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© 2004-2008 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 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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 Paddle (2004) Double feature with Mr. 3000. 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

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

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