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© 2004-2008  by John Varley; all rights reserved

M*A*S*H (1970) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

The Machinist (El Maquinista) (2004) I don’t know why the IMDb lists the Spanish title first, except that all the producers have Hispanic names. Oh, wait, I see that it was filmed in Barcelona. I’d never have guessed.

A man claims not to have slept in a year. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but you’d figure big-time hallucinations, so we assume a lot of what we see may not be real. His life is clearly coming apart, but he doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. A loner, but not crazed. He even has a sense of humor, and is reaching out to a waitress at the airport and a whore with a heart of gold. So you wonder what is really going on, and when you find out at least it’s not some lame SF idiocy or supernatural bullshit. It worked okay, in that it was believable, but still a bit of a letdown. The movie looks great in a creepy way, and the music is pure dark and spooky.

But the real story on this movie is that Christian Bale lost 60 pounds (from 180) to play it. I submit that this is insanity. This is health-threatening, and you can’t help stare at him. Looks like he just checked out of the Treblinka Holiday Inn. Okay, De Niro porked up for Raging Bull, and it was effective, and Renee Z. added weight for Bridget Jones and took it off for Chicago, but this is ridiculous. None of my business, of course, but I can express my disapproval, okay? IMDb.com

Mad Max (1979) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him for the first time. IMDb.com

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him in some weird dome thingy. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Madagascar (2005) Like The Lion King, this movie has to deal with the paradox of a carnivore associating with herbivores. Simba solved it by eating grubs and maggots (uh, no thanks, but I will have some of the BBQ meerkat, thank you), which just made me wonder, what about insect rights? Here, Alex the lion learns to eat sushi (actually, I don’t think he’d dig the rice, though he’d probably like sashimi) ... so, eating Nemo is okay? Heartless! A movie like this, where the main moral dilemma is predation and being a carnivore is intrinsically bad because you have to kill some sort of cute little sentient critter to survive, makes me realize the pitfalls in adopting the Disneyesque view of the world, and why Bambi was probably a lot easier to write.

What, am I serious here? No, not much. None of this is any more serious than Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits and ducks. And yet, I am, just a little bit. The movie wants you to think about a guy eating his best friend, and the solution is to eat somebody else’s best friend. Of course, the one fish we see doesn’t talk, he just lies there like a fish, but we know he does talk, down there under the sea with Sebastian the hermit crab and Ariel the mermaid.

Okay, enough of that. The film is funny and frenetic, sometimes too frenetic. CGI is so easy now, “camera” moves are unlimited and built in to the technology, that I think animators are going a bit overboard. But maybe it’s for the same reason they shake the camera these days even in a static shot. Kids won’t watch something that stays still. But stillness can be the heart of humor, as in the film’s funniest scene. Four penguins (by far he best characters in the movie) have broken out of the zoo—hurray, we’re free!—hijacked a freighter, and ended up in the paradise of their dreams: The Antarctic. There is a long shot of them standing there with their backs to us, maybe twenty seconds, four tiny dots, the wind howling, the snow swirling. You can practically hear their minds working. One turns to the others and says, “Well, this sucks.” IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Monster-In-Law (2005) So, after 40 years of retirement, Greta Garbo has decided to get back into the movie business, and as her return vehicle she decides to star in ... Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster. Or Gidget Goes to Hawaii. This isn’t quite that extreme ... but what was Jane Fonda thinking? Fifteen years she doesn’t make a movie, and then she picks this? It’s not quite as horrible as I expected, we stayed to the end. Mainly, on my part anyway, to see J. Lo getting her revenge. But this is movie-making like paint-by-numbers, and done by a director who can’t even stay within the lines for a bit of drivel like this. Lopez overacts and can’t get away with it. La Fonda overacts ... and can get away with it, she’s very good at finding the right facial expression. The bone of contention, the boyfriend, is such a clueless nerd that his only possible attractions are his considerable good looks and his even more considerable fortune.

But true love finds a way, by the numbers, the Mom From Hell reforms in the last 5 minutes ... and I timed it just right, starting the engine before the credits rolled and getting moving before the huge crowd who had come to see Madagascar and stuck around for Monster were even aware I was in motion. We were the third car out of the theater! IMDb.com

The Magdalene Sisters (2002, UK, Ireland) One of the best of the sub-genre of movies dealing with the atrocities committed by the Catholic Church, or the Catholic-dominated government, of Ireland. I’ve seen half a dozen of them, and they all boggle the mind. This particular one lasted until 1996, if you can believe it. Young women were consigned to "laundries" that might horrify a San Quentin inmate, without trial, for crimes including getting raped, getting pregnant, or just flirting with boys. And it could be a life sentence. The nuns could teach an Abu Ghraib MP a thing or two about humiliation. Excellent film, and the best thing in it is a first-time actress named Nora-Jane Noone. I’ll be looking for her again. IMDb.com

Mammoth (2006) Since I recently published a book with the same title, I felt it was my unpleasant duty to watch this. So I recorded it while we watched The West Wing and The Sopranos, then watched the tape the next night.

Very soon I was making a lot of mental notes, various nasty things to say, really vicious cuts and overhand chops and knees in the nuts. But I soon lost my enthusiasm. It would be like kicking a big, steaming, fresh mammoth turd. It's just going to be all squishy, it's going to fly all over the place, and the more you kick it the more will end up on your shoes. What's the point?

I will make the observation that it obviously intended to be a spoof, or an affectionate send-up of old B movies about monsters. That can be done well: Tremors, or Shaun of the Dead, or even Re-Animator. But you gotta choose. You can't be silly, scary, and sentimental at the same time. (Maybe it's possible, but it's way beyond the talents of the idiots who made this movie.)

Another thing ... it's amazing how even a no-budget porker like this can have some pretty good CGI effects these days. By good, I mean better than Ed Wood. It's relatively cheap now. So ... why did they apparently invest more money in the opening credits than in the mammoth/mummy/alien itself, which looks like a heffalump with the stuffing falling out?

Oh, I can't help myself, I have to stick at least ONE bandillera into the putrid corpse of this film. Twenty minutes in I was feeling gloomy, knowing there was an hour and forty minutes to go. Then ... a commercial break! This movie was so bad I was eager for the commercials, so I could fast forward the tape. Hell, it's only about 85, maybe 90 minutes long, not 120! I can handle that ... IMDb.com

The Man From Elysian Fields (2001) An undiscovered gem. Andy Garcia is a novelist who wrote a good first novel and a bad second one. He meets Mick Jagger, of all people, who runs an escort service for rich women. Complications ensue. James Coburn is very good, too, as a Hemingway figure. IMDb.com

Man on Fire (2004) Denzel Washington apparently wants to be an action film leading man. I got no problem with that, I hope he gets very, very rich. But if he keeps making routine shoot-em-ups like this he’s going to lose my respect as one of the finest actors we’ve got. The first half is good, the little girl is amazing. The second half is unbelievable. Pretty much like Denzel’s last three or four films. IMDb.com

The Man on the Train (France, 2002). An entrancing and mysterious French film starring a guy named Johnny Hallyday, who apparently is a rock and roll legend over there. He looks a bit like a world-weary Elvis, though lots smarter. Plot is hard to describe, but I liked it. IMDb.com

The Man Without a Past (Finland, 2002). Quirky film from Finland’s most respected director. A man is robbed and beaten and loses his memory. Hollywood would have made a hash of this, but the new-born innocent falls in with a series of quirky characters, and I had a lot of wry laughs. IMDb.com

The Manchurian Candidate (2004) Jonathan Demme is remaking this with Denzel Washington as Frank Sinatra, Meryl Streep as Angela Lansbury, and someone called Liev Schreiber as Laurence Harvey. Why do they do these things? Streep is very, very good, but Lansbury had one of the single greatest scenes in cinema history in the original; not even Meryl is going to be able to top it. The Manchurian Candidate is probably the best political thriller ever made. Why do it again?

(2005) It's out on video now, and I'm going to leave this earlier comment from before I saw the remake in place, just to show you how honest I can be!

So ... it’s still a stupid idea, even though the movie is good. Quite good, in fact. But when you’re done making this quite good movie, you still have to stack it up against the original, and it fails miserably on that level. Maybe if they’d just not used the title, called it something else, I wouldn’t have spent the entire movie comparing the similarities and differences, and pondering the reasons why the changes were made ...

I don’t know. Enough of that. What’s good about the movie? Lots of stuff. Meryl Streep wisely doesn’t try to top Lansbury. They’ve changed her role and her motives and her level of knowledge and bitterness. Denzel is as good as he always is, this time in a movie worthy of his talent. Liev Schreiber is very good. I’m getting to know him better. Check him out in Spinning Boris. And the ... texture of the film is very good. It’s clear this is about 8 years in the future. The television news looks a bit different. We hear snippets of radio and TV in the background that tell of wars all over the world, and apparently US troops are getting thin on the ground. Armed soldiers in camouflage are seen here and there in public places, like outside of Penn Station. It’s clear that the war on terrorism has spread to many other nations, and that we’re a few more steps down the road to a police state.

But the original was a tour-de-force, and this isn’t. I’ll never forget that opening scene, one continuous circular panning shot that, incredibly, morphs from bored soldiers sitting, for some reason, in the middle of a lecture at a ladies’ garden society, bored out of their minds, to a demonstration of brainwashing and murder in a Chinese prison camp. One shot, no cuts, and do you know how hard that was to do in the era before CGI? Like, a lot of grips had a lot of work to do in a very short time. IMDb.com

Manhunter (1986) Terrific filming of the extremely weird Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. A very good portrait of Hannibal Lector by Brian Cox, considering how little screen time he has. IMDb.com

Mansfield Park (1999) If Jane Austen were alive, she’d be rolling in dough. The IMDb says Sense and Sensibility has been filmed 4 times, Persuasion and Emma 3 times each (not counting Clueless and other knockoffs), and Pride and Prejudice no less than 10 times. Of course, part of the reason one makes a movie from a book in the public domain is that you don’t have to pay the author.

Some critics didn’t like the fact that the director, Patricia Rozema, has taken considerable liberties with her version of Mansfield Park. Having had the great advantage of never having read the book, or in fact any book by Austen, it wasn’t a problem for me. I can take the movie on its own terms ... and frankly, I don’t see what’s wrong with doing that sort of thing. The credits clearly state that the script is based on not just the novel, but Austen’s letters and ephemera like that. I read a little about her and discovered that Rozema added incidents from Austen’s life, such as having accepted a marriage proposal and rescinding it the next day. This is in the movie. And why not? A 200-year-old novel strikes me as fertile grounds for another take on the material. I enjoy new interpretations of Shakespeare. Don’t get me wrong, a careful and faithful recreation of a period novel, as in Tom Jones and Oliver Twist, can be terrific. But I also enjoyed Oliver!, which is about as far from Dickens’ intention as one could imagine. This movie is sly and funny, and has some scenes that had me laughing out loud. I think it is true to the spirit of Jane Austen, and maybe even more fun. IMDb.com

March of the Penguins (La Marche de l'empereur) (2005) This French film is the most successful documentary ever, after Fahrenheit 9/11. I'm not quite sure why, but first, the things I like about it.

The life of the emperor penguin is one of almost unimaginable hardships. They live in the worst place in the world, and to reproduce they have to perform a complicated series of treks that, at first, defy understanding. I mean, why not go to Patagonia to mate? You could lay your eggs on the ground, not have to shield them from the ice 24/7 for three months. But there are predators in Patagonia, and precious few in Antarctica. We see an albatross harrying chicks, but there can't be many of them. This film, made under hardships almost as unimaginable as those the penguins endure, is a visual delight. I was continually astounded at the shots they got, and at the devotion of the filmmakers.

Also, who doesn't love a penguin? I mean, they waddle comically, they are cute little guys in tuxedos, even the girls. In fact, a human would find it impossible to tell a guy from a girl without an autopsy ... which leads me to wonder, do they ever make mistakes themselves while courting? Many animals exhibit homosexual behavior; do penguins? The film never addresses how they differentiate. Maybe no one knows.

But hey, none of this was new to me. David Attenborough covered the same territory, though not at such length. I have seen better nature documentaries, some made for television, and even a better documentary about birds: Winged Migration. So why this film? Why such a box office bonanza?

This brings me to what I didn't like. I understand the Christian Right (CR) has embraced this film. Part of it is they see it as an argument for Intelligent Design. The saga of the penguins is so bizarre ... how could it have evolved? Well, the film steers clear of most of that issue (which one reviewer thought might be one reason why the CR loved it, a whole nature film with no mention of evolution).

Here's how: A bird species which shared the child-rearing between the sexes (and lots of other birds do the same) adapted to incubating its eggs on the ice as Antarctica moved relentlessly south over the millennia. If you laid your eggs too close to the water's edge, the ice melted in the spring and your eggs and/or offspring were dumped in the drink. Only those who marched 70 miles inland survived. Eventually all penguins marched 70 miles inland. The others had drowned. Natural selection. Dumb Design. What is so tough about that that Christians can't understand it? Duuuuuh.

Another theory is that the CR sees penguins as poster critters for "family values." True, they are devoted to each other as a couple, it would be impossible for either of them to rear chicks alone, but ... Hello? They only mate for a year. At the end of that year they abandon the chicks, who have never even been in the water. Next year, they mate with someone new. This is a family?

Oh, well, screw the CR. The real worst thing about the film is that old bullshit, anthropomorphism. Assigning human values to other creatures. The narrator, Morgan Freeman, waxes eloquent on how this is a film about love. 'Fraid not, Morgan. These are birds. They follow their instincts. (So do we, but we have higher brain functions, I hope, though with some of the CR it's doubtful. If there is Intelligent Design, how do you explain the existence of Pat Robertson?) I guess you can blame Walt Disney, whose True-Life Adventures in the 1950s, like The Living Desert and White Wilderness were ground-breaking, awe-inspiring, perfectly marvelous ... and had a lot of fakery and way-too-cutesy narration. (Did you know that the famous lemming-suicide sequence was staged in its entirety? In nature, it doesn't happen.) Ever since there has been that tendency to humanize animal behavior, and it really sucks. The facts, the sights, the wonder of it all, unvarnished, is enough, as Sir Richard has shown over and over. Attenborough may overdo the solemn and awestruck business a bit, but he never embellishes.

Oh, well, it could have been worse. I understand the original, longer, French version had actual voices dubbed in for the penguins. God, that must have been awful. IMDb.com

Margot at the Wedding (2007) Roger Ebert said this in his review: “The characters are into emotional laceration for fun. They are verbal, articulate, self-absorbed, selfish, egotistical, cold and fascinating.” Hit the nail on the head, Rog, except the fascinating part. He liked it; I didn’t. Spending 90 minutes with these people was quite an ordeal. Spending the whole ghastly weekend with them would be unimaginable to me. Spending a lifetime with any of them … The best part of it was that it just abruptly ended. Cut to black, and the film is over. Big sigh of relief. IMDb.com

Maria Full of Grace (Colombia, 2004) An extremely good movie about the drug trade, and its human cost. I’m not talking about the rich and bored who snort coke, or the poor and hopeless who smoke crack. It’s about the impossibly cruel people who run the trade, and the people who risk their lives to get the stuff to a hungry America. As long as we continue this asinine and no-win “War on Drugs,” people like Maria will pay the price for it.

Catalina Sandino Moreno is a long shot for a Best Actress Oscar, but she sure deserves the nomination. IMDb.com

Marie Antoinette (2006) Today on the radio we heard a story about the Ferrari motorcar company. One popular model sells for $200,000 ... but you have to wait two years to get one. That is frightening enough in itself, that there are that many people ready to spend that kind of money for what is really just a toy car, of no practical use whatsoever. But the capper was that you could buy one on eBay or suchlike ... for $300,000. "I'm not gonna wait two years, mommy, I want my car, and I want it NOW!!!"

Unlimited wealth almost always degrades the fabulously wealthy, almost as much as it degrades the poor slobs the unlimited wealth was stolen from. You see it throughout history, in Rome, in China, in Thailand, in Vatican City, in pre-Revolutionary France, probably in Timbuk-fucking-tu. In George W. Bush's America. (You think I'm exaggerating? Check out the spending sprees indulged in by Kenny Lay before the bottom fell out of Enron.)

But don't we love to watch these fabulously wealthy people! How many times has this story been told in the movies? Hundreds, I'm sure, but seldom with the lubricious attention to the details of joyous self-degradation as in this movie. The IMDb tells me the budget was $40,000,000, not much for these times. I figured it breaks down to about $30,000,000 for costumes, $5,000,000 for shoes, and $5,000,000 for desserts. (Let them eat cake? Christ, there was enough cake on display to feed France for a decade.)

I don't suppose it's really possible to hate Marie Antoinette. She was married at 15, beheaded at 38, and had no more idea of what the streets of Paris were like than a butterfly knows the backside of the moon. No one in Versailles had much of a clue, except maybe the accountants who knew the royal family was spending beyond even their vast stolen wealth. These people had no lives, basically. Useless as tits on a boar hog, as someone said. By the end of this interminable examination of empty lives, I had built my own guillotine from scrap lumber and was honing the blade and weaving the bucket to receive the heads of nobility. Alas, there was no such payoff. The film ends with Louis and Marie fleeing. We never see their comeuppance.

I suppose I know why Sofia Coppola made this movie, but that doesn't mean I forgive her, just as I don't forgive her for almost single-handedly ruining The Godfather, Part III. ("Daddy, I want to be an actress!") Ooh, that was catty, I know, but she is a child of privilege. One opinion on the film had it that Sofia was drawing parallels with her own life ... though just what she meant to show escapes me. Do the rich suffer? Of course they do. Marie lost two children young. We see her humiliated by an examination of her hymen, we see her basically sold to France to cement an alliance, we see her stifled by the incredible idiocies of the Royals. But every time I am shown something like that I see instead the woman lying in the gutter in Paris, who has lost seven children young, who is syphilitic because whoring is the only profession open to her, dying slowly and painfully instead of having her head neatly lopped off. Give me a story of the proletariat every time. I don't really fucking care about the problems of the rich. Bottom line, I want a seat right up close to the blade, I want to toss rotten cabbages and see the blue blood spurt.

In the end, although I know I shouldn't, I kept coming back to Sofia and who she is. She strikes me very much as a dabbler, like Marie playing at being a peasant in her cozy little 9-room cottage. Mucking about in the goose shit in her finery. Maybe she raises a nice little crop of tomatoes once in a while (Lost in Translation), but then she'll raise a rotten turnip. Who cares? Daddy will pay. (Produced by ... guess who?) I hate turnips.

One more thing that narked me: She was allowed unprecedented access to Versailles, and most of the other rockpiles of Europe ... and she produces this? It must be said that the movie is a feast for the eyes. Yummy food, gorgeous locations, thousands of costumes. (We saw a selection of the dresses at the fashion museum downtown, and they are stunning.) So what does she do with it all? She backs it up with the most hideously jarring musical score I've ever heard. Her point: That Marie was just a wild and crazy teen, so why not play punk rock in the dance scenes? Well, because it ruins everything, that's why. Skip this turnip, go see Barry Lyndon. IMDb.com

Marooned in Iraq (Iraq, 2002) Probably the only Kurdish film I have ever seen, and a real winner. Some cultures are so foreign, so alien, they might as well be from Mars for all I know about them. These people have nothing, they have been torn by war forever ... and yet it is almost a comedy. Sure, there are horrors, and a sad ending, but it still manages to be upbeat. Plot: an old musician enlists his sons to cross the Turkish border into Iraq to search for a woman who left him twenty years ago. And we discover, to my astonishment ... that these men are treated like rock stars everywhere they go. Everybody knows them, and pleads with them to play their music ... which might as well be Martian music to me, but soul is where you find it, and these guys obviously have it. Highly recommended. IMDb.com

The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun) (Germany, 1979) This was a huge disappointment, and I can't say why without issuing this

SPOILER WARNING!

Maria gets married as Germany is falling apart in 1945. Her husband leaves at once for the front, where he is presumed dead. Maria looks for him and never believes he's dead, but has to get on with her life. She becomes a bar girl, picking up American GIs. Then hubby returns, finds her with a black soldier, she kills the soldier, he takes the rap and goes to jail. While she waits for him, she becomes a big success in business.

That's very bare-bones. It's all handled wonderfully. Maria has been described by some reviewers as a monster, but I don't see it. I liked her a lot. She is very smart. She is realistic. She is ambitious, but she is also scrupulously honest. She never lies to anyone, she tells them exactly what they're in for. She can only love her absent husband ... who she really doesn't know at all. Perhaps it's safer for her that way. He's in jail, he can't hurt her, and neither can anyone she doesn't give her heart to. Cold? I guess so, but why not?

There is a lot of high-falutin' critical talk that this and all of Fassbinder's movies are allegories about post-war Germany. We don't see what Maria went through during the war to wish to protect herself this way, but we know it must have been awful, simply because it was awful for all Germans in the last years.

Now I must describe the last 5 minutes of the film, 5 minutes that ruined it all for me. Maria is with her husband at last, in the big house she has bought. She is excited, they are going to make love, something that hasn't happened except on their wedding day. She lights a cigarette from the gas stove, then blows out the flame. Shortly after that she goes into the kitchen to light another, and there is an explosion. Maria ist kaput. Movie over.

I just don't get it. Roger Ebert says it's all about the randomness of life. Well, fuck that. I've seen that principle demonstrated where randomness becomes a plot element. It isn't fair to end an interesting story by saying "and then they all got run over by a truck. The End." (Okay, something very like that happened in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but the director made it work. It also happened in the aggressively awful Japon, and I wanted to find the director and beat the crap out of him. This was one of those beat-the-crap-out-of-him moments.)

The question that occurred to me immediately was ... did she kill herself? Was she that afraid to find out what her husband was really like? I mean, we saw her lighting a cigarette from the stove before, and she turned off the gas instantly. What an extraordinary thing to do, to blow out the gas flame and leave the gas on. Who would do that? Excitement and inattentiveness just don't explain it for me. I was left with the feeling she deliberately left it on ... and the only motive I can think of is suicide. And if that is so, I hated it. Just hated it.

But let's end on a positive note here. Hanna Schygulla is one of the great screen beauties, in my opinion, and the costume designer dressed her superbly. She looked stunning in everything she wore. Seldom do I notice costumes in a movie—hey, I'm a guy—but these just knocked my socks off. IMDb.com

Mars Attacks! (1996) Just plain old did not work. IMDb.com

Martian Child (2007) This is based on a novelette (later expanded into a novel) by my friend David Gerrold. David was the first professional SF writer I ever met, way back at Westercon in Oakland, 1975, where he was the guest of honor. The short version of this story won the Hugo and the Nebula award, which is a little odd because it is not really science fiction … but what the hell, a good story is a good story. I am sorry to say that I have not read it, but I’m assuming it’s good. They don’t give those awards to trash.

It concerns a recent widower (John Cusack, one of my favorite actors) who adopts a troubled young boy who claims he is a Martian. The whole story is very autobiographical, “inspired by real events.” A DVD extra, “The Real Martian Child,” shows us Sean, the child David adopted in 1992, and tells us how the real story and the fiction differed. In reality, the Martian business was a game David and Sean played. In the movie, the child seems as if he might have some odd powers over traffic lights and baseballs, but nothing is done with this. In real life, that was only part of the game; “Martian wishes,” not actual powers. The only thing the real, now grown, Sean claims he can do is tell the colors of M&Ms by taste alone. (I’m skeptical—I’m always skeptical—but I’d like to see him do it.) In real life, David is gay. In the movie, John Cusack is not.

I really, really wanted to like this film, but it just didn’t work. The little kid is talented, but I found him annoying in this part, both from the lines in the script and from his wheezy little voice. Scenes went on way too long, and many of them seemed basically repeats of what had gone before. It was desperately in need of a little humor. It’s a weird situation, but not much was made of it. It all seemed too solemn. And the ending was sheer melodrama and, again, too long. IMDb.com

Master and Commander (2003) The best sea adventure movie I have ever seen. I am now reading my way through the Aubrey/Maturin novels upon which the movie is based (apparently picking scenes from half a dozen of the books for a rip-roaring adventure that may not be historically accurate but is wonderfully rousing), and they are wonderful at capturing a brutal and heroic age very different from our own. IMDb.com

The Matador (2005) Pierce Brosnan is a hit man who is losing his touch, big time. Greg Kinnear is a businessman recently out of a job. They meet in Mexico City and, through a series of drunken and sober encounters, become friends. Part of it is that the hit man is undeniably charismatic and seems to be a genuinely nice guy. Part of it the sneaky fascination we all have with someone who is way out of the normal run of things. When Kinnear's wife meets the hit man, she wants to see his gun. The scenes are wonderfully written and played, easing you step by logical step into how such a thing might happen. You expect a lot of bloodshed and some sort of horrible reversal, but this movie never goes where I expected it to go. I recommend it. And I must add that Pierce Brosnan is aging very well, determined to overcome the pretty-boy thing. I first became aware that he could act in a great little thriller called The Fourth Protocol, and he's been great in many things since. Not to mention that he was the best James Bond since Sean Connery. IMDb.com

Match Point (2005) Woody Allen has written and directed 40 movies since What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966. That's about one per year; in fact, he works on a yearly schedule that doesn't vary much. He gets his script, he calls up some actors (who almost always say yes), and he shoots, generally in the summer. He's got two in the pipeline now: Scoop for this year, with Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson, being edited, and Untitled Woody Allen Summer Project in pre-production with Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor. And yet his last 19 films have not turned a profit in the domestic market. Basically, most Woody Allen films only play in New York, Los Angeles, maybe Chicago, and in Europe. This sounds like a perfect description of a director looking desperately for a hit. But he's not. Woody has found a formula.

He makes these films for between 10 and 20 million dollars. He's had the same production team and producers since ... well, forever, in Hollywood terms. He can get the most powerful marquee names just by calling them up and asking if they'd like to be in his next picture, and he doesn't pay them squat, and 99% of them jump at the chance.

Why? Ah, the key question. There is some cachet in working with Woody, but I believe the main reason is, they know he will stretch them. He pays no attention to typecasting, he puts you in a role that is a challenge. He seems to work very well with actors; they love him.

There is this cliché of the "Woody Allen movie." It exists—the neurotic nebbish with good one-liners, usually played by Woody himself—but don't forget that at least half of his films don't fit this mold at all, and some of them are his best. (Some are his worst stinkers, too, and that's the thing about trying to do something different; sometimes you will fall flat on your face. Woody has done this several times.)

This movie is one of those departures. I'd say he was trying for the mainstream with a thriller ... except he refuses to indulge in the thriller formula. He takes his time, and the result has been compared to Hitchcock. I wouldn't go that far, but it's pretty good. The theme is luck. The tennis ball hits the net and bounces. If it comes down on one side of the net you win. On the other, you lose. And there's nothing you can do about it. Woody works a nice surprise twist on this image. IMDb.com

Matchstick Men (2003) I am a collector of movies about con games. This is one of the better ones, and Nicholas Cage is very good. IMDb.com

The Matrix (1999) I thought it was wonderfully imaginative. For once, it actually made sense that characters could fly through the air, or run through a hail of bullets and never get hit, because it was all actually a video game. Then I saw The Matrix Reloaded. Bah. Claptrap, though it had a freeway car chase that almost made it worth seeing just for that. Almost, but not quite. I didn’t even bother with Matrix Revolutions. You shouldn’t, either. What a gigantic waste of time, what a lost opportunity. IMDb.com

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) Miranda July, the writer, director, and star of this movie, is a performance artist, which, in my book, is strike one. I know there is a bit of interesting work done in that field, but 99% of it is pretentious bullshit. This film is an attempt to inject an element of poetry, maybe even magic into the lives of a group of ordinary people. It shows us some interesting scenes, some quite good ones, and then it stops. The critics raved. It was at its most interesting when it explored some aspects of childhood sexuality, not in any really offensive way, but it might make some people uncomfortable. For myself, I’m afraid it just wasn’t that interesting. No kidding. IMDb.com

Mean Creek (2004) Hollywood makes about 100 teenage fantasy films every year, and I like them if they’re done well. You know the sort. The dweeb gets his revenge. The quiet girl torpedoes the awful clique of cheerleaders. Things come out well at the end. Fun, a pleasant night’s entertainment. They seldom make a film like this one, where real teenagers face real situations, where even the “bad” guy is real, with real problems and reasons for his bad behavior. Not excuses; reasons. Bad things can happen when you try to get even, and they do here, and the teens who did the bad thing react like real kids would. Denial. Cover-up. And then ... one can hope, redemption and atonement. Highly recommended. IMDb.com

Mean Girls (2004) Every once in a while in the continual eruption of primordial stink that are “teen-age” movies, somebody gets it right. Clueless was one. This is another. Lindsey Lohan is 16, home-schooled in Africa all her life, and now has to cope with ... High School! Africa was a piece of cake by comparison. She hasn’t a clue about the anthropology of American teenagers. She eventually gets involved in bringing down the Plastics, the dominant girl clique, the alpha females. In the process, she finds she sort of likes being an alpha female, and starts behaving as bad as any of them. Naturally, she sees the error of her ways, but it is all handled very well. The script by Tina Fey is sharp and witty, there is a fine sense of the ridiculous. We laughed a lot. IMDb.com

Meet the Robinsons (2007) First feature at the drive in. IMDb.com

Meet the Parents/Fockers (2000/2004) We had seen the first one but I didn’t remember it very well, except there was some business with a cat. So when the DVD of the second one came out we rented the first and saw it again. Funny. That genre of comedy that relies on a string of humiliating moments, which can be awful but Ben Stiller is probably the best there is at that baffled expression as if he’s been hit over the head with a lead pipe. Why is this all happening to me?

The main reason I wanted to see the sequel, which got bad reviews but made a ton of money, was the same reason I wanted to see Monster-in-Law. Why did Fonda and Streisand pick these things to return to the screen after long absences?

Well, we saw it, and I don’t have the answer. Meet the Fockers was not as bad as I’d expected. In fact, we were laughing a lot for the first hour. Okay, so it’s potty humor. I’m not proud, if the material is funny and it’s being presented in a funny way, I’ll laugh instead of spending time worrying that this is somehow beneath me. Streisand and Hoffman are good. But it really, really ran out of steam in the third act. It wasn’t able to shift from the ribald humor to the “let’s everybody make up and like each other despite the fact that we hate each other” heartwarming part. We didn’t laugh again until the very end, with some funny extra material during the end credits. IMDb.com / IMDb.com

Memento (2000) One of the best films of the year. Revelation piles on revelation, and the viewer is left just as much at sea as the protagonist, who suffers from anterograde amnesia: he can’t remember anything more than a few minutes ago, and yet still manages to discover the causes of his predicament through imagination and determination. I can’t recommend this highly enough. In fact, just writing this has made me want to see it again. IMDb.com

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) It's a good story, though melodramatic. It is totally gorgeous to look at ... though it is often a cold beauty, like Geishas themselves.

There's this endless and heated debate as to the nature of a geisha. Some say she's a prostitute, pure and simple. Maybe so. The only thing I'm sure of is, she's not anything like a prostitute as we know it in the West. It's not even very much like a high class call girl. Prostitutes in the west need know nothing except the techniques of sex, while geisha are not trained in sexual intercourse, per se, at all. They study just about everything else, all to contribute to their allure. And yet, it is clear from this movie that it is slavery.

What is prostitution, anyway? Having sex for money? Does that mean that performers in porno movies, male and female, are prostitutes? I don't think people in the West will ever understand the idea of the geisha, not really. Japanese are frequently more fascinated with ritual than with the thing itself. Watch a sumo match. 99% of it is posturing, bowing, stomping, strewing salt, bowing. The actual fight takes ten seconds, if that.

You can make so many arguments on both sides of the question, and still feel you haven't really grasped it because you haven't been raised in the culture. Yes, in the end it is demeaning ... and yet at that time and place it was maybe the only way other than marrying a rich man for a woman to better herself. Surely, in the West, we've limited women's options that badly or worse. To this day, women are treated worse than cattle in many Muslim societies. And yet again ... the purpose of the whole rigmarole seems to be to boost the ego of the man, tell him how important he is, flatter him. Is it any different, in the end, from "Oooh, G.I! You so big!" Well, at least the clothes are better.

Some people were offended that Chinese actresses played Japanese women. I wondered about it myself. Then I came across this very interesting comment from the Korean-Canadian actress Sandra Oh:

Bravo! Well-said! IMDb.com

Melinda and Melinda (2004) Much has been said about Woody Allen and his films, but there are some things seldom mentioned and I want to point out a few.

They say there is no such thing as a "typical" Woody Allen film, but there is, really. It's true that he's apt to experiment into almost any genre, or make something totally off the wall in no genre at all. But the typical Allen film is about highly-educated, very intelligent, well-off New Yorkers who natter on about culture and find a deep existential emptiness in their lives ... to the point you sometimes want to slap them and shout "You spoiled, self-indulgent brats! Don't you know there are people with real problems out there?" You're tempted to call them shallow, but they're not, really. But they are consumed with their own angst, their relationship problems, and they do glide through life with not much in their way in a practical sense except upper class problems that don't really involve money, or artistic problems such as having lost one's inspiration, being unable to get a part in a play, or realizing they actually have no real talent.

That's the downside. The upside is that they are intellectual, educated, and eloquent. They talk about things most people in films don't talk about, and express themselves well.

I realized a while ago that a typical Allen flick could easily have originated on the stage; probably would have, except Woody likes making films. But here is what I want to thank him for: His films are old-fashioned.

He likes long takes, where the actors actually have to remember their lines. He doesn't use camera tricks of any kind except the most subtle, to emphasize the emotional content of a scene. The dialogue is crisp, delivered in turns, no improvised babble, no talking over another actor's lines (only Altman can really bring that off for me), and, maybe best of all ... no whispering! (Nicole Kidman, take note! Work for Woody, and he'll make you fucking speak up!) No mumbling, no circling cameras. Scenes are staged and played very much as they would have been on the boards. Of course the actors don't project to the back rows, they can speak in normal voices, but they enunciate!

They follow an old-fashioned technical form, too. The action never begins with the credits rolling over it. He gets them out of the way, always white letters in the same typeface against a black background, and then the movie begins. And yes, I've seen some ingenious use of opening credit sequences, and more power to the directors who can pull that off, but it's refreshing to see it done this way, as it used to be done.

Now to this movie ...

The set-up: Four people at dinner in a trendy New York eatery. (Haven't we been here before? Yes, we have, and with one of the same guys, Wallace Shawn, in My Dinner With Andre. Lee pointed out that the other guy even looked like Andre.) Two are dramatists, one a money-making comic writer, sort of a tubby Neil Simon, the other a respected but not nearly so successful tragedian. The four are discussing whether life is essentially tragic or comic. Soon they are more or less dueling, taking the same situation and brainstorming how it could be done. And we begin to see the stories played out, basically the same story but approached from a comic and a tragic perspective. Neat. I like that.

Neither story is fully fleshed out, but they aren't meant to be. You are supposed to see the bones showing, and Shawn even says at one point "And now all the elements are in place for a romantic comedy." Whereupon Will Ferrell does some funny stuff, close to slapstick. Yes, I said Will Ferrell. He plays the part that was obviously written (by Woody) for Woody. If you've seen any of his movies, you know the part. And, sadly, it's a part I've grown very tired of ... when played by Woody. Bringing Ferrell in to take the part was probably the smartest thing the Woodman did here. Ferrell delivers the same wry one-liners, is the same self-deprecating schlub that Woody has played countless times, but he brings a new presence to the role and I liked it a lot.

The cast is uniformly great, again as usual. Actors work for peanuts in an Allen film, and are glad of the chance. Actors, real actors, not action heroes, like to talk, and Woody lets them pour out the words. They all make these sketched-out characters come alive.

I liked it a lot. IMDb.com

Memories (Japan, 1995) Okay, I give up. I was resistant to Japanese anime for years. I guess I was prejudiced against it. Which isn’t fair, because it’s such a broad term. Basically, it’s the Japanese term for animation, and I love animation ... but I don’t love Spongebob Squarepants, and I don’t love Speed Racer, and I don’t love The Simpsons. Some people love all these things. It’s a matter of taste. The simple animation in The Simpsons turns me off ... but I love Bullwinkle, which is just as simple. Go figure. What I love the most is beautiful, imaginative animation, and there is maybe more of it in Japan than in America, because they never saw it as just for children. Animation has slowly climbed out of that pigeonhole here in America, but it was never sneered at in Japan. So I’ve come to realize that some of the best cinematic art being made today comes from Japan, and is therefore called anime.

This DVD is a three-part anthology.

Magnetic Rose. Take a little of Dark Star, a bit of Alien, add a dash of 2001, and season with a taste of Madame Butterfly and The Phantom of the Opera, and you’ll have this beautiful outer-space adventure of the mind. It was a little high-flown for my taste and the acting leaves a little to be desired, but it is so gorgeous to look at. Watch the light, and the textures.

Stink Bomb. Sort of a Typhoid Mary story, full of irony. Can’t say too much about it without giving too much away. Liked it.

Cannon Fodder. The shortest of the three, with the least plot ... but the design and the art here is the best of the three. Reminds me a little of Brazil, both in the look and the Kafkaesque sensibility. IMDb.com

The Merchant of Venice (2005) This is the first theatrical movie of this play since the silent era. Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles have done it for television, but lately people shy away from it because of the anti-Semitism. I think this is a mistake. You can’t deny it’s there, it was an anti-Semitic age Shakespeare was writing in ... but you know what? I’m on Shylock’s side. I think he’s a genuine hero, and I am sad at his final defeat. Spat upon, insulted for doing the only thing allowed to Jews by hypocritical Christians who could then eschew “usury” (I’ll bet he gave better interest than MasterCard), in constant danger of his life, deserted and robbed by his daughter with the connivance of those same Christians ... wouldn’t you want your pound of flesh? I would. The only thing good you can say about Antonio is that he was willing to honor his contract; he entered it eagerly enough, to screw the Jew out of his interest, and to provide the love of his life with the means to put on the dog in a big way for the object of his lust. Bassanio is an asshole who got himself into debt and had the balls to ask Antonio for cash he didn’t have, and he had to know Antonio was hot for him. Mr. Sensitivity! The only admirable person in sight is Portia, stuck in one of those medieval quandaries, made the prize in a game devised by her goofy dead father, and of course she’s the one smart enough to bring Shylock down. Her arguments are brilliant, and you only wish she could continue her life in court. Married to Bassanio, the only challenge to her will be ordering his dimwitted life, and it’s way too small a project for such a mind.

As for this movie, it is beautiful, much shortened of necessity for the traditional 2-hour time slot, and well acted by all in sight. Pacino is brilliant in his famous speech and in court. He never goes over the top. Jeremy Irons is always good. But I only had eyes for Lynn Collins, who before this has been seen in strictly minor parts in movies like 50 First Dates, 13 Going on 30, and Down With Love. I want to see a lot more of her. IMDb.com

Mexican Werewolf in Texas (2005) Okay, I confess, I only rented this one because I wanted that title in my movie list. With Netflix, it doesn't cost you anything except the trip to the post office. And there was always the chance, microscopic but measurable, that it might be fun. After all, would you think a movie about giant, speedy, radioactive earthworms (called "graboids") terrifying a small Nevada town would be good? If you doubt it, see Tremors.

Sorry, no cigar. I'm not a "bad movie" fan. I watched Plan 9 From Outer Space years ago just to see it if was as bad as advertised (it is), and that's about the extent of my intentional bad movie viewing. This sort of movie used to be made for the drive-in circuit. Since there are hardly any drive-ins now—more's the pity—they call this sort of shit "direct-to-DVD." Oh, it played for about a day at the Shriekfest Film Festival (no doubt for Oscar consideration), and then into the box ... where it should stay. We lasted 18 minutes. IMDb.com

Miami Vice (2006) Blame Netflix. I'd never have rented this for $4.68 or whatever they charge at Blockbuster, but with the Flixter you don't lose money taking a chance on probable crap. Just mail it back. And this is one great big turd, browning slowly on the crystal white beaches in back of the Fontainebleau. If there is any chance you want to scoop this one up and study it for a while, stop here, because I will reveal the plot ... what little of it I was able to decipher.

SPOILER WARNING

I got a lot of problems with this movie, but the basic one is I don't believe in vice. I believe in Miami—I have to, I've been there, though it is difficult to sustain that belief once you've left—but "vice" is drugs, gambling, and prostitution ... and it can be and has been and still is, depending on the jurisdiction you live in, homosexuality, anal and oral sex, adultery, promiscuity, and ripping off those DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW patches on mattresses. Vice is sin, and I don't believe we need laws against sin. MV begins with a little nod toward high-end prostitution, or maybe "white slavery" (which is and should be a crime, because the women involved are not free agents), mostly for the chance to show a really happenin' nightclub and the beautiful coke snorters who inhabit it, but that quickly fizzles out and we're back to the good old reliable "vice" of illegal drug smuggling.

I am on record elsewhere as advocating the total legalization of all "controlled substances" for people over 18 years of age. I won't go into it all again too deeply, but I can't resist pointing out once more that, yes, crack and heroin and glue-sniffing destroys lives ... and that 70 years of war on these substances has proven there's not a damn thing we can do about it. That, and the indisputable fact that the one drug that destroys more lives, both of the users and those around them, than all other drugs put together is the one mind-altering drug that is perfectly legal: alcohol. We tried banning it, to the enthusiastic cheers of the teetotalers and the Sicilian Mafia and practically no one else, and that worked so well we repealed it and went after the small fry, like marijuana and LSD. And couldn't even win that war. There has always been organized crime, but the 18th Amendment put it on steroids, and the War on Drugs made entirely new gangs from interesting and colorful new ethnic groups and put them on nuclear power. 'Nuff said about that.

So I don't like narcs. Another group of people I don't like are spies, undercover agents, moles, call them what you will. Many narcs work undercover, which makes them spies. Spying is the filthiest profession in the world, even if your goal is a laudable one. The job description is simple: liar, and traitor. You befriend your enemy and then stab him in the back. Even if your enemy is truly evil, the filth is bound to rub off on you. Nobody likes a rat, not even the cops who pay them.

But even in this moral wasteland, there should be some standards ... and in this movie Sonny the narc pisses all over them. There are three bad people at the top of this drug cartel, and one of them is a woman. (A Chinese woman, from Cuba, played by Li Gong, and I never did figure that one out.) Sonny quickly gets in bed with her ... and that makes him a whore, pure and simple. Am I the only one who sees that? Don't feed me that bullshit that they "fell in love." You cannot tell me, on the one hand, that drugs are pure evil, that the purveyors of them are poisoning our schoolchildren, and then somehow say ... "Except her, 'cause she's got a great ass." Sonny, you contemptible piece of shit, you are sleeping with a Dealer of Death! That doesn't bother you?

Apparently it doesn't, because after the entirely incomprehensible final shootout (Lee said "I wish they were wearing uniforms," so at least we'd know whether to cheer or boo when somebody got his brains blown out), he spirits her away and puts her on a boat to her homeland. You can't have it both ways, asshole. Does she have the blood of innocents on her hands, or doesn't she? Are drugs evil, or aren't they?

Moral of the story: If you're going to poison schoolchildren, make sure you've got a great ass. IMDb.com

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

A Mighty Heart (2007) The problem with a story whose outcome you know is simple: How do you build and sustain suspense in such a situation? There are various ways, some better than others. In an epic like The Longest Day, for instance, you know the invasion will be successful, but you don’t know who will live and who will die. One of my favorite examples of a smaller incident is The Day of the Jackal. You know the assassin isn’t going to kill De Gaulle, but the process is made so interesting that you tend to forget that important point, and the tension comes in wondering how the hell will this genius of death be stopped?

We know Daniel Pearl will be beheaded by some people Allah will spit upon when they present themselves at the gates of Paradise. So we must focus on the process. Michael Winterbottom, who is a damn good director, takes the approach of making this very much like cinéma vérité, as if you were in this situation yourself, a part of it. So we concentrate on the police work, which seems to have been quite competent for a third world country. Unfortunately, the story is too complicated to follow, despite visual aids, and we know it’s futile in the end (the chief kidnapper is still alive, appealing his sentence) so it all becomes rather frustrating. The only thing that could keep me going through all this is the performance of Angelina Jolie, which is impressive. But in the end it wasn’t enough. IMDb.com

A Mighty Wind (2003) One of my favorite movies of the year. Christopher Guest has done several of my favorite movies: Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, and This is Spinal Tap (writer and actor). He has a knack of taking a group of people with an obsession (dog shows, heavy metal rock, small-town theater groups and, in A Mighty Wind, has-been folk musicians), and lampooning them while at the same time bringing out a familiar and even affectionate humanity. He has a troupe of regular actors who are the best in the business, especially Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara. IMDb.com

Millennium (1989) What a disaster. I’ve always enjoyed stories by this John Varley dude, but maybe he should stick to short stories and novels. (Both the story and the novel this turkey are based on are lots better than the movie.) The writing credit blames only him, so I don’t see how he can foist the responsibility on anybody else. Just simply an awful movie. IMDb.com

Million Dollar Baby (2004) The best movie of the year, for my money. (Lee disagrees.) Okay, we haven’t seen Sideways yet, but hope to in the next few days, and we’re probably going to wait for the DVD of Finding Neverland. If I change my mind, I’ll let you know.

There’s really not much I can say about the film, cinematically. Everything worked. But there are two issues I want to address.

I don’t like boxing. I don’t understand why anybody would want to pound on someone else, and get pounded in return. I don’t know why anyone would enjoy watching it. (I take it back; I think I do understand the attraction of boxing, on some level. Along with the foot race, boxing and other forms of hand-to-hand combat are the purest, most basic and primitive of all the activities we call “sport.” They require no equipment and don’t even require any rules. The winner in boxing is the one still standing; the winner in a race is the one that crosses a line in the sand first.)

I don’t understand why anyone would want to ride a horse cross country or over hurdles. I don’t understand why people like to climb onto big motorcycles and drive them at 100 miles per hour. I don’t know why people want to climb up vertical rock faces. But I know there are people who love to do all those things, and more power to them. I wouldn’t dream of standing in their way.

People get hurt, boxing. They also get hurt in American football, in real football, in skiing, in car racing, hockey, and bicycling. All these activities can, and have, produced C2 and C3 spinal cord injuries. But boxing is the one a lot of people want to ban. Why? I guess it’s because it’s the only sport I know of where actual bloodshed is routine, and expected. (Yeah, I know, a lot of blood gets spilled in hockey, but they’re not supposed to be pounding on each other with fists and sticks. They get penalized for it. In boxing you get points for it.) Still, the only opposition I know of to horse jumping, which broke Christopher Reeve’s neck, comes from animal rights nuts, not from people concerned about the riders. So although I dislike boxing intensely, I have no problem with those who want to do it.

And I agree with those who say this isn’t a boxing movie. My mom hates boxing, and loved this movie. I’m with her. Many of the best sports movies aren’t really about the sport itself, but about human determination. The sport is a metaphor. I don’t even think Raging Bull is really a movie about boxing. Rocky, now there’s a boxing movie, because Rocky always wins in the end. In many of my favorite sports movies, the folks we’re rooting for lose. Like Friday Night Lights. I think we learn more about ourselves when we lose than when we win.

One more thing. ... And if you are one of the three people left in the world who don’t know how this movie ends, you’d better check out right here.

SPOILER WARNING

I hate it, hate it hate it hate it, when people grab a work of art and run with it as a political football. I hate it when that pustulent gasbag, Rush Limbaugh, accuses Clint Eastwood of endorsing assisted suicide. I hate it when John Hockenberry and other advocates for the disabled howl that showing one woman’s decision not to live somehow cheapens the lives of people with spinal cord injuries who are living full and happy lives, and even wonder in print if Roger Ebert would like to go to a military hospital and pull the plug on injured Iraq war veterans. Jeeez! You know, if they want the plug pulled, they should have that choice. Most elect not to! I know that! Does that mean that Million Dollar Baby should be forced to include some sort of smarmy example of disabled people triumphing over their disabilities? I’ve seen a million films like that, and they’re fine, they’re inspiring, they’re wonderful, but that’s not the story of this woman!

I’ve known a lot of disabled people in my life, some fully as bad off as the woman in this movie. Not one of them wanted to commit suicide ... and I applaud them and rejoice for them.

I kind of think I would want the plug pulled, myself, but I could be wrong. I won’t know until I get there. However, the issue is choice, not force. The disabled have a horror of society demanding that they get out of the way of the able-bodied, of them being pressured or forced to make the choice of death, or even having it made for them, as in Hitler’s Germany ... and well they might worry about it, with assholes like Rush Limbaugh insisting they stay alive while at the same time opposing the measures that would help make their lives more productive or even tolerable. But I put it to you that denying me or anyone else the right to die when life feels intolerable is in itself the use of force. Suicide is my right, and I resent anyone who denies it to me, from the right or the left. Metaphor schmetaphor. Million Dollar Baby (and Rocky) GLORIFIES boxing, a sport that PROMOTES brain damage. Maybe with a different sport … but there’s still the predictable plot twists (even the ending that everyone’s talking about) and the clichéd characters, especially Maggie’s trailer-trash family. I really liked Morgan Freeman’s character … the first time he played it in The Shawshank Redemption. I like all these actors; they all were good. And I really expected to like this movie, which is probably why I felt kinda pissed off afterwards. Varley and I do agree on the right to suicide. IMDb.com

Millions (2004) A couple times a year a movie comes out of left field and delights me so much that I’m almost at a loss to explain the magic it makes. This is from Danny Boyle, one of the last people you might have expected it from. His previous films included the extremely hairy drug comedy/drama Trainspotting, the film that made Ewan McGregor a star, and the post-Apocalyptic 28 Days Later. Talk about a change of pace! Millions is an irresistible fantasy about two boys who have recently lost their mother. Damian is 7, and he collects saints like other kids collect footballers. He knows every one, and in his innocent decentness is a damn good candidate for sainthood himself. Anthony is 9, and as his father says at one point, in awe, “How did I get you?” The kid could beat the pants off any trader on Wall Street, he is so dedicated to getting rich.

One day a bag with a quarter million quid literally falls from the sky and demolishes Damian’s cardboard play house. He takes it home, thinking it came from God. He only wants to use it to do good, and plans to give it all away ... but to whom? Anthony won’t hear of it. He wants to invest it in real estate. Boyle could have chosen to set the film in a slum, but instead puts it in a new Liverpool suburb that’s as plastic and perfect as anything in America. Hell, it could be under the dome in The Truman Show. So these boys aren’t lacking for anything (though their father works hard for it, and knows they are overextended), except for the love of their mother. I think that was a wise choice.

Damian can’t stop himself from giving away bundles of cash. He speaks to saints, who are solid and real to him, and they are ordinary joes, and funny with their advice on life. (St Peter is proud to be patron saint of keys: “I’m on the gate, up there.”) Complications ensue, including a bad guy who lost the money in the first place ... but that’s all the plot I’m going to talk about. The rest should be left as a delightful surprise.

A few comments. This is not an SFX-driven movie, but it has some, and they are wonderful and enhance the story instead of getting in the way. I loved the way the haloes floated over the heads of the saints like they were made of clear, glowing jelly. The colors of the movie are stunning. And though it uses snappy, high-tech editing techniques, they also never get in the way, but delight me instead. Can’t think of a bad thing to say about this movie. Oh, I forgot one thing. I'm usually pretty good at Brit accents, but these Liverpuddles had pretty thick ones. Another reason I love DVDs: I could turn on the English subtitle for the hearing impaired. Didn't miss a line of dialogue.