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© 2004-2008 by John Varley; all rights reserved

S.W.A.T. (2003) Three-quarters of a good movie, with a realistic feel. Then it degenerates into an overdone improbability, complete with a private jet landing on a bridge and a mano-a-mano fight in a rail yard full of moving trains. IMDb.com

The Saddest Music in the World (Canada, 2003) This will be one of the odder reviews I’ve ever written, which is good, because it’s one of the oddest films I’ve ever seen! First, I don’t recommend it. Second, I’m very glad I saw it. Third, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen! This is one of the most visually stunning films ever made. The director, a Canadian cult figure named Guy Maddin, has made it look like some strange artifact from an alternate 1930s world excavated from a film vault where it wasn’t particularly well cared for. Images are overexposed and grainy, there are dazzles, haloes, irises, an entire panoply of outdated techniques. Montages galore. The set design reminds me of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and M, and The Last Laugh, and other UFA masterpieces from Germany. The sensibility is like David Lynch in his Eraserhead days. Forbidden Zone is also called to mind. I take it back, I do recommend it, but only for its visual style, it’s that good. But I warn you, the absurdist plot is impossible to care about. IMDb.com

Sahara (2002) I thought I'd follow you anywhere, Michael Palin. I'd have done almost anything to go along with you when you went Around the World in 80 Days. I'd gladly have gone with you from Pole to Pole. Himalaya was rough, and with the current state of my feet and legs I could never do the hiking you did, but as a younger man I'd have jumped at the chance. I haven't seen your Full Circle or Hemingway Adventure, but I'm pretty sure I'd have had a great time. But on this journey, traveling around and through the most forbidding desert on Earth ... It's like Lee said at one point: "I'm glad he's going there, so I don't have to ..."

Lordamighty, do I ever agree. He goes some places few people ever go, sees things that only a handful of westerners will ever see. But he walks a great deal of the way, in 56 C. heat ... that's 133 F., boys and girls. And that's the air. The ground would be hot enough to fry shoe leather. I would have collapsed after about ten steps. So, I'd have skipped that part.

He also travels through Algeria, where Muslim radicals have declared a fatwa against all westerners. All of them. White skin, and you're a legitimate target. He travels on a train that has been bombed dozens of times in ten years, and stopped by murdering fanatics even more often. I'd have skipped that part, too.

But don't be discouraged. The whole point is, you don't have to go, and you can still see all the wonderful and amazing sights he sees, without sand in your food. Michael is his usual charming, endlessly inquisitive self, and he even does some Python stuff in Morocco, at the scene of what must have been two months of madness during the filming of Monty Python's Life of Brian. "Over there is the tower where Graham Chapman fell off and was rescued, rather implausibly, by a flying saucer ..." As he points out, it's not everyone who gets to revisit the site of his own crucifixion.

"Always look on the bright side of life ..." IMDb.com

Sahara (2005) Double feature at the Sunset with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. IMDb.com

The Same River Twice (2003) My generation, the Baby Boomers, have been a pain in the ass since we reached elementary school. Our doting parents spoiled us outrageously, and we figured we were the greatest generation of all time, when in fact our parents have a better claim to that honor. We were going to change the world.

Well, we shook things up a little, but now we’re tired, and spoiling children of our own. We are a great bolus passing through the digestive tract of America, and we’ve caused cramps all the way through. By the time we reach the rectum, we’ll really be a pain in the ass. Already the forerunners are into “celebrating” aging, menopause, baldness, big thighs, and soon we will be celebrating death, like Timothy Leary already did.

But darn it, some of us had fun along the way. This movie is a slice of duration, like several documentaries we’ve seen recently. This one takes a 20-year slice, from 1978, when about a dozen people spent their summers as tour guides in the Grand Canyon, naked most of the time, to 1998. Lovely, hard bodies. Everything was possible.

Now they are mostly settled down into good gray lives. I’m not knocking it. The one dude who is still on the river comes across as a fuck-up ... but he’s having a good time. So are the others, mostly. No less than two became mayors of medium-sized towns. But when I listen to one man talking about the cycles of life, how his father got old, and now he’s getting old, and it’s his children’s time to be young, I thought ... who planned this out, anyway? God? Screw him. I wouldn’t want to be as dumb as I was back then, but I’d sure like to have my body back. And I’m not celebrating what’s going to happen to it. IMDb.com

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005) Sarah Silverman (hereinafter, SS, for brevity) recently got in trouble for using the word "chink" on network TV. The network apologized. SS didn't. Here's what happened: She said a friend told her how to get out of jury duty. Just write something really inappropriate on the form you fill out. So she wrote "I hate chinks." But then, she reflected, she didn't want to be seen as a racist, so she wrote instead "I love chinks."

If you don't think that's funny, then you won't like SS.

Here's a couple more: "I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl." "I dated a guy who was half-black, but he dumped me because I’m such a loser. Wow, I shouldn’t say things like that, I’m such a pessimist… he's actually half-white."

SS is about as "edgy" as they come. She jokes about rape, AIDS, 9/11, the Holocaust, race, you name it, nothing is too taboo for her. ("I have a theory that if there had been black people in Germany in World War II, there would have been no Holocaust. ... not for the Jews, anyway.") She gets away with it because her on-stage persona is so clueless and lacking in self-awareness. She thinks she knows how to be politically correct, but then she'll make some perfectly awful statement ... catch herself ... and then make a correction that is even worse than the first statement. "I love chinks." That sort of sums it up. She is so politically incorrect she makes Bill Maher sound like Jay Leno. She is a breath of fresh air to one, like me, who cringes at liberal circumlocutions like "differently abled," or "senior citizens," or "people of color." Or how about "the N-word"? (The N-word is "nigger," friends and neighbors. There, you heard it here first. I'll bet you were wondering.) If Mark Twain can use it, so can I. Though, come to think of it, Twain has been in trouble recently over that bit of racist garbage Huckleberry Finn ...

If SS reminds me of anyone, it is Lily Tomlin ... and Steve Martin. Remember Lily's high school cheerleader talking about how icky people in wheelchairs are? "Why can't people like that just stay at home?!" Then there was Martin, with his clueless but totally self-confident jerk, making an asshole of himself and never realizing it. SS is the female side of that, forever apologetic, and never realizing how awful she is, either.

Having said that, it's too bad I have to tell you that this movie mostly sucks. She's very good on the stage, and then they cut away to some other business and it is cringingly awful, and it's not funny, because you get the feeling SS doesn't know it's awful, as she does on the stage. IMDb.com

Saved! (2004) This story is basically the same as we saw recently in Mean Girls, but at a “Christian” school. What it shows is that being blissed out on Jesus is no barrier at all to being the same kind of bitch queen bee we all remember from "real world" high schools. It is very funny, though it goes a little over the top at the end. The message: true Christian faith is a lot more than just a set of inflexible rules. In short, the Christian message I received in my own youth, from a semi-liberal Lutheran church. But folks, there’s a parallel universe out there, and according to the election news, they might even be the majority. These are people whose every living moment is informed by their shallow religious rules, who listen only to Christian music (most of it awful knock-offs of rock and roll), who wear Christian fashions, who can’t say sentence without Jesus or savior or God creeping into it. And I have to say, I’d have found the movie a lot easier to laugh at if this was some sort of creepazoid minority cult. But, my fellow citizens, these fucking fruitcakes are running the country. If they win again in 2008, I may have to leave. Seriously. IMDb.com

Saw (2004) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

A Scanner Darkly (2006) I was, frankly, stunned at how bad this movie was. Not a single thing worked. It was, famously, done with interpolated rotoscoping. The interpolated part is computer-generated; rotoscoping was invented by Max Fleischer in 1914 for his Koko the Clown movies. Here, it is a horrible distraction. Keanu Reeves' beard looks like some awful fungus crawling all over his face. Many things don't have shadows. The "scramble suits" the undercover cops wear are interesting ... for about five minutes. Then they just get on your nerves.

And really, there isn't much of a story. It mostly consists of dope-addled people sitting around talking nonsense, and that gets old fast. No reason is given as to why 20% of the population is taking this awful stuff called Substance D, and though I assume the rotoscoping was done to give a feeling of a dope dream, no real sense of the high the addicts get is given except for the opening scene where bugs are crawling all over a man. The reviews say that Reaves "fell in love" with Winona Ryder, but it was news to me. There was zero chemistry. World-famous stoner Robert Downey Jr babbled, world-famous pothead Woody Harrelson freaked, and Reeves, who looks stoned at the best of times, mostly just sat there and brooded. The music was insipid. The "revelation" of who "Agent Fred's" boss was, was ... blindingly obvious, the other revelation of what they were doing to Fred was stupid, and the other other revelation of where Substance D was coming from was way, way beyond stupid.

This whole film is almost as bad as Substance D except, thank god, it's not addictive. IMDb.com

The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) Sir Percy Blakeney, Baronet and silly fop, is actually the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, who has devoted himself to rescuing the aristocracy from the horrors of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Perhaps you saw the original, classic 1934 version with Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon. (Or maybe Chuck Jones’ “The Scarlet Pumpernickel, starring Daffy Duck.) This is a lush, well-mounted production, but Anthony Andrews is no Leslie Howard. (Jane Seymour, however, outclasses Miss Oberon in every way, IMHO. All she really has to do is look pretty, and Seymour can’t do anything wrong in that department.) It’s a great, rip-roarin’ adventure, and this version is well done.

But no matter how you tell it, the story itself has a fatal flaw for me, and it can be summed up thus: Who cares? Now, I’m not going to justify the crimes of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. I think it’s neat that all but Marat (assassinated in his bathtub) got to taste the edge of the blade they so enthusiastically endorsed when they were on top. However, this story and all movie versions of it I’ve seen are incredibly dishonest. The Pimpernel is horrified that the children of the aristos are being killed along with their parents. His ultimate coup is to rescue a useless little shitbag known as the Dauphin, heir to the French throne. This makes it a real sob story, but did anyone ask themselves how many children died in the gutters of Paris during the long, long reign of terror of these incredibly decadent, corrupt, amoral, and totally uncaring degenerates who styled themselves the “aristocracy?” It nauseated me to see Sir Percy, one of the richest men in England, surrounded by people whose sole function was to hold his coat for him or fold his handkerchiefs, in his 300-room family rockpile, mooning over “innocent” grandees across the channel. This was class war, folks, and long overdue, and though they horribly mismanaged it, I’m all for the common citizens and fuck the aristos. And no, I do not approve of guillotining children, but if you want to see where the real horror lay, if you want to see the wanton, thoughtless murder of millions of children, if you want to see how most people lived in France at that time, take a look at Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, or some of the newer versions of Les Miserables. (Twenty years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed your hungry family? Sounds about right. Come here, boy, and powder my wig.) That’s what the aristocracy was all about, and whether a particular grandee condoned it or not—and the huge majority never even thought about it, ever—they were guilty as a class. I spit on their powdered wigs. IMDb.com

The Scent of Green Papaya (Mùi du du xhan - L'odeur de la papaye verte) (France, Vietnam, 1993) This is more a composition than a traditional movie. There are two large sets, both on soundstages in Paris, believe it or not, one of a middle-class home in Saigon in 1951, another a rich man’s home in 1961. Both are meticulously thought out down to the last drop of water, cricket in a cage, trail of ants, frog on a leaf, grain of rice. It would be impossible to point your camera anywhere on these sets without framing an incredibly lovely still life painting. It you could smell a movie, this would be the one, and you would savor every scent.

The plot is simple but moving. Mui, a 10-year-old orphan, comes to work as a maid. She is very good, self-effacing and helpful. We see most things through her eyes, she is endlessly observant and fascinated by the smallest things. A great deal of the movie is seen through windows ... which isn’t as voyeuristic as it sounds, since these homes are mostly windows, very little distinction between inside and outside. There is no glass in any of them, just a variety of screens and shutters. The camera glides through these scenes and we see bits and pieces of what is going on.

When she is 20, Mui is forced to move and joins the household of a rich friend of the family. He is her age, grew up with her, never noticed her. One day he notices. It’s love. He teaches her to read. The end.

You either like this sort of thing or you don’t. I eat it up. IMDb.com

Schindler’s List (1993) What can I say? A masterpiece. I wept several times. Many times more I wanted to kill somebody, but almost any Nazi movie can do that to me. IMDb.com

School of Rock (2003) This film is so high-energy, so endearing, that even Mom liked it, and she says she doesn’t really care for Jack Black. IMDb.com

Schultze Gets the Blues (Germany, 2003) (SPOILER WARNING) This is a German film, but apparently doesn’t have a title in German. Schultze and two friends are retired from working in a salt mine. (Which isn’t as bad as it sounds; I’ve been in a salt mine, in Grand Saline, Texas, and it’s kind of neat.) They don’t have anything to do with themselves. Schultze is the most clueless of them all. He isn’t married, his mother is senile in a nursing home. He hardly ever speaks, never shows any emotion. All he can do is play the accordion, and all he knows how to play is polkas. Then he hears some Zydeco music on the radio, begins experimenting, and comes up with something that might be called Prussian Zydeco. Just the same little ditty he plays over and over. He performs it at a music festival in his town, to no enthusiasm at all. They want the old oom-pah-pah. Then his friends decide to send him to a festival in their “sister city,” New Braunfels, Texas, which is sort of like our Danish Solvang in California, only German. It might as well be Mars. The people are friendly, but when he shows up with his squeezebox he sees it’s the same old oom-pah-pah, plus yodeling. He doesn’t play.

He buys a little fishing boat and sets out down the Gaudalupe river and down the Intercoastal Canal for Zydeco country. He has minor adventures along the way. He speaks so little English that he barely knows where he is and seldom understands what people are saying to him. But they are friendly. He hears some real Cajun music. He dies. Back in Germany, they give him a jazz funeral. The German oom-pah-pah band is horrible, trying to play Zydeco, but they’re trying.

What never happens is what I had sort of expected. He doesn’t ever learn to play with anything like soul. In fact, he never plays for anyone in America except the guy in the next room in the motel, who bangs on the wall to make him stop. He’s not “discovered.” He doesn’t find love. But everything he sees and hears is brand new to him, and you get the feeling that he hasn’t seen anything new since he went down in the salt mines as a young man. There are worse ways for your life to end.

This is a first feature by Michael Schorr, and was a huge hit in Germany. It reminded me of the films of Jim Jarmusch, where not much happens but the daily lives of some not-too-bright people who you grow to like. It started out a tad too slow, too many shots that lingered a little too long, but pretty soon I didn’t care. I really grew to like Schultze. He is such a simple, lonely, friendly, shy guy, and all he has in the world is his music, which he isn’t even good at. But I’d buy the guy a beer. IMDb.com

The Science of Sleep (La science des rêves) (France, 2006) Did you ever see a movie that was so visually imaginative, so inventive, so wild and crazy and superficially appealing that you almost ... almost, didn't realize that nothing of real interest was going on? That there was no real story here, or if there was, it wasn't a very good or original one? One example that springs to mind is City of Lost Children, by the crazy genius Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Wow! Knocked my eyes right out of their sockets ... but there's not much there under the surface flash. Jeunet went on to redeem himself with Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Amelie, in English markets), one of the finest movies I've ever seen, and Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement). I expect this director, Michael Gondry, to go on to more meaty stuff, too ... because for one reason, he already has, in the form of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The difference between Spotless and Sleep is painfully obvious: Charlie Kaufman, the best screenwriter working in Hollywood today. He wrote the Spotless script, and he knows how to tell a story. Gondry needs some work.

Having said that, I will say that this movie is worth seeing. The visuals are so terrific they are worth the price of admission and almost two hours of your time. (Well, maybe an hour and a half; the last part began to seem repetitive.) You've heard of cardboard characters? This movie has cardboard sets, cardboard cities, cardboard cars! And I don't mean that in a bad way. They are wonderful! There is clever animation, eye-popping art, that sense of magic lurking around every corner. I assume Gondry is responsible for a lot of the look of the piece, but I feel I should mention the three production designers, who certainly must have played a big part in making it all come alive: Ann Chakraverty, Pierre Pell, and Stéphane Rosenbaum. Fantastic job, you guys! IMDb.com

Scoop (2006) I'm going to forego the chance to point out how useful this film might be if you encountered a canine accident on the sidewalk. (You may insert your own poop scoop joke here, if you wish.) The movie is not that bad. But it's pretty bad.

Woody Allen has directed 38 1/3 movies now, with the 39th and a third in the pipeline ... and it's begun to seem like an actual pipeline, and it's not carrying all good stuff. He seems to be compelled to alternate brilliant films with crap like this. He makes Match Point, and then he goes on automatic and tries to reprise his role from Take the Money and Run, or Sleeper. It was funny in 1973. It's not funny in 2006, it's pathetic. These "comedies" either star himself as himself, or someone else as himself. Maybe he thinks we now view this persona as affectionately as we do Chaplin's little tramp, or big, bumbling Oliver Hardy. I got news for you, Woody. We don't. We are sick of your every twitch, shtick, and mug. I hate the way you always have your hands out in front of you, gesturing. I hate your high, intense voice; it's like fingernails on a blackboard. I hate your stammering, and your stupid confabulations when caught in a lie. I'm even getting fucking sick of your glasses.

Stop starring in your own movies, Woody! You suck!

His part could have been written out of this, not only easily, but to the great improvement of the film. He begins with a good premise—dead reporter jumps into the River Styx and swims back to the world to cover one last story—and totally wastes it. I can see no reason why Scarlett Johansson would spend any time with the totally useless character Woody portrays here. He has wedged himself into the plot like the producer's talentless mistress, and he ruins every scene he is in.

It's pointless to go further. But last night, pondering what a mess he had made of an idea the Woody of the 1970s would have knocked out of the ballpark, Lee and I just happened to look at the TV and who do you think we saw? Tony Roberts! "He got old!" Lee observed. Indeed he did, but seeing him sparked this great idea, Woodster old boy, and I'm going to give it to you for free:

Annie Hall II. It's 30 years later. Alvy Singer is 71, and suffering from the world's first case of terminal anhedonia. He has had his glory days, and didn't enjoy them. He moved to Los Angeles, which he hated, and starred with Bob Newhart in a sitcom produced by Tony Roberts. It was big hit, and ran for 10 years. His second sitcom, on his own, was a flop. He returned to stand-up comedy, and married his stepdaughter, Yoko. Now he's playing Indian casinos with his routines from the '70s and not getting any laughs. Then one day he starts to vanish. He's getting transparent. The doctors can't do anything about it. The only thing that makes him become solid again is to tell jokes ... but they have to be funny. He desperately cribs material from other comics. He recalls the last time he was happy, and finds Annie Hall and they meet for the first time in decades. Years ago her brother went crazy and killed her parents and 5 other people. She's had both breasts removed and is bald from chemotherapy. She had a job in the World Trade Center and lost 20 of her friends and co-workers ... and still she's happier than he is ...

I'll let you run with it from there, Woody. I think it's got Oscar written all over it. It combines the fantasy themes of pics like The Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig with the real emotion of Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives, plus, you'll have the whacked out humor you used to be so good at. You'll have to have it, Woody, or you'll start to vanish, just like your audiences are doing. IMDb.com

The Score (2001) From above we see a fat man in a white suit. The way he walks, the sheer size of him ... it's gotta be Sidney Greenstreet. He turns, and ... it is Sidney Greenstreet! I thought he was dead! No, wait a minute, wait a minute ... oh, shit, it's only Marlon Brando.

Actually, I'm being mean. Brando is pretty good in this, his last film. The director, Miss Piggy (and who'd a thunk she could be so good at a thriller!), was able to find a way to rein in his excesses. I don't know how I missed this one when it came out, but it's a humdinger. It's almost worthy to stand beside John Frankenheimer's Ronin, which also starred Robert De Niro. Lord, I love a heist movie, and I love a thriller, and it is pathetic how few of them deliver on their promise. 99% of them self-destruct before the last reel, in an orgy of car chases and shootouts. There's hardly any violence in this, but there is tension aplenty, of the sort that only very few writers and directors and actors can create. I won't tell any details because I'd spoil your fun. Let it stand that these guys have to break into an unbreakable place, and it all was logical. Not that I believe anyone could be quite that smart and that competent ... but if there was somebody like that, this is all honest and well-thought-out and cogently presented so that, from time to time you go Ahhh! So that's what that was all about! ... and doesn't rely on superhuman antics a la Mission: Impossible or the countless others of that ilk. See this at once, if you like a thinking person's thriller.

I must add one bit gleaned from the trivia section of the IMDb. It's fun to learn this stuff, but sometimes you get a lot more than you wanted to know. They say that, "During breaks, Marlon Brando would walk around the set naked because of the warm weather where the film was being shot." Now, that is an image I could have done without. IMDb.com

The Sea Inside (Mar adentro) (Spain, 2004) Based on a true story of a quadriplegic poet who fought for 30 years for his right to die, and when he was unable to convince the legislators and courts, was helped by friends.

I believe in the absolute right to die, not only for the physically disabled but for anyone who finds life intolerable. Any other point of view means you believe the state, or the church, or your neighbors own your life. To me, your life is the only thing you really own, the only thing that matters, anyway. If I decide one day that I just can’t take it anymore or even that I’m just not happy with my life anymore, I will end it. If I am sufficiently disabled that I can’t do it myself, I’d hope I would have friends who would help.

Many groups of the disabled are opposed to assisted suicide, afraid that it’s the first step toward getting rid of those who are a burden on society. Many also are offended by those who choose not to accept conditions that they themselves accept, and point out that they are leading enjoyable, fulfilling lives. In my opinion, a quadriplegic has no more right to demand another quad must live than I do. His experience is his own! I personally feel that I would not want to live as a quad, but I could be wrong. If it ever happens to me, I demand the choice!

This is a very good movie that covers all the angles. Javier Bardem delivers a fantastic performance, mostly bed-bound. Most of the time he is amused by all the fuss. To him it is simple and inarguable, but of course other people have other ways of looking at it. It is also interesting that his lawyer has a degenerative disease. She decides to end her life, too, but waits too late. This decision is never easy, and the film does not shy away from the heartbreak it causes those left behind. But in the end ... Whose life is it, anyway? IMDb.com

The Sea is Watching (Japan, 2002) The movie takes place in a geisha house, and is taken from an unproduced script by one of my two favorite directors of all time, Akira Kurosawa. But it’s a minor piece. IMDb.com

Seabiscuit (2003) A big Hollywood movie in the best sense of that term, based on a story that could have been imagined in Hollywood, but happens to have been true. IMDb.com

Secondhand Lions (2003) Maybe Michael Caine and Robert Duvall just wanted to work together, I don’t know. I can’t find any other way to account for casting Caine as one of two crotchety old Americans living out in the boonies. Caine is one of my favorite actors, but a convincing American accent is beyond him. This is not a bad movie, but not really memorable. IMDb.com

The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002) A low-key, wonderfully acted small movie about a family in crisis because the husband suspects his wife of infidelity. I enjoyed it a lot. IMDb.com

Secret Window (2004) Defenestrate this one. IMDb.com

Separate But Equal (1991) You can't really dislike a movie like this. It is so earnest and so well-intentioned, and the story is an important and fascinating one. But you can't really like it much, either, because making a movie about real history without overhyping it too much with false events (as in the execrable Mississippi Burning, on much the same subject) so often means that what you're left with ... is a very slow story. One might even say boring. Sydney Poitier as Thurgood Marshall is not well cast, in my opinion. The tone of intense indignation he used so famously well by saying "They call me Mister Tibbs!" just doesn't work that well for me when he is coming ... down ... hard ... on ... every ... ... ... word! Add an intense whisper to the last two words, and you've pretty much exhausted his emotional range in this picture. Again, as I said, sincerity and good intentions does count for something, but I kept thinking that a tight, well-done one-hour documentary could have been a lot better than 3 hours and 15 minutes of arguing and debate. Let's face it: Lawyering is not really an exciting life, in spite of what you've seen in the movies and on TV, and courtrooms are infrequently dramatic in real life. IMDb.com

A Separate Peace (2004) I’ve never read the novel this is based on. It was made once before, in 1972. This is a 90-minute version for Showtime, by Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away). It’s well-acted, and it’s a good story, but it has a sort of condensed feel to it. It could have been at least an hour longer, I wouldn’t have minded spending more time with these characters, get to know them a little better. IMDb.com

September 11 (2002) Shortly after 9/11/01 someone named Alain Brigand had the idea to hire 11 directors from different countries to make 11-minute movies in reaction to the atrocity. They would have complete artistic control. The result came out on 9/11/02, and is now available on DVD. Most of them are quite good, and one is devastating.

Naturally, there have been objections that some are anti-American, but I don’t really see much of that in evidence. Many of them relate 9/11 to other atrocities, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, and none of them in any way denigrate the deaths of the people in the towers or on the planes or at the Pentagon. There is a perspective to be had here. In fact, awful as it was, 9/11 was not the most horrific event in human history; not even of the 20th Century. But it is still so fresh, so raw, the images so far beyond what we are accustomed to seeing in less-photographed, more ongoing horrors, that it sticks a knife in my gut and twists it, and probably always will.

If you want to be surprised by the segments, stop reading here. IMDb.com

SPOILER WARNING

Serenity (2005) No fewer than 4 people wrote to me via the website and recommended this movie. Some were wildly enthusiastic. The viewers at the IMDb gave it a very high 8.0. Metacritic gave it a 74 and their users rated it a stratospheric 9.2. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 80%. Wow.

I didn't like it. Not even enough to finish it. We watched half an hour, paused the DVD, and asked each other if we really wanted to continue. "Eh." So we watched another 15 minutes, paused it, and never came back. That's almost half the film. I'm not saying it was bad. I just didn't give a shit.

I guess you need to know where I'm coming from. Serenity is the brainchild of Joss Whedon. He is best known for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (which I've never seen), and "Angel" (which I've never seen.) (I'm not saying these shows are bad; I know several people of discriminating tastes who like them. We just don't watch much TV.) (In fact, now that "The West Wing" is gone and "The Sopranos" is on hiatus, we don't watch any TV. ) This movie was based on something called "Firefly," (which I've also never seen: Hat trick!) which ran on Fox for a while and apparently was totally botched: episodes shown out of order, if you can believe that, and canceled in mid-season. The legion of fans were pissed, as they should have been.

Here's something else about me. I didn't like "Star Trek," in any of its incarnations, TV or theatrical. I never watched "Doctor Who," or "Battlestar Galactica." I hated X-Men, was bored by all the Batman movies except parts of the last one. I loved the original Star Wars, but my reaction to all the sequels ranged from indifferent to actively bored. What I saw in 45 minutes of Serenity was a lot of inferior Star Wars, including things like the Empire vs. the Rebels, the famous bar scene, and the Millennium Falcon, complete with Han Solo clone, a slice of Blade Runner, a dash of Alien, a wee bit of The Matrix, and a twist of Kill Bill. Wild originality, huh?

Thinking back to some of the films on that list, I realize that what I have grown mortally tired of is what "science fiction" has come to mean in the minds of the movie-going public. SF used to be a movie ghetto featuring low-budget black and white turkeys like Them! and Curse of the Werewolf and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Every once in a while an intelligent film like Invasion of the Body Snatchers would come along, but even that was low-budget, and drew little critical notice.

Then in the '60s and '70s came 4 movies that transformed how SF was seen in Hollywood: 2001: A Space Odyssey; Star Wars; Alien; and Blade Runner. The first was maybe the most revolutionary movie since The Great Train Robbery. It was the first "special effects" movie, and the first to really attempt to show what outer space would look like. Come to think of it, it may remain the only movie ever to do so. I can't think of a single film since that has dared to show spaceships in silence; even Apollo 13 couldn't resist a deep whooshing sound as the capsule sped by. Then came Star Wars, and we were off to the races ... and after a while, it was a race I didn't care to see anymore. Star Wars was loads of fun, and silly as pants on a snake. It was the first to show a "lived-in" future. Then the others had their own elaborate futures. And goshdarn it, there hasn't really been a new vision of the future since then. Little things here and there (parts of The Matrix), but just about everything dealing with space travel since then has been space opera. Which has its place, but I yearn for something intelligent and original, and find it, ironically, only in low-budget projects like Primer.

Action! Big and stupid fight scenes with fists, swords, light sabers. Chases. Villains and superheroes. And most of all, special effects. The SFX people can now do anything, with the result that nothing is now really mind-blowing. You don't need a big studio anymore. You can cobble together an SFX movie on your iMac. Hell, you can do it on your cell phone. Really, come on now, what haven't we seen by now? Only one thing comes to mind, and it may already have been done and I just didn't see it. That is a really, really, really gigantic interior space. I'd like to see Rendezvous with Rama. I'd like to see Ringworld. Or even a little thing I wrote a while back called Titan. But only if the stories are character- and/or plot-driven, and the SFX are there just as background ... IMDb.com

Shall We Dance (2004) A total trifle, for when you’re in the mood for something that won’t strain your brain. A lawyer is suffering a mid-life crisis and, instead of boffing his younger secretary or whatever, decides to learn to dance. The only tension is how his wife will react to it, because he’s so uptight he doesn’t tell her, he sneaks around. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. The key to a movie like this is often the minor, supporting characters, and they’re all good here, all fully fleshed out. No surprises, but fun for the right kind of evening. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: A Shark Tale (2004) Incredible colors and textures and flexibility in these bodies and faces. I was most taken with a pair of Rastafarian jellyfish. A lot of funny one-liners, many of them based on our knowledge of The Godfather. (“You’ll be sleepin’ wit’ da fishes. Da dead fishes.”) Staggering visual imagination ... but not much else. The story is a dead fish. Some good music. From the makers of Shrek, but without the heart. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) This was the second time we’d seen it, and I liked it even more the second time. Famously, the entirely film was shot against blue screens and the scenery was dubbed in later, by computer, possibly the first film to use this technique for every scene, though increasingly SFX films use it for up to half of a film these days. (Carrie Fisher remarked way back when the first Star Wars was released that it was weird to have to react to something George Lucas told her would be happening when he morphed it in, and I heard Gwyneth Paltrow say the same thing a few days ago. I had thought most actors would be used to it by now.) I assume there were a few props here and there, and they probably had a mock-up of a P-40 fuselage and wing for Sky Captain Joe to walk around on. But the rest was all CGI.

Right from the very first, a scene of the Hindenburg III docking with the Empire State Building in some alternate 1939, you know you’re in for something different. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow deliberately sets out to get the look of those old science fiction covers from the 1930s, right down to the fading that has happened to all but the most well-preserved copies. Much of the movie is almost black-and-white, sepia-toned, infinite shades of brown—except for Gwyneth Paltrow’s luscious red lips. That is combined with the story sense of the movie serials of that era and later, with scenes that you will remember, in a much more primitive version, from feature-length movies of that time. Here you’ll see it all. Giant robots in a dozen varieties. Zeppelins, propeller-driven giant aircraft carriers hovering at 10,000 feet. Gleaming spaceships and ray guns and just about everything but bug-eyed monsters and half-clad screaming women. Also, of course, a clichéd plot and dialogue that is strictly B-movie, but with some sly digs here and there. The very last line is a great one.

Shattered Glass (2003) Excellent story based on fact, of one of the most egregious examples of the rash of lying reporters we’ve heard of in recent years. The guy seems positively pathological, because he was not untalented, but he yearned to be the golden boy so much that he went from merely embellishing his stories to making them up completely. It had me on the edge of my seat as Glass’s lies were peeled back one by one, with him denying and denying, inventing lie after lie to cover up his original lies. Excellent. IMDb.com

Shaun of the Dead (2004) One of the best spoofs I’ve seen in a while. What if zombies invaded London ... and nobody noticed? Shaun doesn’t notice, anyway, not for a long time. After all, what do zombies do? Shamble, stare vacantly, moan from time to time. Not all that different from a regular day. The main characteristic of zombies, other than their unfortunate habit of killing and eating live people, is that they are slooooooooow. Unless you’re actually lying on the sidewalk, you’ve got very little to fear from them. The movie is best during this early part, as we see snatches of alarming news on the telly, see odd things in the background, hear constant sirens ... and Shaun strolls by it all, oblivious. When he finally notices—a dead woman getting up with a hole drilled through her big enough to see through finally grabs his attention—Shaun and his best mate, who has reached an almost Zen state of dumbness himself, try to behead her with old record albums, and have plenty of time to argue over which ones have to be saved and which ones they can do without. In fact, Shaun and all his friends have plenty of time to carry on all their old arguments while the zombies shuffle relentlessly after them. After all the blood and mayhem there is even a happy ending. Turns out there are plenty of uses for zombies after you capture them and chain them up. They are even good at video games. Very clever. IMDb.com

SherryBaby (2006) Poor Sherry. She's one of those people who go through life always a step or two behind other people, and behind where she's trying hard to be. She's not a bad person, but everything she does is just a little bit ... off. She is inappropriate, she has a quick temper that doesn't serve her well, she is impatient, she tries too hard, she is self-centered. She is a drug addict who just got out of jail, clean, going to AA and NA, but still craving. She has a terrible history that we only learn late in the story, and which I will not reveal ... but given that history, she may never have had a chance. She's got a daughter who she thinks she adores ... but I'm not sure she knows how to love. The daughter has been cared for by her brother and sister-in-law, and it's clear they are a lot better at it than she is. You can't say she has no parenting skills, because she's very good with other children. But around her own daughter she is smothering, clueless, given to the big gesture, but unable to reach her. She's a walking pile of contradictions, and I'd have said her case was hopeless (this is quite a depressing film), and yet she pulls back from the final bad decision, and I'm left with a small feeling of hope.

I rented this because we heard Terry Gross interview Maggie Gyllenhaal about it on "Fresh Air." I was intrigued. So far I had only seen Maggie G. (and that name makes me long for the days when the studios shortened them!) in more standard roles, not the chancier stuff she's better known for, such as Secretary. Now I'd like to see that. She is tall and a bit gawky and absolutely fearless. She plays a nude scene more naturally than almost any actor I've ever seen. I have to say I was very impressed with her performance, and with all the others in the movie, and with the writer/director, Laurie Collyer. IMDb.com

The Shining (1980) In 1997 Stephen King caused this to be re-made as a TV mini-series because he was so angry about Kubrick’s take on his book. The re-make really stunk. It wasn’t scary at all, not even a little bit. Now, I understand King’s outrage, he never should have let Kubrick have the book, as the man has his own strong vision. And I admit that Kubrick lost his way at the end. But any five minutes of the original is ten times as good as the entire remake. Except for the five minutes that he killed off Dick Hallorran the psychic chef, my favorite character, who was still alive and sitting on the beach with the kid and the mom at the end of the book. IMDb.com

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

Shopgirl (2005) An open letter to Steve Martin:

I love ya, baby, but you need to stop and evaluate your career. I'd suggest you sit down with Bill Murray to do so. What do you want, Steve? Big paychecks? I know your expenses are high, since you collect modern art. If so, keep churning out those remakes, and remakes of remakes, like Cheaper By the Dozen (two of them!), Sgt. Bilko, The Pink Panther, The Out-of-Towners, and Father of the Bride parts one and two. The first part of Bride was okay; the first part of Cheaper sucked so bad we didn't see the second ... and there's the problem, Steve. Your name has been so tarnished by cash-in stuff like that, and like the awful Bringing Down the House that we didn't bother with stuff like Bilko and Panther ... and with Bowfinger, which I heard might actually have been funny. Are there other movies you've done that are good and we didn't see because the brand name "Steve Martin" is now so tacky with unnecessary remakes?

You have done your "Wild and Crazy Guy" period, and I loved it, from The Jerk to The Man With Two Brains. But your second movie, Pennies From Heaven, served notice that you weren't a one-note guy, that you weren't going to be satisfied to be Chevy Chase (and look what's happened to him!). You did All of Me, a comedy with a lot of smarts. Ditto Roxanne. Then one heck of a string of really great comedies: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; L.A. Story; Housesitter; and Parenthood. In there was a completely serious and great performance in Grand Canyon. So we know you can be funny, and you can be serious, often both at the same time, that you have aspirations, and want to stretch. But what have we gotten in the last decade? Your work has been 90% crap.

Make up your mind, Steve. Shopgirl is damn good, but if you bookend it with Cheaper By the Dozen and The Pink Panther, you're going to disappoint everyone. I urge you to follow Bill Murray's example, put your money where your mouth is. Or in 20 years you're going to be sitting in the back seat of a car with Rod Steiger's corpse blubbering "I coulda been a contendah!" IMDb.com

Show Business: The Road to Broadway (2007) Compared to the movies, they don’t make a lot of documentaries about Broadway. This is one of the better ones. The conclusion you have to reach at the end is quite simple. Theater on Broadway could be immeasurably improved by lining about a dozen people up against a wall in Shubert Alley and shooting them. I’m referring to the theater critics, of course, mostly New York critics, who used to be able to kill a show after one performance, but now can kill it while it’s still in tryouts. Why do people listen to these assholes? Not even Roger Ebert, surely the most powerful movie reviewer in America, can kill a movie with one bad review, and in fact, a lot of bad movies with bad reviews still make a lot of money. I don’t know if that’s all a good thing, but it is good in the sense that people don’t really listen to movie critics like they seem to listen to this small group of buttheads, who we see here smugly sitting around a table and dissecting with their rapier wit the work of their betters.

If you are a theater lover, like I am, try The Season, by William Goldman, absolutely essential reading. For one year, in 1968, he attended every show that opened on Broadway, and a lot of off-Broadway plays. Then he wrote what is still, almost 40 years later, the best book about it I’ve ever seen. (A copy of it can be seen in this movie, sitting on someone’s desk, second book from the top.) (He’s also in the movie, but not long enough.) Basically things have gone from bad to worse, but still the “fabulous invalid” lives on. A million or two spent on a major musical used to be big money. Now a big one will cost up to $15 million, and has a much smaller shot at making its money back than a Hollywood blockbuster. What an insane crapshoot! Why do they do it? Because they love it, and because it is the most exciting thing in show business.

This movie follows four musicals that opened in 2004. We see them in rehearsals, being reviewed, closing, right on to that make-or-break night: The Tony Awards. They are:

Wicked. This is the big, expensive one, at $14 million dollars. (Coincidentally, we had just seen one of the co-stars, Idina Menzel, in Enchanted the very day we watched this.) “Overproduced,” one critic intones. I haven’t seen it, though it’s been playing just down the street from us at the Pantages for almost a year now. All I can tell you is I like the music, and “overproduced” is a pretty stupid word. We didn’t come to this seeking Tennessee Williams, did we? We didn’t pay $100 and up—these days, maybe way up—for a sensitive little one-set three-character piece, did we? Critics are idiots.

Taboo. It was a hit in London, and Rosie O’Donnell loved it and spent $10 million of her own money to bring it to Broadway. And that was it’s biggest problem, it seems. Broadway is as celebrity-gossip driven as Hollywood, and Rosie is controversial, so before it even opened the catty claws were out, savaging her as much as the play. Now, I’ll confess, this is the story of the life of Boy George, and there are few people I could be less interested in. I doubt I’d have bought a ticket. But a show should rise or fall on its merits, not the antics of its producer.

Caroline, or Change. Hate the title, loved what I saw of the singing of the star, Tonya Pinkins. This is an attempt at a “small” musical, with unglamorous settings. I have no problem with that: I loved A Chorus Line, along with everyone else, which is most bare stage, and years ago I saw Serafina! on Broadway, whose sets were mostly chain-link fences and barbed wire. This is by Tony Kushner, who is most famous for Angels in America. I only saw the HBO version, and was not wild about it, except for the pleasure of seeing Roy Cohn dying in agony from AIDS. Here we have the story of Tony growing up in Louisiana, with a mostly black cast. I’d have given it a try.

Avenue Q. You can’t help rooting for these guys, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx. Nobody told them you couldn’t just show up in New York with a show consisting of Sesame Street-like puppets with visible operators and a lot of catchy, witty tunes, and take Broadway by storm, so they just did it. They began off-Broadway, then moved to the big time, and next thing you know they were a smash and in contention for the Tony. This was budget Broadway, and they were up against Wicked and Taboo (which, it turns out, didn’t even get nominated), multi-million-dollar extravaganzas. Nobody figured they had a chance. “Where is their audience?” the round-table critics sneered. “Sesame Street kids, all grown up now?” I hope all those asshole bet large on Wicked, because come Tony night they opened the envelope, and the winnah is …

Avenue Q, in what everyone called the biggest upset in Tony history. I haven’t seen it, more’s the pity, but all you have to do is see a few of the clips, available on YouTube, of songs like “If You Were Gay,” and “The Internet is for Porn,” and you can’t help feeling the Tony voters were just endorsing something that was different, off-the-wall, and sheer fun. Caroline, or Change was dead serious, maybe too serious, Wicked was your standard Broadway fare, Taboo was a vanity project by and about Boy George, and The Boy From Oz (the other nominee) was a vanity project by and about Peter Allen. How could you not vote for Q?

There is a short sequence here that quickly covers the other shows that opened—and all too often, closed after only a few performances, or even during previews. It’s scary. Sure, some of them probably sucked, but I can’t believe that many of them did. And it’s heartbreaking, in a way that a movie bombing just is not. You make a movie, you move on to the next one, whether you are cast or crew.