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© 2004-2010 by John Varley; all rights reserved

The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) (France, 1953) Sorcerer (1977) We just saw the former film, me for the second time, Lee for the first. It's been some years since I saw the latter, but I've seen it at least three times, so I remember it well. It struck me that it might be useful to review them both, to compare and contrast. For convenience, I will refer to one as W and the other as S.

William Friedkin's original intent when he remade the classic W was to keep the title. Changing it, and changing it to what he changed it to, was the stupidest decision he ever made (see my review of Les Diaboliques). And believe me, he got lucky, because he had tried to make some other bad ones. His first choice of star was Steve McQueen, who I loved in some parts, but would have been all wrong for this. (McQueen demanded a part be written in for Ali MacGraw, which would have been utter disaster; luckily, Friedkin realized this, too.) Then he went after Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson. Wrong, wrong, wrong, Bill! So he cast Roy Scheider, who was perfect ... and what did he have to say about that? Worst casting decision he ever made, he opined. Why? Because Scheider is only a "second or third banana, he's not a star." I guess the miracle is that this shithead ever made any good films ... which he has, but not since 1985's To Live and Die in L.A. (He recently made the perfectly awful The Hunted.)

W: The weakest part of the film is the first half hour or so. It establishes the characters, but takes a lot of fairly boring screen time to do so. Vera Clouzot takes what would have been the Ali MacGraw part, and she's not really needed. Sorry, she's just the love interest, she's clichéd, she overacts. But I guess the great romantic Yves Montand needs somebody to adore his chest beneath his torn shirt, and the kerchief he keeps tied around his neck, and the stub of cigarette in the corner of his mouth (so French, so tres French!) that keeps him squinting most of the time, like Belmondo in Breathless. I'm not complaining; this it all great stuff.

S: Friedkin realized this movie didn't need a female any more than The Great Escape did. It's a pure action film, and while I love to see women in action films, there are times when you realize they were simply shoehorned in, and this is one of them. Friedkin also realized it made more sense to show these desperate men before they arrived in this asshole of the known planet, who they were before, what they did to get themselves there. So he gives us four vignettes at the beginning. Originally, they were meant to be interspersed through the story as flashbacks, but I think this works better.

Friedkin does a better job of portraying just how low, just how desperate these men have become. I myself would have leaped at the chance to drive a truck full of leaky dynamite (S) or nitroglycerin (W) to escape this place. What's the worst that could happen? You get blown sky-high. Big deal, you'd never know it.

It turns out that the journey is much worse, of course, to the point that I might have hit a pothole just to get the suffering over. Once the trucks get moving, the movies are about equal in building unbearable suspense for a while. (Though S outdoes W in the process of making these trucks seem actual living beings, menacing and terrible, one of them being named Sorcerer ... though we see the name in only one shot. Some time is spent preparing the trucks, adapting them, making sure everything works. They are ugly, and superb.) Each movie has a vertigo-inducing scene with the road collapsing beneath the tires.

In W the road is blocked by a rock. In S, it's a huge fallen tree. In both, the man who knows about explosives uses some of the nitro they're carrying to blow up the obstacle. I'd call these sequences a draw, in cinematic terms. Both are very, very tense.

Then S considerably raises the bar with one of the most spine-tingling suspense scenes I've ever witnessed: the famous crossing of the rotten wood-and-rope suspension bridge over a raging river in a howling storm. The good old IMDb informs me that the bridge cost a million dollars to build in the Dominican Republic ... and then the river beneath it dried up, and the whole thing had to be moved to Mexico, at a cost of another million. And then that river started to dry up ... Helicopters provided the wind, and huge rain machines provided the water. The bridge was a marvel of engineering with many safety devices, but trucks fell in the water five times. It took three months to film. It sounds as grueling as Fitzcarraldo, maybe even more.

S gets a bit over the top near the end, with hallucinations and stuff that I didn't think fit in that well. W wins that part of the contest. But in the very end, W goes for ironic, foolish tragedy, where S's tragic ending grows honestly from the story.

One area where S wins hands down is in the music, by Tangerine Dream. It is relentless and pulse-pounding, and enhances every scene where it is used.

All in all, I can't think of an instance where a re-make has held its own so well. In my capacity of all-knowing God of the Cinema, I'm going to call it a draw. But I do know that, if I decide to see one of them again, it will be Sorcerer. IMDb.com

Waiting For Guffman (1996) One of Chris Guest’s little gems, this time about amateur theatrics in a small town. He manages to tread the careful line, sometimes lampooning their pretensions and still managing to make us like them. IMDb.com

Waitress (2007) I guess everyone knows the sad story of this little film by now. The writer-director, Adrienne Shelley, was brutally murdered by a piece of human garbage, Diego Pillco, when she complained he was making too much noise in an adjoining apartment. Diego’s explanation? He was having “a bad day.” May he never have another good one. As of now he’s awaiting trial, and should never be a free man again, but you never know about New York juries. Los Angeles juries let celebrities walk, but in New York it’s the poor folks who it’s hard to convict. The murder happened just days before she would have learned that her little labor of love had been accepted at Sundance.

I wanted to put all that out of my mind and simply view it as a movie, but it’s impossible. I didn’t want to give Shelley any sympathy points as an artist … and I don’t think I did. My verdict: She would have had a bright future as a writer-director-actress. Another Kubrick or Scorsese? Probably not, but you never know. She should have had plenty of time to develop. She had two full-length directing credits before this one, and I haven’t seen either of them. What she showed me here in her writing was a great imagination, a great feel for character. There is a business with the making of pies that is just delightful. As a director, she knew how to place the camera, knew how to edit for best effect, and had a wonderful sense of composition and color. It reminded me, a little, of another waitress, Amélie Poulain, though of course she didn’t have the budget Jean-Pierre Jeunet was working with. In short, this is a delightful little film. It has a few rough edges, but I enjoyed every minute of it. IMDb.com

Walk, Don’t Run (1966) We had just seen The More the Merrier, and thought it would be fun to see this one, which is a remake, 23 years later. And it was! There is a housing shortage in wartime Washington/Tokyo during the Olympics. Charles Coburn/Cary Grant inveigles Jean Arthur/Samantha Eggar into subletting her apartment. Later, Coburn/Grant sublets his part to Joel McCrea/Jim Hutton. Hilarious romantic complications ensue, culminating in marriage.

This is one of those rare times when a remake works very well. Which is the better film? I’d have to say the earlier one has the edge, though that’s not to knock this one. Jim Hutton is not as interesting as Joel McCrea. Cary Grant plays it quite differently from Charles Coburn, and rightly so. Coburn was a jolly fat man, and Cary Grant was … well, Cary Grant. Samantha Eggar is no Jean Arthur … but she doesn’t have anything to be ashamed of; nobody could equal Jean Arthur.

There are nice bits of business in both movies. Both use a gag about vanishing pants that is very funny. Jim Hutton is an Olympic athlete, but every time someone asks him what his event is, he deftly changes the subject. That’s because he’s competing in the most silly-looking Olympic event there is, except maybe the triple jump: the 50K walk. There’s just no way to look dignified or even athletic in that crazy gait walkers use, though you’d better be quite the athlete if you intend to do it for 50K! While making coffee or showering, Cary Grant whistles the themes from two of his previous movies, Charade and An Affair to Remember. And he is willing to spoof himself. Several references are made to how old he is. He looks in the mirror and worries about the hint of a turkey neck. (He was 61, and looks amazingly good, and in several sequences proves himself about 1000% more spry than I am today at the same age.) He’s done this sort of thing before, as in His Girl Friday, when he says at one point, “The last man that messed with me was Archie Leach ...” Archibald Leach was Cary Grant’s real name.

Sadly, this was Grant’s last film. At least, I think it’s sad. He felt he was too old for romantic leads, and decided to get out, unlike some present-day actors I could name who insist on playing opposite actresses 40 years younger than themselves. Still, there was Paul Newman, who worked right up to the end of his life. He didn’t go into supporting roles so much as find roles more suited to an older man. Could Grant have done that? I’m not sure. Paul Newman was a great actor, and Cary Grant was … Cary Grant. He could play Cary Grant to perfection, but that was pretty much it. (He said of that, “I've often been accused by critics of being myself on-screen. But being oneself is more difficult than you'd suppose.” He also said, “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”) To be sure, playing Cary Grant was enough, more than enough, but I wonder if he could have shifted to old man roles. Well, whatever. He didn’t want to, and that’s that.

There is one scene, early on, that’s a little hard to buy. Grant comes to Eggar’s door, asking to rent the spare room. She says she would prefer a women. Now, does that sound real, ladies? Ask yourself, if Cary Grant was standing in your doorway, would you slam the door? I think not. The only woman I can think of who wouldn’t be interested is a lesbian … and I think even some lesbians would think it over. There never has been, and probably never will be, a male romantic lead like Cary Grant.

There are few people who have ever lived who had the charisma of Cary Grant. I have a small personal experience of that charisma.

When I was working at MGM we were having lunch in the commissary one day. There are two rooms in the commissary, a large one for technical people and extras, and a smaller one for executives and stars … and the occasional writer, like myself. I was with David Begelman, Freddie Fields, Doug Trumbull, and John Foreman, men who had worked around big stars all their lives. The tables around me were filled with similar people, producers and stars. Suddenly a buzz went around the room. It’s Cary Grant! Cary Grant is here! And all at once these powerful men, men impossible to impress, were as atwitter as the most starstruck fan standing outside the ropes at a big premiere. They didn’t jostle or shout, of course, but you could feel it, as he entered the room and passed quickly through, smiling, shaking a few hands. The man hadn’t made a film in twenty years, but he still had more star power than any dozen men on the lot. That was Cary Grant.

There are two supporting roles worth mentioning. Miiko Taka plays Samantha Eggar’s best friend, Aiko. She speaks very good English, probably because she was born in Seattle. She starred in Sayonara as Marlon Brando’s romantic interest. And watch for George Takei as a cop in the police station. IMDb.com

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) First feature At the Drive In with American Gangster. IMDb.com

Walk the Line (2005) This was pretty much what I expected it to be. A biopic, and even more a biopic about a contemporary musician, always seems to have the same story line. Comes from nowhere, early struggles, success, bigger success, crisis and downfall (usually from booze and/or drugs), triumphant return. There are exceptions, like The Doors, but if they ever do Jimi or Janis, that one will begin to seem like a cliché, too.

Like Sam Goldwyn said, "What we need are some new clichés."

That doesn't mean it's a bad film, far from it. It was bold to have the two leads do their own singing, but we're not talking Streisand or Pavarotti here. Country rock is not like that; plenty of people without notably talented voices have made it big, and rightly so. Johnny Cash's voice was deep and gravely and sometimes had only a nodding acquaintance with where the notes should be, but he made up for it in passion and songwriting ability. He started at a time when genres were not quite as stultifying as they have become, and so could be a rocker or a country boy, as he chose. He could spot talent, and knew Bob Dylan was a genius before a lot of other people did, and didn't care when he went electric. His cover of "It Ain't Me, Babe" is one of my favorites. Joaquin Phoenix doesn't particularly look like Johnny Cash, but he does something with his mouth when he sings that somehow makes him the spittin' image. And what can I say about Reese Witherspoon? I've been madly in love with her since her first role in The Man in the Moon (strictly platonic, of course; she was 14), and she just keeps getting better and better. She has done very well in stuff like The Importance of Being Earnest and Vanity Fair. I even liked her in movies I didn't like, such as the Legally Blonde ones. I haven't seen all the Oscar-nominated performances yet, but no matter how good the others were, her win certainly couldn't be a travesty, like Braveheart taking Best Picture.

Oh, yeah, I have to add ... I was squirming at the end, when Johnny proposed to June live onstage, and I was hoping it was some screenwriter's invention. It wasn't. None of my business, of course, but that was a pretty tasteless thing to do, John. IMDb.com

WALL●E (2008) What can I say? This is currently getting an astronomical 93% at Metacritic (lowest score: 70), 97% at Rotten Tomatoes. There are essentially no dissenting voices. And everything they say is true. It’s an awesome movie, and one that will make you feel good instead of just a bit exhausted. The story is simple enough. WALL●E is a trash compactor, still functioning at the task of cleaning up the Himalayas of trash that forced humans to abandon Earth for a giant space colony 800 or so years ago. He collects odd treasures, like an old videotape of Hello Dolly, which shows a lonely robot what it might be like to love, and to dance, with the musical numbers “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment.” This part of the movie is essentially silent, though rich in sounds. No dialogue.

A ship from the colony pays a visit, looking for life. If it finds life, the humans can come back. WALL●E falls in robotic love with the new, high-tech probe robot, EVE, and follows her back to the colony, where adventures ensue. Humans have devolved into amoebic blobs, the ultimate couch potatoes whose couches float from place to place, endlessly consuming, endlessly watching 3D screens that hover in front of them. This stuff is very funny. No more plot points are necessary here. See it and enjoy it for yourself. This movie is so dense with flabbergasting detail that I know I’ll want to see it many times, because you’ll see more on each viewing.

My review of Ratatouille turned out to be essentially a review of Pixar Studios, so I made sure to actually say something about this movie. But again, in my mind the big story is still Pixar. Has any studio, ever, had such a string of mega-hits, without a single stinker? Without even a single mediocre movie? (Maybe Walt Disney in his prime.) And not just hits—because I’ve seen some “hits” that really stunk up the theater, that would appeal only to fanboys and troglodytes (as if there was a difference)—but real stories that move and affect you, that are really worth your time. That they will be visually stunning is a given; any fool with a computer can now produce snazzy visuals, although Pixar is still the leader in CGI design. But so many of them are just sound and fury and no soul, just jokes and frenetic action. There is action aplenty in any Pixar film, but it all flows from the story. The story! John Lasseter has said that, over and over. Don’t even start until you have nailed the story. And they have always done so. They have never produced a sequel simply because the first one made money; first you must have a story to justify it. (And Toy Story 2 was wonderful, and I have no doubt at all that Toy Story 3, scheduled for 2010, will also be wonderful.)

A lot of critics have pointed out that WALL●E was quite a risk, in that the first half is a silent movie. (The creators studied the great silent comics, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and it shows!) Would kids dig it? I don’t know if the verdict is in on that, but to my mind, it would take a really stupid kid not to love it. … on the other hand, we are raising a lot of kids with 2-second attention spans, who aren’t happy unless something blows up every three seconds. We’ll see. What I’m really waiting to see is the next Pixar film, due next summer, which sounds like a really risky one. It’s called Up, and concerns the adventures of a 78-year-old man and an 8-year-old boy. Will kids watch a movie about an old fart? I know I will. Oh, by the way, after WALL●E, all the new Pixar films will be in 3D! I can hardly wait! IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) I’d heard about Wallace and Gromit for a long time, but never seen one of their shorts. This is the first feature-length, and there will probably be more, given the stellar reviews for this one. I admire the devotion of these people who have stayed with stop-motion in an age of CGI, but I can’t say I understand it. The process takes a degree of patience that is almost incomprehensible to me. And they did cheat quite a few CGI effects in, but why not? I don’t know how you’d do fog in stop-motion.

Wallace is a goofy but nice inventor. He has a million gadgets, many of which work as advertised. When they go wrong, the disaster usually seems to be sorted out by Gromit, his sidekick dog, who doesn’t speak, and is a lot smarter. The humor is fairly broad, with a sly zinger tossed in now and then. I quite enjoyed this, but can’t think of a lot more to say about it. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Just Like Heaven (2005) Romantic ghost comedies have been a Hollywood staple since at least the 1930s. I tend to like them, if there is good writing and acting, and there is both in this. Sure, they’re corny, but so what? This one doesn’t rise to the level of Ghost, it doesn’t take itself quite that seriously and doesn’t have Whoopi Goldberg to lighten things up when it threatens to bog down. But we both had fun. IMDb.com

Walt: The Man Behind the Myth (2001) This documentary delivers. That is, it tells me some things I didn’t know. Unless you’ve read a biography of Walt Disney, it will probably do the same for you. I didn’t know that Walt and Roy’s father was killed by a gas leak in a house the sons had bought for their parents. That must have been devastating. I didn’t know his second daughter was adopted. There are a lot of nuggets like that, and I suspect that Walt and his family’s life was photographically documented better than just about anyone of his generation. There was always a movie camera around. We see a lot of this footage, and Walt is a touchy-huggy sort of guy, always smooching his wife.

You don’t expect a lot of controversy in a film produced by WED Enterprises, and there isn’t, but nothing seems to have been omitted. The fact is, the family was a solid one, there has never been a whiff of anything nasty about any of them that I’ve ever heard of. Everybody (and just about all the living people who worked with him are interviewed here) seems to agree that he was an ordinary, decent man, nothing special … until suddenly that spark of genius would just knock you over. He was a hard taskmaster at work, and I got no problem with that. I look at the results. Time and again he took some idea that everyone else thought was cock-eyed, impractical, and sure to lose a ton of money, and turned it into a gold mine. I really wish he could have lived to finish EPCOT, which was going to be an actual planned town where people lived and worked, and is dazzling in its conception. If it were built today, it would still be decades ahead of its time. The EPCOT that was built is nice (so they say; I’ve never been there) but is really just a permanent world’s fair.

I particularly enjoyed one segment with Chuck Jones, probably the best cartoon animator who ever lived. He worked at Disney for a short time, and when Walt asked him why he was quitting, he said “There’s only one job here that’s worth having, and that’s yours.” Walt thought about it, and said “You’re right. And the position is filled.” IMDb.com

Waltz With Bashir (Vals Im Bashir) (2008) Here’s a movie that was one of the major upsets of the 2009 Oscar ceremonies. It was considered a shoo-in to win for Best Foreign Film, but it lost out to a Japanese entry. I wonder why? Possibly the stodgy old Academy members just couldn’t get behind an animated movie as Best Foreign Film. Or possibly, since it is an Israeli film that doesn’t depict Israel in a good light, the large number of Jews in the Academy didn’t go for it. Which would be odd, as it has been generally lauded in Israel; most of the criticism it got objected that it went too easy on the Israeli Army and its leaders who, during the war in Lebanon and the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, looked the other way as “Christian” Phalangists slaughtered whole families, mostly women and children.

It wasn’t on the ballot for Best Animated Feature, and what would have been the point, anyway? WALL-E had a lock on that. I haven’t seen the Japanese film that won, but I’ll tell you something: Waltz With Bashir was not only the best Foreign film of the year, I think it may very well be the best film of 2008, period. Better than Slumdog Millionaire, better than WALL-E, both films I loved madly. I say this not because I believe it is a perfect movie—it is sometimes a little slow, and I agree with some critics that it may not have brought its central message home as powerfully as it might have, nor with the focus it should have had. But these are very minor carps. What this movie does is so rare it is almost beyond price: It shows you something you’ve never seen before. An animated movie about war? (Let’s banish that word “cartoon” completely for this movie.) You’ve got to be kidding. And it’s basically a documentary, as well, another genre that wouldn’t seem to agree well with the animator’s pen. But the animation format allows the director to do things he could not have done with live action … or at least could not have afforded, even with a much larger budget than he had. This film is ravishingly beautiful, even as it is horrific. The colors are amazing. He often uses only one or two colors in a scene, and the effect is electrifying.

What happens, briefly: The director, Ari Folman, was a young man in the Army during the First Lebanon War. He knows he was near the massacre at the Palestinian camps, but he can’t recall what he did. He sets out on a voyage of discovery, visiting old friends he hasn’t seen in years, finding out what they remember. (These are all real people, who were filmed as they testified, and then drawn in a graphic novel style. No rotoscoping in this movie! the head animator emphasizes.) Then their experiences are shown, in both realistic and dream-like fashion. How much is true? How much is memory to be relied on? This incident was the first time the Israeli Army was seen by even the Western powers as something less than admirable, and Israelis are ashamed of it. It was condemned as genocide by the United Nations. (Which, to me, it clearly was not. Massacre, yes. Atrocity, yes. Genocide, no. And what do we make of the fact that the Christian Phalangists, who did the actual killing, were never accused of genocide, nor even condemned very harshly?)

That’s all I really care to say about all that. I prefer to see the movie as an exquisite work of art, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. A warning: Some scenes are hard to watch, but it would be  wrong of you to look away from them. “Never Again” is a saying that applies to more than just the Holocaust. IMDb.com

Wanted (2008) Second feature At the Drive In with Hellboy II: The Golden Army. IMDb.com

The War (2007) Each of the seven episodes of this Ken Burns documentary begins with these words:

The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting. This is the story of four American towns and how their citizens experienced that war.

How are you going to tackle something with the scope and breadth, sacrifices and bravery and sheer horror of World War Two? It dwarfs Burns’ other great topic, the Civil War. Fifty million people died, the great majority of them civilians. All the major countries of the world were involved, except those in South America. Fighting ranged from the Aleutians to New Zealand, from Pearl Harbor to Stalingrad, from Norway to Burma. How do you deal with that?

One way is to try to tell the whole political, strategic, and tactical story … but it’s been done, many times. Time-Life brought out a terrific, massively illustrated 39-volume series of books. The BBC’s brilliant 26-hour “The World at War,” narrated by Laurence Olivier, covered just about everything there was to cover, brilliantly, and unlike most American projects, moved American participation off to the side, where it belonged, and told me much I hadn’t known about Britain’s war, and most of all, the Soviet war.

I am no historian, but I am a history buff, and I know quite a lot about WWII. I expected no surprises concerning the major events, and I got none. I knew that when a unit was sent from Italy to the Ardennes Forest for a little rest and relaxation, they found anything but R&R. I knew that when the marines landed at Okinawa and met no resistance, they were wrong to think this one was going to be easier than Iwo Jima and Tarawa. I knew that when the cruiser Indianapolis was sent to San Francisco in the early summer of 1945 for refitting (and to take on the Little Boy atomic bomb for delivery to Tinian, something few of them knew), that the war was not over for these poor sailors, who soon would find themselves sunk, and swimming with sharks for five days.

What Ken Burns has done here is to make the war deeply personal. And, without apology, almost strictly American. He wants to show us what it was like to be an American at that time. It is fitting that he should do so. Let a Brit make such a series about the British experience, and a Russian about the ghastly Eastern Front. Let a German make such series about what it was like for the average German, and ditto a Japanese. (I had to stop myself from writing “Jap,” as all the papers did in those days. I am still steamed at what those murdering fucks did, and how little their leaders suffered for it.) I’d watch any of those series eagerly.

This series concentrates on four American towns: Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. (Well, actually, Luverne, Minnesota, but it might as well be Lake Wobegon.) West, South, East, and Heartland. It concentrates on a few dozen men and women who are amazingly articulate about their experiences. Men from all four towns died at Okinawa, and on Omaha Beach. The soldiers speak frankly, some for the very first time, about how totally terrified they were, all the time. This is no John Wayne propaganda machine.

As usual in a Ken Burns project, it is stunningly beautiful to look at. Even the scenes of combat take on a stark beauty. Only the images of the dead—and there are many, and they are quite gruesome—fail to enchant, which is as it should be. Burns has chosen carefully from the millions of images available, and has mostly avoided the stock shots that any history buff has seen a thousand times. He has unearthed a lot of stuff that may not have been seen since 1945, including a really amazing amount of color film that looks very, very good, considering its age. Most WWII films are almost totally black and white; I had no idea there were so many combat photographers shooting Kodachrome back then. And by the way, kudos to the combat photographer, who put his life on the line as sure as did the combat soldier, so the folks at home could understand, in some small way, just what their boys were going through.

Some critics complained that little or nothing was said about things like the war in Burma, the resistance in France and Holland, the Battle of Britain, and most of all, the epic suffering and determination of the Russian people. I had no problem with it. The idea here was not to tell the story of the whole war—which is impossible—but of some of the people who fought in it. Some of their stories will move you to tears. Some of them will probably move you to rage. Listen to the man who walked into one of the death camps, or the 12-year-old girl from Sacramento who was interned by barbarous Japanese in Manila. If you don’t weep, there’s something wrong with you.

The bad is shown along with the good. “Colored” troops were sometimes attacked by their fellow soldiers. Black shipyard workers in Mobile and other “American” towns were set upon by white workers, beaten, even lynched. Returning black soldiers who fought for their country were once more herded to the back of the bus by sub-humans who stayed at home.

American citizens were thrown into concentration camps by none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt … and then drafted to fight in Europe. And these nisei Japanese were eager to fight, to prove themselves. I must say, I wouldn’t have been that patriotic. If my government had thrown my family into concentration camps and then asked me to fight, I’d have told them to go take a flying fuck, served my prison term, and then devoted my life to the destruction of America in any way I could. Sorry, that’s just how I feel. Maybe that makes those nisei better people than me; I don’t know. My hat is off to them.

But I do know that the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, all nisei, was the most decorated outfit in the history of the US Army for two reasons: One, they were incredibly brave and had something to prove; and, two, their commanding general hated Japs, and threw them into the worst situations he could find. For which he is currently burning in Hell, right alongside Tojo and Hirohito and Hitler.

The 442nd was the most decorated outfit in spite of the fact that people like Daniel Inouye were given the Distinguished Service Cross for deeds that would have earned white Audie Murphy five Medals of Honor. (President Clinton acknowledged that by upgrading his medal 55 years later. Good on ya, Bill.) A few years ago it was my privilege to shake the hand of a veteran of the 442nd, at their war memorial in the remains of Little Tokyo. I thanked him for his service. It was the least I could do.

I get a weird sense of déjà vu when watching things about The War. I feel a part of it, somehow, though I wasn’t born until two years after it was over. I know the stories, I know the music, I know the photographs, though I’m not in them. I think it’s a kinship I feel, and sort of a longing. I’m not foolish enough to wish that I’d been there so I could fight, but don’t you sometimes wish you could be part of something so large, so determined, so dedicated? I suppose there are places to find such causes, but I have been unable to identify with any of them. With The War, you had no choice. There it was, impossible to ignore; now, what are you going to about it? Tom Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation,” and I have no problem with that. What they did was, they stood up, they did what had to be done, terrible as it was. It marked them all. They are dying now at the rate of 1000 per day, and pretty much all of them remember The War in good and bad ways as the most significant event of their lives.

My generation … did we stand up? Well, some of us stood up against our own war, which we saw (and I still see) as a gigantic mistake, not something that had to be fought. But it was a puny thing compared to what our parents were asked to do, and did. As for later generations … they have never had to face a challenge of any kind. Nothing. Would they stand up? I don’t know.

I don’t anticipate that there will ever be another war like World War Two. The world has been lousy with wars since then, but they have all been confined (from our point of view) to some foreign shithole. Our soldiers have done what was asked of them, bravely (and in most cases, I believe, in sheer futility), but they are a tiny fraction of us. We on the home front have had to sacrifice absolutely nothing since 1945. We won’t be asked to sacrifice anything if another world war comes along, either. We won’t have any choice. It will be over in hours, and the world will be nothing like it was before. There will be no home to return to. Other than that, we seem doomed to fight these smaller conflicts. Do you realize that the war in Afghanistan has already gone on twice as long as American participation in World War Two? And there is no end in sight.

My grandparents went to war to end war. Didn’t work. My parents went to war to stop a great evil, and, I think, also with the thought that they could end war. Didn’t work. Within five years we were at war again. My generation intended to put an end to war. Didn’t happen. Now we seem doomed to perpetual war, like in the book 1984. And in spite of smart bombs and other high-tech weapons, it’s still as bloody awful as it ever was, and it’s still the civilians on the battle fronts who suffer most. IMDb.com

War of the Worlds (2005) First, the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense ... but when did it ever? I mean, going back to the original story? Alien creatures invade, whip the pants off us, and then die from our teeny little germs. This element remained in the radio play, in the first movie, and in this remake. This one attempts to inject a little “logic” into it, showing the alien machines sucking our blood, using our bodies as fertilizer to grow some icky stuff ... I wasn’t very clear, but it was nasty, as you’d expect from bad aliens. It wasn’t really needed, except to inject a bit more gore. Also, instead of coming from Mars (done recently, and badly, in Mars Attacks!), these invaders come from some undefined place, which is okay, but seem to have buried their death machines millions of years ago. So ... why now? Better to just show up, that way all we need to know about them is they like to kill and destroy.

But having said that ... I liked this a lot. Watching it, I became aware of how goddam sick and tired I am getting of action pictures that defy the laws of physics, and of action heroes whose bodies defy the dictates of physiology. The Kung-Fu epic where people fly. The guy who outruns an explosion that’s following him at 1000 miles per hour. The action hero who absorbs blows that would decapitate an elephant. The falling man who reaches out and grabs a rope, never mind that he’s moving at 80 miles per hour and it would pull his fingers right off. The car that flies, the plane that performs stunts that would tear off the wings.

Neither Tom Cruise nor anyone else in this movie performs gravity-defying stunts. (He has an amazing amount of sheer luck, but that’s different. Somebody survives a holocaust like this, and naturally it is the man whose story we choose to follow.) He spends all of the movie running and hiding and scared shitless, just like you and I would. At first he is stunned almost catatonic, and is close to sheer panic. He never leaps from a five-story building and survives, he never jumps a car 500 feet into the air. Every special effect we see is logical, given the powerful nature of the aliens, and as real as if it was actually filmed. There are awesome moments and tense moments.

I want to say a word to Roger Ebert, who seems to like almost everything lately ... and then inexplicably gets into a hissy fit about something he really ought to like. He said he didn’t believe the tripods, because a tripod is unstable. Hel-looo! Roger! Anybody home? A tripod is the only stable platform. Look at an easel. Just ask a photographer, or a Pierson’s Puppeteer (a Larry Niven creation which these aliens resemble). A four-legged device will always have one short leg, and will instantly form ... a tripod! It’s a bipod that is unstable. If you don’t prop it up on one side or the other (thus forming ... a tripod!) it will immediately fall over. These aliens were tripodal, and would naturally build machines in their own image. IMDb.com

Washington Heights (2002) A fairly average story of a man trying to break out of his origins in a predominately Dominican neighborhood in Manhattan. He’s a cartoonist, his dad owns a bodega that’s in debt. Dad get shot and paralyzed and the son must take over the business. I enjoyed it, it’s well acted and photographed. For a first-time director, not a bad effort at all. IMDb.com

Water (Canada/India, 2005) I hate fundamentalists of any religion, but Hinduism is particularly foul. There seems to be little of love in the Hindu pantheon, a collection of psychotics who would make a hyena queasy. One of the vilest traditions in the religion concerns widows, and even Muslim women fare better. You have three choices if your husband dies: Throw yourself on his funeral pyre, marry his younger brother (if he has one, if he’s willing) or live out your life in poverty, because you are a part of him, now and forever, amen, and must keep yourself chaste and penniless (unless you sell your body, because there’s nothing else society allows you to do) until you join him in death. This movie is set in 1938, when Gandhi was trying to reform some of this insanity, and concerns an 8-year-old widow (that’s not a typo: eight years old) who is sent by her family to an ashram to live out the rest of her life with the other widows, who are unclean. (Why, I don’t know, but don’t bother me, kid, it’s a tradition!) It is not a particularly insightful movie, and is rather slow, its whole purpose being to show this monstrosity—a good thing, for sure—but with a love story that seems tacked on. The most interesting things happened off camera, in what passes in India for the real world. The sets were burned by Hindu fundamentalists. Were they actually supporting this tradition, which still goes on in some cultural backwaters and, for all I know, in the big cities, too, or did they just not like the fact that it made their stupid religion look bad? For whatever reason, the government was going to shut down production, which had to be moved to Sri Lanka. That sound you hear is Gandhi weeping. IMDb.com

We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004) Two best friends are screwing each other’s wives. It was hard for me to figure which of these four people I disliked the most. I can’t find anything good to say about any of them, nor the story. IMDb.com

We Own the Night (2007) First feature at the drive-in with The Kingdom. IMDb.com

The Weather Underground (2002) One of the most depressing documentaries I’ve ever seen. Did I ever think these people were worthy of following? Well, not actually, I was never a radical activist, but I believe I mostly enjoyed it when these wackos lashed out at the government ... and just about everything else in sight. The Weathermen hijacked the Students for a Democratic Society in 1970, and proceeded down a well-worn path I’ve since seen all too often in my life, toward frothing fanaticism. They never killed anybody but each other, partly because of the deadly explosion in the town house in New York that sobered them up just enough to realize they didn’t really want to kill anybody, and partly from sheer dumb luck. And for smart people, they sure were dumb. We see the whole miserable history here, starting with the "Days of Rage" in Chicago, where they hoped for thousands of angry radicals and got about 150. They built a bonfire and smashed some windows. The government trembled.

The funny thing is, it did tremble, and promptly set out to smash the Weathermen, with or without laws to back them up.

They became the Weather Underground. They blew up things. In the late ‘70s most of them got tired of it and turned themselves in. And here we can see that they were not completely off the mark in their assessment of the government: for all the laws the WU broke, the government was able to prosecute very few charges against them, because just about all their evidence had been obtained illegally. Most of them walked.

We see them then and now. Two of the women say they regret nothing, they’d do it all again. Bernadine Dohrn doesn’t say much at all one way or the other about the past. Brian Flanagan regrets a lot, he often goes to the site of the town house, ruminating on his mistakes. Mark Rudd, fiery good-looking absolutely self-assured Mark Rudd, is a ruin of a man, a teacher at a small community college who seems to realize that everything the WU did played perfectly into the hands of Nixon’s thugs, and turned the American people against him and his causes to an extent that we’re still suffering from it. Poor Mark. Poor "revolution." Did they really think they could overturn the richest, most successful nation in history with a few sticks of dynamite? Yep. IMDb.com

For the last month the local drive-in has been infested with the absolute dregs of the summer, atrocities like Stealth and The Dukes of Hazzard. I sort of figured next in line would be Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo, but we got lucky instead. It was a Rachel McAdams film festival! .... Well, she’s young, hasn’t been working that long, so it was a small film festival. Only two films. But she shined in both of them:

FIRST FEATURE: Wedding Crashers (2005) This one might as well have had Wait For The Video! written right into the trailers. I was skeptical going in, and it won me over within five minutes. Early on, wondering why I was smiling so much, I realized that it had jumped right in and got my feet thumping and my eyes delighted. The music is very good.

These guys crash weddings, for the partying and free food and the sentimental babes ... but they also just flat out enjoy it. They have to, to fit in with no one asking embarrassing questions, but when they are tying balloon animals or dancing with grannies or little kids or just plain joining in the hilarity you can tell it’s sincere. Sure, they’re freeloading, and getting laid, but no one is being hurt, everybody’s having a ball. There is a wonderful, long montage of five different weddings of different ethnicities, and they fit right into all of them. Then it moves fairly smoothly into deeper stuff, their gradual realization that what they have really been seeking is family. That they can’t carry on like this all the time. It’s punched home with a hilarious meeting with the guy who taught them everything they know (Will Ferrell, uncredited) ... who is still living with his mom and now crashes funerals. Of course, like almost all movies like this, it ends with an excruciating and unbelievable scene where everything works out okay and the bad guy gets what’s coming to him ... but it’s a small price to pay for all the laughs I had. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Red Eye (2005) So Rachel McAdams can play the charming ingenue in the Wedding Crashers. In this one she gets her teeth into something completely different, and much more to my taste: a take-no-prisoners, no-nonsense businesswoman. She manages a swanky hotel in Miami and finds herself on a night flight from Dallas, heading home, sitting beside a man who says her father will be killed if she doesn’t make a phone call and switch the Secretary of Homeland Security from the 38th floor to the penthouse on the roof. Obviously it’s an assassination attempt. (By the way ... is this the kind of accommodations we rent for our “public servants” with our tax money? Sadly, I’m pretty sure it is. Far as I’m concerned, they can stay at Motel 6, like we do.)

People in movies usually do a string a dumb things. She doesn’t. She struggles with her situation, is foiled in several attempts, and then does almost everything right. She thinks on her feet (literally; as soon as she can, she ditches her useless high-heeled shoes so she can run!), never hesitates to become the aggressor when she can, and understands one of The Rules (I’m making a list of survival rules, which I may post here some day) that few people in movies seem to grasp: A car is a deadly weapon. She thinks! She acts! She uses what is at hand to great effect. She only makes two mistakes, which are minor. One: when you’ve just killed a man with a gun ... take the gun! Two: Never point a gun at a desperate man and tell him to freeze. Point, shoot, and keep shooting until the gun is empty. Other than that, I had no complaints at all about how she handles things. Do you know how incredibly rare that is in a thriller movie? The last one I can recall that came close was Cellular. See this one. IMDb.com

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) One thing leads to another. We watched Fitzcarraldo, and then the documentary about the making of it, Burden of Dreams, and this little 20-minute documentary was thrown in for free on the DVD. As a way of motivating Errol Morris to find a way to make his first feature film, Werner Herzog swore he'd eat his shoe if Morris could complete it. The result was Gates of Heaven ... and now we're going to have to watch that. (No problem; I've always wanted to, Morris is very good, having done The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.)

I'd already begun to like that brilliant madman, Herzog, and my respect for him only went higher as I watched this. He doesn't just eat his shoe in front of Errol Morris, he makes a big production out of his humiliation, actually enjoys the experience. He goes to Chez Panisse, the restaurant in Berkeley that invented "California cuisine." (I ate there once; it was very interesting and very good, but shoes weren't on the menu.) The genius behind the place, Alice Waters, helped him prepare the shoe with garlic and spices and stock and boil it for 5 hours. The result was ... well, it's still a shoe, isn't it? Tough as shoe leather, as they say. But Herzog cut it up and ate some of it on the stage of the UC Theater in front of an audience who seemed to enjoy it a lot. Naturally, there are short cuts from the most famous shoe-eating film ever (and there's a ton of them, right?), Chaplin's The Gold Rush, and a cute little song about a guy called Whiskey Shoes. This is a gem. IMDb.com

West Side Story (1961) Surely one of the top 5 musical movies ever made. (The others? Let’s see … Singin’ in the Rain, The Boy Friend, An American in Paris, Les parapluies de Cherbourg, Cabaret, 42nd Street, Top Hat, Across the Universe … oh, bother … I’ll never get it down to five.) It was one of the biggest selling soundtrack albums of all time. I played it so often I wore it out, and I can still sing every part of every song, even the ones without lyrics. I found a LaserDisc for $1, which is why I watched it again a few days ago.

So, does it stand the test of time? Musically, without a doubt. There is still nothing that even comes close in terms of musical sophistication. Not Sondheim, certainly not Lloyd Webber, much as I love Cats and Sweeney Todd. Rita Moreno has spoken of just how hard it was to dance to the fractured time signatures of Bernstein … and how rewarding. (Everybody can sing “America,” but did you know it was written in alternating bars of 6/8 and 3/4 time? Not what dancers are used to.)

There was a downside for the movie dancers, though. Jerome Robbins could not make up his mind, and he didn’t seem to know how to call CUT!! He rehearsed them for three months and then he kept changing everything and wasting tons of super-expensive 65mm film, until he got fired. (Luckily, he had completed most of the showstopper dance numbers: “Prologue,” “Cool,” and “America.” I don’t know who choreographed the other one, “Dance at the Gym.”) And the opening dance was actually performed on the city streets, on concrete, which was hell on the feet. A movie can be choreographed with steps, stunts, and jumps that are much too hard to performed night after night; miss a step, you can just cut and do it again. Almost every dancer was injured at one time or another during the production.

As for acting … it’s a bit dated. The whole situation is a bit dated, the “brutal” Sharks and Jets with their switchblades and zip guns having long been eclipsed by gangs with Uzis and Mac-10s, firing indiscriminately into each others’ turfs. Hell, these days kids glorify gangstas, listen to their horrid rap music, make them millionaires, and still these assholes kill each other. The list of dead rappers is almost as long as the list of live ones. But the story is strong, having been based on Romeo and Juliet … except Juliet dies, and Maria doesn’t.

We all know that the great Marnie Nixon dubbed Natalie Wood’s singing. But did you know that Richard Beymer’s singing was dubbed, too? His part was sung by Jimmy Bryant. Even the great Rita Moreno, a crackerjack singer, was dubbed for “A Boy Like That.” It was below her range, so Betty Wand sang that one. Rita sang the rest of her numbers herself, and won a well-deserved supporting Oscar. From the IMDb, a heartbreaking story:

When filming "The Taunting Scene," Rita Moreno was reduced to tears when she was harassed and nearly raped by the Jets, as it brought back memories of when she was raped as a child. When she started crying, the Jets immediately stopped and tried to comfort her, while pointing out that the audience was going to hate them for what they were doing.

And love her. God, did I ever hate them. Which was exactly what they wanted. And I’ll bet it was hard for the Jets, too.

And did we ever dodge a bullet. A bullet? Hell, lovers of musicals and of West Side Story in particular dodged a frickin’ howitzer! A plum part like Tony would obviously attract all the young stars in Hollywood, and a whole bunch of them auditioned, including Warren Beatty, Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, Burt Reynolds, Troy Donahue, and Richard Chamberlain. I can’t imagine any of them in the role, but that may be because the images from the film are so indelible in my head. Who knows? Maybe they would have been great. Bobby Darin was seriously considered. But do you know who was Robert Wise’s first choice for the role? (And why I question his sanity!) You won’t believe it: Elvis Presley. Oh! My! God! The dude could sing, it’s true, but was there ever more of an acting stiff? And the thought of him crooning “Maria” … it makes my skin crawl. (The Colonel said no. First time I’ve ever respected The Colonel.)

Both Audrey Hepburn and Suzanne Pleshette wanted the part of Maria. Suzanne as a Puerto Rican … ? Maybe. But Hepburn? Loved her, even in My Fair Lady (which should have gone to Julie Andrews, who could sing it) … but no, no, no. It might have been better with Carol Lawrence reprising her Broadway role as Maria, but she was deemed too old.

All in all, still one of the greats.

P.S. Did you know the original concept was Jews and Gentiles? Can you imagine it? Two gangs, the Yids and the Goys. Yids in their prayer shawls, black hats and suits, beards, and long sideburns, brandishing wickedly-sharpened 9-pointed menorahs. The Episcopalian WASP Goyim in their preppie white ducks and sweaters, wielding tennis rackets and riding crops. They battle it out among the Upper East Side penthouses to the music of Leonard Bernstein’s adaptations of Kingston Trio and Four Freshmen tunes and jazzed-up klezmer and mizrahi. With Barbra Streisand as Rachel, the JAP cantor’s daughter who falls in love with Pat Boone as Skip, the stockbroker’s son. IMDb.com

Whale Rider (New Zealand, 2002) I didn’t like this quite as much as some of the critics ... but don’t take that as a negative; I liked it quite a lot. And Keisha Castle-Hughes is about as good as it gets. IMDb.com

What Did You Do In the War, Daddy? (1966) Between 1941 and 1945 or ’46, most American males of a certain age were in one branch or another of what my dad always called “the service.” (He was in the Army Air Corps.) For just about all of them, it was the most intense experience of their lives to date, and for most of them, afterwards as well. And whether they were in the nightmare of combat or the endless boredom of the rear areas and stateside, they all shared things in common, that can be summed up as “typical army (or Navy) bullshit.” The expression SNAFU (situation normal; all fucked up) originated in these years.

When the boys came home, Hollywood made a lot of pictures for them. There were plenty of action war movies. I have always wondered who went to them: the veterans, many of whom had seen all the combat they’d ever want to see, or the 4Fs, the agricultural and war plant workers, the ones too old or too young to have served. (My dad got in late, and never saw combat … hooray!)

But the ones I have no doubt the veterans wanted to see were what we call “service comedies.” Sure, these guys knew these light-hearted japes were bullshit … and yet, in a way, they weren’t. They usually focused on the rear area, movies like Mister Roberts, Operation Petticoat, You’re in the Navy Now, and Don’t Go Near the Water. (For some reason, most of them I can easily recall were in the Navy. Even The Wackiest Ship in the Army was on a boat!) Cary Grant was in a lot of them, and Jack Lemmon, and Glen Ford. I did find some Army examples: I Was a Male War Bride, The Horizontal Lieutenant, Never Wave at a WAC, The Perfect Furlough. There was a sub-genre of musical service comedies. I think Gene Kelly was in most of them, in movies like Anchors Aweigh, On the Town, It’s Always Fair Weather, Thousands Cheer, and even in part of Invitation to the Dance. What was real about them was that they understood the bureaucracy of military life, and told amusing stories of how to get around it, which might even result in keeping you alive. Nobody had made movies like this before, comedies about war, so far as I know. I mean, I can find examples (Buster Keaton’s comic Civil War masterpiece, The General and Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms), but not a genre.

This movie was pretty much the last gasp of the straight service comedy. “War comedies” after this were largely much harder-edged. For the Korean War there was M*A*S*H. The only one I can think of for the war in Southeast Asia is Good Morning, Vietnam. There was a very hard-edged service comedy set in the Gulf War, Three Kings. And of course Stanley Kubrick made a sort of service comedy about World War III, Dr. Strangelove.

Okay, so what about this one? Not bad, I’d say, though of course it’s way beyond unlikely. Blake Edwards directed, James Coburn and Dick Shawn star. Shawn managed to portray an uptight by-the-book lieutenant for about ten minutes, after which he gets drunk and the fun begins. The plot involves … oh, who cares? It’s very silly, and mostly funny, and it has music by Henry Mancini. How bad could it be? IMDb.com

What tHe #$*! Dθ wΣ (k)πow!? (2004) May 13, 2005 VarleyYarn. IMDb.com

What's Cooking? (2000) This is a food movie, like several others we've seen and liked, that centers around family and cooking. Usually it's one particular culture that is explored in these things; this time it is wildly multi-cultural. I have to quote Roger Ebert here about the director, Gurinder Chadha: " ... an Indian woman of Punjabi ancestry and Kenyan roots, who grew up in London and is now married to Paul Mayeda Berges, a half-Japanese American. Doesn't it make you want to grin?" Yes, it does. Chadha made Bend It Like Beckham and the Bollywood extravaganza Bride and Prejudice, so she seemed to be committed to feel-good movies. That's okay, we like feel-good movies, if they're honest and don't try to cheat tears out of you.

It's also a Thanksgiving movie, a small genre that includes the wonderful Pieces of April and ... I can't think of any others at the moment. Maybe Lee will. Home For the Holidays, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Ice Storm, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I miss John Candy.

And it's very much an L.A. movie. In the last year we've come to know the city pretty well, the vast flat warm ethnic stew in the smog and, like Randy Newman, we love it. So how bad could it be?

Not bad at all. There are no real surprises, but a nice little revelation at the end which I won't spoil for you. Premise is as simple as can be: Four families gathering for Thanksgiving, very different and very much the same. Old Americans, new Americans, brown and yellow black and white, as we used to sing in Sunday school (only I think for brown we sang red). Hispanic, Vietnamese, African-American, and Jewish. We see the stories being set up. Jewish daughter is a lesbian and has brought her girlfriend with her. Alfre Woodard has caught her husband cheating and is disrespected in her own kitchen by grandma. Vietnamese house is divided by old customs and new ways. (Laugh out loud moment: half their turkey is plain, American style, and half is basted in spicy chili, with no demilitarized zone between North and South.) Latino family has split but hubby wants to come back. Wife (a very good part for Mercedes Ruehl, who is half-Cuban) doesn't want him, kids are divided. All standard bits, all worked out more or less happily after much tension, and it all works because of good writing and very good acting by all involved.

Along the way we see the preparations at all four households, accompanied by some really nice, really appropriate music. It all looks so good I'm getting a taste for cranberry sauce ... but I have to say that if I could be invited to only one of these feasts, brown or yellow, black or white, I'd go with the brown. I don't think I'd even need any turkey with all the delicious tamales and such served on the side. IMDb.com

When Billie Beat Bobby (2001) What a delightful little movie this is! I'd never have run across it except after we saw, and loved, The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom I looked up the director, Jane Anderson, and saw she had teamed with Holly Hunter once again on this movie. She also did The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, which we loved. This lady has a pretty small output as a director and writer, but she's damn good when she makes a picture.

This is the story of the famous "Battle of the Sexes," between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, which took place 33 years ago now, so some of you may not have heard of it. These were the early days of feminism. Prize money was extremely lopsided in pro sports, even in tennis, where it was becoming clear that as many, if not more, people were coming to see the "ladies" play, because they were getting as aggressive as the men, and they were easy on the eyes, to boot. Chrissy Evert was just getting started. Martina Navratilova was still on the horizon. The top-ranked player was Australian Margaret Court, but Billie Jean King was just as good, and some say better.

Bobby Riggs was once the best tennis player in the world, no one questions that. But he was 55 now, and best known as a hustler. He'd do anything on a bet, and usually won his bets. He'd do anything to promote himself, and when he became aware of feminism he stated that even an over-the-hill male like himself could beat all the top women players. This instantly made him a hero to insecure males world wide, and a thorn in the side of progressive women. What Riggs really was is open to question. In this movie, as masterfully played by Ron Silver, it is impossible to hate him, or even to dislike him, for me anyway. He was a hustler, plain and simple, and I have a soft spot in my heart for hustlers. I really don't think he gave a damn one way or the other about women's rights, and I don't think he believed even half the nonsense he was spouting. He was out to make a buck. The movie claims to be based on interviews with Billie Jean, and even she liked him, almost in spite of herself.

But after he totally bamboozled Margaret Court, just out and out slaughtered her by destroying her confidence, rattling her (she had had no idea of the kinds of pressure that would be brought to bear, she was used to the polite, staid atmosphere of Wimbledon), and forcing her to play his game of backcourt lobs, Billie Jean saw that someone had to stand up and beat this guy, and she was the one to do it. And she did. She ran him ragged in the Houston Astrodome, before a full house and a TV audience of millions.

This is an exciting movie, even though you know the outcome. For Bobby Riggs it was a win/win situation, exactly the kind he liked. For Billie Jean, it was must win. If she had lost, it would have set back women's sports by years. Holly Hunter brings her usual hot focus of intensity to this role, and man, the lady is pumped! Not quite to the level of Linda Hamilton in Terminator II, but she looks good!

There has been endless debate on whether or not Riggs threw the game, and it makes no sense to me. Sure, losing wasn't a big deal, his ego really wasn't wrapped up in it, and I would have had no trouble believing he might even have bet against himself. No one knows for sure. But think about it. If he'd beat her, he could have kept this scam going forever, challenging every seeded woman in tennis. He'd have made millions. Losing, he was reduced to challenging them and being ignored. The point had been made. And when you think about it, it was a pretty silly point ... but no one really noticed that in the hysteria of the moment. I mean, if Billie Jean had played Rod Laver he would have killed her in straight sets, and even she would admit that. It's no reflection on women; 99% of sports were designed by men, to play up to men's superior size and strength, especially upper-body strength. We're never going to see women playing against men in most high-level professional sports, though the occasional prodigy like Michelle Wie can compete.

Back to Jane Anderson for a moment. It is her style that makes her movies work. First the writing, of course, but then the choice of music, and very much the editing. She makes it move without making it breakneck, and—miracle of miracles!—she knows when to use slow motion for good effect, not just to drag out the action. There is a zip, a snap to her movies, a sense of style that most directors can only envy. Please, please, Jane, make me some more movies, and soon! IMDb.com

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) Our problem in the US seems to be short attention span. We can’t seem to stay angry very long. Lots of people were angry in the months following Katrina, but now, almost two years later, only the people of New Orleans are still pissed off. The rest of the country seems to pretty much have forgotten the criminal—and I’m not using the term figuratively, I mean people should have gone to jail for this shit—bungling that cost hundreds of people their lives and thousands of others their property and human dignity. Of all the impeachable offenses perpetrated by Monkey Boy and his trained chimps and trainers, this is the one that is easiest to understand, most visible, and, aside from the war in Iraq, most egregious. And yet … when’s the last time you saw a news report from New Orleans? When it was happening we got some long-overdue outrage from the reporters covering it. Now, they’ve all gone back to their comfortable beds, happy to be butt-fucked by the people in power for the small price of being allowed to ride on Air Force One and otherwise hobnob in the Monkey House … formerly known as the White House. Congress investigated, others investigated, commissions were appointed, all with the usual result. More study was needed. Mistakes were made … tsk, tsk. Shame on you. Don’t do it again.

I’m not being partisan here, or at least no more partisan than I am by my very nature. Democrat Ray Nagin fucked up badly. The Democratic governor didn’t distinguish herself. The Corps of Engineers, after decades of neglect, is the only organization that actually stepped up, later, and accepted blame for the disaster—though to my mind the blame could be stretched back over decades and many administrations who failed to heed the warnings and failed to fund the needed improvements to the levees. But “Heckova Job” Brownie should be in jail, and his cellmate should be Michael Chertoff. And Bush should have been impeached. The sheer spectacle of where all the high government officials were and what they did while a city was drowning is enough to make you puke. Cuntaleesa Rice shopped for shoes and went to see Spamalot … where she was booed, thank god. Monkey Boy hopped all over the country raising money, giving speeches, smirking, throwing his feces through the bars at his trainers, giving no sign he knew a hurricane had even hit. Cheney shot another lawyer.

Spike Lee is still angry, and after seeing this, you will be, too. He lets the facts speak for themselves, lets the guilty parties hang themselves with their own words. Monkey Boy: “Nobody expected the levees would break.” Nobody but every scientist who took a look at them, and concluded that a Force Three would put NO in a world of hurt, and published their studies that were available to everybody. Fuck, I knew they’d break; why didn’t Brownie and Michael Jerkoff and Monkey Boy?

And as one guy reminds us, "People think we got hit by a hurricane. We got missed by a hurricane. Hurricane went east. We've been lied to all these years by the federal government." He’s right. The hurricane hit Mississippi, where the wind destroyed pretty much everything. What hit NO was not even a Category 5, as most people assume. What hit NO was inadequate levees and the federal bureaucracy.

Spike doesn’t get bogged down in conspiracy theories. Some people living near the levees heard explosions, and there’s an urban legend that the Corps blew them to flood the poor districts and save the rich ones. Spike reports this, and moves on, not taking a position. As someone else points out, “We’ll never know. Nobody did even a little investigation.” Paranoid? Well, blowing the levees is exactly what the government did in 1927. But it’s not 1927 now, right? The feds wouldn’t flood out all the darkies like that today, would they?

Wake up, asshole. Monkey Boy has already taken us well on the way back to 1827. IMDb.com

When Worlds Collide (1951) When I heard someone was remaking this I just had to dust off my old LaserDisc and take a look at the original again. I am something of an authority on the book, (I say “something of,” because I’m no SF scholar), because a few years ago I wrote an introduction for a new Bison Books edition.

I learned a bit about one of the authors, Philip Wylie, and not very much about the other, Edwin Balmer. Being a truthful person, I pointed out that this classic SF book was much like many classic SF books: Badly written and wildly inaccurate, and in this case, racist as well. But lots of fun, if you get off on seeing planets hit each other and billions die. (Hell, who doesn’t?) There was a sequel, After Worlds Collide, and I’ve always thought that would make a good movie, too.

This George Pal production is surprisingly good, if you allow for the bad acting, stupid dialogue, turgid pacing, and other hallmarks of the 1950s B-movie. It’s actually only a B in the sense that there’s no “name” actors in it. In terms of production values, it was state-of-the-art for the time. There are very, very good glass shots of the space ship and the sky with the approaching planet.

There were eight people in the SFX department, a staggering number for that time. None of them were famous, but the art director was Hal Pereira, who won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo and was nominated a couple dozen times. I assume he’s the one who had the wit to hire the great Chesley Bonestell to design the rocket. In case you don’t know of him … until we got actual pictures of other planets and spaceships and such, Bonestell was the man! He was God! I gazed for hours at his magazine covers, and the layouts in such prestigious places as Life magazine. They were always as accurate as the science of the time could possibly make them.

We all know that Hollywood always screws up SF books. Well, not this time. Partly it’s because the book is so bad, in some ways, that most changes would be for the better. But they are also pretty faithful to the main thrust of the story, only making a few changes here and there, sometimes to condense the story, sometimes for reasons known only to the producer. In the book the two planets on the way to destroying Earth were Bronson Alpha (Jupiter-sized) and Bronson Beta (Earthlike). Here they are Bellus and Zyra. I guess because they sound more eerie. In the book, there was a space of quite a few months between the first passing of the planets, when the tidal effects killed 90% of humanity, and the second passing. Here it is 18 days. But much of the planetary motions are reasonably accurate in book and movie.

A character has been added to play devil’s advocate. He’s Sidney Stanton, your basic bitter, angry, selfish prick in a wheelchair, who gives the money for building the spaceship just so he can salvage his own worthless ass. He’s the one who points out that when push comes to shove, people are going to want to get on this ship, which will only hold 44 people. Cole Hendron, the genius who is charge of everything (although he seems to do precious little) the idealist, doesn’t think that will happen. He thinks people are as idealistic as he is. Wrong! In the book, the rocket builders are protecting themselves from the mob of survivors outside; here, it is disaffected project workers who suddenly turn into psychos at the last second.

There’s a love triangle, an adorable little kid they rescue from a rooftop—while leaving millions of other kids to starve to death; go figure—and even a little dog … of which they bring only one! Er … Noah knew it takes two …

Then the ship blasts off (down a ramp and up into the air, in the absolute best rocket-launch scene ever filmed up to that time), and it’s a tossup as to whose science is the stupidest. I’m voting for Wylie and Balmer, who for some inexplicable reason built their ship with engines at both ends! Sure, you can’t put a rocket in reverse, like the screws of an ocean liner … but did you ever think of turning it around to decelerate? Duuuuuh …. And of course they completely misunderstand free-fall, having their crew become weightless when the gravitational pull of Zyra equals the pull of the Earth … but they were hardly the first ones to do that. As I keep telling non-SF writers: Handle it carefully, it has sharp edges. You might get hurt.

All in all, it’s still a pleasant experience to watch this. At least they tried.

Now, what about the re-make? I see it’s being produced by Steven Spielberg. Okay, he’s done a lot of SF, some of it actually good. Directed by Stephen Sommers. Who he? Ah, well … shit. He’s the man who wrote all those awful Mummy and Scorpion King movies. Yuck. And from the summary at the IMDb: “Alpha Centauri is on a collision course for Earth, and mass hysteria of biblical proportions breaks out in the streets.” Oh, great. Just the teeniest bit of research (which I’ve just done; took me five minutes) will tell you that “Alpha Centauri” is actually a triple star system. It’s about 4.3 light-years away. If it continues its current motion it will pass within 3.6 light-years of the sun. Whew! In astronomical terms, that’s damn close! … of course, this will happen in 29,700 A.D. … It’s difficult to imagine the forces needed to divert it toward the Earth, and the speed necessary to get it across four light years in any reasonable time. See, there’s an example of how, by changing only a few words in the script, you can go from at least plausible to plain stupid. What’s wrong with the original concept? Two planets, ripped from their star by a passing star, many millions of years ago. Could happen. Alpha Centauri, headed for Earth? Couldn’t. I’m sure the new film will be dazzling, but the fact is, it will be stupid at its core, and the 1951 version isn’t. That’s known as progress, I guess. IMDb.com

Where the Truth Lies (2005) Atom Egoyan wrote and directed The Sweet Hereafter, a film that was critically acclaimed but which I didn't like that much. In this one he seems to be trying for a David Lynch Mulholland Dr. sort of atmosphere, a ‘40s film noir sensibility, with maybe a bit of Chinatown thrown in. The background music is moody and intrusive and the story is fairly distasteful and not easy to believe. I thought Alison Lohman was miscast as the plucky young author trying to root out the sins of the past. It was just hard to take her seriously. There were good things about the movie, particularly the evocation of the 1950s era, but not enough to make it worthwhile. IMDb.com

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

White Chicks (2004) This was #2 at the drive-in with Spiderman 2. Thank god it wasn’t first. You don’t expect wit from a movie like this, you can tell that from the trailers. So can’t they at least make the low-brow humor funny? Two things are guaranteed to make Lee laugh: pratfalls, and fart jokes. (Okay, fart jokes get me, too.) In the first ten minutes they passed up golden opportunities for pratfalls in a store covered in melted ice cream. At 30 minutes they tried the fart joke, and at 35 minutes we left. Lee summed it up: "Pretty pathetic when they can’t even get the fart jokes right." Amen. IMDb.com

White Heat (1949) Everybody remembers Cagney's masterly performance. "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" He was a gangster, which was familiar, but in earlier pics like this there was a sub-text of admiration, of the lone cowboy who doesn't play by society's rules but has some of his own. Not here. He is a psychopath with a very sick mother complex, plain and simple, there is nothing to like, though you can maybe sympathize with his crippling headaches. What may be hard to remember is just how very revolutionary it all was. It led the way to countless other hard, uncompromising, increasingly realistic screen portrayals. I was also bemused to see just how important a role the developing sciences of forensics and electronics played in the story. It's all spelled out in A-B-C terms that today's audiences wouldn't need, it's all very primitive, but it led the way to CSI and countless other series of today. The triple tail, aided by actual telephone/radios in police cars, and radio triangulation were among the high-tech features seen here, maybe for the first time. IMDb.com

White Sands (1992) A fairly standard noir whodunit involving dirty FBI and CIA agents and a small-town deputy sheriff who gets in over his head. This is not a bad film, but it’s not good enough for me to recommend it, either. Its best feature is probably the New Mexico scenery. I rented it to see what kind of work Mickey Rourke was doing before his long meltdown. He’s pretty good. By the way, Willem Dafoe is listed at the IMDb as being 5’9½.” Balderdash, say I. In scene after scene he’s looking up at guys, and when he’s with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who is said to be 5’4”, they’re eye to eye. IMDb.com

Whiteout (2009) Second feature At the Drive-In with Jennifer's Body. IMDb.com

Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock? (2006) Okay, the title they put on the box finessed the vulgarity with #$%#, which I think of as the Beetle Baileying of language. Remember the Sarge, when he was cussing out Beetle, always used those symbols? Who are we kidding, folks? “Fuck” is as deeply embedded in the language now as the verb “to be,” and almost as commonly used, and bleeping it only draws attention to it. It’s high fucking time we got off our prissy fucking horses about this word. Fuck, okay? Fuck fuck FUCK!!!! Anybody who is offended now, you’ve come to the wrong fucking website.

First, to review the fucking movie. It’s competently told, nothing special. It concerns a retired truck driver and thrift shop junkie and dumpster diver named Teri Horton who buys a painting for $5 and then learns it may be a Jackson Pollock, and “worth” about $50,000,000. (She seems to have become obsessed with this figure, as she has since turned down an offer of $9,000,000.) The art world is almost unanimously against her. She’s still fighting to prove its provenance, which is probably impossible, even though she has some very interesting evidence that tends to support her contention. The end.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to the interesting stuff. How does a piece of paint-spattered canvas come to be worth 50 big ones? This is the underlying question, and to my mind, they only addressed part of the answer.

I am a believer in the free market … regulated where needed, to avoid the worst excesses of capitalism. But I firmly believe that anything, anything at all, is worth precisely this: What someone is willing to pay for it. Marx declared that the value of an object was determined by the labor that went into it. This is bullshit. You can labor for years on something, whether it’s a painting or a tractor, and if no one wants it, it’s worthless. When I write a book, my publisher puts a price on it, about $25 these days. Whether I wrote it easily in an afternoon, or sweated blood for ten years, the worth of this book is entirely a decision you make, as the buyer. Do you value a John Varley book enough to pay $25 for it? I hope you do, but it’s not my call. I could put a price of $250 on it, and have few buyers. They might go like hotcakes for $2.50. The market decides.

In the art world, like many others, such as rare coins, stamps, animation cels, antique furniture, it’s a huge conspiracy of buyer and seller. (As, in fact, is our whole system of paper money. A $1 bill has as much “labor” in it as a $100 bill, but we all agree that these scraps of paper are “worth” different amounts, have different amounts of buying power. If we lost faith in that lie, chaos would result, as it has in the past.) So a square of canvas meticulously painted over a period of months by Rembrandt can be worth $100,000,000, if enough people agree and are willing to bid it that high. The same price can be put on a square of canvas dashed off in bold strokes in a day by Van Gogh, or another square spattered by Jackson Pollock in an hour. If someone wants to pay that amount for it, that’s what it’s worth. It seems silly on the face of it, but that’s our system.

It worked pretty well, until recently. Hundreds of years ago, paintings were not nearly as valuable. They weren’t cheap, of course, you didn’t see them hanging in peasants’ shacks. But a patron would commission one, or an artist would paint one on spec, and then the artist would be paid, and it would hang in some grand palace. The criteria on which it was judged were simple: Is this any good? Does it look like what it’s supposed to be portraying, whether it be the Duke of Dubuque, or the Battle of Borodino? Nobody wanted an impression of the Duke. They wanted a likeness. And paintings were not traded like baseball cards, they were not invested in.

Then came the camera. Everything changed. The aristocracy and the rich kept commissioning portraits, of course, but now everyone could have, in a few minutes, an image as accurate as anything painted by anyone. Better, if accuracy was all you required. This changed the world of art. Impressionism was born. Van Gogh began laying on the paint with a thick brush. Lots of people didn’t like this new stuff, and the gulf between people who thought art should represent something and those who felt it could simply give an idea of it was established, and began to grow.

Over the last century, that gulf grew to unbridgeable size. Somewhere in there, the old masters began to be seen as real investments, as bankable as diamonds or gold. Collecting them moved from the province of aesthetes and national galleries seeking to preserve cultural heritage, to speculators. But there was a problem. The supply of old masters was limited, because they were all dead. Sure, the Mona Lisa was worth a ton of money, but what about this new guy, Picasso? He’s churning out stuff at an amazing rate, but it … well, anyone with a paintbox and a brush can imitate him pretty easily. Provenance was getting harder and harder to prove, too.

So the conspiracy of modern art was born. It relied, and still does, mostly on the opinions of experts, of connoisseurs. As the century progressed, it became even more difficult, with people like Andy Warhol mass-producing soup cans and lithographs colored with a broad brush. Can we seriously tout this stuff as worth many millions of dollars?

It all really came to a head with Jackson Pollock. He didn’t paint, he flung. You may have seen movies of him creating his big canvases, legs spread, can of house paint in one hand and brush in the other, slinging color more or less randomly. You can see the finished results in any major art gallery. They have no meaning, they are simply splashes of color. Tell you the truth, I like some of them I’ve seen … to the point that I’d look at them for maybe a minute, let the color wash over me, and then move on. I’d never need to see one again, though. Later he produced mostly black stuff, and I fucking hate it.

(A digression in this long article that has little to do with a short movie … Let me give you my definition of art, honed over the years. Art is: Anything that anyone points to which he or she has created and says “This is my art.” From Raphael to kindergarten finger-painting, from Beethoven to a pennywhistle solo, from a Stradivarius violin to a Shaker chair, it’s all art, if you say so. From performance art to installation art, to Christo’s outdoor lunacy, to conceptual art where nothing is actually even done, it’s simply proposed, it’s all art. Having made that concession, I reserve the absolute right to decide for myself if it’s good art or bad art or indifferent art or crap art or pretentious art or masturbation art—a lot of those last two going around in the last 50 years or so.)

But what are you going to do with someone like Pollock? He didn’t keep good records, he gave paintings away when he was drunk (which was always), and a child flinging paint at a canvas could make a damn good Pollock in about the same time the great master could. What to do?

No prob. Bring in the artistic experts, like this asshole Thomas Hoving, snoots in the air, to “authenticate” paintings. It is a wonderfully comic moment, seeing this asshole enter a room for his first look at the suspect painting. He won’t even look, at first. He goes through an arcane ritual that reminds me of a wine taster, sort of edging up on it, getting a first whiff. His hostility is so apparent from the first that his “considered opinion” is no surprise. This picture doesn’t speak to him. This mélange of spatters that could have been painted by a cow’s tail dipped in paint, just doesn’t have the spirit of Jackson. As if anyone could distinguish between one set of flings and another. I will never believe that. Case in point: Pollock at one point in his career actually threw paint into the exhaust of a jet engine and let it hit the canvas. And you’re telling me you can tell it was Pollock who threw the shit into the fanjet? Bullshit, total bullshit.

But most of the experts consulted were as sure as this asshole Hoving, either for or against. A small number said they weren’t sure. Millions of dollars hang on these opinions, because they all pretty much dismiss the forensic evidence, science being anathema to this sort of mind.

There is one last question, though. Why is it so important? Aside from the collector value, that is. I think there is something deeper going on here, and it’s the reason that authenticity is so important in the first place. The reason it’s so important is superstition. These objects have become talismans. It is now possible not only to produce, by computer, a copy of a Van Gogh that is correct in every detail not only of color and line and brush stroke, but even in the texture of the paint. It wouldn’t fool someone who examined the back of the canvas, or analyzed the paint, but set the original and the copy side by side and believe me, no human eye could tell the difference. But the original is worth $100,000,000, and the copy is worth a few thousand. And the only difference is … this object was touched by Van Gogh himself. It’s a spooky contact with the tortured painter. This is a very primitive feeling, and thus people in the art world will go to unbelievable lengths to either authenticate or debunk a canvas, when in a logical world the copy would be just as good. IMDb.com

The Whole Shebang (2001) It’s sad when a small movie that looks like a labor of love, with a nice cast (Stanley Tucci, Bridget Fonda, Anna Maria Alberghetti), and sets out to be a charming little quirky romantic comedy ... lays an egg. But this one does. The scenes go on way too long, there is a lot of overacting, and the story is clichéd and badly told. What is really too bad is that it’s the only film I can think of about fireworks, a subject I love, and it could have been a great film. It is based on the Grucci family, which has been making pyrotechnics for 155 years. The only interesting parts are when they are actually showing the manufacture and launching of the big shells, and if they’d shown more maybe the film could have come alive, sort of like a cooking film with explosives. But they get most of it wrong. The Gruccis didn’t survive that long by smoking near the fireworks sheds, and neither would anyone else. IMDb.com

Wicker Park (2004) You can’t really say much of anything about the plot of this movie, because it’s all about revelations, and because it’s so incredibly complicated that I have no idea if it really all adds up. I was interested in it as it unfolded, but only marginally. In retrospect, it seems the whole thing would have fallen apart without some pretty stupid behavior on the part of all involved. If the characters had had any depth it might have worked better, but they didn’t, and the acting was pretty bad. At one point a bit of a Shakespeare play was performed, and it was awful, and then everybody marveled at how good it was. So I guess these people can’t even tell when it’s bad. Not worth your time. IMDb.com.

The Wild Bunch (1969) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

Wild Hogs (2007) Second feature at the drive in. IMDb.com

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003) Yes, it is about parrots, and they are wild (though they will eat out of your hand), but it's really about Mark Bittner, who is the birdman just south of Alcatraz. There are small flocks of escaped tropical birds all over the US, including a bunch of parakeets in Chicago until the city evicted them. Apparently they can withstand the cold climate, but often have trouble finding the kinds of food they need. Ornithologists hate them, because they're non-native. Hey, I hate starlings, too, but it's not like these parrots are threatening to push out any indigenous species. Let 'em go, say I.

Watching pretty birds is fun, but I was wondering where the director, Judy Irving, was going to go after the first ten minutes. And the real question to me was not how the birds survived in chilly San Francisco, but how Bittner survived on extremely expensive Telegraph Hill with no job and no money in the bank. The answer is fascinating. The man is obviously crazy, but he's not nuts. He lost me a few times with talk about receiving emotion from various of his feathered friends, but I still liked him. And I think he was doing worthwhile work on parrot behavior. They are a lot easier to observe in a little group of trees in the middle of the city than in the dense rain forest. Bittner began completely ignorant, was self-taught, and by now I suspect he's one of the world's experts on parrot behavior.

One small problem in an otherwise excellent film experience. We all anthropomorphize animals. I do, and I'll bet you do. It's harmless, but it can rankle me. And because we fear death, we see it as somehow evil. It's not, it's part of the natural process. So we can be sad when a hawk takes a parrot, that's okay (though rather foolish). But stop and think about the hawk. She's only doing what nature adapted her for, feeding her children. Predation is natural and necessary. Stop making it so sad. Rejoice that she made her daily kill. IMDb.com

Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) (1957) During my brief stay at Michigan State University—1965-1967—I did a lot more movie watching than studying. (The last term, no studying at all.) Between the local art houses in East Lansing, the film society, and various other programs in some of the dorms, you could see a film every night and only occasionally have to pay for it. It was here I was introduced to Ingmar Bergman. I saw this one, The Seventh Seal, a couple others. Wild Strawberries wasn’t that old then, and already seen as a classic. We didn’t have a good relationship, me and Ingmar. This film begins with a dream, and right there we have a problem. I hate dreams in books, and only tolerate them in films because they usually have arresting images. I’m not sure why this is, but it may be that my own dreams have always been so evanescent, so impossible to pin down, remember, or—god help us—interpret, that I have a hard time getting interested in other people’s dreams. So in the first ten minutes we see a horse-drawn, riderless hearse. A wheel comes off, the coffin spills into the street, a hand is seen, and old Dr. Isak Borg takes the hand and looks down into his own face. There are clocks with no hands, and a figure that turns to liquid. What does it all mean?

Ask somebody who gives a shit. I don’t have any truck with symbolism, I find it to be a huge waste of my time. Go ahead, figure it out any way that pleases you. Write an essay, promulgate a theory, found a school of thought, I’m not interested in any of them. I don’t so much mind symbolism being in a film, I just prefer to skip over it and go to the things that intrigue me more. So Bergman is not and never will be on my Top Ten list of directors. I didn’t like the movie at all in 1966. This time around I am more informed, more aware of things like his stunning black and white photography and compelling camera work, and I liked the movie much more, and in fact agree that it deserves to be called a classic … but I will never love it. I haven’t seen a single Bergman film that I could love. IMDb.com

Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) For some reason neither of us ever got around to seeing this, so we decided to rent it so we could compare it with the new version. I read up on it a little, discovered that though the screenplay credit is to Roald Dahl, he was extensively rewritten and hated this movie so much he wouldn’t sell the movie rights to the sequel. Now I suspect I’ll have to read the book.

Without even having seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the first thing I was struck by was how far film technology has come in 34 years. I’ve seen the trailers, and they are eye-popping. In 1971 Willie Wonka probably was, too, and it’s still bright and energetic, but look at the lighting. It’s all too bright and shadowless and ‘50s Technicolor. The camera work is boring and static ... and yes, we’ve gone too far in the other direction these days, but still ... Listen to the sound track, particularly the clunky Foley work. It always sounds like they’re walking on cheap plywood. Details like that make a difference, never mind the contrast between 6 Oompa Loompa dwarves and 140 CGI ones, or fake chocolate that looks like dirty water instead of Hershey’s syrup.

I didn’t care for any of the music.

What I did like was the weird randomness of it all. The movie is too maudlin and sweet until they get to the chocolate factory, and then it becomes a sourball, more to my taste. I liked Willie Wonka until the last scenes, which don’t ring true. Is that how the book ended? WWATCF lost me when Charlie picked his lazy-ass grandfather instead of his hard-working mother. I couldn't get past his "disabled" grandfather getting out of bed and walking for the first time in 20 years just in time for the fun trip. IMDb.com

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) Ken Loach is an unapologetic lefty socialist Brit who is much more popular in Europe than in his own country or in America. It’s not hard to see why many Brits don’t like him and accuse him of hating his country; his portrait of the British occupying forces in Ireland in 1920 is about as brutal as it gets. But it’s one thing to hate your country, and quite another to hate its government, its policies, its history. All the things he shows are true, and the Irish don’t come off all that well, either. I am not historian enough to take you through the tangles of this plot, how brother is set against brother in the Irish Civil War, something I was only vaguely aware of. But the basic situation we see at the end of this film still prevails today, after partition, with the Republic of Ireland in the south and the Brits still very much in the north. (There is one small bit of sweet revenge, though. For maybe the first time in its troubled history, Ireland is much more prosperous than England. Irish are actually moving back to Ireland!)

There are many things to think about in this film, including how revolutions always go too far, or how compromise can lead to defeat, and how to tell what is the right path and the right time—which we, as fallible humans, seldom get right. But the thing that will stand out in your mind is torture. It is displayed more vividly here than in any film I can recall, except possible The Battle of Algiers.

In the last six years we have become a torturer nation. There’s no way to soften that sentence. We do it … and if we don’t, we kidnap people and send them to countries who will do it for us, which is the precise moral equivalent … no, I take that back, it’s worse. If you are going to sin, if you feel your end justify this means, it is cowardly, in addition to wrong, to farm the job out. What, Dick Cheney, too prissy to get your own bloody hands dirty? This six years has soiled our nation’s soul, just as it soiled the Brits in 1920, and it will take a lot of expiation to make it right. (We could make a beginning by putting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and all the others on trial for war crimes as soon as their criminal regime is repudiated.)

Oh, wait, I hear someone say. Waterboarding is not really torture. We waterboard our own boys, in the Navy Seals and Army Rangers and all those ultra-tough-guy cadres who flatter themselves that they are “warriors,” as training for when they might fall into enemy hands. That says a lot right there, don’t you think? That we’re now doing what we trained our boys to expect when they were captured by our evil enemies? Well, if you don’t think it’s torture I’d like to invite you over here for a short course. Say, a month of continual waterboarding. I’m sure I can rig something up in the bathtub. I’d like to see how long it takes before you beg me to rape your mother … IMDb.com

Winged Migration (France, 2001) Stunning, awesome, unbelievable! I can’t find enough superlatives for this film. There is no dialogue, no real story; you fly with the migratory birds, right among them. I wish I’d seen this on a big screen, but then I would definitely have rented the DVD later, as well, because there is a documentary on how it was made that is about as long as the film itself, and just about as amazing. The things these filmmakers did, over about four years, are almost beyond belief. See it! IMDb.com

The Wings of the Dove (1997) Based on a novel by Henry James. A young woman (Helena Bonham Carter) with no money, dependent on her rich aunt, in love with a young man with no money, is befriended by a rich American young woman who is dying and in love with the young man. Obvious solution, to Helena anyway: Young man marries heiress, she dies, and then marries Helena and is able to keep her in the style to which she is accustomed, and doesn’t want to give up for mere love. Only she can’t leave well enough alone. It’s all rather slow. My main impression: Venice has got to be the most photogenic city in the world. Too bad it’s sinking. IMDb.com

Without a Clue (1988) The beloved character of Sherlock Holmes has passed into the public domain, so he’s now fair game for anyone who wants to do a pastiche. This can produce good stuff, as in They Might Be Giants, where George C. Scott is a delusional man who thinks he’s Sherlock, and Joanne Woodward is Dr. Watson, his psychiatrist. (Oddly enough, this is out of print and very expensive on DVD.) Or there’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which puts forth the amusing proposition that Moriarty is actually an inoffensive maths teacher victimized by Sherlock’s drug-induced paranoia. Watson takes the great detective to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud! These efforts can be disasters, too, as in Young Sherlock Holmes, which takes the intriguing idea of Holmes and Watson as young boys at school, and turns it into Goonies of London. This time the premise is that Sherlock (Michael Caine) is just an actor fronting for the real brains of the operation, Dr. Watson (Ben Kingsley). It’s not a disaster, but it doesn’t really work. Could have been good, but wasn’t. Holmes was a drunken idiot and Watson an egotistical fool. Didn’t like either of them. Maybe it would have worked better if we’d just seen the machinations needed to carry off such an imposture, instead of having the plot revolve around Watson’s need to be recognized as the brains. The dude simply has no understanding of showmanship, which is almost as big an asset to Holmes as deduction. IMDb.com

Without a Paddle (2004) Double feature with Mr. 3000. IMDb.com

A Woman in Berlin (Anonyma - Eine Frau in Berlin) (Germany/Poland, 2008) In the early spring of 1945 the Russians had fought their way into Berlin. The Nazis were still fighting in some parts of the city; nerves were on edge. The Russian troops set about doing what soldiers have been doing since long before the Sabine women: looting, pillaging, and most of all, raping. In 1959 a book was published anonymously by a woman who had lived through it. The book caused a scandal in Germany, where many could not believe that a good German woman would willingly submit to a Russian sugar daddy rather than be raped by the regiment. Russians were pissed, too, as it sullied the name of the great Red Army. This movie is based on that book.

It stirred conflicting emotions in me. I will state unequivocally that rape is wrong, it is horrible, brutish, and disgusting, in any and all situations. No exceptions, ever, no matter who the victim. But I have to say I was maybe a trifle less sympathetic to these particular victims than I would have been to others. The movie begins with a scene of merriment, when things are going well, and these smug, pampered, oblivious Nazi wives are having a nice party and sending their best wishes to their brave troops in the field. And what were those brave troops doing, at that precise moment? Why, they were raping every Russian woman they could get their hands on, and killing Russian men, women, and children by the millions. It is useful to remember who invaded whom here. So, I totally loathe what those Russian soldiers did to those German women … but I can’t help remembering, as one German soldier told his wife, that what was happening in Berlin was not one tenth of what the Russian people were subjected to by their Nazi invaders. Not one hundredth. I do not excuse for one second the rape of a German woman by a Russian soldier or anyone else, but think about what that soldier saw Nazi troops doing to his people. To his family. Odds are good that some Nazi sub-human raped and killed his wife, his sister, his mother, his daughter. Payback’s a bitch, even if it is unfair.

Our anonymous heroine, after being raped several times (as all the women in the bombed-out house they live in are) determines that she will decide who touches her from now on, which means she will find a powerful Russian, a major, and “willingly” submit to him. Become his girlfriend, rather than his revenge fuck. It also means she and the other women will get better food, and they’ve been desperately hungry for months. And why not? It’s better than being brutalized every day.

It got me to thinking about war, and rape, which historically have gone hand in hand … until very recently. Ever since war began, soldiers, warriors, have viewed the spoils of war as their right as conquerors, and women were definitely part of those spoils. I mean, does it make sense to risk getting your guts spilled in the dust by an enemy sword if there isn’t some reward for winning? That’s always the way it’s been. Men die on the battlefield, women are raped when it’s over. Both are horrible fates … but which would you choose? Then, finally, the concept of a “limited” war arose. It’s ironic that it happened mostly in the 20th Century, the bloodiest century in human history. And of course it was by no means a concept that all armies subscribed to. But our army does, and it’s something to be proud of. America, and most civilized nations, now classify shooting prisoners, poison gas, rape, and other atrocities as war crimes. You can be tried and sentenced to prison, by your own side. It’s not perfect, otherwise George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would be in prison, but if you expect war to be perfect, or to ever be just a bad memory … I envy you your optimism. IMDb.com

The Women (1939) We get a kick out of watching remakes and original versions of movies close together, so they’re easier to compare. We watched all four versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers within a month. (The first one is still the best.) Every once in a while a remake (Sorcerer, 1977) is as good as or better than the original (The Wages of Fear, 1953), but you wouldn’t go wrong too often if you assumed the remake is not as good as the original: King Kong; 1933, 1976, 2005. We just saw the new version of The Women (review follows), based on the all-female play by Clare Booth Luce. I thought it was a failed project that had its moments, but was badly in need of a better script. I felt confident that this original version would be a damn sight better. After all, it’s directed by George Cukor, of My Fair Lady and The Philadelphia Story renown. It stars Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford … in fact, every female star on the MGM lot in 1939 except Myrna Loy and Greta Garbo, and believe me, that is more stars than in your typical galaxy. Even the dogs and horses and artwork on the walls in this movie were female. And we were happy to see the actress whose name delights me every time I hear it: Butterfly McQueen. It is an acknowledged classic. I was sure it would be better than the remake.

Boy, was I wrong.

I’m not saying it’s worse, and I’m sure that it was a knockout in 1939. But the passage of 70 years has brought about changes in our society that makes this movie almost as cringeworthy as the collected works of Stepin Fetchit. Sometimes a movie does not age well, and this one hasn’t.

As I said in my review of the 2008 version, I have always had a tough time feeling real empathy in stories of rich people and their problems. If their main concerns in life are shopping, fashion, and gossip, I’m even less likely to like them. The women in the remake were like that, but at least some of them had careers. In 1939 it would have been implausible to have a group of women friends who had careers, and in fact none of them do. Is there anything more useless than a “socialite”? Nothing comes to mind. These women’s lives are completely taken up with shopping (for clothes; the maids shop for groceries), hairdressers, manicurists, spa treatments, and endless, endless, endless nattering gossip. They speak of raising children, but you know that’s mostly a matter of instructing the nanny or governess on what to do. News of infidelity is delicious, divorce is even juicier. Even the Norma Shearer character, the sort of down-to-earth type, was awful, in a different way. In the end, which had Lee ready to throw things at the screen, she literally goes running to reunite with her cheating husband who she divorced 18 months ago. “Where is your pride, Mary?” one of the gals asks her. With a rapturous smile she gushes, “I have no pride!” The end. Ouch!

All of that said, I have to add that the performances here by all concerned are terrific. Roz Russell, in particular, shines. The script is sharp and witty, but with way too much talking for my taste. That’s because what they talk about is so disgusting and mostly trivial, but I can’t deny that it’s true to life.

Looking at this thing, you are reminded that in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s … even, to some extent, today, though not as much as back then … one of the big reasons women went to “women’s pictures” was to see the clothes. Oh my god, the clothes! Every actress wears something new and outrageous in every scene. Much of it is simply horrid (to my eyes), or plain silly. Hats! Gowns! Sequins! Furs! Norma Shearer has an enormous fur robe, it looks like a whole polar bear skin, apparently for wearing only between the bed and the bathroom. There are easily 100 gowns and many, many other items of clothing such as leisure outfits and lingerie. In fact, right in the middle the film stops dead in its sprockets for a 15-minute fashion show … in Technicolor! This is a black and white film! I don’t doubt that many in the audience liked that part the best.

Enough. But since gossip is the life blood of these women, I can’t resist putting in a little dirt of my own. (Hell, Hedda Hopper has a small part, which I’m sure steamed Louella Parsons.) So … a one-named designer known as Adrian created all the gowns. I had vaguely heard of him, but now I find that most people rank him as the best costume designer ever to work in Hollywood. He has 250 screen credits. He’s the guy who designed all the costumes for the Munchkins. He designed the ruby slippers! He was to MGM what Edith Head was to Paramount and Universal, and was largely retired before she came along. He is credited with starting the padded shoulders fad, which became Joan Crawford’s trademark, and may be a large part of the reason that I’ve never liked Crawford; she looks like an NFL lineman! Adrian was gay, but was married to Janet Gaynor. They were apparently happy, as the marriage lasted 20 years, until his death. Then there was Paulette Goddard, who Charlie Chaplin featured in Modern Times. They were secretly married in 1936, divorced 1940. He was her second husband. Then she married Burgess Meredith, then Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. The lady got around! IMDb.com

The Women (2008) The reviews for this were so abysmal I almost didn’t rent it, But the cast was so wonderful I didn’t see how I could pass it up. But … 13% at Rotten Tomatoes? That’s just about as low as it goes. Then I took a closer look. RT and Metacritic use some sort of weighting system that can be thrown considerably out of whack if, say, a whole lot of critics give the movie 2 stars, or 40%, or something just below a recommendation. It means they didn’t like it, but they didn’t hate it. I think something like that happened here. None of the reviews I sampled were vicious. Most of them said something to the effect that a great opportunity had been wasted by a poor script. I find that I pretty much agree with that. There were some good moments. But it could have been so, so much better.

Right out of the gate, I have to overcome my reluctance to give a shit about rich people and their problems. Rich women who are deeply into fashion and shopping is another hurdle to clear. Then there’s the fact that they’re New York sophisticates. (I love New York, except for the fact that it’s populated by New Yorkers.) But Meg Ryan and Annette Bening were very good, and so were Candice Bergen and Cloris Leachman … and a lot of others. Quite a cast, in search of a better script. It was written and directed by Diane English, who created “Murphy Brown,” so we know she can write. But I understand it took her 15 years to get it made, and I think I know what might have happened. It got stale, the same thing that happened to my film, Millennium. Too many years on the shelf, too many re-writes, and without you realizing it, the life goes out of it. Too bad.

This has to be the ultimate chick-flick. It’s a remake of the 1939 George Cukor version of Clare Boothe Luce’s play. Cukor was the best at what they then called “women’s pictures,” and though I haven’t seen it, it’s an acknowledged classic. Both films have all-female casts, literally; not even a single extra in either film is male. (In the last 30 seconds of the remake a male baby is delivered, which I thought sort of spoiled the conceit.) There have been countless movies with all-male casts, but offhand, I can’t think of another all-female picture. Think about it. Not even a walk-on part? Elevator operator, cab driver? Some mope walking down the street? Even the artwork hanging on the walls depicted only women. I love that idea. Again, too bad it was only mediocre, at best. IMDb.com

The Wooden Camera (South Africa, 2003) Madiba and his friend Sipho are hanging around the tracks one day in Capetown when a man falls or is pushed from the train. Looting his dead body, they find some money, a gun with one bullet it in, and a video camera. Sipho takes the gun and Madiba takes the camera. They return to the squalid shantytown where they live, basically nothing but sheet metal and scrap wood and cardboard. They build a box that looks like a toy camera and Madiba turns into a film nut, shooting everything he sees.

You know Sipho will shoot someone with the one bullet, and he does. You’re set up to expect Madiba to tape something he shouldn’t be seeing, but it doesn’t work out like that. He loves his camera, and is artistic and inventive. It is apparent this is his only possible escape from the hellhole of his origins. He makes friends with a rich white girl who is experimenting with liberal tolerance and rebellion against her racist father.

It all works very well, aside from one clichéd improbability near the end. I think it’s best appreciated as a dark, urban fairy tale, and there is even some narration to that effect. The princess in the tower and the dark prince.

I suspect South Africa needs films like this. Despite confounding my every fear of a bloodbath, so far the death of apartheid has gone wonderfully well down there ... but 90 minutes of seeing how gigantic the divide between rich and the huge masses of ultra-poor still is and you know there is trouble ahead. IMDb.com

The Woodsman (2004) It takes some real guts to make a film where the main character is both a child molester and not a monster. It takes some guts to take the part, too, and my hat is off to Kevin Bacon (who I am only 2 degrees away from).

Pedophilia is something that runs the gamut from John Wayne Gacy to guys (like me) who look at a nubile 15-year-old and feel a hot flash of guilt because she is so sexually attractive. What makes Walter different from me is that he feels that flash for 10-year-olds, and he acts on it. He has spent 12 years in prison for having sex (no real details given, but it sounds like fondling) with a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old. He knows what he does is wrong and he wants to change. But the compulsion is still there.

Most pedophiles seem to be that way because of what happened to them during their formative years. Unlike other behaviors that deviate from the “norm,” whatever that is, it is unconscionable because it involves someone too young to make decisions for him- or herself. So mostly pedophiles are victims; victims who victimize. The pedophilia is a monstrous act, but that doesn’t mean the pedophile is a monster. Roger Ebert had a good point in his review: “Most of us have sexual desires within the areas accepted by society, and so never reflect that we did not choose them, but simply grew up and found that they were there.” This applies to homosexuals and transsexuals and many others. One day you realize what you’re attracted to, and you don’t have any control over what that is. Sadly for pedophiles, they must repress their desires, all the time. Think about that, and reflect on just how badly you wanted sex when you were, say, 18 and permanently horny. IMDb.com

Woodstock (1970) Nineteen sixty-nine. As I write this, September 1, 2008, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair (An Aquarian Exposition, Three Days of Peace and Music), came to an end 39 years and just a few days ago.

I was there. I didn’t get to hear much live music, other than that made by the people around me. In fact I made it to the stage only once, and didn’t stay long. I had other responsibilities, to my wife, who was on crutches and couldn’t make it through the mud, and my 18-month-old son. We lived in a 1956 Buick Roadmaster, almost as big as a bachelor apartment, parked in a field with lots of other cars. Everything we owned was in the trunk, including some food, cigarettes, and a little bit of low-quality New York grass. We even had a little money. The car had about a pint of gas in the tank, there was no gas for sale for 30 miles in all directions, and besides, you couldn’t move your car, anyway, as all the roads were jammed with cars that had stopped moving when there was no place else to go. Arlo Guthrie said the New York Thruway was closed. I had no way of knowing if that was true. We were pretty much cut off from the outside world. It rained, and rained, and rained. We stayed dry in that wonderful old car. I marched back and forth in the ankle-deep mud, miles of it, getting supplies from the few places that had them. It was a scene from the outer circles of Hell.

God, it was glorious.

We were never hungry. Food always appeared, and I usually had no idea where it came from. Everyone in that field shared. I shared cigarettes until I ran out, then I bummed them. Lack of marijuana was not a problem. Everyone seemed to have brought a big stash, and they always shared. Getting water and washing was tough, and frankly, I don’t recall just how I accomplished that, but we were never thirsty, and Stefan’s diapers got washed. When it began to break up I think all of us felt a sense of loss. We had become a community.

Then a year later this film came out. For three hours I felt I was back in the muddy field, only this time I was right up at the front of the stage, looking up at the performers, or actually on the stage, only a few feet away. It’s hard to tell you how revolutionary Michael Wadleigh’s film was in 1970. We’d never really seen a concert film like it. He used split screens to surround you with the action, he got up closer than we’d ever been to the musicians, saw them from all angles. I don’t think anyone has ever topped this in a concert film. And of course it was much more than a concert. It was a social phenomenon that no one had ever seen before, and no one has seen since.

Roger Ebert has been so affected by it that he has written three different reviews, at different times. He addresses the question that I’ve asked myself many times since 1969: Did it make any difference? Did we make any difference? I look at those young faces on the screen, all that hope, all that idealism, the commitment, the opposition to the war. I mentally try to add 39 years to those faces and bodies. Hell, I look in the mirror. Getting old is such a bitch, and I don’t think we ever thought it was going to happen to us.

Were we different, we baby boomers? Here’s what Ebert had to say:

“Years from now when our generation is attacked for being just as uptight as all the rest of the generations, it will be good to have this movie around to show that, just for a weekend anyway, that wasn't altogether the case.”

I can’t add much to that. Society is still rolling along pretty much as it did in 1969. Oh, sure, there’s civil rights, women’s rights, environmental awareness, those are all good things … but it wasn’t just us. Many of us were too busy listening to the kind of optimistic Rock the people in this movie are digging.

But in a way we were different. Just because we turned out to be not that different than our reviled parents’ generation, we did something no one else had done. If only for a moment. Don’t think so? I ask you to consider the horrors of Woodstock 1999, the most recent (and I fervently hope, the last) attempt to recreate Woodstock. Actually, it wasn’t much of an attempt, considering that it was run entirely by the mega-corporations who have completely taken over the music business since those four would-be capitalists (Michael Lang, John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, and Artie Kornfeld) tried to make a little money in the fields of Yasgur’s farm … and who turned it into a free concert and lost their shirts.

What was the result? What are the memories those 200,000 people carried away? Rapes (at least four of them), arson, looting, theft, random violence, police actions, and an abrupt termination. $150 tickets, ATMs, shopping malls, for cryin’ out loud … outrageously overpriced food and drink ($12 for a slice of pizza, $8 for a soft drink, $4 for water) … it was blind chance that no murders were committed, and that was probably because of the stringent security checks at the gates, which kept out the guns. Deaths at Woodstock: One overdose, one idiot sleeping in tall hay who was run over by a tractor. Security at Woodstock? A chain-link fence that soon vanished.

Here’s how MTV’s Kurt Loder described it in USA Today:

"It was dangerous to be around. The whole scene was scary. There were just waves of hatred bouncing around the place. It was clear we had to get out of there.... It was like a concentration camp. To get in, you get frisked to make sure you're not bringing in any water or food that would prevent you from buying from their outrageously priced booths. You wallow around in garbage and human waste. There was a palpable mood of anger."

What happened in 30 years? I wish I knew. Violence permeates pop music these days. I didn’t hear a single note of violence in the Woodstock film. What happened? Why are the young so fascinated by violent rap? I wish I knew.

Were we better than they are? I honestly don’t know. I’m tempted to think so, but I’m aware that the older generation has always had that view of the younger.

But I do know one thing. For three days, we were better. IMDb.com

Wordplay (2006) A few minutes ago I sat down to do the New York Times crossword, as I do every morning at breakfast and sometimes three or four times later in the day. This being a Saturday, it was formidable. Many people assume that the Sunday puzzle is the toughest thing out there, because it's bigger. Not true. The Sunday puzzle may have a trick, such as the use of symbols or multiple letters in one box, and it has room for longer answers that may include outrageous puns or other wordplay, but working it is not too hard because the supporting clues tend to be easier. No, it's the Saturday bastard that is the bull-goose wowser in the crossword racket. Sometimes you look at it and see all that white space, maybe all four corners that interlock 6-letter words, and you just despair. But I always finish them. Always.

I used to do them on paper, but I didn't like the cost of subscribing, especially since I only do the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday ones. For some reason the editor, Will Shortz, the star of this movie, scales them up gradually during the week. Monday is not even worth looking at, you can fill it in as fast as you can write. Even Thursday isn't much of a challenge. I'm not such a X-word goof that I'll fill in any old grid. (Jon Stewart, one of the celebrities shown in this film, admits that he'll even do a USA Today puzzle ... but he doesn't feel good about himself afterward.) Now I do them on the computer, and Monday through Thursday I download an old one from the archive that goes back to 1996. I've done them all, but I don't have a photographic memory, and after a few years it might as well be a new one.

But this morning I did something different, because of watching this movie. I started the little timer that comes with the online version, to see how fast I was. This is something I never do; I don't work them for a fast time, but for the pleasure of solving. My time: 16 minutes and 2 seconds. But I was eating a bowl of cereal while I solved ...

I'm not bragging. I probably could have finished it in 10 minutes, but the people in Wordplay regularly turn in times of 5 to 8 minutes, sometimes even less. That's not for me. I'm just not competitive like that. I've never thought of entering a Scrabble tournament, though I'm a damn good Scrabble player. Sitting there with 3 or 4 other people I'm competitive as hell, no quarter is asked or given, I take no prisoners. But that's as far as it goes. I'd never go to the crossword tournament that is the centerpiece here, either, though it might be fun to meet some of the people. They are all very smart—have to be—and articulate and a little bit loony, which is fine with me. But they are all obsessed, and I'm not.

The best parts are listening to the famous X-word addicts explain their addiction, their ways of solving, and then—believe it or not—watching them solve the same puzzle, talking out loud as they go. I know, it doesn't seem possible, but the director has found ways to make it exciting. There is Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, the Indigo Girls, Ken Burns (a lefty, like Clinton and Stewart ... and me!), and Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina, who likens a Saturday puzzle to pitching to Barry Bonds.

The final is as tense as the World Series. Three guys on stage, solving without a net, for all the world to see their blunders and recoveries ... and the sad saga of Al Sanders. A perennial third-place, he has his puzzle solved before the other two, he's finally won ... and then realizes he's made a bonehead move that ranks up there with Bill Buckner letting a simple little liner to first dribble between his knees and score the winning run whereby the Mets eventually defeated the Red Sox.

My only complaint would matter only to other fellow puzzlers. No mention is made of Eugene Maleska, who held the job of NYT editor before Will Shortz did, and who was famously fussy about slang and pop culture, which he didn't like. I'm with Shortz—anything goes!!!—but Maleska was a giant. IMDb.com

World Trade Center (2006) When I first heard about it, I had to wonder if Oliver Stone was going to ride off into looneyland with some sort of conspiracy theory. Luckily he left that to the looneytunes director of Loose Change and other Internet bug brains.

This movie is very good, and very, very, very, very, very, very hard to watch. I don't suppose I shall ever be able to view these images without choking up and getting angry and seriously wanting to kill somebody. That somebody is still hiding in an Afghan or Pakistani rathole due to the criminal incompetence of the George W. Bush administration ... but let's not go there any further.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning. I don't recall hearing a single line that didn't ring true, didn't sound like something somebody from this place and time would have said in the terrible situation of that day. There are no phony, overblown heroics here, no cardboard heroes, just ordinary, everyday heroism. There is a considerable dramatic challenge in having your two main characters absolutely, totally immobilized for about 45 minutes of this 2-hour film, and Stone manages to make it work. This may not be quite as gripping as the masterpiece United 93, but it's damn close. IMDb.com

The World's Fastest Indian (2005) Not a Comanche, nor a Sioux, nor a Navajo, nor a person from Bombay, but an Indian motorsickle. This movie is just a terrific little hoot, based on the true story of Burt Munro, a crazy old Kiwi who went from New Zealand to the Bonneville Salt Flats with his 1920 Indian in the 1960s, intending to break the land speed record for his class. He makes his own pistons, he's never heard of a fire suit or a drag chute ... and doesn't really understand why the officials in Utah want his machine to have brakes, for cryin' out loud. He didn't come to Utah to stop!

It reminded me very much of David Lynch's little gem The Straight Story. An old guy gets it into his head to do something insane, and pulls it off. (I was going to put in a spoiler warning, but what's the point? Roger Ebert pointed out in his review that this is not a movie about the second-fastest Indian.) But his amazing victory is only the cherry on top of this sundae. It's the journey that is the story, and it takes its time. Burt proves irresistible to most of the folks he meets, and ends up reminding even the uptight officials of Bonneville Speed Week that, in the end, in spite of all their rules and regulations, what this meet is all about is a bunch of nuts climbing into death machines and just going as goddam fast as they can!!

Burt's record from 1967 still stands. All hail to the crazy old farts of this world! IMDb.com

World’s Greatest Dad (2009) I’m glad a read a little about this, as I had been assuming it was just another of those awful knockabout comedies Robin Williams has been wasting himself on for so long. I suppose I should issue a

SPOILER WARNING,

though I’m pretty sure this cat is out of the bag. Robin is a teacher at a high school, raising his son alone. Now, it’s well known that every 16-year-old boy is obnoxious and sex-obsessed, but Kyle is way off the charts in crudeness and sheer hatefulness. He hates everything except video games and jacking off to Internet porn. He’s got precisely one friend; everybody else thinks he’s a jerk, and they are right. I was so, so happy when he died of auto-erotic asphyxia somewhere a bit before the halfway point, because I couldn’t have tolerated watching him much longer, he was that awful. Dad is devastated; he didn’t like him any more than anyone else, but he loved him. So he rearranges the body to make it look like suicide, and writes a suicide note. (He’s a failed writer, with a dozen rejected novel manuscripts.) The note laments that no one understood him, and makes it look like he was a sensitive soul crying out in the wilderness. It’s Dad’s best work. But the note becomes public record in the police report, and it is posted on the Internet and quickly goes viral. Suddenly all the kids regret how they treated Kyle. (I was reminded of the funny song “Poor Jud is Dead,” from Oklahoma!) Dad gets new respect in his grieving. The mourning takes on epic proportions, just as we’ve seen countless times when a young person is murdered or kills himself. Dad finds himself pestered for more information about his son, and ends up writing Kyle’s diary, which is published. He goes on an Oprah-like TV show. Book contracts are offered, and who knows what else is in store. Kyle could become an industry, in the way that John Walsh turned his murdered son into America’s Most Wanted. But finally, on Kyle Memorial Day, when the school library is being named after the repulsive, barely literate little shit, Dad admits he wrote it all. Suddenly everybody hates him. Nobody likes being bamboozled. He goes home, to find that only Kyle’s one friend still respects him.

It’s not a bad ending. The movie (by Bobcat Goldthwait, who previously did Shakes the Clown, which was half of a good film) is funny and sharp, and pokes at sensitive spots we might prefer not to examine about ourselves and our society. But I felt it could have gone a bit farther. How did the students feel in the weeks to come, after they’d ripped down all the posters of Kyle? Dad didn’t start out to do anything wrong, things just snowballed, and some good came of it. At least one student decided not to kill himself after reading the book, and another found the courage to come out as gay. It was, as they say, a “teachable moment.” Still, I recommend it. IMDb.com

The Wrestler (2008)

In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade

And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him

Til he cried out in his anger and his shame

I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains

When I first heard those lyrics, on vinyl fresh out of the sleeve in 1968, I was moved to tears. And I wasn’t sure why. The only sport I hate worse than boxing is professional wrestling, so it didn’t really have much to do with a battered pugilist. And I was young, still full of piss and vinegar, barely scarred by the battles of life. But I had recently suffered a severe emotional upset, so bad that I had dropped out of college and gone on the road with no idea of what I was going to do next. I had learned that our lives do not always go where we had intended them to go, that you can be derailed in unexpected ways. My life had changed, and though I now know it was for the better, at the time I was very much up in the air. And I had, for the first time, met many of the ragged people Paul Simon sings about. Hell, I was one of them, in the sense that I was a dirty hippie and hitchhiker, and I knew drug addicts, welfare people, former (and future) mental patients, and derelicts. It was all very different from my small-town Texas middle class upbringing, and totally alien from my year and a half at Michigan State. I could see this scarred, angry, frightened man, beaten down and yet with a remnant of pride, and I cried.

We went to see this movie reluctantly, moved only by the unanimous praise for Mickey Rourke’s performance. We remembered that he used to be pretty damn good, and then had seemingly pissed it all away with erratic behavior. But … wrestling? The sport of choice for life metaphors is boxing, the “sweet science.” There have been hundreds of movies about boxers. I’m sure you can name a dozen without breaking a sweat. Many of them are quite good, though you have to be able to stomach the brutality of the sport itself. But I can only think of a very few wrestling movies. Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment has some wrestling in it, and so do The World According to Garp and Topkapi. The only serious movies I can find at the IMDb (as opposed to Wrestlemania compilations) that were about wrestling are All the Marbles (which idiotically pretended that it was an actual competition, that it mattered who won) and Nacho Libre, about Mexican wrestling, which sucked.

I don’t know how pro wrestling evolved into the obviously phony spectacle it is, but I’ve always thought it was kind of sad. Wrestling at the high school, college, and Olympic level is a legitimate sport, and much less brutal than boxing. But if you’re good at it and want to go pro, the only way is to put on a mask, strut around and bellow like an asshole. That these guys (and girls) are athletes is beyond dispute. If you don’t think so, try getting in the ring and pulling off some of the acrobatic stunts they do … without breaking your fool neck. These performers have to be strong, agile, quick, and have a good sense of timing, or … gasp! … somebody could get hurt! Hurt is relative, of course. If you can’t soak up a good deal of pain, you don’t want to get into this business. Though punches are always pulled, and body slams are ridiculously phony, some of this stuff is sure to be painful.

Speaking of pain … I knew about things like cage matches, “ultimate fighting,” and other perversions for the sick among us, but I had not realized just how nauseatingly brutal the slimy “extreme” end of wrestling has become. In “hardcore” wrestling, the object is blood, blood, and more blood, and it’s impossible to fake it. We see this in all its horror, and it’s hard to watch. I knew about the trick of hiding a little piece of razorblade … not to cut your opponent, but yourself! We see Randy “The Ram” (birth name, Robin, to his chagrin) cutting his forehead to make the blood flow, fairly harmlessly. This has been done for decades. But we also see a match where broken glass, thumbtacks, barbed wire, and a staple gun are used, and the ring looks like a slaughterhouse then the match is over, and the performers look like they’ve been in a plane crash. Sickening! Unimaginable! And all true! Who are the sub-humans who watch this stuff? They should be forced to wear a sign, “HARDCORE WRESTLING FAN,” so human beings can cross the street to avoid them.

This movie is much like Raging Bull, which usually ends up in critics’ Top Ten of All Time lists. Raging Bull is a masterpiece, and The Wrestler is not, but what they have in common is that I can appreciate the artistry … and yet never, ever want to see either of them again. I don’t need to see the story of that incredible anthropoid, Jake LaMotta, again. Once was ordeal enough. And though The Ram is a much nicer guy—think Rocky Balboa, not Mike Tyson—the spectacle of his career is painful to watch. The story line here is pretty predictable. Randy was a big star, fought in Madison Square Garden, but it’s 20 years later and he’s eking out a living in much more humble venues now. Can’t pay the rent on his pitiful little trailer, works as a stockboy, frequents a strip bar where Marisa Tomei works as the lap dancer with the heart of gold. He has a heart attack, and tries to reconcile with his daughter, hopes to get serious with the stripper, looks for more hours at the supermarket. But he drinks too much, has a temper, and can’t deal with frustration, so he goes back into the ring. What did you expect?

This kind of story works only if the performances are noteworthy, and if there is good, telling detail in the script, and both of these more than measure up. The best parts happen backstage, before and after the performance, when the wrestlers discuss what moves they’re going to make. It’s evident that, far from having ridiculous blood feuds over childish insults—the sort of stuff the fans eat up—these guys are all good friends and have a lot of respect for each other. I don’t know if this is the case, but it rings true to me. They are performers, and they know it, and they like it. In fact, most of these dudes are actual wrestlers (where else would they get enough actors who are that bulked up?), and they all acquit themselves very well in the acting department. Not surprising. And there are little bits of stuff for The Ram that make him interesting. He’s really just a working dude, he’s rather meek in his interactions with most people. He’s assigned to work behind the deli counter, facing the public, which he dreads … but he treats it as just another performance, and he turns out to be good at it, a big surprise to me. IMDb.com

2008 OSCAR WATCH: Our continuing quest to see most of the nominated movies and performances before Oscar time. First, Marisa Tomei is good, and could win. But we haven’t seen three of the more interesting performances yet. Then, there’s Mickey …

Here’s another similarity to Raging Bull. DeNiro was famous for gaining a lot of weight to play LaMotta in his declining years. Well, it’s nothing to what Mickey Rourke did, and we’re only now realizing it. He’s spent the last twenty years or so preparing for this role. We all thought it was mere dissipation, craziness, a return to the boxing ring (where he had been pretty good as a youth) and bad career decisions. No! He was making sure his face would be like a Halloween mask. Talk about “carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down.” This face is a road map to hell. And only years of steroid abuse could have given him the right body to play this part. It is a towering performance, no question … but so far, I’m sticking with Sean Penn. I liked Harvey Milk. Is that what I should base my (non-existent) vote on, whether or not I like the character? Probably not. So sue me.

Wuthering Heights (1939) This is one of the “classics” on everybody’s list that I somehow never got around to seeing. I always wondered what “Wuthering” meant, and now I learn it’s a Yorkshire term for turbulent weather. Yorkshire sure looks turbulent here. Most of the time it’s raining or snowing, and the wind is howling. (Yes, I know it was all filmed in Hollywood.) This was Emily Brontë’s only novel … or, in this case, the first half of the novel. It was severely shortened, and the book was much, much more complex. As for the movie … it is a masterpiece of craft. The look of it is wonderful. The lighting, the sets, the choice of camera angles, all great. As for the acting, Olivier at first seemed to be a bit too loud, projecting too much (he credits the director, William Wyler, with teaching him how to act for the camera), but later his intensity almost burns through the screen. Merle Oberon is much less interesting.

But I really could not enjoy the movie, as I intensely disliked both Heathcliff and Cathy. Heathcliff was surely badly treated, but he relishes his revenge so much I couldn’t stand him, and his obsessive love for Cathy ruins the lives of both himself and everybody around him. Cathy is the queen of bad choices, first declaring her love for Heathcliff, then marrying Edgar, denying her love, proclaiming it … make up your mind, lady. Perhaps I’d enjoy the book more. It certainly has moved a lot of people over the years. Wiki lists no less than 15 adaptations, including two operas. I can see that, as the story is nothing if not operatic. IMDb.com

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