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© 2004-2008  by John Varley; all rights reserved

L.A. Confidential (1997 ... was the year that overblown behemoth Titanic rolled over all the competition at the Oscars. (This is the movie that should have won.)

Noir is the word that keeps coming up in reviews, and in my own mind, when thinking about this movie. It's time people stop insisting that film noir must be in black and white, even though noir is black. This is as noir as it gets, and it is gloriously colorful. Visually, it ranks up there with The Godfather and Chinatown in terms of getting the period feel right. In content, it draws heavily on the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler.

We loved it the first time, and we rented it again because shortly after we moved into this Hollywood apartment we became aware that our street was in the film. Get the DVD, go to scene 6. Danny DeVito emerges from some shrubbery and hurries down a driveway to the street. Today, if you walk up that driveway to the end and then turn left, you will be in the parking lot of the building next door to us. Keep going a few feet and you'll probably find our car, parked in the second spot to the north. The house Danny has been snooping on is two doors down from us!

As the camera follows him we see, at the end of the street, a brightly lit building with a tower and a theater marquee. A huge sign announces the premiere of When Worlds Collide. That building isn't, and never was, a theater. The marquee is phony. It's still there, empty, and we haven't been able to determine what it was originally. But we use that tower like a bookmark when we're driving down Hollywood Boulevard. That's where we turn to get to our place. Neat, huh?

And remember, this is all off the record, on the Q.T., and very hush-hush! IMDb.com

L4yer Cake (2004) A stylish, sometimes funny flick about drug dealers and a deal gone wrong. But after a while we were both wishing for American subtitles. I’m usually pretty good with Brit accents, but I know a missed a lot of dialogue. By the end, I was far from sure just what was happening, and the final shot, literally, was not needed and felt like a cheat from back in the days of the Hays Office, when the bad had to be punished in the last reel. IMDb.com

La Ceremonie (1995) A fascinating film from Claude Chabrol, sometimes called the French Alfred Hitchcock. A disturbed young woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) meets a flat-out crazy one (the wonderful Isabelle Huppert), with disastrous results. The build-up is very slow, and the pay-off shocking. Jacqueline Bisset is in it, and she’s very good. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and she’s aging well. Apparently she’s been working right along, but not in movies that I’ve seen. IMDb.com

La Dolce Vita (1960) Recently restored and released on DVD. It had been quite a few years since I’d seen it, so we rented it ... and pretty soon I realized that I had never seen it. I’ve seen just about all the “classics,” the great films, but there are gaps here and there. I hadn’t realized it was so long, almost 3 hours. It is gorgeous to look at. I think Fellini had a black and white heart. The shadows and lighting are awesome. I’ve liked or loved all his earlier films in B&W, didn’t care for most of the color ones.

To me, this one has dated a bit. I know it was revolutionary and shocking in its time, nobody but Ingmar Bergman and a few French new wave directors like Alain Resnais were making films like this at the time. But there have been plenty since. It is pretty much a series of episodes that don’t lead to much: rich people leading empty lives and the meaningless journalists who cover them, the cult of celebrity which was just getting started. The word “paparazzi” (sparrow, in Italian) for twittering, predatory flocks of those who flatter themselves as “photojournalists.” It was Marcello’s nickname for his photographer buddy, and the name caught on. It is full of Fellini’s usual trademark symbols, religious and circus and show biz. It is just terrific to look at and I was never bored, but I much prefer his earthier works like Nights of Cabiria and Variety Lights, or for a work of existential ambiguity, 8 1/2. 8 1/2 has one of my favorite movie lines: “I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it just the same.” IMDb.com

La vie en rose (2007) In ‘60s rock there were The Beatles, and there was everybody else. In 20th century male popular singers, there was Sinatra, and there was everybody else. But with female singers of the last century, we got very, very lucky. There was Garland, there was Holiday, there is Streisand, there is Franklin, and there was Piaf. I couldn’t really rank them, though I suppose Piaf would be my personal least favorite, merely because I don’t know her genre that well and don’t quite have the ear for it. It’s partly a French thing. But that doesn’t detract from her right to a place with those others in any way.

Abandoned by her mother and then her father, raised in a whorehouse and then in the circus, then performing on the streets. Blinded as a child, then recovered or healed, depending on what mythology you prefer to believe. Heavy drinker, morphine addict. No less than three bad car accidents. The love of her life who died in a plane crash as he was on his way to see her. Dead at the age of 47 from liver cancer. Wow! She must have been the luckiest woman who ever lived. I’m surprised she was never abducted by aliens. I mean, could you write a better recipe for a tragedy, and a great singer? Would you exchange longevity for a life lived at that level, for a chance at greatness? I think I would. Some artists would kill for a biography like that.

The title is from her signature song, and it means “Life in pink.” The French title was La Môme, which means “The Kid.” I like that title, but am not sure what it refers to, except that she was 4’8”, hence the stage name Piaf, “sparrow.” In fact, unless you are a Piaf scholar, there will be a lot of things you will be unsure of when you watch this movie. It jumps around from her childhood to her deathbed without apparent logic. At the end, I decided the idea was that these were the jumbled memories of a woman whose mind was failing. That’s okay with me; a biopic is very hard to make well, and often thankless because we’ve seen so many of them and just about every way of telling them has become clichéd. There is just no way to squeeze a whole, full life into 2 hours and 20 minutes. Abbreviation is necessary, but painful. And after all, if you want a history lesson you can read a book. A movie should give impressions, and they don’t have to be just the high and low points, but those points that best illuminate the character. Still, sometimes you wish … I mean, we skip from 1940 to 1947. Wasn’t there a little thing called World War Two in there? At one point we see a man who she refers to her husband (she had three). Where did he come from? And very late in the game we learn about a child. So, like I said, not a straight bio by any means.

These are minor carps, though. I liked this film a lot, and I learned a bit. But the chief pleasure here is without question the performance of Marion Cotillard. First there’s the physical appearance. Take a look at her in A Good Year, and compare it with her as Piaf. Not the same woman. Then there’s the height. Cotillard is 5’6”, which nobody would call petite, a full ten inches taller than the Little Sparrow. You hear of actors growing into a role. Cotillard shrunk into this one. She somehow seems to have made herself smaller. (Sure, José Ferrer did it with Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge, but he was on his knees.) I’m not quite sure how she did it, either. In long shots she doesn’t look tiny in comparison to others, but somehow my impression is of her as a smaller woman. Partly it is her posture, which always seems to be cringing away from a possible attack. Later, she was prematurely hunched, like a very old woman. But most of all it’s just that she somehow seemed to have played it small. There is Oscar buzz, and you can sure see why.

With a biopic about a singer, there is a crucial decision that must be made: Do you let the actor sing, or use tapes of the real singer? When Larry Parks starred in The Jolson Story, the decision was easy. Jolson was still alive, and recorded the sound track. Gary Busey sang and played guitar for Buddy Holly. Diana Ross did a pretty good job of being Billie Holliday in Lady Sings the Blues [totally disagree], without slavishly imitating her. Kevin Spacey sounded very much like Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon not only sang for Johnny and June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, but learned to play the guitar, too. Jamie Foxx didn’t try to sing Ray Charles (good decision, Jamie) but he did play his own piano! I guess the two questions are, how true-to-life do you want the sound to be, and just how important is the distinctiveness of the voice to the story. If they ever do a biopic of Barbra Streisand, they’d better use her recordings or I won’t go see it. On the other hand, I’ve heard a fair number of Judy Garland impersonators over the years.

With this one I think it was a no-brainer. Nobody has ever sounded quite like Piaf, before or since, and the uniqueness of her voice was the chief reason for her fame, so they went with the recordings, and it works very well. IMDb.com

Lackawanna Blues (2005) An HBO movie, based on an autobiographical one-man show play. There are at least a dozen high-powered black actors in this, plus Jimmy Smits, all with small parts, all obviously eager to get a chance at a cameo in this sweet little film. But it is dominated, as it must and should be, by S. Epatha Merkerson, from “Law & Order.” She plays a saintly but no-nonsense woman who runs a boarding house for society’s losers. The story is episodic and has no dramatic arc, but hey, it’s real life. Does your life have an arc? Everyone involved is very good. And the film would be worth seeing just for the music. Would you believe Mos Def wailing out on “Caledonia!”? Some hip-hop dudes are good right across the musical spectrum. In fact, during the two big party scenes here ... you see why music and dancing were the most valuable resources of black people while they suffered from institutional racism and ostracism from the larger society. Hell, they didn’t need whitey’s approval to be happy. They made “our own paradise on Earth,” and you really want to join in. IMDb.com

Ladder 49 (2004) Double feature with The Incredibles. IMDb.com

Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) (2005, South Korea) They say revenge is a dish best served cold. Thirteen years is enough time for it to get very chilly indeed. That’s how long Geum-ja Lee (the intoxicatingly beautiful Yeong-ae Lee) has spent in prison for a horrendous crime which she didn’t … or, wait a minute. Did she commit it? It’s not that simple, and neither is anything else in this movie. If you want to find out all the plot details it’s easy enough to do, but you won’t find them here, as I don’t want to spoil the fun of finding them out for yourself. In fact, if you don’t already know the plot, I’d recommend you see this film without learning anything about it … except I will warn you it’s not for the squeamish. The violence is not depicted directly, as in a slasher film, but gruesome things are going on. Suffice it to say that this woman had ample reason to seek revenge, and plenty of time to work out exactly how to do it.

The reason I rented this is that we’ve got two revenge movies coming out very close to each other: Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence opened yesterday (to pretty bad reviews) as I write this, and The Brave One with Jodie Foster opens next week. The early buzz on that one is good, as you’d expect from her. I read an interview with her and she mentioned Lady Vengeance, and the reviews were pretty positive. I admit I was expecting something a lot different than what I got. It was directed by Chan-wook Park, who has a cult following among Asian cinema buffs, and is the third of his “Revenge Trilogy.” I haven’t seen the other two. I expected a lot of fighting and a lot of blood, maybe a female Bruce Lee avenging evil. But things aren’t as black and white in Park’s universe. This is a much more nuanced story. And, totally unexpected by me, it had a lot of very funny moments, at least in the first part, in a very dark way. Geum-ja is never quite what she seems. The last part gets so grim it is hard to watch in places. Some crimes are so awful you can barely stand to see them depicted, even in an indirect way. Again, this guy really needed somebody to take him apart, piece by piece.

Remember Death Wish, back in 1974? A very controversial film. Vigilante justice? Tut-tut, can’t have that, can we? I think it was a pretty good litmus test, myself. If you really, really, really felt that Charles Bronson was a monster, that these people he was killing deserved a “fair trial,” well, your credentials as a liberal were impeccable. Me, I’m liberal in many things, and I believe that certain people should be squashed like bugs, anally raped with nail-studded baseball bats, flayed alive, disemboweled, and their graves pissed upon. Fuck the law, fuck the jury, fuck the appeals courts. Does that make me a bad person? I think most of us are like that, every once in a while, in our blackest heart of hearts. (I also think most of us wouldn’t go through with such things.) But isn’t thinking about it almost like the act itself? If I am wrong, if I am severely misjudging my fellow humans, then I apologize to you all, and I guess I am a bad person. But I don’t think I’m that different from you.

Having said that, I am aware enough to be pretty sure that such acts would not come without consequences. I don’t know if I could get a good night’s sleep if I ever carried out any of my more violent fantasies against people who so richly deserved it. I hope I never have to find out. But this movie is an unflinching, thoughtful examination of the question.

Best of all, the story is told with considerable style and flair. This Park dude has an amazing eye. He’s not quite in Kubrick’s class, but pretty much every shot is beautifully composed and just … right. There are special effects that don’t draw attention to themselves but contribute to the telling of the story. And the story itself is artfully laid out, bounding around in time to the point that it almost becomes confusing, but I was always able to keep up with it. Above all, the story was related with images make me think of Hitchcock, though their styles are very different. What I mean is, nobody was better at telling a story though cutting, camera angles, and the essential artistry of filmmaking than Hitchcock. Park is working in that league. He’s that good. IMDb.com

Ladybird, Ladybird (UK, 1994) This was a movie so unpleasant that I can hardly remember anything about it, except an outstanding performance by Crissy Rock. She is a bad mother and social services has taken her four children (by four fathers). They’re right to do so ... but they are so heartless you hate them for it. A tough one to watch. IMDb.com

The Ladykillers (1955) I believe this is the only one of the classic Ealing comedies that I hadn’t seen ... and boy, am I glad. By that I mean that if I’d seen this first, before seeing the recent remake by the Coen Brothers, I’d have hated the new one instead of merely finding it mildly annoying. Why do they do these things? What is it that leads even funny, inventive, original guys like Joel and Ethan Coen to remake something that was perfect the first time around? You can’t win, artistically, not even with the great Tom Hanks, who was at his worst in the remake. All you can do is cynically cash in on the vast audience who won’t go see a movie older than two years, who demand the sort of foul language that is permissible these days in lieu of actual wit, and who like their slapstick raw and unfunny. So if you haven’t seen it, rent this one, and leave the new turkey alone. IMDb.com

The Ladykillers (2004) When the Coen Brothers are cooking, as in Raising Arizona or O Brother Where Art Thou, over-the-top humor is their trademark. When they’re even a little bit off, as in The Hudsucker Proxy or The Big Lebowski, ... well, even then there are things to like. This is one of the latter. Tom Hanks quickly becomes hard to take with his mannered performance. IMDb.com

Lana’s Rain (2002) The writer/producer/director of this very low-budget thriller strikes me as a film school Quentin Tarantino wannabe, but he doesn’t have the chops to pull it off. It gets off to a very nice beginning, but squanders it in a lot of bloody foofaraw. The lead, Oxana Orlenko, is quite good. She starts off as a war-torn waif in Bosnia, goes through incredible degradation, and ends up a real stunner. You wouldn’t recognize her. She has a lot of range, unlike her co-stars, who are cartoon villains. I hope to see her again. She could have quite a glamorous career. IMDb.com

Last Holiday (2006) This is a remake of a 1950 British film with the same title, starring Alec Guinness in the part Queen Latifah had in the new one. The original screenplay was by J.B. Priestley. I'd really like to see that one, but it's not available on DVD. Lady finds out she's dying, decides to spend all her savings on a last fling, doing the things she's dreamed about. Of course you know she's not really dying. From there it shifts to the "innocent good person among the schemers" plot that goes back at least to Nikolai Gogol, as filmed by Danny Kaye in The Inspector General. Other antecedents are It Should Happen to You with Judy Holliday, and Being There. Hollywood perfected this sort of thing in the ‘30s and if you listen you'd swear the incidental music was lifted intact from a Rock Hudson/Doris Day movie of the '60s, with pizzicato strings punctuating everything, along with lonely little woodwind riffs. It's 100% predictable, but I guess it's an okay example of its type. But I swear, if I see the beginner skiing down the mountainside somehow managing to stay upright while doing tricks an Olympic snowboarder couldn't do and ending up in the village square scene again, not only will I not laugh, I won't even be responsible for my actions. No jury would convict me. IMDb.com

The Last King of Scotland (2006) Idi Amin Dada (there is some confusion about his real name, and even his birthdate) styled himself His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. That he was a thug and a megalomaniac should have been obvious to everyone, but it wasn't, maybe because he was replacing Milton Obote, another of the long and depressing line of thugs and thieves and madmen who have run African countries since the murderous and racist colonial powers departed and left the continent in shambles. Amin didn't look so terribly bad, in context. That he was a psychotic didn't become obvious for some time. As in many other African holocausts, no one knows the exact number of people killed during his regime, but a good estimate is 300,000. (That is fairly close to the number of deaths caused by Monkey Boy, Dickhead Cheney, Cuntaleeza Rice, and "Rummy" Bumfuck. Impeachment, anybody? War crimes trials? Amin escaped all retribution; maybe Monkey Boy and company can be held to account.)

The story follows the short career of a young and sort of idealistic and very naive doctor (he seems more bent on adventure than actual humanitarianism, though he does work hard at the Ugandan bush clinic where he lands, pretty much at random) as he stumbles into the role of Amin's closest advisor, something he never asked for but stupidly thinks might be a way to help Uganda. By the time he discovers the horrors of what is going on around him, he's pretty much fucked. Then the movie turns abruptly into a suspense story of whether he can make his escape with his head still on his shoulders.

I think a great opportunity was missed here. I know you have to make a story like this personal, it's almost impossible to tell a story of such great events by covering it all like a documentary; leave that to the documentarians. That's why movies like The Killing Fields and Hotel Rwanda work. They tell the story from a limited point of view. The moral question that should have been much more to the forefront is that of the limits of collaboration and how much evil rubs off on you if you abet a mass murderer, even unwittingly. At some point it becomes too late to shout "I didn't know!" At some point, you should have known, if you were paying attention, if you weren't spending your time screwing Idi's third wife. The movie largely sidesteps this question by becoming a thriller. I don't really much care if the doctor escapes, I want to see how he faces the music, and his own crimes of omission.

This is worth seeing if only for Forrest Whitaker's Oscar-winning performance. It is a role that he was physically born to play, the resemblance is amazing. But resemblance aside, you have to be able to inhabit the man's madness, and Whitaker does an excellent job. He scares the crap out of you, even when he's smiling. Maybe especially when he's smiling. You can always see the slavering beast just beneath the skin. IMDb.com

The Last Samurai (2003) God, I hope so. IMDb.com

The Last Shot (2004) An FBI sting involves pretending to make a movie (this apparently actually happened). Matthew Broderick is the director, totally in the dark, Alec Baldwin is the FBI producer, who is gradually seduced, as everyone who has ever touched the movie business is, into actually wanting to make this turkey. The cast is to die for, especially Toni Collette, the situation is funny, there are a lot of funny lines ... and yet it doesn’t quite come together. I kept feeling I should be getting more laughs. What it does best is to capture the giddy feeling of mixed joy and tension and full-focus dedication as a movie is developed and then actually goes before the cameras. As Roger Ebert said in his review, “Nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie.” This is true, I can vouch for it. Even the people working on a piece of shit like Alien vs. Predator or Taxi or Millennium have a vision. It may not be Kurosawa’s or Bergman’s vision, they may only be seeking to entertain you, but they want to do the best they can. IMDb.com

Late Marriage (Hatuna Meuheret) (Israel, 2001) At some point watching this, Lee said something like “This is the anti-My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” She’s right. In that one, ethnic families were a jolly thing to be endured. It was funny, trying to live with old-country values in modern America.

This movie is in an ethnic Georgian community in Israel, and these Georgians don’t fuck around. A 31-year-old man, still being supported by his family, is enduring an endless round of bride interviews. We see one, and it is horrific, part yard sale and part slave auction, with both families trying to sell the prospective bride and groom. Trouble is, the guy is seeing a 34-year-old divorcee with a young daughter. Absolutely not! The family visits her, with the son present, calls her a whore, threatens to kill her. And you believe they would. And the guy takes it. At the end, he’s marrying some stranger, drunk out of his mind. He actually tries to kiss his father’s balls ... apparently because he has none of his own.

My own prejudices are unavoidable here. I know that romantic love affairs often (hell, even usually, these days) produce disastrous marriages. But it never occurred to me, not once in my life, to do anything my family told me to after I was 18. (Luckily, they never tried; I’m not from that sort of ethnic background.) So I know what I would have done. And, from my point of view, this man is a coward. The big question for me is, does the man have no spine because his family systematically castrated him over 31 years, or was he simply born with no balls? You decide.

I must mention that this film contains one of the most realistic sex scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie, and I emphatically include hardcore movies, where the sex is by the numbers, almost never convincing. I’m not talking about graphic, explicit shots, though there is nudity. This scene is extended, and brutally and comically honest. It’s real, like you’re actually peering into someone else’s bedroom, and discomforting because of that, but in the end it’s well worth watching unless you’re prudish. IMDb.com

Laurel Canyon (2002) Has Frances McDormand ever been bad in a film? I sure can’t remember one. I’m so glad she got her Oscar for Fargo, because she doesn’t have the glamour to be a leading lady except in quirky roles like that. This was a good film, three stars or so. IMDb.com

Le cercle rouge (1970, French) A hugely influential movie from Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director who never made a big name for himself in America. Though it's in color, this is the sort of movie that the term film noir was invented for. Nobody in it is very nice, but man, are they ever cool! Many directors of American thrillers count Melville as one of their heroes. The cast is great, with Alain Delon, Bourvil, and Yves Montand, who may be the coolest actor ever to appear in film. That world-weary, hound-dog face ...

That said, it's not a very emotionally involving movie. It's more of a lesson in cinema construction, complete with archaic devices like wipes and some imaginative editing in the violent scenes. The centerpiece is a really nice jewelry heist, worth the price of admission all by itself, right up there with Topkapi, Rififi, and The Hot Rock. IMDb.com

Leap of Faith (1992) Steve Martin used to be one of my favorite comics, and he still can be, if he tries. Trouble is, he hasn’t been trying much lately. From his first film right up to this one, he had an amazing string of critical and financial successes. After this one, his career just seems to peter out, though I guess he’s still making money. This is one of his best. It isn’t a comedy, though there are plenty of laughs watching him capering around on stage as a big-time, high-tech tent revival preacher and con man. Watching him, you might think he’s way over the top, but I tell you, brothers and sisters, he’s not. I’ve seen a meeting like this, and there is literally no trick these guys won’t stoop to. They could sell shit in a sewer, and make you think you got a bargain. Every born-again Christian ought to see this, particularly if they’ve witnessed healing, or miracles. See how easy it is, suckers?  The credits lists Ricky Jay, world’s most dangerous card thrower and a guy who knows every scam ever invented, as “Consultant: cons and frauds,” so you can take this stuff to the bank. Ever wonder what’s going through the heads of Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart, and that whole cynical bunch of evangelical salvation floggers while they’re laying their hands on your forehead and their fingers in your pockets? What a bunch of maroons! IMDb.com

Leave Her To Heaven (1945) Watching the final courtroom scene in this movie makes it abundantly clear why America needed the Miranda decision. If anyone in the audience in 1945 believed five seconds of this farrago of idiocy, then it's clear they had absolutely no idea of their civil rights. Looking at a few online reviews, I came up with this quote, which is dead on: "...finally culminating in a courtroom melodrama of such histrionic preposterousness that one’s hands are thrown up in frustration." Lee and I were laughing, wanting to stand up and holler "Objection, your honor! Badgering the witness!" Vincent Price, the prosecutor who, get this, was the jilted boyfriend of the victim (can you say "conflict of interest?") calls the defendant to the stand, which no prosecutor has been able to do since at least 1789, and all but throws her to the ground and stands on her neck, screaming and demanding the answer to this question: "Do you love him? Do you love him? DO YOU LOVE HIM, YOU LYING WHORE?" (Well, that's what he means.) The movie is one long flashback, and at the beginning the defense lawyer (hah!) laments, a little ruefully, "Maybe it's partly my fault that he did two years in prison." No shit, Sherlock. At the trial he never raised one objection. The judge apparently slept through the whole thing. This is what passed for courtroom drama in 1945.

I know, it was 1945, you bring a different sensibility. But there was one other element in it that really rankled, also typical of 1945. This kid. He has polio. Awwwwww! And he is so ... gee whiz, I mean, golly, he's so ... boyish! So lovable, so eager to please. I found another gem of a quote, this one from Bright Lights Film Journal: "He’s the kind of earnest, unaware boy everyone loves less than anyone wants to admit." Exactly! I hated the little prick! I was hoping Gene Tierney would drown him!

But there's one of the good parts: Gene Tierney. She's been called the most beautiful woman ever to work in Hollywood, and I wouldn't go that far—she's not really my type, too icy and perfect and controlled—but she's perfect for this part. From the very first shot you know there's something seriously wrong with this girl, she is creepy on a deep level, and you know Cornel Wilde won't see it until it's too late.

The other thing to like is the glorious, saturated Technicolor, back when they had to overlight a scene to the point of sunburn to expose the film properly. Watch Gene light a kerosene lamp ... and a million lights spring up all around her, from every angle! Look for the multiple reflections on the shiny, bulbous cars. But it's lovely. Won an Oscar for cinematography, and you can see why. Color was still rare back then, and it must have been almost a sensory overload for audiences in those days. And it works pretty well as a story of an obsessed control freak ... up until the preposterous ending.

Oops! Almost forgot. (Actually, I did forget, and Lee had to plug this into the bottom of the review later.) Chill Wills was in it, looking very out of place in Maine, far from the lone prairie where we usually see him. He sang a silly little song I couldn't get out of my head all night long. IMDb.com

Legally Blonde 2 (2003) I was in a bad mood when we saw the first LB; Lee liked it, I didn’t even watch the whole thing. This one wasn’t an improvement. IMDb.com

The Legend of Suriyothai (2001) Wow! What an epic! A cast of tens of thousands, hundreds of painted war elephants, beheadings, and enough skullduggery to make Lady MacBeth queasy. This is a history of a critical time in Siam, around the 1500s, and frankly it’s hard to get really involved in the story. It is a glimpse of a life-style so ritualized that it makes the court of Louis the Sun King look like anarchy. It reminded me of Indonesian shadow-puppet epics, which can go on all day and all night and are full of action such as “Lord This battled with Lord that, and they battled and battled and battled ...” But it is incredibly beautiful, filmed in and around real Thai palaces on a scale you seldom see anymore. Awesome numbers of soldiers and elephants clash, blood flows in buckets, and in between everything is golden and solemn. Bangkok has more palaces than Los Angeles has gas stations, and they are all incredible, even the ones I only saw from the canals. This film seems to have shot in most of them. Worth seeing just for the pageantry. IMDb.com

We’re such determined drive-in goers that we will pop the corn, buy the Subway sandwiches, and tootle off to one of our two local places even if the outlook is bad. It sure was bad last night, but we went anyway ...

FIRST FEATURE: The Legend of Zorro (2005) I had forgotten that Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones had made one of these before, back in 1998. It’s coming back to me now, vaguely ... and I now remember that Antonio was a sort of Zorro Jr., learning to fight from his old man. So there were a lot of ways they could have gone with this one, and I think they made just about every wrong choice they could make. This one has a serious case of Crouching Tiger syndrome, that infectious Chinese disease that has swept through Hollywood like a plague, whereby people fly and absorb punishment that would pulverize a blue whale and emerge without breaking a sweat nor suffering a scrape. They don’t actually fly here, but it’s a close thing. The relationship between Zorro and is wife is clichéd and not funny. Their little boy is a pain in the ... what’s Spanish for butt? I didn’t care about anyone in the movie. Fights happen. Scenery is destroyed. A train blows up. People run and scream. Ho-friggin’-hum.

The IMDb lists at least 60 Zorro movies, reaching all the way back to the best of them, the silent starring Douglas Fairbanks. If the writers and director had taken a look at that one, they might have understood that Zorro is supposed to be fun. But you can’t have fun with an $80 million budget, too much is at stake, so you go with the slam-bang mindlessness, because people go to see it. But guess what? The Legend of Zorro pulled in only $16 million the first weekend, beaten out by a repulsive piece of shit called Saw II. Oh, well. They’ll probably make their money back in China.

I can’t help noticing how unexciting CGI action sequences have become, at least when they’re done by the numbers, as here. The climax of this film is a fight/chase aboard a hurtling train. The train is full of nitroglycerin. I was bored. Everything is overboard these days. You want to see a train sequence? Rent How the West Was Won. Somehow, way back then, working only with stunt men and ingenuity, they made an edge-of-the-seat gosh-wow eyepopper that still stands up, and beats the pants off this one.

And about that nitro ... In what passes for a plot in this turkey, an evil cabal (sort of like Opus Dei?) wants to destroy America in 1850 by aiding the southern slave states (here called the Confederate States, and isn’t this a bit early for that term?) with a new secret weapon, more powerful than gunpowder. Nitro was invented in 1847, but not used much until Nobel tamed it, because it was sort of ... unstable. So what do these geniuses do? They manufacture their nitro in California! And I wondered ... then what? How do you get it to Georgia? Overland by stagecoach? That would have been quite a movie, sort of a 19th Century Sorcerer. Around Cape Horn? Good luck. Overland by mule train in Panama? Riiiiight. Of course, you could make it in Georgia, save yourself a lot of trouble ... but then you got no movie, except for the side plot about California statehood. And even that is ironic as hell. If you read your California history, you will discover that shortly after the time of this movie, Zorro and all his Spanish friends and family will be robbed of their lands and status by the new legislature Zorro is fighting so hard to establish. What a load of crap this movie is. From the very first scene! IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: The Fog (2005) ... or, The Curse of the Lepers! Or ... Sort Of Like The Blob, Only Not So Solid and Gray Instead of Red. But you gotta admit, this movie is not an underachiever. It has managed in a very short time to appear on the coveted IMDb’s Bottom 100, at #100. With a bullet. Which is what John Carpenter should have put through his head when he got the idea to remake his stupid 1980 original, and not even direct it himself.

Does this stuff actually scare people? I mean, I’m realizing that it is no longer possible to scare me at the movies, which is why I hardly even bother to see movies like this. I have only been scared twice at the movies as an adult: Jaws in 1975, and the last time, Alien in 1979. Both movies withheld their monsters until the last reels. What you don’t see is a lot scarier than what you do, and these days the gore starts spilling in the early frames. We see horrific monsters by the zillions, and we aren’t horrified. I suppose small children are scared ... but they shouldn’t be seeing gore like this! I remember as a teenager getting some serious shivers from dreck like I Married a Monster From Outer Space. But there’s nowhere left to go with horror. We’ve seen it all, and in my case, far more than I ever wanted to see. IMDb.com
 

(contains a few minor spoilers)

FIRST FEATURE: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) I’ve only read the first book in the series of 11, going on 13, and I enjoyed it immensely ... though I have some reasonable doubts as to whether younger children should read it. It is downbeat. What I love is, it warns you right up front that it is, and even urges you to put the book down and read something more cheerful. (What better way to sell a book to a child, huh?) The movie was made from the first three books, and you find yourself wondering why they made the changes they did, in particular why in the sham wedding Count Olaf was foiled not by the clever Violet signing the marriage document with her left hand (not “her own hand”) but by Klaus using divine intervention and a burning lens. But that’s a quibble. The movie was extremely well-designed, and fun to watch. It even preserves the ambiance by starting out to be some animated, chirpy horror called “The Littlest Elf,” before Lemony breaks in mournfully to advise us this is not the movie we’ll be seeing, but you still have time to leave and find something more cheerful playing elsewhere in the Cineplex. Being at the drive-in, though, we were out of luck ... though not really. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: National Treasure (2004) Once again, the reviews were so dismal we expected nothing, and were surprised. I was a blatant attempt to cash in on The Da Vinci Code ... and so what? I thought that book was stupid, false, and very poorly written. Didn’t believe it for a nano-second. Still, Ron Howard is making it, starring Tom Hanks, and it is certain to be a blockbuster and may even be good.

To say that National Treasure strains one’s credibility is an understatement ... and again, so what? It’s no worse than dozens of action/adventure films I’ve seen and enjoyed, and lots better than dozens more. There was one lapse in plot logic, one fairly stupid “clue” leading to the treasure, and a bit of a hard nut to swallow near the end. But it avoided several clichés I was expecting with dread, and it handled most of the other clichés you can’t avoid with panache, in particular the comical sidekick, who got in a few good ones. It is really nothing more than a minor amusement, doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I have to give it a recommendation, though not a hearty one. IMDb.com

Les liaisons dangereuses (2003) Believe it or not, this story, based on a novel by Choderlos de Laclos, written in 1782, has been filmed 10 times that I know of, and we’ve now seen 2 1/3 of them, in red below: IMDb.com

The story seems to have universal appeal and fascination for directors. #1, #9, and #11 are modern-day; #9 in an American high school. #10 is set in 18th Century Korea. # 5 and #6 have an odd history.

Valmont was to be shot in historic locations, taking up a lot of time, and Forman was sure it would be cancelled, but for some reason the studio execs went ahead. Too bad.

Dangerous Liaisons was a masterpiece, up for Best Picture, Close and Malkovich were brilliant, the final scene was one of the most stunning I’ve ever seen in any movie.

Valmont was just ... good.

Cruel Intentions is set among spoiled Park Avenue preppies. It begins well, then has to take a few unnatural contortions to make it sort of work in that milieu. It is suitably nasty, but in the end I was left feeling like I’d seen a bunch of very talented junior high school drama students putting on Death of a Salesman. You admire their spunk, but it’s probably doomed from the start.

So we were interested in the most recent French version. We rented the DVD and started watching. It seemed sort of ... abrupt. I only vaguely remembered most of the plot details. Oh, well, I suppose since this one was listed at 200 minutes they had time to tell more of the story. And then after an hour... it ended. Roll credits.

Huh? I grabbed the DVD box and saw, in very small print, something I’d missed: Disc 3. We had watched the end, and didn’t know it.

I know it sounds dumb, but there it is. I had had some vague misgivings, but the fact is, the photography was so arty—almost every shot backlit, where there was any light at all—and the French dialogue so dense, it was hard to keep up with it in the first place. I decided I didn’t really care to rent the first two and watch more scenes set in dark rooms. You want to see it, rent Dangerous Liaisons, the 1988 version. It is brutal.

Lethal Weapon (1987) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him in a rainstorm in Los Angeles while a bunch of cops watch. IMDb.com

Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him for the second time in Los Angeles. IMDb.com

Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him ... haven't we seen this before? IMDb.com

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) Does anybody care by now if Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him? IMDb.com

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) The verdict is in: 2006 was a good year for good movies, but not a year for great ones. We have now seen all 5 Oscar-nominated films (and I don't think I've ever done that before the ceremonies), and they're all good. But none are great. The film I enjoyed the most this year was Dreamgirls, closely followed by Little Miss Sunshine, and the one that came closest to greatness was United 93. Neither of those were nominated, so it's LMS, in my opinion, by default.

Iwo Jima was, and is, as worthless a piece of shitty real estate as ever blood was spilled needlessly for, a frying pan of volcanic rock and black sand where nothing grows. But the US needed it to base their B-29s to bomb the home islands for the projected invasion, and the Japanese ... well, it was part of the sacred homeland, that that was reason enough to defend it to the last man.

This film is good, no question. It's also too long by about 20 minutes, and fairly slow when the bombs aren't falling. But there is something quite disturbing about it that only a few reviewers picked up on. It really gives the Japanese a break.

I understand Clint Eastwood's intention here, and I wouldn't have wanted him to portray the average Japanese grunt as a slavering, fanatical, homicidal maniac ... but you know, a hell of a lot of them were. You don't believe me, read The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang. It will open your eyes. There are countless other accounts of the behavior of the Imperial Army from the 1930s to 1945, and they will make your skin crawl. And the Japanese are still in denial about it, and this film won't help.

Do I think all Japanese soldiers were like that? Of course not. Do I think American marines were lily-white? Of course not, but most of the illegal (by international law) things they did were in the nature of killing prisoners who were too inconvenient to take care of (which is shown here), whereas the norm for the Imperial Army was rape and torture and degradation (which is not shown). Their officer corps treated their own troops like slaves, and civilians and prisoners as dogs. They were as vile as the Nazis.

Eastwood's point, and I agree with him, is that most soldiers in any army are pitiful tools who just want to stay alive and go home. That's why this is a companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, which I haven't seen yet. Show the battle from both sides, an excellent idea. But the point is not exactly a new one, it goes back at least to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which was done from the German point of view. And I think he was way too easy on the Japanese. IMDb.com

Levity (2003) Possibly the most misleading title of all time, unless they reissue Schindler’s List as Springtime for Hitler Part 2. Billy Bob Thornton is one of the most interesting actors working today, but this was a misbegotten project from the start. I don’t object to depressing movies, if they have something to offer just a little bit beyond depressing. This had nothing. IMDb.com

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) An HBO movie. Biopics are hard. Hollywood used to make them with little regard for actual facts. The subject was usually portrayed as a pure hero, all warts forgotten. He would usually rise in his chosen field, meet a crisis, and then recover at the end. Consider Night and Day or Words and Music, which never mentioned that Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart were gay. By the time Hollywood did Cole Porter again, in De-Lovely, the form had evolved into self-examination, something pretty much started in the semi-autobiographical All That Jazz.

This is one of those. What is hard about the pics is that they have to skim over so very, very much. You only get carefully chosen highlights (and lowlights), and it can all feel like Cliffs Notes.

I had heard that Sellers was a self-centered SOB, and he certainly is here. He himself said that he had no personality. I don’t have any idea how much of it is true, though I always take these things with a lot of skepticism.

But it is well-done, visually, and as an acting extravaganza. It is not absolutely necessary that the actor resemble the subject ... but it doesn’t hurt. With Jamie Foxx in Ray, Kevin Spacey in Beyond the Sea, you feel like you’re seeing the actual person. This is very much true here, and since Peter Sellers was a man of 1000 faces, Geoffrey Rush gets to channel many, many familiar parts. He does a wonderful job of it. It’s fun, but not much more than that. IMDb.com

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) One reviewer said you’re going to love or hate this movie. I disagree. There’s not enough here to hate, and very little to love. I has a nice look to it, but at 45 minutes we were so uninvolved that we paused it and just didn’t have the enthusiasm to start again. So if the last hour and a quarter was a masterpiece, I guess we missed it ... and so what? If you’ve fucked up the first half, whose butt is still going to be in the seat for the last half? I love off-the-wall movies, which it seems this was trying to be, but for an idea to take a weird bounce off a wall there has to be a wall, and these people just kept lobbing the balls out into the emptiness with no effect at all. A sad waste of a lot of talent. IMDb.com

Life in the Freezer (1993) Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!! You really should watch this three-hour series in the summertime. Lee and I felt colder than we actually were, watching the emperor penguins huddled in the –70 degree, 120 mph weather. Wind chill must be somewhere around absolute zero, but they survive. But we toughed it out, and now there is only one more of these to see: The Private Life of Plants. Oddly, it is not available on Region 1 DVD, which is the US and Canada, only on Region 2. Lucky Aussies. IMDb.com

There are six episodes:

Life in the Undergrowth (2005) Our favorite nature guide, Sir David, takes us down below ground and sometimes into the air with insects and other creepy crawlies in the fifth of his "Life" series. We've seen all of them except The Life of Plants and Life in the Freezer, and intend to see those, because they are simply the best thing going, miles beyond your regular nature documentary. He will entertain you even when he's showing you stuff you were already aware of, and then four or five times or more he will show you something that will make your jaw drop and think "Who knew?" The answer sometimes is, nobody, until they shot this film. From an underwater wasp that makes a sand flea look like an elephant, to the great blue whale, David always finds 'em and brings 'em back alive and in the camera.

For this one, it was some very special cameras indeed. Some of the best macro shots I've ever seen, and it was all shot in high definition video, so one day I'll watch it again on my 96-inch flat plasma screen ... as soon as I can buy one. Here's the chapter headings:

Dear David is 80 now, getting a bit long in the tooth to hike into deserts and caves and crawl into termite mounds or even get hoisted up into a gigantic bee nest in Sumatra. He always insists on putting himself in the picture, and typically he will appear on 6 continents, and sometimes on the 7th, in one episode. I wonder how many times the man has been around the world? Is there any country he hasn't been to? He is now embarked on what will surely be his last hurrah, the final part of the Life series, Life in Cold Blood, due in 2008. I can't tell you how eagerly I await it, and how sadly it is to know that it will be the last. IMDb.com

The Life of David Gale (2003) Dumb, dumb, dumb, da dum dum. Dishonest, unbelievable, stupid. What more can I say? IMDb.com

The Life of Mammals (2002) What are you gonna say about a guy like David Attenborough? What a scamp! He has to be the most egregious camera hog in the world except for Geraldo Rivera, but unlike Geraldo, he's a class act. He will do anything to get in the shot. We have seen him riding a swimming elephant, squeezing himself into the basement of a gigantic termite mound in Africa, riding a snowmobile above the Arctic Circle in search of polar bears, bouncing along in a zodiac with a blue whale breaching a few feet off the starboard side. He has sat quietly in his own back yard in England to await the arrival of his neighborhood hedgehog, and paddled down the Congo looking for hippopotami and crocodiles big enough to eat a full-grown water buffalo. He has been hoisted high into the jungle canopy in Brazil through the habitats of big creepy-crawlies I don't even like to think about. At least once in every episode of his nature documentaries he will quietly sneak into an uncomfortable position, whispering to us as the infrared camera records it all, and say something like "Now if we wait awhile, perhaps we'll see something interesting." Then he sits there. Fade out; fade in. Maybe it will get dark while he's sitting. Then some interesting small animal or insect will emerge from its burrow. You half expect to see moss growing on David's head, or maybe a light dusting of snow. He'll do anything!

And I've come to believe that's part of the power of his series. Other people have gotten footage as good as his. (In fact, other people find this stuff for him and tell him where to go. Other people bore into hillsides to insert tiny cameras to witness the birth of a platypus.) But it's that personal touch. Of course, Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin does the same thing, catching and toying with the world's most venomous snakes, for instance, but Steve Irwin is an asshole. Sir David is an enthusiast, and his brand of breathless excitement has no element of hype in it. He's civilized, authoritative, and you just immediately like him.

He began with the epic Life on Earth in 1979. It's wonderful, but he soon seemed to have realized that maybe it was a bit too broad a subject for a series, and since then he's been breaking life down into its constituent families and doing a series about each of them. We've seen The Living Planet (1984) and The Trials of Life (1990) and The Blue Planet (2001) and (I'm pretty sure) The Life of Birds (1998). The Private Life of Plants (1995) is not yet available on DVD in the USA, nor is Life in the Undergrowth (2005), which explores insects, and I'm dying to see it. He has said that the one he's working on now, Life in Cold Blood, about reptiles and amphibians and due to be completed in 2009, will be his last (he's 80 now).

The Life of Mammals lives up to the high standards of his work. We all like warm fuzzy things, since we are warm fuzzy things ourselves, and he covers them from the shrew to the blue whale. As usual, he features some things that have never been filmed before, and some things that weren't even known before, things that have often been discovered as a result of the work of his dedicated teams of photographers. There are wonderful DVD extras about this, about the sort of horrible work that often went into the capturing of these images, with interviews with the photographers, many of whom are women. Their dedication and bravery has to be seen to be believed. Would you go into a pitch-black cave, home of 10 million bats, wade through knee-deep guano, brave ammonia poisoning and histoplasmosis, flesh-eating worms, rabies and a smell that would stun a pig, and do it for ten nights in a row, just to get some footage of skunks groping around, as blind as you are, finding and eating baby bats? Not me.

The last episode was particularly well-done. He has worked his way up to the monkeys and great apes (including homo sapiens, and shows us that they are a lot smarter than we knew even 10 years ago, and their societies are incredibly complex. We're learning more about them every day, and, to my amazement, they ar