premise was stolen (I don’t know if it was conscious or not) from a classic 1951 short story by Cyril M. Kornbluth: “The Marching Morons.” Basically, smart people had small families or none at all, while the teeming idiot masses reproduced like bunnies. A time traveler (two of them, in the movie) is sent 500 years into the future, where everybody is stupid. And I mean everybody; in the Kornbluth story there was an intelligent elite behind the scenes that kept things running, but here there’s nobody. And I mean really, really stupid. Dumb as a box of rocks? A box of rocks would invent calculus in the time it would take one of these people to figure out how to fling a booger. And that’s where the fun comes in. If you want plot logic, go elsewhere. What’s keeping things running, given the level of destruction these people wreak on their surroundings all the time? Well … machines, I guess, built by the last generation that had any brains.

But figuring out things like that is not the point of this movie. Forget about worrying about it. The point is satire, and big laffs! The creators—the same dudes who made “Beavis and Butthead,” which I am not a fan of, and which caused a long internal debate before I rented it—have taken everything awful and tacky about our world that makes you wonder every day if our civilization really is falling apart, and amplified it 1000 times. Ubiquitous commercials. People are named after products; the lawyer for our hero is called Frito Lexus. Trails are like “Let’s Make a Deal!” Executions take place at monster truck rallies. The president is an ex-porn star and professional wrestler. The Secretary of State is 14. The Costco looks like it covers 50 square miles, and has a law school. Stuff like that. Maybe this isn’t your cup of tea, but it sure is mine. And yes, the acting sometimes leaves something to be desired, but this movie isn’t as bad as the distributor apparently thought, when they essentially killed it by releasing it in only 6 theaters in small markets, then dropping it. Why? Nobody seems to know. IMDb.com

Ikiru (1952) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

The Illusionist (2006) This is one of those movies where even a spoiler warning wouldn't do much good, because I wouldn't want to be discussing the ending, but the marvelous set-up, and by doing that I'd be clueing you in to more than I want to. About all I can say about the plot is that the title of the film gives you a warning, and that it then proceeds to bamboozle you with that most useful of the magician's tools: misdirection. You think you're seeing one thing because that's what the magician wants you to see, but ... and that's almost too much right there. The film is beautifully staged, and I must mention the music by Philip Glass, my favorite avant-garde composer (actually maybe the only such that I actually like), which adds a lot to every scene. The only weak part of the movie is Edward Norton, who is one of the best actors working today but who is wrong for this part. Someone with a bit more passion would have helped sustain interest during the long buildup to the final payoff, which is superb. IMDb.com

Imagine Me and You (2005) The Beatles sang:

“Do you believe in a love at first sight?”

“Yes I’m certain that it happens all the time.”

This movie is about love at first sight. Does it happen, or is it wishful thinking? Well, it’s never happened to me, but it happens to a woman in this film who is, literally walking down the aisle to get married, glimpses a person and instantly falls madly in love. Trouble is, this person is another woman. No indication is given that she has ever had a homosexual thought; it simply happens, a thunderbolt from the blue. The other woman is, luckily or unluckily, depending on your point of view, a lesbian. The new bride still has a high regard for her husband, who is decent and still loves her. But as Woody Allen said when marrying his stepdaughter, “The heart has its own ways.” Or something like that.

This is a premise for an interesting movie, but this movie isn’t it. Everybody’s too pretty. There aren’t enough witty lines, and what there are don’t come off. Every scene seems clichéd. All I really concluded from this film is that British yuppie scum are just as boring as American yuppie scum. IMDb.com

Imaginary Heroes (2004) A beloved son commits suicide, and a family tries to deal with it, mostly pretty badly. We’ve seen this family before, and done better, in both The Ice Storm and Ordinary People. This movie is all over the place, can’t decide what it wants to be, and I’d have given up on it but for its emotional center: Sigourney Weaver. The lady is getting better and better. The right part in a movie people actually go to see and she’ll be up there getting an Oscar one of these days. Sorry to say, one outstanding performance can’t rescue a movie ... but it can make it watchable. IMDb.com

IMAX Space Station 3D (2002) There’s a few of these out on DVD now. I remember seeing IMAX NASCAR 3D on the shelves. I didn’t see much point to it. Neither film is 3D on DVD, and even the biggest HDTV with the coolest home stereo isn’t going to give you 1/100 of the IMAX experience. On the other hand, this is the International Space Station, and I’d probably watch grain 8MM black and white footage if that’s all there was. And it’s only 45 minutes. Having seen it now, I wish it were longer, and most of all, I’d like to see it on the IMAX screen. A Google search tell me the closest place to me that it’s playing is Houston, at the Johnson Space Center, but with IMAX they can come around again. The movie shows the whole thing, inside and out, from the first module launched, all the assembly, crew activities inside. But I have a feeling the money shots are two close-ups: A shuttle lift-off and a Proton lift-off. Man, that would be something on the IMAX screen! IMDb.com

In America (2002) One of the all-time greats. The acting of the children is wonderful. In fact, everything about it is wonderful. We just saw it again on DVD, and was even better the second time. Couldn’t recommend it more highly. IMDb.com

In Bruges (2008) First, let’s get something absolutely clear: though it says nothing about it on the box, this is a foreign language movie. Some intelligible English is spoken, here and there, mostly by Belgians, but all of Colin Farrell’s dialogue is in Irish. Not Gaelic, but in an Irish accent so thick, so impenetrable, that I’d wager there’s plenty of people in Dublin who wouldn’t understand it. Five minutes in, I realized I’d understood almost nothing he’d had to say, and very little of what his buddy, Brendan Gleeson, said. But (praise the wonks who developed it), we live in the age of the DVD, and if those shiny little disks had done nothing else of worth they would have justified themselves with just that little button on the remote that says SUBTITLES. Most DVDs have them, sometimes in multiple languages. What I ordered up was English for the Hearing Impaired, so we got a lot of titles saying things like (Clears throat) or (♫ Music playing ♫), but that’s okay. Now, Colin would mutter and swallow a few wretched syllables, and an acre of print would appear on the screen! Lord, he couldn’t have said all that, could be? Apparently so.

Now, on to the movie itself. I’d best insert a half-hearted SPOILER ALERT here, because I’m going to discuss a few plot secrets … but they are secrets that are revealed fairly early in the movie, and you’ve probably heard of them. (I will not discuss the ending, which was a bit of a surprise.) Ken, the old hand (Brendan Gleeson), and Ray, the new guy in the business (Colin Farrell) are hit men who have botched an assassination and have been sent to Bruges to “cool off.” Ray is pretty upset, unable to enjoy the sights of Bruges that Ken is reveling in. He probably wouldn’t have liked it even if he weren’t in a funk. He’s a simple Irish lad who can’t give a shit about a vial of the true blood of Christ. He was just trying to better himself in a new line of work, and now this happens … And what happened? Well, he starts his really, really bad day by gunning down a priest in the confessional, just as he has confessed that he has been paid to do the hit on the priest. The holy man staggers into the church, Ray still filling him full of lead from behind, but one of the bullets passes through the priest and then the head of a little boy kneeling at the altar.

(Back up for just a minute, read those last two sentences. Have you ever come across a situation where so many cardinal sins have been committed in such a short space of time? Most of them by one bullet? Let me get this straight: He fires into the confessional booth, during the holy rite itself. He murders the priest in the church. For money. He kills the little boy, an innocent bystander! While he is at his prayers, doing his penance! (“Try to do better at maths,” is one of the poignant goals expressed on the blood-stained paper in the kid’s hands.) To improve on that score of sins you’d have had to have the Pope standing between the priest and the boy, and the bullet kills all three, and then Ray would have to take a crap in the baptismal font and piss in the holy water on the way out.)

Okay, enough black levity from me. Black humor is what this movie is all about, and it’s very good at it. It also manages to convey a real sense of Ray’s suicidal remorse. All through the story some demented Irish criminal sense of morals dictate the action, and leads to some scenes that are so funny you want to cry. Because the reason Ken is in Bruges, of course, is to kill his friend Ray for being such a spectacular fuckup. Because killing kids is right out, even to the vicious psychopathic family man Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes).

This all comes together quite nicely as one of those films that is continually startling you with good, though occasionally insane, writing, and top-notch acting, and a plot that turns you around every ten minutes. You might be reminded of some of the goofier dialogue in Pulp Fiction, before Tarantino apparently decided to devote himself entirely to bad drive-in movie and Hong Kong chopsocky ripoffs. Plus, whatever that low-brow Ray thinks, Bruges looks like a place I could spend a few weeks in. IMDb.com

In Country (1989) There are some great war movies that concentrate on combat. Saving Private Ryan, Paths of Glory (the first part), Full Metal Jacket (the second part), and Platoon come to mind. But the ones I prefer are those that concentrate on the home front, and/or the aftermath: Mrs. Miniver, Coming Home, The Best Years of Our Lives, Born on the Fourth of July. My never having served, never having been shot at, may be one reason for that. I’m never quite sure they’ve gotten it right. But there’s also the fact that combat strikes me as somehow … easier. In film terms, I mean. Blood spilling, people getting blown up, the intensity of violent action. Any competent writer can write that, any decent director can direct it, actors can scream their lines. The hard stuff is more subtle.

This is one of the best. The wonderful Emily Lloyd is just graduating high school, and wondering about her father, who died in Nam before she was born. She’s living with her uncle, Bruce Willis (in what I think is his finest, most understated performance), who, like so many, never really came back from Southeast Asia. He left an important part of himself behind. All the vets in this movie are damaged, but none in the standard Hollywood way. There are no Rambos, just men trying to put it behind them, seldom talking about it to outsiders, hoping to forget, knowing they can’t. I won’t say more, except to mention that if the final scene at The Wall in Washington doesn’t tear your heart out, you don’t have a heart. And it does it honestly, never working too hard to jerk the tears. Quietly, with calm understatement.

A word about Emily Lloyd. You would never guess she’s a Brit, she gets the Kentucky accent down perfectly. I had seen her in Wish You Were Here and been greatly impressed, and after this, I was sure she was going places. But she didn’t. I now learn that she suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and it almost stopped her career completely. Then she had some bad luck in casting. I still hope to see her again, and wish her well. But if she never does another major role again, this one will do. IMDb.com

In Good Company (2004) You know this is going to be fairly standard stuff from the start, but I like Dennis Quaid and love Scarlett Johannson, so we took a look. And for the first two acts it was damn good, transcending the material because of smart writing and top-notch acting. A loathsome young yuppie played very well by Topher Grace (Topher?) is promoted way beyond his capabilities over a man twice his age. But he has the grace (Grace?) to realize he is a loathsome yuppie, and wants better for himself. The digs at corporate sociopathy are very good at first. (Were corporations always this heartless and stupid, or is it recent development?) Then the whole thing collapses at the end in an attempt to make everybody feel good. Every cliché in the book is dragged in except boy-gets-girl. It just sort of lies there and dies. IMDb.com

In Her Shoes (2005) I liked this movie almost in spite of myself. The first half hour is a bit hard to take, as two sisters who share nothing but parents and the same shoe size clash repeatedly. Cameron Diaz is beautiful, lazy, a drunk, a thief, a liar, an illiterate, a slob, and keeps stealing her sister's shoes. What's not to like? Toni Collette is a pretty Aussie (though you'd never guess in this movie) with a slightly large ass who keeps playing plain fat girls. She's the responsible one here. I didn't like either of them at first. Then the movie gets more detailed, and I ended up liking them both. But only because they'd changed. Shirley MacLaine is the catalyst, and she's as good as usual.

But what I want to talk about is shoes. Everybody needs them, but only women seem to obsess about them, and I have never understood it. Not only that, they wear shoes that are guaranteed to destroy their feet by the time they're 30, if not before. Maybe it's because men don't have many options (thank god!) in accessorizing. Pick out a tie, and that's about it. Since I don't wear a tie, I'm even more baffled. Here, Toni has a closet full of shoes she never wears. She buys them as a treat for herself, shoe-shops when she feels bad about herself. Then Cameron says to her ... it's because it's the only part of you that doesn't gain weight. An aha! moment for me! It's true! Except at the extreme outer limits of morbid obesity, the feet don't get fat! No matter how your weight may fluctuate, you can always wear your shoes.

That's probably not the real reason so many women obsess about shoes, but at least it's one that makes sense. IMDb.com

In My Country (2004) Shortly after Nelson Mandela got out of jail he and the government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to do an extraordinary thing: They allowed many of the criminals of the previous regime to get off scot-free if they admitted what they had done, apologized to the victims and survivors, and could show they were “only following orders.” There is a great documentary to made about this (and maybe it’s already been made, but I haven’t heard of it), and a great fiction movie, too, like Hotel Rwanda ... but this isn’t it. This really isn’t it. I could hardly believe it was made by John Boorman, of Deliverance and Hope and Glory. The direction is sloppy, the script trashy and utterly predictable, the acting is amateurish. Even the cinematography is boring and sleep-inducing. A crying shame, because so much could have been done. Juliette Binoche is an Afrikaner, Samuel L Jackson is a black American reporter covering the tribunals. He isn’t inclined to forgive, she thinks the TRC is the only hope for the country. The film indicates that she is the true African, in that she was born there and knows far more about Africa than he ever will. But she will never know what it’s like to be black.

There has to be a way to come at this material edgewise, without slapping you in the face with it all like a lecture, which is as far as this film ever goes. As an American, a westerner, and a man who was raised “Christian,” I find it hard to forgive, especially atrocities like those committed under white apartheid rule. “An eye for an eye,” that’s what I was brought up to believe. Not “love thy enemy as thyself.” Christians get to pick and choose that way, and the former has always made more sense to me. But I know in my gut that it’s the wrong way to go, at least some of the time. Maybe most of the time. I don’t think anyone would have forgiven Hitler. But should we forgive Tookie Williams? (My vote: NO. But I could be wrong.) The lack of forgiveness leads to a relentless cycle of revenge, which is what I and just about everyone else expected when the white government fell in South Africa. I was wrong, wrong, wrong (though only time will tell; there are still many problems to confront), and Nelson Mandela is a much wiser man than I am. But I knew that a long time ago. IMDb.com

In the Cut (2003) Directed by Jane Campion, who won a screenplay Oscar for The Piano in 1993, which was a good movie. This, however, is basically a stupid potboiler that makes no sense. IMDb.com

In the Electric Mist (2008) This is the second of the 17 Dave Robicheaux book by James Lee Burke to be made into a film, after Heaven’s Prisoners, which was based on the second book, and starred Alec Baldwin as Dave. In this one, it’s Tommy Lee Jones, who is a better choice. I guess it’s better to have them made into movies rather than risk a truly awful television series, like “Spenser for Hire,” but neither of these movies satisfy. In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead was the seventh book in the series, and my least favorite up to that point. I just didn’t care for all the magical realism of Confederate soldiers appearing to Dave, led by Texas General John Bell Hood (played by Levon Helm). In the movie it is implied that Dave’s lemonade was doped by bad-guy “Baby Feet” Balboni (John Goodman), but then at the end we see Dave in a history book, standing with Hood and his men. Sort of like the last, dumb scene in The Shining. Gee, how weird, huh? I can almost hear the Theremin music playing.

Part of the problem seems to be that, in the books, Dave knows he’s a violent man, and tries to fight it, and loathes himself when he finds he’d gone down that road yet again. In this movie, he seems to like it about as much as most heroes of violent movies, which is to say, maybe a mite too much. I know, it’s hard to portray that sort of internal dialogue, which is why it’s not always a good idea to make a movie from a first-person novel. But the fact is that the books are good because of James Lee Burke’s sense of place (his Texas and Montana novels are not nearly as good as his Louisiana novels, in my opinion, maybe because he doesn’t know them so well), and the fascination of the character of Dave.

One other thing that makes them so good is the character of Dave’s best friend, Cletus Purcell. To call the man a loose cannon is quite the understatement. In one of these books he drives one of those gigantic earthmovers right through a gangster’s mansion, just rips that sucker apart, all to steal a floppy disc and to conceal the fact that he stole it. He is always doing things like that, and getting in big trouble. And he’s not in either of these movies. I can’t recall for sure, but it’s hard for me to believe that he doesn’t put in an appearance in either of these books. So why isn’t he here? I always saw him played by John Goodman … who is in this movie, but in the wrong role.

The producers must have felt the same way I do. Despite being helmed (in Variety-speak) by Bernard Tavernier, a serious and well-respected director, this movie went straight to DVD. IMDb.com

In the Good Old Summertime (1949) Hollywood’s second take on the play Parfumerie by Miklós László, the first being The Shop Around the Corner. This time it’s a musical set in Chicago. (Oddly enough, it takes place almost entirely in the good old winter time.) It’s not bad, but it can’t really compete with the original. However, it has the singing of Judy Garland, which makes up for any shortcomings. When I haven’t seen one of her movies for a while, I am always freshly astonished at the power of her voice. If the world gets a voice like that every 50 years, it is a lucky world indeed.

It also features one of Hollywood’s great character actors, Mr. S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall. I wondered what sort of a man would want himself to be listed as Cuddles in the credits of a film. According to Wiki, not Cuddles himself, it seems. He didn’t like it. Which makes it sort of nasty, in my book, to list him that way, even if it was what everybody called him. He’s most famous as Carl the headwaiter in Casablanca.

The film is accompanied by two little Technicolor time capsules: “Chicago the Beautiful,” and “Night Life in Chicago.” These are examples of a thing that is now as extinct as the wooly mammoth: the travelogue. I remember seeing some of the last of these, when they played with a cartoon and a newsreel. They are pretty lame, but provide a fascinating look into the times and places where they were made. These were by the king of the travelogue, James A. FitzPatrick, “The Voice of the Globe.” The IMDb lists 207 documentaries under his name, most of them under 10 minutes long. He made them for MGM under the label of “Fitzpatrick Traveltalks” and for Paramount as “VistaVision Visits.” I’m glad somebody’s saving them. Think what they’ll look like in 100 years. Buster Keaton is here, too, sadly. He plays the boss’s incompetent nephew. What a come-down for one of the great comic actors of all time, to get 6th billing in a bit part. IMDb.com

In the Loop (2009) Here is a script that was nominated for an Oscar, and had no less than four writers, plus the director, which is usually a disaster. But this time it seems to have meant that they used the best stuff each of them wrote. I doubt that any group of humans have ever been as articulate and funny and wicked and literate and obscene as the people shown here ... but in a better world people’s dialogue would be that sharp. It's like “The West Wing” on steroids, only everybody here is either cravenly out for him- or herself, or incompetent, working way above their pay grade. It’s about how we bumble into war sometimes, and we don’t even have a clear idea why, it just all sort of snowballs. It is satirical in the same way Wag the Dog was, so it didn’t make much money. As George S. Kaufman said, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Most people can’t handle satire. I laughed and laughed and laughed, in the sort of appalled way you laugh at Dr. Strangelove: or How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb. You laugh and at the same time you wish you weren’t laughing, because this is serious stuff, dammit, people are going to die because of the ineptitude of these brilliant, mouthy, narcissistic people. But if you get satire, you laugh anyway. I couldn’t recommend this more highly. One of the best movies of the year. IMDb.com

In the Valley of Elah (2007) I can be a very easy audience for a movie. If the acting is good, the script is interesting, and the situation provocative, I tend not to ask a lot of questions as I’m going along. The acting here is very good, especially Tommy Lee Jones, who was Oscar-nominated, and Charlize Theron, who I didn’t even recognize until I looked at the sleeve and saw her name. (We all know she can go ugly, as in Monster, but she’s also able to go plain, which might be even harder. Here she is a pretty girl, but not stunning; put her on a runway in a nice dress with her hair and make-up done and she’ll blow any other model, actress, or whatever right off the red carpet.) So the movie kept me going right up until the final frames …

But later I had a lot of doubts. Jones is a Vietnam vet, who learns his soldier son is AWOL, and then dead. He wants some answers. As the story progresses we learn something about the “good” son’s 18 months of service in Iraq. It ain’t pretty. The war has changed him. Jones doesn’t go into any histrionics over this, though in his tired old eyes we can see that it’s hard for him to contemplate the changes his son has gone through. And I don’t buy it. I don’t know what he did or saw in Nam, but even if he was one of the “good” soldiers over there, he must have heard the stories. Hell, I’ve heard them, and I wasn’t even there.

I’m not picking on American troops, Nam vets, or Iraq vets here. This sort of dehumanization is common to all armies, in all wars. Some soldiers are able to cope with it and retain their humanity, but some come back mentally damaged. Some find themselves committing atrocities they couldn’t have imagined a year ago. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, patriotic, gung-ho boys (and girls, now) go into combat and soon they see things that deaden their emotions. Maybe they do things that, later, they have a hard time accepting … and it can be wholly innocent, not like My Lai. You fire into a hootch or a shack in Iraq, and then find that you’ve blown a baby to pieces. What do you do? You go crazy, or you get hard. Sergeant Jones would know that. He would have known that before his son went off to war. So his gesture at the end, hanging the flag upside-down, the signal that the country is in distress, seems odd to me. I happen to believe the country is in considerable distress with this evil and unnecessary war, but it’s always in distress in wartime. American boys are always doing awful things in combat, just like the soldiers of every other country. It comes with the territory. If Jones got through his service in Nam with his patriotism and army spirit intact, then he was pretty naïve. I don’t think he would be. So this movie, while interesting as a whodunit, failed for me as the anti-war effort it was obviously intended to be. IMDb.com

In This World (2002) How would you go from an Afghanistan refugee camp to London to begin a new life ... with nothing but a few forged papers and a little bit of money your family has scrimped together? With great difficulty, that’s how. This is the story of a 16-year-old and his uncle who set out to do just that, and it is mostly real, though some scenes had to have been staged. Engrossing and heartbreaking. IMDb.com

In Which We Serve (1942) … is the story of a ship, a destroyer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy from shortly before the war to somewhere in 1942. In the first 15 minutes we see her built from the keel up, launched, fighting in her last combat engagement, and sunk. The rest of the movie is the recollections of a few men clinging to a life raft as the goddam Nazis strafe them every few minutes. This is a very effective way to tell the story, as we see the quiet heroism of the men at war, and the quiet heroism of the women on the home front. It was written, scored, and co-directed (with David Lean) by its star, Noel Coward. In fact, Mr. Coward’s name shows up so often in the credits that I thought they might name the ship the HMS Coward … but somehow, that doesn’t sound like a great name for a warship, does it?

When you watch a film like this or Mrs. Miniver, made as it was all happening, or a later one like Hope And Glory, which show the hardships the British people endured when Hitler made Piccadilly Circus one of the war’s front lines, I’m always reminded of what an incredibly easy time of it we Americans have had in our wars. If you don’t count Pearl Harbor, there has been no combat on our shores since 1865. Sure, we sacrificed big-time during World War II, even a bit on the home front—gas rationing, rubber and steel drives—lost many lives (actually, a fairly small number compared to China, the Soviet Union, Poland, and many other countries). but after Pearl Harbor no civilians were bombed. Not once. Our families never cowered in basements or tube stations, no incendiaries fried our children in their beds. The war in Vietnam took a terrible toll on our soldiers, but we civilians slept safe every night, never had to listen for the sound of Viet Cong helicopters in the night. As for our recent wars … other than a bunch of money (most of it going to war profiteers like KBR and Blackwater) and the blood and bones of the mostly poor young men and women who make up our military, we have been asked to sacrifice nothing. What was George W. Bush’s advice to us, the way we could do something to help the effort for his war of choice in Iraq? Go shopping. Spend money. Gee, Monkey Boy, do I have to?

So we are attacked on 9/11, and what is our response? We squealed like the spoiled pigs we are: Keep us safe, Mr. Bush! Fight ‘em over there so we don’t have to fight ‘em over here! Here, tear up the Constitution, bomb civilians, torture prisoners. Do anything, Mr. Bush, but don’t let them scare us like that again! My fellow citizens, if Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Afghans, Sunni or Shiites Iraqis had been able to drop one single bomb on us, if one remotely-controlled Predator drone had penetrated our shores, both of these wars would have been over in ten minutes. We would have been begging for surrender terms. We have become a nation of cowards, a fat, spoiled, degenerate nation of indulgence, and it makes me sick. We have fallen so far from the people who endured the Civil War, fighting for a cause (yes, the cause of the South was evil, but it was a cause), who stopped the evils of Hitler and Tojo in their tracks. We have become a people who go to war to keep the price of gas down at the pump, so we can feed our monstrous vehicles, and so long as all the damage is done far away from here. We will suck up every drop of oil, no matter what the cost, and then throw a tantrum because it’s all gone. Sometimes I’m ashamed to be an American.

Enough. My movie reviews often veer off into rage. I’m not going to stop doing it. You don’t like it, don’t read them.

I love this little movie. It is a sharp departure for Noel Coward, who previously had chronicled the foolishness of the British upper classes with frothy, witty little plays. There’s nothing frothy about this movie. He is very good at portraying the stiff-upper-lip Captain of the destroyer. And once more I must sing the praises of the IMDb. No telling what you’ll learn if you browse through the Trivia section on a movie. Here, I spotted a rather familiar name in the end credits: John Varley! All I know about him is that he played very small parts in half a dozen movies, and stopped as I was being born, in 1947. Also, there was a small but important part played by someone who looked a little familiar. I mean, could that be little Dickie Attenborough in that sailor hat? Naw, I don’t think so, and his absence in the end credits seemed to confirm it. But wait! It was! The IMDb says his role was uncredited through an oversight. It was his very first screen appearance! And by golly, here’s another familiar name: Michael Anderson. He was the First Assistant Director, and then was dragooned into playing a small part. Now, that’s a pretty common name … could it be …? Yes! It is my friend Michael Anderson, director of Around the World in 80 Days, The Dam Busters, Orca, and … wait for it … Millennium! I spent a fun 6 months at his side in Toronto, doing re-writes, and I’m happy to see that he’s still alive, at 89. In fact, he has a movie coming out this very month, September 2009. Bravo, Michael! IMDb.com

Incident at Loch Ness (2004) Think This Is Spinal Tap meets The Blair Witch Project meets The Art of the Fart. Only you don’t understand it’s a joke at first, unless you’ve read about it. For the first half hour it all seems reasonable enough. The great Werner Herzog is planning to make a documentary, not about Nessie, but about the belief people have in chimeras like that. At the same time, a film crew is following him around, making a documentary about him. Everybody plays himself, these are all real people. Things only gradually begin to smell, and then they get stranger, and goofier still, and by the time Nessie was battering the boat and the craven producer was abandoning ship and leaving everyone to their fates I was laughing a lot. You can’t really pinpoint the place where you are sure this is a spoof ... and it’s actually a lot more complicated than a spoof, anyway.

I read a few reviews. The critic for the Globe and Mail was incensed that she was initially taken in. Lighten up, idiot! The New York Times thought it tried to segue into real horror at the end. You missed the point, lamebrain! The movie was at its funniest precisely when it looked most like Blair Witch, that vastly overrated bit of hokum. You thought he was trying to scare you? Get over yourself! This movie is about reality shows, and Hollywood bullshit, and about five levels of deadpan looniness, and it all worked for me. I recommend it highly. IMDb.com

Incident at Oglala (1992) Michael Apted has a serious bee in his bonnet over the Leonard Peltier case. First he made Thunderheart, which wasn't about the shootout on the reservation where two FBI agents were killed, but mentioned it, and explored the tensions between two tribal factions and the government, and now this, a documentary that explores the facts of the case. And does a damn good job of it. All the evidence against Peltier is, at the very least, suspect, and more likely actually fabricated. All the witnesses against him are either incompetent or clearly lying, probably intimidated by threats from the government. It is crystal clear that Peltier never got a fair trial, and that the rage that still simmers within the FBI against the slaughter of their men comes from an impulse that really has to be expressed as "Well, we may not have nailed the right son of a bitch, but this one will do."

The movie hits on all cylinders for 75 minutes ... then suddenly reveals that at least two people claim that Peltier is innocent ... because they know who the real killer is. He is identified only as Mister X, and he has apparently admitted that he did the killing—and you can't sell it to me as self-defense. The shootout was self-defense when it began, but it ended with somebody walking up to the wounded agents and blowing their heads off at close range with a high-powered rifle. One of the people who claims to know the identity of Mister X is Peltier himself.

Now, you can make a good case, especially in the context of the '70s with the government's neglect of the Rez and their support of a band of Indian thugs who were robbing their own people, that the FBI was an occupying army, and I am very sympathetic to that idea. However, even in war, you do not execute wounded soldiers from the other side. Uh-uh. We've put Marines on trial for doing that in Iraq.

So it comes down to this. Two murders were committed. We either have the culprit in jail (highly unlikely), or he's walking around, a free man. (It seems to me it's probably this Jimmy Eagle who the agents were chasing in the first place. The film is silent on Eagle's whereabouts.) Peltier says he knows who the killer is ... but it is against his principles, against his culture, against a long list of crazy reasons for him to name the guilty man. So, you know what? Fuck you, Leonard Peltier. Shield the murdering bastard all you want, and enjoy yourself in prison. I guess if you won't finger the guilty party, you'll just have to do. IMDb.com

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Lee tells me this film was offered free of charge to a school district or districts, and was turned down. Let something like this in the door, was the reasoning, and we'll have to start showing all kinds of other stuff, and you may not like that stuff. Sadly, I have to agree, though the content of the film is something that everyone should be shown, including students. There is no reasoned opposition to the facts presented here. The disgraceful handful of "scientists" who dispute them are being well paid to do so. The planet is warming up; believe it. The consequences of this warming are certainly debatable, as are the steps needed to deal with it, and the pace of the solutions and many other aspects. That is the political process, and this is a political film, which is why it should not be shown in public schools. But the reason this critical issue is political is simple and shameful. The current administration, bought and paid for by the mega-corporations who care only for the next quarter's bottom line, has denied scientific findings it doesn't like more than anyone since the days of Stalin's Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. They have called global warming "a great hoax." The media have fallen in line, somehow buying the line that it hasn't been proven. It has been proven, my friends, as surely as evolution, gravitation, and the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of neo-con Republicans.

As a film, it works very well, considering it is basically just a long lecture. But one of the things done to make it less daunting, to break up what might become monotonous, is personal asides from Al Gore that often resemble a campaign commercial. As a man who ran for president and who might run again, I would have to oppose showing this for free to public school students, or else Pat Robertson might ask for equal time ... and be justified in doing so. What I would like to see is a re-edit, removing Al Gore and using someone else to present the facts. Again, sadly, because here we see a passionate Gore that I don't recall seeing in the 2000 campaign. Where was he hiding his charisma? Did he only find it after he got cheated out of the White House? IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: The Incredibles (2004) Everything I expected it to be, and even a bit more. One of the more adult-themed feature-length animations I’ve ever seen, except maybe The Triplets of Belleville. The animation is everything you’ve come to expect, and the story is even better than Finding Nemo, in my opinion. Of course, that’s from an older viewer. It has more to do with family/work conflicts than with actual "super-heroes." Also, it is scathing in its view of how anybody who is “special” is made to pay, how individuality is so often weeded out and crushed. And the very, very sad fact that no good deed will go unpunished if you let lawyers take over your society. The music was reminiscent of the John Barry and Henry Mancini scores of the '60s and '70s. One other thing worth noting is that during the closing credits they used what looked like computer-era “pencil tests” behind the endless crawl of names: just simple shapes and primary colors of action we’d already seen. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Ladder 49 (2004) We had no expectations for this, and pretty much liked it. Predictable, I’ll grant you, and some say it exploited all the dead firemen from 9/11. I prefer to think it honored them. I know I’ve never felt quite the same about firefighters since that horrible day. Ladder 49 is organized as a man reviewing his life, from rookiehood to the day he is trapped in a huge burning building with very little chance of getting away live. But his comrades keep fighting hopeless odds. It is more accurate than any fire movie I’ve ever seen, most of which totally ignore smoke, the better to see the action.

Interesting detail: The filming of the big warehouse fire in Baltimore was close to the freeway, and thousands of calls flooded into the fire department, to the point they had to put out emergency bulletins on radio and TV telling people what was going on. I sort of wondered, watching it, how many big-budget action movies will be made in the future with “real” effects this big. They can do the old big challenges of scale-model work, fire and water and smoke, in computers these days ... hell, they can do almost anything. IMDb.com

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) What is all this negativism? Why are some people trashing this? As far as I’m concerned, it’s a little better than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and maybe not quite as good as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but close.

Could Indy survive being hurled a mile inside a refrigerator? Hell, no … but he’s Indy. Could he survive going over even one of the three waterfalls he goes over? Not on your life … but he’s Indy. We expect him to come out unscathed. The fun here is in the sheer exuberance of the (real, mostly) stunt work. The chase through the college is very funny (and just how many vintage cars are in that sequence, including a cherry Hudson?), and the truck chase through the jungle had me on the edge of my seat. Cate Blanchett … well, the lady can do anything, can’t she? She is terrific as the cartoon communist (and looks terrific in that uniform, with that haircut; I wanted her to tie me up and whip me, and I’m not into S&M), with the Pottsylvanian, Natasha Fatale accent.

True, the plot was complicated (you come to an Indy movie for the freakin’ plot?), and the ending was weak, as was Last Crusade, and a little overblown with the CGI effects, but who cares? I certainly didn’t. It was also grand to see the return of Karen Allen, who got into a beef with Spielberg and was not invited back to the sequels.

There is some buzz that Shia LaBeouf is being groomed to take over the franchise. Oh, please! The dude is good, and may deserve his own, smart-ass adventure series, and I wouldn’t even care if he’s presented as Indy’s son … but it wouldn’t be an Indy movie. Only Harrison Ford can be Indy, end of story. I don’t care if they bring him back at age 85, in a wheelchair or an iron lung. I’ll go see it. IMDb.com

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) Not a lot more to say about this one. Spielberg and Lucas came to bat three times, and they hit three homers. Who cares if two of them went into the stands and one went clear out of the park? The intro action scene with River Phoenix as the young Indy was great, and explained the hat, the jacket, the whip, and his fear of snakes. Sean Connery was excellent as Jones Sr. No need to explain the Scottish accent. The fight aboard the weird tank was as good as the truck chase in Raiders. Only the very end was a little bit of a letdown … but not much. The old knight, watching the bad guy drink from the Grail, get old, turn to dust, blow away. And he says, deadpan, “He chose poorly.” Gotta love it. IMDb.com

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) Movie series usually follow a predictable pattern. The first one wows you, the second may capture some of the thrill of the first, and subsequent numbers are usually … by the numbers. It’s the peril of sequels. The power of sequels seems to be that most people don’t notice too much, or don’t care. Why else would people flock to The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor? As I’m sure they will, later this year. (Well, I don’t understand that one at all, because the first one wasn’t that good.)

The exceptions are almost as rare as ideas in the head of George W. Bush. I’m searching for examples, and have come up with only three. The Back to the Future trilogy held up until the end. The Lord of the Rings actually got better at the end. And this one held up for three installments.

Which is not to say it’s perfect. The second of a series is virtually always the weakest. (Only exception I can think of: The Godfather, Part II.) Even the above have the second act problem; BTTF II and The Two Towers were the weakest. We all know why this happens. Part Two is connecting material, taking what was established in the first one and leading you into the resolution in Part III.

That’s for stories that were planned as trilogies, though. The Indiana Jones series are stand-alone movies. You don’t need to know anything about the first one to understand the second and third, each is an independent adventure, complete in itself. (So is the original Back to the Future, but its success enabled Robert Zemeckis to go on, as is often the case.)

Yet Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the weakest of the three, and it’s for another reason entirely. When something like Raiders or Star Wars or the original Pirates of the Caribbean redefines what it’s like to have a good time at the cinema, the creative people do their best to recreate the magic of #1 … but it can’t be done. (At least in my opinion. I know many people think The Empire Strikes Back was better than Star Wars, but I don’t.) Even if you get it 95% right—maybe even if you get it 100% right—you can’t lose your virginity twice. The joys of Part II are the joys of comfortable familiarity; if they keep the magic, that’s an extra bonus that you should not expect.

I say all this not to demean The Temple of Doom, only to point out that if it had been better than a masterpiece like Raiders, it would have been like the Second Coming. Raiders was an A++++. Doom was merely an A+. Someone said that, after hitting the bullseye, the creators of this series—Spielberg, Lucas, the screenwriters—wavered a bit on the second and third shots, just missing the dead center. In Doom they took it a little too seriously, with too much blood and intensity, too much gross-out. (I liked the dinner where nothing was edible, didn’t like ripping out the beating heart.) Recognizing their mistake, they over-compensated with The Last Crusade, going a little too much for light-hearted humor. I’ll have to see about that, but that’s how I remember it at the moment, almost twenty years after I saw Crusade, and I do agree with the assessment of this one.

I have one other (very minor) carp, just as those are minor. I thought the escape in the mine cars was a little too contrived, a little too transparent in its attempt to set up a later tie-in; i.e., a roller coaster ride at a theme park. (Just like the cuddly little Ewoks were obviously designed to sell Star Wars teddy bears.) We never did get that ride, though of course we did get an Indiana Jones ride, and it’s still one of the most technically advanced rides in Disneyland, better than a roller coaster. IMDb.com

Indigènes (2006, Algerian-French) This movie was released in America under the perfectly awful title of Days of Glory. Unless you take that as supremely ironic, it’s hard to think of a worse title, as there is nothing of glory in it, not for France, and not for the ever-suffering infantry, which in this case is North Africans from Algeria and Tunisia and Morocco, Muslims in French colonial countries who were hoodwinked into fighting to free the “motherland” from Nazi occupation. Most of these men had never even been to France. The French title translates as “Natives,” and that is how these men are treated, in the worst sense of the word. There were basically three types of men in the French army of liberation: “Real” Frenchmen (white, born in France), pieds-noirs (white Arabic-speaking Frenchmen born in Africa), and wogs. The name says it all: Brown or black-skinned Muslims. (In our army at the time, black men were seldom allowed to carry a weapon into actual combat, though there were exceptions such as the Tuskegee Airmen who flew P-51s with distinction. Black soldiers tended to be truck drivers and potato peelers.) The French handled the race and religion problem differently. If there was an impossible hill to be taken … send in the wogs! There were separate messes for French and African soldiers, and guess who got the best food. Frenchmen were allowed rest leave at home, as their hometowns were re-taken. Africans … well, we don’t have enough ships to take you back, you see. (“You had enough ships to get us here,” one African points out.) It goes on and on like that.

This film is in the long tradition of following a group of grunts through their day-to-day experiences, from boredom to battles. The first one I recall is The Victors, which may have been the first movie I ever saw that not only didn’t glorify war, it made it look … well, awful. It was real, in other words. (It isn’t available on DVD. I don’t think it was even on VHS.) Then, of course, everybody knows about Saving Private Ryan. This movie isn’t as good as that one … but SPR was a rather artificial story, and this one is real. Then there was the excellent Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier), from Finland. And more recently, HBO’s Band of Brothers and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers and Letter From Iwo Jima. Take these movies together and one message is loud and clear. All grunts in all armies are the same. They just want to survive, help their buddies survive, and get home in one piece.

This movie tells of an injustice that has persisted until only a few months ago. Because though these men fought as valiantly as the Japanese-American 442nd Combat regiment, and with as little reason other than patriotism to a country who had done them a terrible wrong, and though they were promised promotions and other bullshit, none of it ever happened. Those who weren’t dead at the end of the war found themselves at the same rank they enter it, while Frenchmen moved up the ladder.

It gets worse. In the 1950s, when the French colonies were forcing “Mother France” to get her boot-heel off their necks (see The Battle of Algiers, one of the finest movies about revolution ever made), the government froze the pensions of these brave men, spit in their faces, and finally revealed out in the open the racism that had dogged them all their lives. And still they fought, this time in the courts. Finally, several years ago, a ruling came down that the men must be paid the same pensions as white veterans … and the government ignored it. (The Bush Administration apparently isn’t the only regime that ignores stuff it doesn’t like.) The thing was, hardly anybody knew about this shit. All the four main actors had been ignorant of it until they read the script! It took the release of this film to finally shame France into agreeing to equalize pension payments. I hope it was retroactive, but I wonder … IMDb.com

The Informer (1935) John Ford had a hard time getting this film made, as the protagonist, Gypo Nolan, is a terrible person. About the only good thing you can say about him is that he’s stupid, but even that doesn’t excuse the things he does. Down on his luck, kicked out of the IRA because he disobeyed orders, he needs some dough to take his girlfriend to America. The fare is £10. The British are offering a reward of £20 for information leading to the capture of Frankie McPhillip. Gypo peaches to the Black and Tans, and Frankie is killed in a shoot-out. He manages to spend his way through the money in about four hours of carousing, buying drinks for the house, fish & chips for everybody on the street, handing £5 to an Englishwoman he’s never met. He might as well have used to money to make a neon sign that flashed INFORMER!!! with a big arrow pointing at him, and carted it around Dublin. He accuses an innocent man of being the informer. When a trial is held, Gypo is easily destroyed and convicted. He escapes, and with his usual finesse manages to stay alive about an hour before he is gunned down.

Frankie’s sister pleads with her lover, head of the IRA, to spare poor stupid Gypo’s life. The soldiers are not portrayed as blood-thirsty maniacs, they are not eager to kill this idiot for his crime, but they point out that he knows too much. If the police get their hands on him it will take about ten minutes to have him blabbing the names of everyone he knows. In the one scene I found a little hard to swallow, even Frankie’s mother is willing to forgive him when he staggers into a church with four bullets in him.

This film is glorious to look at. Ford was influenced by the German Expressionists of the previous decade, and it is full of shadows and light and fog. In today’s terms it may be a little heavy-handed, dramatically, but not overly so. It all revolves around Victor McLaglen’s towering performance as Gypo, for which he won an Oscar. Gypo is a huge man, quick to anger, quick to forgive. His every emotion is written large on his face. Poker players speak of a “tell,” some mannerism that reveals the strength or weakness of your opponents hand. With Gypo, he always takes off his hat and throws it on the floor when he’s about to lie. As if he needed any more tells; his whole life is a tell. With Gypo, what you see is what you get. He’s the last person in the world who should have tried something as devious as informing.

Hollywood Legend: True or not true, I don’t know … they say that John Ford told McLaglen they wouldn’t be shooting the trial scene the next day. McLaglen promptly went out and drank all night, as Ford knew he would. He came to the set and found they were shooting the scene, and he had to work with a massive hangover, which probably made his sweaty, trembling performance a little easier. IMDb.com

Inglourious Basterds (2009) First feature At the Drive In with A Perfect Getaway. IMDb.com

Inkheart (2008) The idea here is that there are certain people, silvertongues, who when reading a book aloud cause the characters and/or events to cross over into our world. It’s an interesting idea, and some of this movie is good, but it ends up with all too much special-effects hugger-mugger, too many things happening at once. I have to say that the locations are ravishing, though.

When I encounter a magical conceit like this, I am always curious about the rules that apply. Sometimes rules are established and then blithely thrown away, and I hate that. In this movie, I didn’t think I was told enough to know if rules were being violated. So I wondered, for instance, if father and daughter Mo and Meggie, both silvertongues, could read, say, a newspaper aloud and have the subjects of the story appear before them. A phone book? If they sang an aria from an opera, would people appear who sang all their dialogue? And most important in this day and age when I get a letter every week asking when some of my stories will appear as ebooks … would it work on a Kindle? IMDb.com

Inland Empire (2006) It is with great pleasure that I announce the bestowal of the coveted Gerry Award on David Lynch, the third honoree after Gus Van Sant (for the detestable Gerry) and Carlos Reygadas (for the insufferable Japón). The Gerry is given out weekly, monthly, or yearly, totally at the whim of the highly-respected Gerry Committee (me and Lee), to the most impenetrable, incomprehensible, stupid, boring, muddled, artsy-fartsy, and/or pretentious—and especially slow—movies ever made. Inland Empire is all of these things, plus it gets extra points for being very, very long, almost three hours of unadulterated bullshit. David Lynch can make weirdness a virtue, as he’s proven in many films, but it doesn’t work here. I knew I was in trouble when the scene with the people with giant rabbit heads played out, and by the time Jeremy Irons spent almost ten minutes of screen time instructing an unseen stagehand on the placement of a light on a movie set, we decided to pack it in, at about one hour. The Gerry, by the way, if we ever get around to making one, will be a carving of a human hand holding a DVD remote, with the thumb pressing the 60X FF button. If the movie still seems slow at 60X, it is Gerry material. IMDb.com

Inside Man (2006) When we rented this we didn't even realize it was a Spike Lee Joint; we were attracted by Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster, two folks who have never turned in a bad performance even in a bad movie. The Spike Lee brand name leads you to expect a certain type of product, and this isn't it. It's a straight thriller/puzzler, and wants to be like The Usual Suspects, slamming you hard with a big surprise at the end. It is so complex, and so carefully drawn, that I can't tell you much about the plot except that it involves a big bank robbery. It is superb in the details, every minor character sharply drawn and totally New York ... except it is interspersed with interviews with the hostages that obviously come after the heist. We realize that at least one of these people is one of the robbers because the detectives are browbeating them mercilessly, and not one of them clams up and asks for a lawyer. I mean, come on. Wouldn't you? The very first time the words "Are you one of the robbers?" came out of a cop's mouth, that's when I'd say not another word until my lawyer arrived. So would most New Yorkers.

Eventually stuff like that sinks the movie. It had me up until about 90 minutes in, and it is ingenious, but finally I didn't buy it. IMDb.com

Insomnia (2002) Not nearly as good as the Norwegian original version with the same title. Al Pacino can be very good, but he has a tendency to chew the scenery, the wiring, and any stagehand who stands still long enough. To overplay, in other words. It might have been better in this one to do Michael Corleone, rather than Tony Montana. IMDb.com

Intermission (Irish, 2003) There is an Irish humor that you either get or you don’t get, you can’t have it explained to you. I have enjoyed this rather cock-eyed view of the world in quite a few low-budget gems from the Land o’ Leprechauns, and this one is rich with it. It has almost too many characters to count, and many story lines that intersect (sort of) in a botched kidnapping/bank robbery. I won’t say nobody gets hurt, but the only one who dies is the one who had it coming. Along the way we had a lot of fun with these people. Now I’m going to see if I can induce Lee to try some brown sauce in her coffee. After you try it in your iced tea. IMDb.com

The International (2009) This aspires to be sort of The Bourne International, and falls considerably short. Of course, that’s setting the thriller bar pretty high. There are still pleasures to be had here, though the plot is way beyond unlikely and there are some things that just don’t make sense. For instance, do you think it’s a good idea to remove your bullet-proof vest in the middle of a gun battle with Uzis and/or Mac-10s (I don’t know the difference, except that each sprays a lot of lead), particularly when it has just saved your life? That’s what one character here does, apparently simply because the plot called for him to be killed. Clive Owen and Naomi Watts do a good job, but the real star is the Guggenheim Museum … actually a life-sized set of three of the circular floors, with upper or lower parts of the spiral filled in by computer where needed. For a while there they actually had me fooled, with an establishing shot of people walking in and out of the real museum, but when the gun battle really got going it was a certainty that it was a set. No way the directors of the museum would have allowed that much mayhem, even if they promised to clean it all up. And, I have to say, the short documentary on the DVD about the making of this wonderful set held my attention slightly better than the movie did. There was another short concerning the selection of the buildings they used, which were mostly made of glass, and that was also fascinating. Architecture played a big role all around in this film. I wish they’d paid as much attention to plot. IMDb.com

The Interpreter (2005) One element of this film is the Third World dictator who began as a man of the people and, over the years, turned into someone as bad as or worse than the man he replaced. Lee pointed out that it’s such a sad and common story. You can find dozens of examples. Woody Allen poked fun at it in Bananas, when the “Liberator” makes his first speech and promptly goes whacko with power: “All citizens will change their onnerwear every hour. Onnerwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check.” I’m not going to get into the plot, but the movie has a bit in common with that phenomenon. It starts out as a cracking good thriller, Hitchcockian, and goes along well for quite a long time. Then it bogs down and loses its pacing, which is so critical to a movie like this. It alternates between scenes that move so fast you have a hard time keeping up with the complicated plot, and scenes that really drag. Especially at the end. So many thrillers do that. Directors drag out the last scenes and all suspense is lost. I had expected better from Sydney Pollack. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy it. The situation and dialogue and stars are smart and believable, apart from one rather large coincidence at the beginning without which we’d have had no story. Best of all are the location shots at the United Nations, the first time a movie has been made there. But I shouldn’t have been yawning at the end. IMDb.com

Intimate Strangers (Confidences trop intimes) (French, 2004) A woman walks into a psychiatrist’s office and starts spilling her guts about the sexual troubles in her marriage. Trouble is, he’s not a shrink, he’s a bored and restless tax consultant. He is so stunned that he says nothing. She keeps coming back. Complications ensue.

You’re set up to expect a Hitchcock film here, both by the situation and the music, and some reviews I read complained that it didn’t turn out to be a thriller. Idiots! Grow up! I could have written 15 different types of stupid and overdone homicidal-maniac double and triple reverses to this script in my sleep, pretty much like the awful mess that was Hide and Seek, and that’s exactly what Hollywood would have done with it. And, to be sure, even some French directors, though they tend to do it better. But there’s a lot more interesting things going on. The wonderful Sandrine Bonnaire is one of the best actresses working anywhere, and the man, Fabrice Luchini, manages to do an amazing amount of things by doing almost nothing. I was fascinated throughout. IMDb.com

Intolerable Cruelty (2003) Not the best effort by the Coen Brothers. In fact, it really doesn’t work. IMDb.com

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

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Review is in VarleyYarn: The Movie That Wouldn't Die. IMDb.com

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Review is in VarleyYarn: Son of the Bride of the Movie That Wouldn't Die. IMDb.com

The Invention of Lying (2009) Second feature At the Drive In with Where the Wild Things Are. IMDb.com

Invictus (2009) Second feature At the Drive In with Sherlock Holmes. IMDb.com

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006) The title says it all. There are over 100,000 employees of private contractors in Iraq, handling everything from providing clean water to the troops (most of it is filthy) to trundling convoys of empty trucks back and forth because you get paid whether you deliver a cargo or not, to burning $100,000 trucks because they have flat tires, to the odd spot of torture at health spas like Abu Ghraib. (These are just a few examples of dozens in this film, and not even the worst ones.) They work for hundreds of companies, but I will let Halliburton, the boss hog at this trough, stand for them all. If you don't know by now that Halliburton came striding up the Eastern seaboard from Washington a few years ago, bitch-slapped the Statue of Liberty, punched her in the gut, brought her to her knees and lifted her skirts and has been butt-fucking her ever since, as torrents of money spill from her mouth ... well, then you just haven't been paying attention.

We've moved from the era of the $600 toilet seat to the $45 six-pack of Coke—which Halliburton bought for 50 cents in Baghdad—and the $100 load of laundry that isn't even clean when it's done. (I'm not making this up, this is literally true. A soldier tries to do his own laundry and is told by his commander that it's illegal. Illegal.) Every executive employee of Halliburton and their secretaries in Iraq and Kuwait rates a $40,000 SUV, for which they bill the government $250,000 ... and they are never driven. There is no place to drive them to. They sit there on the desert sands, leased at $7000/month, and when it's over Uncle Sam won't even own them.

Dick Cheney: "Hand me some more grease, George, this bitch is about to cum!" Harry Truman would have had these people stood up against a wall and shot. Hell, Dwight Eisenhower would have shot them himself.

I accuse Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, and all the giant corporations bleeding the US and Iraq of every nickel they can squeeze of out them of high treason against my beloved nation. If you're not ready to go that far, watch this movie, and you'll be tying the noose yourself and looking for the right tree to hang them from. IMDb.com

Iron Man (2008) First feature at the drive-in with Drillbit Taylor. IMDb.com

Is Anybody There? (2008) Michael Caine loves to work, all the time. Sometimes this leads him into projects he might have better left alone. This might be one of them. I say might, because we bailed out at about the halfway mark. It’s not that the movie was awful, or that Caine’s performance was bad; offhand, I can’t think of a bad performance by Maurice Micklewhite (his real name, and as good a reason for changing one’s name as I’ve ever come across). It’s just that sometimes a movie fails to connect, and this one didn’t. So don’t take this as a bad review. A lot of people liked it. Maybe you will, too. IMDb.com

Here’s a textbook example of how expectations can affect my reaction to a movie. You set the bar high for Kubrick, a lot lower for a romantic comedy ... but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a romantic comedy.

FIRST FEATURE: The Island (2005) Starts out looking like a jazzed-up version of THX-1138: A sterile, spotless, soulless environment, everybody dressed alike. But something is obviously going on.

SPOILER WARNING

These people are clones, grown to replace the organs of rich people or to act as surrogate mothers for women too queasy to go through pregnancy. Harvesting them obviously involves killing them, so the story is they are vat-raised and mindless. It’s a huge operation, which bothers me right there. Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead, and such a massive number of people are involved in this conspiracy that it would be headlined on CNN ten minutes after it opened its doors.

But The Island’s worst sin is to set up an interesting moral situation and then completely fail to deal with any of its implications. After the set-up, about halfway through, it’s just one chase after another. At one point, after the escaped boy and girl survive a 40-story fall, a man looks at them and says “Jesus must really love you!” It’s about as rational an explanation as I’ve ever heard for this sort of mindless and stupid stunt-oriented action that humans could not possible survive.
You just hate it worse because of what it could have been. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are sometimes very good as strangers in a strange land, said to have the minds of 15-year-olds, with all their adolescent compulsiveness. But it has nowhere to go but into the crapper of lots of big explosions. And if you’ve never seen an explosion in a crapper ... skip this movie. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Fantastic Four (2005) I’ve said elsewhere that I was never a comix reader. A friend of mine was, and I sometimes browsed his collection. I’m not sure why, but The Fantastic Four was the one I found most interesting. I can’t really say why, except that Ben Grimm’s wry and funny observations made me chuckle. This film did, too, several times (Silly Putty Man falls asleep with his face in the computer keyboard, and wakes up with one side of his face looking like a waffle iron), and the intervening action was pretty groovy.

The makers of this film have set out to do no more than capture the spirit of the comic, and succeeded pretty well. The premise is bullshit, but the premise of all superhero comics is bullshit. Who cares that “Our DNA structure was altered by the cosmic storm!” or “I was bit by a radioactive spider!”? This dude can stretch, this one can set himself on fire, this one looks like a first-grader’s sculpture in orange modeling clay, and the girl can turn invisible. Accept it, and move on. How would people react to this stuff? The Torch digs it; the Thing (the name sort of says it) thinks it sucks. How would you react? Like Catwoman and the Torch, I think it’d be cool (if I wasn’t ugly like Ben Grimm).

No Spiderman angst for me, thank you very much. Flame on! IMDb.com

It's Complicated (2009) First feature At the Drive In with The Twilight Saga: New Moon. IMDb.com

It’s Trad, Dad! (1962) I’ve wanted to see this film for many, many years. It was Richard Lester’s first feature film, released in the US as Ring-a-Ding Rhythm! I guess most Beatlemaniacs (I am one) know that what influenced John Lennon to want Lester to direct the first Beatles film was that he was a fan of a short that Lester made in 1960 with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan called The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film: Part 1, Part 2. (This little gem was also obviously an influence on Monty Python.)

After that short, he made It’s Trad, Dad! I had always wondered if it was an influence on A Hard Day’s Night.

Well, don’t you just love the Internet? I found a DVD copy of this extremely rare film for sale on eBay from a guy in England, and I snapped it up. (The guy assured me it should play on any DVD player, but when it arrived I found that mine wasn’t one of them. Luckily, the player in my computer was able to decode it.)

So, is it anything like A Hard Day’s Night? Yes!!! Very much so! It’s an amazing little film, a time capsule, and perhaps more important in the history of film than even the Beatles film that followed it … though, of course, not seen by nearly as many people. This film is where Richard Lester learned his distinctive way of making movies, that he later put to use with the Fab Four. A very good case has been made recently that Richard Lester basically invented the music video. From Wikipedia:

Roger Ebert says that today when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day's Night.

Which, in turn, was the child of It’s Trad, Dad! The form of the film is pretty much like those awful Alan Freed Rock and Roll films of the late ‘50s, like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock: Small-town kids want to dance to their loud new groove, but stuffy townspeople think it’s the Devil’s music. After much dancing to the hot new groups of the day, the parents discover there ain’t nothin’ bad about Rock. Only Lester spoofs these movies mercilessly. The man characters are A Boy (Craig Douglas) and A Girl. (15-year-old Helen Shapiro, who was a big star in England at the time. Did you know that when the Beatles first went on tour, they had second billing to Helen Shapiro? She was the bigger star. I didn’t know that.) They are so labeled by a narrator, with arrows pointing to them. They live in “A town which shall remain nameless,” and we see a sign saying WELCOME TO ___________ Pop. 343. Later, when they need to get to London, the Boy and Girl face the camera and ask the narrator if he can help them out. Presto, the background is swept away and replaced with another one. Lester delights in fracturing the thin fiction that this is all real, and employs every trick he would later use in the Beatles films and in The Knack, and How to Get It, my personal favorite of his movies.

Recognizing that the plot in movies like this is really just a way of stringing the musical stuff together, Lester squeezes an astonishing number of performances into this 74 minute film. The script, the non-music moments with actual dialogue, probably could have been written on a post-it note. I’d guess that 60 minutes of the film are music.

And here’s an historical oddity. About two-thirds of the music is … Dixieland! The British called it “traditional jazz” (It’s Trad!), and it was enjoying a revival in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s in England. Listening to it, I suspected that the fad grew out of skiffle music, which the early Beatles played. If you like Dixieland (and I do), you will hear some of the best you’ve ever heard from groups like The Temperance Seven and Mr. Acker Bilk. (Remember him? If you only know him from that treacly hit “Stranger on the Shore,” you’re in for a surprise. The dude can wail on that clarinet!). If you don’t like Dixieland … this movie is probably not for you. But if you can tolerate it, the other third of the music is right across the broad spectrum of rock and roll in those just-pre-Beatles days, from the nostalgically awful, to stuff that still sounds good today. You’ll hear Chubby Checker, Gene Vincent, Gary U.S. Bonds, the Paris Sisters, and Gene McDaniels.

And you’ll soon see what I’m saying about Lester inventing the music video. Remember how new and daring those MTV videos looked when they first started making them? It’s all right here, in this little film. Each musical performance has a different slant to it, some of them hilarious, all of them groundbreaking, and every one is a little gem. These musical bits would soon be imitated by many lesser talents. It left me wishing that Lester had made a film about some other rock groups as well, or of a concert, like Martin Scorsese has done. I’ll bet it would have been bad, dad! IMDb.com

It's Tough to Be a Bug (1998) This is probably the best 3D short film I’ve ever seen. You have to see it in the special theaters at Disney’s Animal Kingdom or California Adventure, because it is tailored to those venues and wouldn’t make sense anywhere else. The show begins before you ever enter the theater, as you descend into an anthill and while waiting in the lobby of the underground bug “playhouse,” you can read very amusing posters for past productions, such as Web Side Story, My Fair Ladybug, and The Dung and I (featuring the hit song “Hello Dung Lovers”). There is, in fact, a giant ball of dung suspended from the ceiling, and the amazing information that, if it weren’t for dung-eating insects, we’d all soon be up to our dung-holes in poop. (Kids love this stuff. So do I!) Inside, the below-ground theme is repeated, and there are several large audio-animatron effects. The seats play tricks on you. At one point about 50 black widow spiders the size of Shetland ponies drop from the ceiling. A stink bug sprays the audience and a termite shoots acid. (I could have done without the water in the face.) As for the movie itself, it’s narrated by Flik, who is an ant. (Quick, Henry, the Flit!) It’s very well done and doesn’t stay around long enough to wear out its welcome with all the in-your-face 3D effects. IMDb.com

Italian for Beginners (2000) We loved this movie. It concerns a group of Danes who meet weekly to learn Italian, and it concerns itself with the relationships that develop among them. Highly entertaining. IMDb.com

The Italian Job (2003) Another re-make that works. How rare. I wouldn’t say it is as good as the original, things must be too complicated and too flashy these days, but there are two pretty good capers in it and I’m thankful for that. IMDb.com

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