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© 2004-2008 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’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

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

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 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 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

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

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

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 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

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

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 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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