The Nick Schager Film Project

The Five Obstructions (2003): B+

Those who find Danish auteur Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) to be an insufferable, egomaniacal pain-in-the-ass will undoubtedly find much to loath about The Five Obstructions, a fascinating (and oft-times infuriating) documentary in which Von Trier instructs filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake his abstract short film The Perfect Human (which Von Trier puzzlingly finds to be “perfect”) five different times under varying sets of difficult circumstances. The point of this cruel experiment is twofold – to torture the mild-mannered Leth (not unlike how Von Trier reportedly likes to torment his own actors and actresses), and to help Leth transcend his safe, comfortable artistic space. Von Trier’s conditions range from demanding that no shot by more than 12 frames long to making Leth shoot in the most miserable place he can imagine (a Bombay ghetto, apparently) and forcing him to recreate his short as a cartoon, but much of the film’s tension comes from Leth’s regular attempts to slyly circumnavigate Von Trier’s rules. That Leth’s new films seem to improve upon his original confirms The Five Obstructions’ position that artistic inspiration frequently flourishes not in an environment of complete freedom but, rather, one of sometimes-severe restrictions, but it also subtly stands as Von Trier’s “told you so” rebuke to critics who decry his harsh work methods.

Tokyo Godfathers (2003): B+

While neither as visually nor as thematically intricate as Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers – a reimagining of John Ford’s weepy Western 3 Godfathers in which three homeless friends attempt to return an abandoned baby to its parents on Christmas Eve – is nonetheless a delightfully rambunctious holiday fable about the vital importance of family. Crotchety drunk Gin, motherly transvestite Hana, and young girl Miyuki have each fled their dishonorable pasts for a life on the streets, yet an opportunity for redemptive familial reconciliation arrives when they discover an infant discarded in a trash heap and embark on a night-long quest throughout Tokyo to track down the child’s mother and father. Kon’s colorful, irrepressibly antic animation makes up for its lack of facial and background details via energetic, vibrant action sequences, culminating in a climactic chase through the snow-covered streets that’s a marvel of high-strung humor and tension. The film’s narrative is too convoluted by half, and the director’s trademark talent for blending dreams and reality is largely absent (save for a few tantalizingly quick moments). But even as a lesser Kon effort, Tokyo Godfathers remains a delightful film bursting with meticulously drawn lead characters – all three of whom mask their shame and disappointment through hysterical bickering – traces of whimsical fantasy (“Kiyoko,” the baby they find, is something of a Christ-like miracle child), and outright bizarreness.

Stander (2003): B-

“If you go fast enough, you can’t see where you’ve come from,” says a cohort of Andre Stander in Bronwen Hughes’ Stander, and it’s an outlook the notorious South African cop-turned-thief apparently held dear. Disgusted by his participation in the state-sanctioned murder of innocent blacks, Stander threw away a promising career in the police force for a reckless life of non-stop crime, looting over twenty banks in the 1970s while still on the job and another bushel after he broke out of prison. As played by Thomas Jane, Stander is a charismatic, carefree rebel who robbed banks as an act of protest against Apartheid, and Hughes gets great mileage out of her subject’s go-for-broke brazenness. What Stander lacked, however, was a genuinely subversive modus operandi – the man held up banks to spit in the face of his cruel white countrymen, but he was no Robin Hood, and with one trivial exception, he greedily kept the money for himself. Stander’s selfishness goes a long way toward negating the supposed nobility of his actions, and Bronwen’s film doesn’t help itself by using oppressed blacks as merely a device to provide Stander with some criminal motivation. Still, it’s a rather entertaining (if style-over-substance) portrait of insane illicitness.

Heat (1995): B+

Michael Mann’s beautifully hard-edged direction – not unlike a sports car that masks its brawn underneath a beautifully elegant exterior – was never more muscular or sleek than with Heat, his near-masterpiece about the cat-and-mouse competition between ruthless thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and cagey lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Mann strives for epic grandeur in every ice-blue widescreen composition and tightly edited conversation (which boast the director’s firm grasp of shot-reverse shot technique), and though his film has its minor deficiencies – there’s still too much overacting on Pacino’s part, and a few too many deadweight scenes (like every one featuring Hank Azaria) – the filmmaker nonetheless breaths vibrant life into his somewhat clichéd story about kindred warriors on different sides of the law. Hanna and McCauley are alienated outsiders, victims of a masculine code of honor that places duty, perfection, and a dedication to method – whether it be catching criminals or eluding the powers-that-be – above personal concerns. In his last great screen role, De Niro delivers a frightening vision of frosty criminal efficiency that nonetheless conceals a longing for comforting human contact. Yet the film’s steely force is mainly attributable to Mann, who both subtly evokes how these urban predators (who resemble cowboys in an L.A.-set Western) use emotional isolation as a means of protecting themselves from the harsher realities of their work (and the world), while also depicting, in noir-like fashion, how repudiating one’s true nature can only lead to catastrophe.

Millennium Actress (2001): A

The finest anime film I’ve ever seen, Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress concerns a documentary filmmaker’s interview with legendary Japanese film actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who retired from the business 30 years earlier to live a hermetic life in her forest-shrouded home. The life story Chiyoko recounts is one which melds authentic memories with both her movies and national history, and as her tale unfolds, the documentarian himself (who has known and loved Chiyoko for years) becomes a first-hand witness to, and later an active participant in, her sprawling personal saga. Chiyoko’s lifelong search for an anti-government rebel painter she met and fell in love with as a young girl – a mystery man who gave her a beloved key “to the most important thing in the world” – becomes the focal point of not only her life but her films’ narratives, and Kon (as he did in his debut Perfect Blue) beautifully blurs the line between the real and unreal with graceful animation (highlighted by a cinematic forest fight in which his “camera” bobs and weaves with fluid energy) that invigorates his temporal-shifting narrative. His stunning film confronts issues of love, obsession and aging, yet ultimately Millennium Actress’ earthshaking virtuosity comes from its meditation on the nature of cinema itself – how moviemaking and acting (whether in dramas, comedies or documentaries) all contain competing degrees of make-believe and autobiography, and how Chiyoko’s millennium-spanning affair with romance and the movies mirrors our own.

Along Came Polly (2004): D+

Ben Stiller headlined six films last year (Duplex, Starsky & Hutch, Envy, Dodgeball, Meet the Fockers), and Along Came Polly may be the worst. Inane, inorganic and predictable from the start, the film exists solely as a reason for the clumsy comedian to behave ineptly while simultaneously giving Jennifer Aniston some post-Friends big-screen exposure. Ruben (Stiller), an uptight risk assessment executive for an insurance company, is devastated when his wife cheats on him during their honeymoon, yet things get wackier after he falls for a devil-may-care free spirit named Polly (Aniston) who teaches him how to lighten up and love life. One might say it’s ironic for a movie about taking risks to wholly ignore its own advice and play it safe, but the film’s unimaginative nonsense really just feels pathetic. Phillip Seymour Hoffman seems to channel Jack Black as Ruben’s best friend, a has-been actor who once starred in a Breakfast Club-style teen drama, and he thankfully provides a few chuckles via his character’s horrendous athleticism. For the most part, though, Along Came Polly is just another lame Stiller attempt to rehash his There’s Something About Mary persona, replete with him suffering through humorless bathroom indignities (here an overflowing toilet), bowel embarrassments (spicy food irritates Ruben’s tummy!), and bodily fluid humiliations (during a basketball game in which he’s slimed by a hairy man’s sweaty chest).

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003): B+

Korean provocateur Kim Ki-Duk sets aside his penchant for misogyny and violence with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, and the results are somber, serene and stirring. Split into the title’s five seasons, the film is a simple fable about the different stages of a young man’s slow but steady maturation. A boy lives on a floating river raft as the apprentice of an elderly Buddhist monk, and Ki-Duk’s film charts his growth from being a cruel kid who tortures animals (Spring) to a love-struck teenager enraptured by a beautiful visitor (Summer) to a spurned and vengeful lover (Fall) to a repentant and spiritually renewed adult (Winter) and, finally, to a wise mentor to a young boy not unlike his former self (and Spring). More so than with Bad Guy or The Isle, Spring, Summer’s symbolism – which aids the film’s themes of compassion, altruism, love, lust, jealousy, revenge, penance and selflessness – fits smoothly into his mise-en-scène, which conveys delicate spirituality through contemplative tranquility. Ki-Duk’s film runs a bit too long, but his patient storytelling reflects a newfound directorial maturity, and his hypnotizing depiction of the repetitive (and unalterable) cycles of life has an unaffected profundity.

Tupac: Resurrection (2003): C

Tupac: Resurrection provides an "autobiographical" take on the late gangsta rapper’s tumultuous life, yet those who don’t believe in the holiness of Tupac – this reviewer being one of them – will find the documentary’s gushing adoration for its subject annoyingly one-sided and misleading. Lauren Lazin’s film charts the rapper’s rise to stardom with montages of old photos, news clippings and performance footage, and the central gimmick is that Tupac himself narrates his own story via carefully edited archival interviews. Unfortunately, he’s an untrustworthy storyteller, and neither provides satisfactory explanations for his misogynistic lyrics and “Thug Life” persona – which he lamely attempts to describe (by redefining the word “thug”) as a lifestyle of rebellion rather than one of criminality (um, sure) – nor really confronts his own responsibility for his notoriety and problems with the law. Tons of great concert clips and a wealth of lucid discussions (including a lengthy one with former MTV newswoman Tabitha Soren) reveal Tupac to be a well-spoken, intelligent, funny and charismatic guy. But his attempt to depict himself as an unjustly persecuted truth-teller doesn’t jibe with his juvenile and shallow glorification of the unlawful life, and Tupac: Resurrection’s unwillingness to balance its reverence with criticism of Tupac’s infatuation with guns and drugs ultimately leads to a dishearteningly incomplete portrait.

The Isle (2000): B-

Before 2003’s heralded Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, Korean director Kim Ki-Duk was best known for his unnerving shock-cinema love story The Isle, a creepy, gruesome, gorgeous and flabbergasting treatise on romantic obsession and violent, nasty male-female relationships. Hee-Jin (Suh Jung) is the mute proprietor of fishing shacks sitting out in a river who spends her overtime sexually servicing (or procuring other female companionship for) her male clients. One of the shack’s current residents, Hyun-Shik (Kim Yoo-Suk), is a suicidal police officer traumatized by having killed his girlfriend – an act he sees in nightmarish flashbacks – in a fit of jealous rage. The two strike up an unlikely, and unhealthy, relationship in which Hee-Jin murders another prostitute who’s eyeing her new man and Hyun-Shik crafts little sculptures (such as a swing and a hangman) out of copper wire. Ki-Duk’s film partially succeeds as allegory even as it falls flat dramatically, but symbolism-infatuated director Ki-Duk beautifully juxtaposes the serenity of the mist-shrouded isle – its hazy gray punctuated only by the floating cabin’s coats of primary colored-paint – with ugly violence such as Hee-Jin and Hyun-Shik’s two shocking acts of fishhook self-mutilation that eerily link the lovers’ plight to that of the water’s hunted fish.

Polyester (1981): B

While it might be a tad simplistic to state that every John Waters film is, at heart, exactly the same, Polyester certainly shares fundamental similarities to many of the director’s prior and subsequent offerings. Waters’ 1981 freak-a-thon was “filmed in Oderama,” meaning that, during its initial theatrical release, moviegoers were provided scratch-and-sniff cards to use at prompts throughout the film. While enjoying the film on DVD doesn’t afford such odorous participation (one is simply left to imagine the stench of farts and skunks), this swift 86-minute farce still serves up plenty of nasty fun. Divine is the alcoholic matriarch of a supremely dysfunctional family that includes an adulterous porn theater-owning husband, a son whose foot fetish compels him to stomp on women’s toes, and a floozy daughter looking forward to having an abortion. Toss in Divine’s best friend Cuddles (Edith Massey) – a retarded former maid who, after inheriting a fortune, is driven around by a German chauffeur in a limousine and is planning a debutante ball for herself – and you’ve got a typical Waters three-ring circus. The film’s gross-out outrageousness aims to skewer the “normalcy” of suburban-dwelling nuclear families, and bits involving Divine’s picnic in the country and a disastrous robbery that proves fatal for her money-grubbing mother keep the goofy quotient high. Though it’s not Waters’ funniest or most accomplished effort, Polyester definitely stinks in all the right ways.

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965): B+

Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix concerns a plane populated by oil company employees and military men that, due to a monstrous sand storm, crash lands in the Saharan desert. Forced to cope with the dawning realization that no rescue party is forthcoming and their water supply is depleting, the men – led by Capt. Frank Towns (Jimmy Stewart) and his right-hand man Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) – are convinced by German airplane engineer Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger) to build a new plane from the old plane’s damaged parts. As in The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard, Aldrich’s characters are, in one way or another, outcasts – Stewart’s pilot is an over-the-hill relic, Ernest Borgnine’s Cobb is leaving work because of “mental exhaustion,” Attenborough’s sidekick is a drunk, and Kruger’s mysterious Dorfmann is not the man he purports to be – and the director once again gets exciting mileage out of examining male codes of honor and behavior. The stranded men’s arrogance, selfishness and cowardice all come to the fore during the ordeal, and the central conflict of egos between Towns and Dorfmann resonates as a philosophical battle between not only old-world, hands-on ingenuity (Towns) and modern, analytical discipline (Dorfmann), but also between cocky, can-do American resourcefulness and cold, clinical German efficiency. Aldrich composes shots of these two adversaries for maximum tension – the characters always seemingly in conflict within the frame – and their eventual reconciliation winds up being a subtle, hopeful nod toward gradually thawing post-1945 relations between their respective homelands.

The Great Train Robbery (1979): B-

A Victorian-era caper in which Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland attempt to rob a moving train of gold headed for British soldiers fighting in the Crimea, The Great Train Robbery is drenched in convincing period details even as its story remains imbued with the spirit of the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture. Connery’s Edward Pierce is a dapper master thief who, along with his constantly disguised lover Miriam (Lesley-Anne Down) and his sidekick Robert Agar – played by the quirky Sutherland with an enormous moustache and muttonchops, and a habit of stretching his long, nimble fingers with a popping wiggle – plans to pull of the first train heist in history. As portrayed by Michael Crichton (who not only adapted his novel for the screen, but directs as well), the three crooks are roguish anti-establishment heroes, ultimately cheered for their daring feat by the common people while England’s fussy-duddy powers-that-be frown with dismay. Crichton’s direction is straightforward and solid, while Connery and Sutherland lend the material some dry humor. One wishes The Great Train Robbery weren’t so lackadaisical – the climactic act of larceny is preceded by mini-larcenies that drag on for far too long – but as a quaint diversion, it’s a pleasant-enough theft of one’s two hours.

Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003): C

If watching car crashes is your idea of fun – and as the innumerable traffic jams on I-95 confirm, it’s a favorite hobby of many drivers – then Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films will be right up your carnage-loving alley. A comprehensive history of the highway safety films forced upon high school teenagers from 1959-1979, Bret Wood’s documentary spends an inordinate amount of time replaying grisly clips from classic educational films such as Signal 30 and Mechanized Death. As this frequently fascinating film elucidates, the highway safety movement phenomenon was sparked by Dick Wayman, a Mansfield, Ohio volunteer who believed the most effective way to teach impressionable kids about the rules of the road was to scare the living bejesus out of them. The result was scores of brutally graphic short films in which the camera longingly gazed at corpses or recorded injured people being rescued from their destroyed vehicles while screaming in agony. Wood attempts to evenhandedly examine this strange social movement, enlisting both Wayman’s former colleagues to opine about their works’ effectiveness and cult film experts to weigh in on the films’ origins and impact. The filmmaker astutely identifies how these auto-instructive movies projected Middle American adults’ fears and anxiety – about the unstable post-WWII social order, drinking and driving, and sexual promiscuity – onto kids. Yet any criticism levied against Wayman’s death-obsessed creations (which likely traumatized young drivers but did little to dissuade them from behaving recklessly behind the wheel) is drowned out by the director’s incessant, pornographic use of death-and-dismemberment clips from these ghastly films. By reveling in horrifying images of unspeakable bloodshed as a means of titillating its audience, Hell’s Highway winds up functioning no differently than the disgraceful, despicable films it scrutinizes.

Scarface (1983): B+

Hip-hop’s favorite gangster fantasy, Brian DePalma’s Scarface is a thrillingly opulent, lurid and vulgar – not to mention morally questionable – saga about the criminal corruption of the American dream. Charting brash Cuban émigré Tony Montana’s (Al Pacino) homicidal ascension to white china-fueled power, DePalma’s epic (written by Oliver Stone) revels in its extravagant orgy of drugs, betrayal and four-letter words. An absorbing portrait of the seamier side of the immigrant experience, as well as a slyly ironic vision of America’s still-thriving meritocracy, Scarface nonetheless glorifies its whacked-out protagonist to such absurd degrees that the film – even discounting rappers’ affinity for Montana’s catch phrases and brutal, selfish code of honor – seems like the bible for wannabe crime kingpins. Still, despite its ever-present admiration for the ruthless Montana, there’s so much to savor in DePalma’s extravagantly gonzo classic – Tony’s early chainsaw troubles in a motel bathroom, Michelle Pfeiffer’s wicked ice queen, a Shakespearean finale in which the air becomes thick with blood and bullets – that griping about its debatable depravity interferes with the pleasure of watching this iconic bastard’s savage rise and fall.

Absolute Power (1997): C

Clint Eastwood assembled an astounding cast for 1997’s presidential malfeasance thriller Absolute Power (based on David Baldacci’s novel), and one can only surmise that their participation had more to do with Eastwood’s involvement than with William Goldman’s moronic, plot hole-filled script. Eastwood plays an un-retired thief who, during a burglary, happens to witness (from behind a vault’s two-way mirror) the President (Gene Hackman) engage in some rough extramarital foreplay that ultimately ends in the woman’s death. Eastwood films this tantalizingly taut set-up with unfussy precision, but his film has absolutely no clue how to capitalize on its sterling opening. Hackman, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Scott Glenn, Dennis Haysbert, Judy Davis, and E.G. Marshall all prove more competent than their material, but none can save this dunderheaded fantasy about noble thieves and corrupt commander-in-chiefs from either its own illogicality – why does detective Harris think breaking and entering is OK? How does E.G. Marshall’s assassin know Eastwood’s whereabouts during the outdoor café scene? Why does everyone assume, merely on the basis of Eastwood’s status as the city’s only thief, that he was the mysterious crook at the crime scene? – or its surprisingly slack pacing.

Bride of Chucky (1999): C+

Given the Child’s Play franchise’s ludicrously non-terrifying premise – a cute and cuddly children’s doll with the soul of a killer terrorizes kids and teens – it’s not surprising that by the third go-around, 1999’s Bride of Chucky, the series had devolved into intentional self-parody. Ronny Yu’s sequel follows Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif) and his bloodthirsty ex-girlfriend Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) – who Chucky inevitably winds up turning into a doll – as they attempt to possess two good-looking teenagers’ healthy bodies. The buxom, breathy Tilly is deliciously vampy as Chucky’s plastic lover, but the self-referential jokes about Chucky’s silliness, no matter how meta they may be, seem like the filmmakers’ desperate attempt to enliven a moribund series by aping Scream’s postmodern posture. Given that the Chucky films have always been satiric – how could horror movies about a stupid-looking murderous doll not be? – Bride of Chucky’s up-front recognition of its preposterousness winds up feeling redundant and more than a little wearisome.

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004): D+

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! regurgitates the hackneyed ‘50s romantic comedy formula in which a pretty, naive waif (Kate Bosworth’s country bumpkin Rosalee) meets and wins her dream guy (Josh Duhamel’s movie star Tad Hamilton), only to realize that her one true love has been right beside her all along (Topher Grace’s nerdy Piggly Wiggly manager Pete). And in the process of mechanically adhering to genre conventions, Robert Luketic’s drearily unfunny film fails to produce one single convincingly realistic moment. Grace, left with the thankless role of pining over Bosworth like an insecure loser while cracking wiseass sarcastic comments like his That ‘70s Show alter ego Eric Foreman, makes a wimpy leading man, while Bosworth smiles like a cheery idiot as the moronically oblivious Rosalee. That former soap star Duhamel never comes close to approximating superstar charm is little surprise given the film’s overwhelming ineptitude, nor is there little shock in seeing Nathan Lane and Sean Hayes – two gay comedians shoehorned into sorta-straight roles – wasted as Hamilton’s bitchy, money-grubbing handlers. But the shallow “California materialism vs. down-home West Virginia coziness” peddled by Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! is so painfully clichéd and unsophisticated – West Coasters love booze and babes, Virginian hillbillies love debating the merits of different Pringles flavors – that after a while, I began yearning for the ditzy charm of Luketic’s middling Legally Blonde.

Mona Lisa (1986): B+

An atmosphere of desperate neediness permeates Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, the story of a recently paroled criminal underling named George (Bob Hoskins) and the sleek, imposing African-American prostitute named Simone (Cathy Tyson) he’s ordered to chauffeur to and from high-class establishments. Jordan shoots nocturnal London in scraggly, hard-edged shadows, transforming the city into an empty, lonely place where the compassionate company of others is a rare commodity. George, denied a relationship with his daughter by his ex-wife, finds in Simone a female to protect and love, while Simone – like the titular painting’s subject, an alluringly mysterious beauty – finds in her new driver a guardian who doesn’t use his fists to make a point. Jordan’s razor-sharp film initially centers on this odd couple’s contentious relationship – George finds Simone uppity and cruel, she finds him déclassé and unmanageable – before segueing into George’s search for a young friend of Simone’s who is being forced to work the streets by a ruthless pimp. The real drama, however, stems from each character’s frustrated attempt to transcend his or her lousy lot in life. Facades figure prominently in Mona Lisa, with George, Simone and their menacing boss Mortwell (Michael Caine) all trying to project the dignified, respectable refinement they crave – George as a well-dressed gentleman and suitor, Simone as a regal call girl, Mortwell as an honest businessman. And what makes Jordan’s underrated gem so affecting is the recognition, found in George and Simone’s downcast faces, that such pretenses are likely little more than fanciful, futile delusions.

Infernal Affairs (2002): B-

Infernal Affairs’ cinematic family tree isn’t hard to trace – start with American crime movies from the ‘40s to the ‘70s, then look to John Woo and the Hong Kong cop-yakuza flicks of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and finally to Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, and the crime epics of the past decade – but it is difficult to find anything new or inspired in Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak’s flashy 2002 hit about dueling undercover agents in Japan. Lau (Andy Lau) is a drug dealer’s underling who’s infiltrated Tokyo’s law enforcement ranks, Yan (Tony Leung) is a cop working as a mole in Lau’s nefarious boss’ narcotics operation, and both have the same assignment: to discover and expose the other’s identity. As is always the case in such films, the two men are so deep in disguise that they’re beginning to forget which side of the law they’re on, but Infernal Affairs’ primary schizophrenia is caused by its chaotic homages to every crime film since Pulp Fiction. Familiarity breeds boredom in Lau and Mak’s derivative directorial hands, with the filmmakers attempting to obscure their story’s predictability and frequent hokeyness – especially during introspective scenes set to Japanese pop ballads and a painful subplot involving Lau’s girlfriend, who’s writing a book about ambiguous identity – with Lai Yiu-Fai’s and Lau Wai Keung’s sleekly superficial cinematography and Danny Pang’s anxious editing. It’s not infernally bad, but this stab at duplicating Heat’s examination of the distinctions between cops and crooks is ultimately quiet tepid.

Unforgiven (1992): A

Clint Eastwood’s defining commentary on – and deconstruction of – the gunslinger persona that made him an icon, Unforgiven remains, a decade after it nabbed 1992’s Academy Award for Best Picture, the actor/director’s crowning Western achievement. The solemn tale of retired outlaw William Munny (Eastwood) and his final murderous act against a duo of cowboys who’ve mutilated an innocent whore, the film exhibits Eastwood’s trademark directorial classicism (expert framing, sharp editing, quiet grace without a showy moment to speak of) and a soul-wracking despair born from Munny’s acknowledgement that killing is “a hell of a thing.” Unforgiven conveys the power of the Western genre’s myths (dramatized most vividly through the character of Saul Rubinek’s reporter) as well as the ugly, unromantic realities that lurk behind them, and the film’s overpowering tragedy is brought to heartbreaking life by the terrific Eastwood, Morgan Freeman (as Munny’s compassionate former sidekick Ned Logan) and Richard Harris (as ruthless bounty hunter English Bob). Yet the film belongs to Gene Hackman, who, in a superbly chilling performance, makes the corrupt, gregarious sheriff Little Bill infinitely more frightening by imbuing his arrogant villainy with a hint of rationality.

My Boss’s Daughter (2003): D-

Few films are as consistently pathetic as My Boss’s Daughter, an Ashton Kutcher-Tara Reid vehicle (that says it all, doesn’t it?) directed by David Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun). Kutcher stars as Tom Stansfield, a goody-two-shoes roped into house-sitting for his boss (Terrance Stamp) by the domineering old man’s blandly sexy daughter (Reid). Insanity of the lamest variety ensues, including an owl flying high on cocaine and Reid’s platonic strip-tease for Kutcher that occurs because she thinks he’s gay. The film’s problems are overwhelming – an endless parade of poorly executed slapstick gags, flat performances from Kutcher and Reid (an actress who gives new meaning to the term “vacant”), grating peripheral characters (thanks Andy Richter, Michael Madsen, Molly Shannon and Carmen Electra!), and a strict adherence to the most basic juvenile comedy conventions – but writing about them in detail might take a week, and just continuing to think about this fiasco is beginning to make my head hurt.

Twentynine Palms (2004): B

A twisted, frequently trying examination of sex, violence and the banal desolation of the expansive American West, Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms traverses ground already covered by his superior The Life of Jesus and Humanite. American photographer David (David Wissak) and his Russian, French-speaking girlfriend Katia (Katia Golubeva) take to the Joshua Tree National Park to scout locations for a photo shoot, and wind up wandering around the bleak, barren landscape like a modern-day Adam and Eve desperate for emotional and spiritual fulfillment. Frequently naked underneath the scorching sun, doing little more than aimlessly wander, mechanically screw, and fail to successfully communicate with each, David and Katia are hopelessly isolated from themselves and each other, and Dumont captures menace in long silences and empty spaces by shooting his contentious protagonists with chilly aloofness. Until its climactic paroxysm of bloodshed exposes the frighteningly unavoidable link between sex and violence, Twentynine Palms (despite endless shots of David and Katia driving around deserted highways) is dramatically languorous to the point of stasis, and its leads’ performances are so stilted and mannered as to be laughable (apparently one of many responses garnered by the film during its initial festival screenings). Yet the primary shortcoming of Dumont’s rigorously ascetic film is its emotional remoteness. The director conducts his treatise on man’s inherent bestiality with such self-conscious impassivity that one fails to engage – via compassion, anger or disgust – with the story’s central couple, leaving the film fascinating in the abstract but wearisome in reality.

The Life of Jesus (1997): B+

The Life of Jesus, Bruno Dumont’s 1997 debut, paints a disturbingly bleak portrait of alienation through the story of Freddie (David Douche), an epileptic skinhead who spends his listless days driving his motorcycle around his rural town, dispassionately screwing his grocery store clerk girlfriend Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), and taking out his latent hostility toward life on an Arab teen named Kader (Kader Chaatouf) who flirts with Marie. Dumont shoots his disquieting film – its characters long on menace but woefully short on Christ-like benevolence or compassion – with cool detachment, alternating between stark close-ups and long shots in which people appear tiny amidst the expansive countryside. The director doesn’t judge these wayward boys despite their increasingly horrifying actions; instead, Dumont uses his intently watchful camera (and the constant sound of birds chirping, an allusion to Freddie’s caged finch) to elicit truths about the racism, hatred and violence that lurk beneath the surface of rural communities. Though one occasionally wishes the director would provide more than oblique glances into his impenetrable characters’ frightening, mysterious hearts, The Life of Jesus’ unforgettable images – Freddie and his apathetic friends wasting away outside in the sweltering heat, the boys’ brutally blunt crime – ultimately form a harrowing vision of volatile youth bored to death.

Crimson Gold (2004): A-

An incisive portrait of one man’s quiet rage at, and heartbreakingly violent response to, social inequality, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold (written by Abbas Kiarostami) plays out like a less operatic Iranian version of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Expressionless, overweight pizza deliveryman and war veteran Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin) brims with unspoken resentment at the contemptuous treatment he receives from Tehran’s wealthy and powerful. Commencing with Hussein’s homicidal robbery of a jewelry store before flashing back to elucidate the motivations for his crime, Panahi’s somber film details with exacting perceptiveness the accumulation of minor slights and humiliations – at the hands of a jeweler, the police, his grating fiancé, an elder thief, and a rich young customer who allows him to stay the night in his opulent apartment – that drive this marginalized man to commit murder.

Capturing the sights and sounds of a bustling city that’s both economically and culturally divided, Panahi, via measured, detached cinematography, orchestrates the slow build-up to disaster with calculating precision, and Kiarostami’s script effectively dramatizes Hussein’s fury as the byproduct not of jealousy or greed but of wounded self-esteem. In this regard, Hussein is a possible stand-in for many Muslim men whose sense of self-worth is largely dictated by notions of honor and respect. Yet though Emadeddin’s artless performance seethes with under-the-surface intensity, Panahi and Kiarostami complicate such an easy interpretation of the volatile Hussein by allowing him – during a scene in which he is prevented from delivering pizzas to an apartment building (because the military is raiding a party in which young people are dancing) – an act of stunningly tender selflessness. By beginning and ending his understated masterpiece with the ill-fated robbery – and by populating the film with numerous shots of the deliveryman motorcycling around Tehran – Panahi expresses the social immobility that paralyzes the desperate, alienated Hussein, and when the climactic gunshots ring out in the jewelry store, their sound conveys a sense not of exploding rage but, instead, of sad resignation to a tragic, unavoidable fate.

THX 1138 (1971): C+

Before the world-conquering Star Wars made him a popcorn movie mega-mogul, George Lucas crafted a modest, somber vision of the future with THX 1138. In place of lightsabers, Death Stars and furry 7-foot tall animals, Lucas’ filmmaking debut takes place in an Orwellian world in which people are identified by letter and number designations, spied on at all times by the state, and forced to conform via institutionalized pill-popping. In this environment of emotionless obedience, a robot engineer – Robert Duvall’s titular THX 1138 – is awakened from his drug-induced catatonia and taught how to love by his female “roommate” LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie). Since such behavior is strictly prohibited by the omniscient powers-that-be, LUH 3417 (who’s with child) is taken away, setting THX – with the help of Donald Pleasence’s off-kilter prisoner SEN 5241 – on a mission to rescue her and, if possible, escape the industrial complex he calls home. As with much of ‘70s-era sci-fi, the unremarkable story’s primary focus is the individual’s attempt to break free from society’s uncompromising, stultifying constraints (read: sedatives and consumerism), and Lucas’ stark, sterile all-white production design (reminiscent of Kubrick’s uncanny use of negative white space) does lend the film a claustrophobic menace. Unfortunately, while I can respect Lucas’ spartan mise-en-scène and disdain for sentimentality, THX 1138’s depiction of a dystopian future populated by bald automatons is – unlike his pretension-free Star Wars trilogy – leaden and tiresome.

Millennium Mambo (2001): B

As the new millennium dawns, Vicky (Qi Shu) balances separate love affairs with abusive, drug-smoking Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan) and paternal petty gangster Jack (Jack Kao) in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s exquisite Millennium Mambo. Narrated (in hindsight) by Vicky from the year 2011, the film’s splintered, flashback-heavy narrative nominally concerns Vicky’s tumultuous two romances, though the storyline is – even more than usual for Hou – largely inconsequential. Supposedly part of a trilogy about Taiwanese youth culture, Millennium Mambo is similar to Hou’s superior Goodbye South, Goodbye in that both chart small-timers’ aimless search for money, love, or, at least, some fleeting feeling of genuine human connection. As is his custom, Hou frames his bored, detached protagonist (who, in a telling early scene, lies motionless as Hao-Hao sexually ravages her body) in doorways and hallways, thus visualizing Vicky’s inability (or unwillingness) to abandon her vacant, static existence for something more fulfilling. Nonetheless, Vicky’s narration alludes to her eventual evolution, as does the ravishing opening sequence (seemingly set in 2011) in which she prances down a deserted walkway and – one can sense – away from the tedium and madness of her former life. Despite its techno-enhanced rhythm and stunning cinematography by In the Mood for Love’s Mark Lee Ping-bin – who uses bold, primary colors to create a pulsating vision of Taiwan nightlife – there’s a noticeable redundancy about Hou’s latest. But as proven by moments like Vicky leaving a temporary face-print in the snow – one of the film’s many stirring visions of the transitory nature of life – even a minor Hou effort is brimming with poignant artistry.

Flowers of Shanghai (1998): B+

A story of insularity, slavery and sexual politics, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s straightforward period piece Flowers of Shanghai tells the story of four brothel houses (“flower houses”) and the relationships shared between its wealthy patrons and attractive, cunning employees (“flower girls”). In 1880s Shanghai, wealthy men spend their days and nights gambling, playing drinking games, feasting and smoking opium in the company of servile beauties who function as their escorts, lovers, and financial benefactors. The fragile-looking women project easygoing compliance, yet as Hou’s film reveals, the women are actually unsentimental realists eager to secure their freedom through their dealings with the foolish, hesitant, capricious men they entertain. Hou employs no traditional edits throughout his meticulous film (instead, scenes are conjoined by fade-ins and -outs), and his long, unbroken shots – which are set solely inside the opulent brothels, never giving us a glimpse of the outside world – capture the suffocating airlessness of the film’s decadent milieu. As Master Wong, a man who suffers after punishing his flower girl by marrying another, Tony Leung exudes a somber, forlorn uncertainty, and Hou eloquently illustrates the unpredictability of passion through a startling third-act scene in which a flower girl’s impulsive attempt to poison her beau ironically leads to marriage. While the drug-addled men ensconce themselves in lavish, ornate whorehouses, their pragmatic female companions covertly plot to escape their extravagant prisons, and as these lovers squabble, cavort and reconcile, Hou – in this, his most accessible film – sympathetically depicts the consuming, love-sick ennui which afflicts both his discontent male and female characters.

Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996): A-

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film set entirely in present-day Taiwan, Goodbye South, Goodbye concerns two low-level gangster brothers – easygoing Gao (Jack Kao) and impulsive Flathead (Giong Lim) – who, along with their girlfriends Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) and Ying (Kuei-Yin Hsu), navigate the rural outskirts of Taipei trying to earn enough money to open a restaurant. However, since the director is more interested in atmosphere and conveying a sense of time’s relentless progression than he is with straightforward narrative clarity, Goodbye South, Goodbye is more elliptical mood piece than traditional gangster flick. Gao and Flathead organize illegal card games, attempt to sell pigs at inflated prices, and engage in a variety of other misbegotten business ventures, all the while drinking, smoking, and coasting through life with the vague, imperceptive grogginess of men incapable of seeing the forest from the trees. Hou’s trademark long takes and fondness for gliding dolly shots – including stunning views from the front and back of moving trains, shots of the brothers driving motorcycles through the lush forest, and the image of the city as seen through a car’s green-tinted windshield – convey the hazy aimlessness and insularity of Gao and Flathead’s lives, and their indifferent detachment from the world functions as a microcosm of modern Taiwanese youth’s disconnect from their social and cultural roots. From the film’s opening scene in which Gao fails to hear a caller on his cell phone, to the closing sounds of Flathead desperately (yet vainly) attempting to garner a response from Gao, Hou brilliantly evokes the isolation of a generation hopelessly cut off from its past.

Good Men, Good Women (1995): B+

The lingering effect of the past on the present is once again Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s thematic focus in Good Men, Good Women, which jumps back and forth between contemporary Taiwan, the immediate past, and the 1940s and ‘50s to tell a fractured tale of personal and national treachery. Lian Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) is an actress preparing to make a movie (titled “Good Men, Good Women”) in which she’ll star as Chiang Bi-Yu, a real-life revolutionary who traveled to mainland China in the ‘40s to fight Japanese occupation, only to return home to be executed by the government (along with hundreds of others) for being a communist. While preparing for her role, Lian begins mysteriously receiving faxed pages of her diary that concern her romance with a small-time gangster named Ah Wei (Jack Kao), sparking (in a lovely formal device) flashbacks to their heady love affair and, ultimately, her betrayal of his memory during her subsequent years as a drug-addled bar hostess. The implication, as subtle as it is powerful, is that Lian’s struggle to come to grips with her own disloyalty reflects modern-day Taiwan’s attempts to confront (and accept) its own shameful past persecuting communists. Cinematographer Chen Huai-en shoots Lian’s visions of the movie-in-progress in aged black-and-white, while drenching the present-day events in luxurious color, and Hou’s stunningly sparse direction – using no close-ups and measured, uninterrupted takes – frequently frames characters in doorways and other physical structures as a means of visualizing the claustrophobic binds of time, place and memory. Never easy but immensely gratifying, Good Men, Good Women may not achieve the epic grandness of The Puppetmaster, but it’s nonetheless a gorgeously wrought portrait of the cyclicality of history.

The Hitcher (1986): C

I’ve always found Rutger Hauer to be an awesomely menacing actor, and The Hitcher – Robert Harmon’s preposterous thriller about a kid named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) who picks up a hitchhiker (Hauer) in Texas and winds up being terrorized by the stranger – does nothing to dispel that notion. The film, written by Body Parts scribe Eric Red, is a horribly long-winded affair, weighed down by both Howell’s awful performance as a fresh-faced youth consumed by vengeance and a slow-footed story that not only makes no sense (if Halsey is driving from Chicago to San Diego, how the hell did he wind up in Texas?), but also disastrously keeps Hauer’s boogeyman off-screen to heighten tension (the result, predictably, is the exact opposite). Harmon’s direction is a mixed bag – at times his compositions are laughably exaggerated, at other times he captures the frightening, oppressive desolation of the desert highway (and provides a truly frightening image of Hauer leering in the dark corner of a motel room) – and one can only groan at the realization that Hauer’s unhinged hitchhiker may be pestering Halsey because he wants to turn the teen into his bloodthirsty doppelganger. Still, Hauer is at the top of his game, his wild, shining eyes glowing like those of a nocturnal predator maniacally focused on his prey, and his relaxed physique masks an imposing, coiled viciousness. The actor may have gone on to make even worse B-movie blunders, but the Scandinavian star is nonetheless a master of off-key creepiness, and his lunatic performance is the only thing that keeps The Hitcher from completely running off the road.

The Dreamers (2003): B-

Though most focused on its racy, NC-17-rated sexual explicitness, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is surprisingly lacking in pulse-pounding passion. Admittedly, there’s a modicum of sensuality in the relationship shared by Matthew (Matthew Pitt), a student studying abroad (and perhaps fleeing his overbearing father?) in 1968 Paris, and Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), twin siblings who take Matthew into their home and include him in their carnal pastimes. But their youthful shenanigans, though striving for Last Tango in Paris intensity, never fully ignite. Matthew and his two adventurous new friends share a common love of the cinema, and Bertolucci links their infatuation with the budding New Wave (and the American genre films that inspired it) to their growing political activism – Isabelle and Theo, the children of a famous poet, worship Mao and support the ongoing ’68 Paris student riots – and their emotional and sexual awakenings. The film’s numerous cinematic allusions can grow a bit wearisome – the central trio are modeled on Jules and Jim’s love triangle, and the director regularly employs match cuts to show us which films he’s referencing – and the erotic games the trio enjoy in their claustrophobic apartment (not to mention the pseudo-incestuous longings shared by the stunning Isabelle and conniving Theo) are thematic devices rather than believable presentations of counterculture rebellion. Yet if Bertolucci can’t generate the heat his film’s hype promises, he does provide the venue for Pitt’s marvelous coming-out performance, a mixture of eager experimentation, wide-eyed excitement, and sensitive maturity that grounds the frequently implausible The Dreamers firmly in reality.

Cecil B. Demented (2000): B

“Demented forever!” is the rallying cry of Cecil B. Demented’s renegade cinematic terrorists, and while director John Waters’ latest film doesn’t totally make up for the disappointingly stale Pecker, it does prove that the director hasn’t completely forsaken his own deranged moviemaking urges. Cecil B. Demented (a hilariously over-the-top Stephen Dorff) is an independent filmmaker who, along with his militant gang of oddball cohorts – including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Adrian Grenier and Alicia Witt, all tattooed with the name of an iconic indie or old Hollywood filmmaker – is determined to crush modern cinema with a potent combo of firebombs and a fiery low-budget film starring kidnapped starlet Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith). Waters’ equal-opportunity critique slams modern Hollywood for its mawkish simplicity and unchallenging idiocy while simultaneously lampooning the fanatical lunacy of those who blindly champion independent film. The campy narrative is modeled on the Patty Hearst saga (as in many of his films, Hearst herself cameos), and though the filmmaking itself is somewhat flat and bland – despite the colorful set design and punk-metal soundtrack, there’s a genericness to the film’s mise-en-scène – Waters’ incisive deconstruction of hideous Hollywood blockbusters and egomaniacal, illogical fringe cinema fans is more than enough to sustain this mildly scabrous comedy.

Pecker (1998): D+

Shockingly obvious filmmaking from a usually eccentric and unpredictable iconoclast, Pecker is arguably director John Waters’ worst film. A transparent, laugh-free parable about Waters’ own rise to fame, the film charts the unlikely superstardom of Edward Furlong’s titular schlub, an aspiring Baltimore photographer whose life becomes front-page news after his photos of his family, friends, and the city’s weirdoes and degenerates are made famous by New York art snobs. Pecker’s loving portraits of the city’s misfit population are usurped by big-city intellectuals who condescendingly embrace his snapshots and declare him a genius, and Waters means to critique those who have patronizingly embraced his own freak-filled films for the wrong reasons. Yet this comedy’s attempts at gross-out zaniness and bourgeoisie-bashing barbs (a shot of two rats humping; male strippers tea-bagging eager club customers; jokes about the Virgin Mary; Pecker’s wink-wink name) are mostly tame and desperate; the cast – including Christina Ricci, Lilli Taylor and cameos from Mink Stole and Patty Hearst – is generally awful (especially Furlong, who belts out his lines like an overeager five-year-old); and the lifeless plot’s pervasive irony and camp is more exhausting than energizing. Pecker’s art-world reprimand feels like a tepid scolding rather than an inspired rant, and amidst all the second-rate gags and go-nowhere scenes, it was depressing to discover not a single flash of Waters’ classic, uninhibited mischievousness.

The Girl Next Door (2004): C-

The Girl Next Door is essentially Risky Business for the 21st century, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The story of a dorky high school class president (Emile Hirsch’s Matthew) who finds love, happiness and self-confidence by dating the porn star (Elisha Cuthbert’s Danielle) who’s housesitting next door, it’s a mixed-up fantasy in which pornography is incongruously presented as the mainstream and as a degrading outsider profession from which one yearns to escape. Danielle is an adult film starlet who falls in love with Matthew because – as a nerd with a severe lack of sexual experience – he’s a safe, white-bread do-gooder who sees the compassionate person underneath her raunchy, sex-biz exterior. Director Luke Greenfield unimaginatively tries to have it both ways by having the audience revel in the thought of wooing a porn star while simultaneously assuming that any sensible woman working in porn would desperately want to settle down in suburbia with a bland boy-toy (countless real-world examples to the contrary). Meanwhile, the film fails to even acknowledge the fact that a straight-laced, Georgetown-bound geek might think hard (pun intended) about the health risks – not to mention potential moral implications – of sleeping with someone who’d spent years having nasty, kinky sex on camera. Timothy Olyphant (this film’s version of Joe Pantoliano’s Guido) is amusingly sinister as Danielle’s skeevy manager/film producer Kelly, but once it hits the mid-point and preposterous narrative devices begin piling on top of one another, The Girl Next Door goes flaccid.

Perfect Blue (1997): B+

I don’t know what Perfect Blue’s title has to do with the movie itself, but as an adult anime feature about the complexities of celebrity (and celebrity worship), Satoshi Kon’s 1997 debut is quite enthralling. A sugar-coated “pop idol” named Mima decides to abandon her music career for a shot at acting stardom, but her role on a murder-mystery soap opera about a schizophrenic serial killer leads to semi-pornographic work that’s far removed from her former squeaky clean image. Shortly thereafter, Mima finds a creepy website purporting to be her diary that features intimate details about her life, begins receiving visits from a ghost that looks like her old pop star self (or are they merely hallucinations?), and starts losing the ability to decipher her dreams from her waking life. Kon’s animation can be uneven (some sequences seem far less detailed and expressive than others) and the dubbing is, in a word, abysmal. Yet Perfect Blue is nonetheless an astute examination of the obsessive, addictive nature of fame for both wannabe stars and fanatical fans – in the film’s finest moment, Mima’s ghoulish, obsessive stalker seems to be cupping the singer in the palm of his hand – and the uneasy relationship between a celeb’s public image and off-screen personality. Expect some graphic violence and some unnecessary animated nudity throughout Kon’s Dario Argento-influenced “what is reality?” narrative, but just don’t expect to understand the meaning of the film’s title.

The Watcher (2000): D

Who watches The Watcher? Probably no one, and with good reason. One of the lamest serial killer thrillers of the post-Silence of the Lambs period, this jarringly incompetent film (by music video vet Joe Charbanic) has the bad sense to cast Keanu Reeves – he of the vacant, dim-bulb charm – as a homicidal maniac who moves to Chicago so he can continue playing a cat-and-mouse game with James Spader’s mentally unstable detective. Spader takes meds to ease his migraines and visits a shrink (Marisa Tomei, with duffel bags under her eyes) to discuss the guilt he feels for letting Keanu kill his lover years earlier. Meanwhile, Keanu dances around to Rob Zombie tunes, watches lots of victims and explains to Spader that they’re “yin and yang.” With the killer constantly taunting the cops (after a while, he starts mailing photos of his victims-to-be to the police), Spader’s distraught detective fearing he’s all-too-similar to his criminal counterpart, and more bad camera tricks than one can tolerate – what purpose does it serve to shoot Keanu’s POV shots in digital video? – it’s as if Charbanic wants only to provide a handy compendium of well-worn genre conventions. Unfortunately, to see them all on display, you’d actually have to watch The Watcher and, well, I can’t see any reason to do something like that.

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004): C-

I have a confession to make: In the celebrity feud of 2004, I side with Lindsay Lohan and against Hillary Duff. That said, I could barely stand Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, last year’s pre-Mean Girls Lohan vehicle which – with its inattention to narrative or character development (aside from watered-down after-school special lessons) and maniacal focus on fashion, make-up, and sexualized young girls – is nearly identical to a half-hour episode of Duff’s former Disney Channel program The Lizzie Maguire Show. This excruciating Sara Sugarman-directed fiasco tells the too-cute tale of Lola (Lohan), an obnoxious bohemian and aspiring actress whose mother uproots her from beloved Manhattan to New Jersey, where she has to teach her high school friends and rivals that being yourself is, like, the coolest. It’s hard to even call Teenage Drama Queen a movie, since there’s virtually no story or cinematographic value to this parade of underage, underdressed hotties. Lola models an exhausting array of ultra-fashionable outfits, but her battle against a bitchy rival (Megan Fox) is so mind-numbingly juvenile that it’s difficult to even pay attention to Lola and her best friend Ella’s (Alison Pill) attempts to crash a going-away party for their favorite band SidArthur or the climactic Brittany Spears-inspired high school adaptation of “Pygmalion” which Lola headlines. And if I still haven’t convinced you to avoid this deflating dud, I have another confession to make: My teen movie-loving wife disliked it even more than I did.

Taking Lives (2004): D+

As the late Henny Youngman might have said, if this is what the serial killer genre has come to, take my life, please! Perhaps the most derivative Hollywood serial killer thriller since, um, well, since the last one, Taking Lives involves Angelina Jolie’s pseudo-psychic F.B.I. agent (she lies in victims’ graves to “understand” what happened to them, à la Red Dragon) as she tracks a murderous Canadian drifter who assumes the identities of his fallen prey. From its Seven-inspired opening credit sequence and grime-infused cinematography to its gimmicky villain (highly erudite, loves to play games with the cops), “guess whodunit” plot structure and sexual link between the detective and the deviant, D.J. Caruso’s film is just a ridiculous, rehashed patchwork quilt made from old decaying movie parts. Since there are only two reasonable suspects for the crimes – and one is clearly a red herring – the film eventually shifts its focus to its heroine’s immense lips and undulating unclothed chest. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but with a decent cast including Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands, Olivier Martinez and Tchêky Karyo, it would have been nice if the filmmakers had come up with at least one narrative surprise that didn’t involve Jolie’s T&A. As it is, Taking Lives won’t kill you, but it will steal precious hours you’ll never have back.

Godsend (2004): C

Here are the three things I learned from Nick Hamm’s Godsend: Don’t ever let your kid hang out alone on a New York City sidewalk while you sign a credit card receipt in a store; don’t ever trust Robert DeNiro if he offers you a deal too good to be true; and don’t ever attempt to clone your child unless you’re absolutely sure that the test tube tyke won’t be demonic. Somewhere inside this idiotic horror-thriller is a debate about the moral implications of human cloning, but Hamm’s allegiance is to frightening, not enlightening, his audience. Unfortunately, that goal goes wholly unaccomplished. Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos are Manhattan parents who partake in Dr. DeNiro’s 21st-century Frankenstein experiment when their 8-year old son is killed in an accident, but after relocating to the quiet, anonymous suburbs with their new baby, they slowly learn that their genetically manipulated offspring may have a nasty little satanic streak. Alas, the kid (Cameron Bright) – despite a naturally disturbing face (check out how far apart his eyes are!) – is no Damien, Godsend is no The Omen, and this pudgy, obvious DeNiro is definitely not the one I grew up admiring.

50 First Dates (2004): C-

Unless you like your romantic comedies light on romance and even lighter on comedy, I’d suggest shunning Adam Sandler’s 50 First Dates at all costs. Although it reunites Sandler and Barrymore (who previously paired up in the superior, but still mediocre, The Wedding Singer), this dopey film has virtually nothing going for it but its genial stars...who, from the implausible beginning involving Sandler and a walrus to its even-less believable happy ending in frigid Alaska, share zero chemistry. The story – about a penguin-loving Hawaii veterinarian (Sandler) in love with a cute girl (Barrymore) who, because of a car accident, has short-term amnesia that makes her forget each day once she goes to sleep – is make-believe garbage that’s so stupidly contrived, it’ll have you wanting to strangle yourself with a lei. The syrupy script – which has Sandler wooing Barrymore over and over again each morning – would be tolerable if it offered a single funny moment. It doesn’t. Ever. Rob Schneider and Sandler’s usual cast of no-name buddies appear in dull supporting roles (Note to Schneider: as time goes on, acting like a stupid stoner seems less and less like acting), but after fifteen minutes of lazy one-liners and annoyingly wacky side characters (check out Sandler’s creepy androgynous co-worker!), it becomes obvious that Sandler peaked as a comedian with Happy Gilmore. In the immortal words of a kid from Billy Madison, 50 First Dates is most assuredly “retarded or something.”

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001): C

Nothing more than a bland inside joke for genre aficionados, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is writer/director/star Larry Blamire’s campy ode to square ‘50s sci-fi adventures. Shot in faux-amateurish black-and-white by Kevin Jones, and featuring a group of largely unknown actors who deliberately go overboard in caricaturing the stilted acting performances of those bygone Cold War-era fantasies, it’s a one-note goof-off that, although largely painless, will only appeal to serious sci-fi lovers. The story concerns a scientist and his wife (Larry Blamire and Fay Masterson) who, while searching the countryside for the rare mineral “atmospherium,” become embroiled in a three-way tussle for the prized chemical compound with an alien couple (Andrew Parks and Susan McConnell) and an evil scientist (Brian Howe), his sexy sidekick Animala (a woman, played by Jennifer Blaire, who was created from forest animals), and the legendary titular skeleton who requires atmospherium to “live.” Since The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra’s ancestors are such easy targets for affectionate ridicule, there’s nothing very comical about purposefully making the skeleton’s puppet strings visible or staging a pointless dance sequence in the midst of the action, and there’s valid reason to question the necessity of spoofing inherently ridiculous movies in the first place. Still, those who think a bad joke gets funnier the more often it’s repeated will surely enjoy Blamire’s Dr. Paul Armstrong regularly talking about his desire to continue “doing more science.”

Spartan (2003): C+

It’s a bad sign that, three weeks after seeing Spartan, David Mamet’s latest thriller, I can scarcely remember what happens. The president’s daughter is kidnapped and apparently sold into the white slave trade (no, I’m not kidding), and stoic military spook Val Kilmer is assigned to rescue her. But when the government decides to cut its losses and proclaim her dead, Kilmer covertly heads to Eastern Europe to save the young girl. One is supposed to read Kilmer’s heroic decision as a sign that he’s matured into a man who can no longer ignore the humanity of those he’s assigned to save/kill, but since Mamet’s too-stripped-down script doesn’t provide us with a protagonist of any depth or emotion, it’s nearly impossible to care about Kilmer or his courageousness. The writer/director’s trademark dialogue is somewhat diffused by the military setting (which doesn’t allow for enough repartee), although a brief appearance by Ed O’Neil vividly proves that, in the right actor’s mouth, Mamet’s writing has an unmatched cool-as-ice zing. By and large, however, the bland Spartan is barely memorable.

The Flower of My Secret (1995): B

Leo (Marisa Parides) writes popular romance novels under a pseudonym, but, mired in a loveless marriage to an adulterous military man in Bosnia, she no longer has the desire to write her profitable melodramatic stories. When writer’s block strikes, she gets a job working as a literary critic for a newspaper, and she promptly trashes her novels as sensational and simplistic while her editor – a pudgy romantic named Angel (Juan Echanove) who quotes Casablanca and references The Apartment – writes a counterpoint article championing the florid books. In Pedro Almodóvar’s 1995 The Flower of My Secret, the director dramatizes the contentious relationship between fiction and reality via Leo, who, despite despising the unreality of her work, eventually accepts (after writing a zany Almodóvar-ish novel) that although fiction is inherently false, it nonetheless conveys, at its best, fundamental truths about the human soul. There’s the usual gaggle of Almodóvar zaniness strewn throughout this messy, colorful romp – a maid who wants to be a dancer, Leo’s cranky mother and her “horse face” sister, pills and suicide attempts galore – and the director’s affecting use of teary-eyed close-ups imbues the film with more passion and frivolous humor than was found in the dreadful High Heels or somber Kika. Although Leo hates romance novels, the always-mischievous Almodóvar ironically provides a cheerful ending in which Leo and Angel find happiness in each other’s arms. Yet since this cinematic satirist is as deeply suspicious of sentimentality as he is a hopeless romantic, Almodóvar makes sure that the optimistic conclusion isn’t simply preordained but, rather, hard earned.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003): B+

Surrealist adult animation without all the Disney treacle, The Triplets of Belleville is a unique and playful Parisian fairytale about a club-footed mother’s valiant mission – aided by her trusty dog and the titular trio – to rescue her kidnapped Tour de France-competing bicyclist son from square-bodied mobsters. Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, the film is a bustling cornucopia of delights, from its opening nostalgic newsreel footage of the triplets – a cabaret group from the ‘50s decked out in matching furs – that comments on the West’s racist exploitation of Africans, to a cinema-loving finale involving bicyclists operating stationary bikes in front of a movie screen. Chomet’s fabulous animation is a swirl of the bulbous and the elongated, and his characters’ sinewy, animalistic physicality – modeled after Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot (a favorite of the triplets) and the distinctive styles of Al Hirschfeld and R. Crumb – gives the film a rubbery vivacity. Chomet’s film features no dialogue, and the director’s mastery of silent-movie storytelling (aided by Benoît Charest and Mathieu Chedid’s bouncy post-war score) is bizarrely enchanting, even though said charm is slightly marred by the film’s inclusion of gratuitous negative American stereotypes (no shock that the French think we’re fat slobs who love hamburgers). Nonetheless, it’s still last year’s finest animated film not named Finding Nemo.

High Heels (1991): C-

With 1991’s High Heels, Pedro Almodóvar hit a new career low, producing a florid riff on ‘40s and ‘50s women’s pictures that’s not funny, suspenseful, or original. The Byzantine plot – about a caddish man who’s two-timing TV news anchor Rebeca Del Paramo (Victoria Abril) with her pop star mother Becky (Marisa Paredes), as well as a transvestite (and cop!) who impersonates Becky and is both having a child with Rebeca and investigating her for the murder of her first husband (got that?) – is a laundry list of Almodóvar fixations. There’s a lightness to the early scenes that’s bolstered by the director’s typical penchant for bright color schemes and pulsating, extravagant music, and I couldn’t resist laughing during a scene involving the daughter confessing that she killed her hubby on TV while the sign-language newscaster disbelievingly communicates the news to hard-of-hearing viewers. Shortly thereafter, however, the film’s pacing goes limp and Almodóvar resorts to dull stabs at humor such as a random dance sequence with female prison inmates that seems based on John Waters’ equally tepid set piece in Cry-Baby. As the title suggests, the film’s melodramatic females are all dressed stylishly, and there’s the requisite nod to Buñuel’s legendary foot fetish. Yet despite attempting to tackle the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships, religion, identity and sacrifice, it’s tough to care about anything going on in a film as dry, stilted, and lifeless as High Heels.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990): C+

Pedro Almodóvar’s controversial 1990 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! was originally rated NC-17 before being released unrated, but, ironically, it was one of the director’s least risqué films to date. A black comedy about the (literal and figurative) bonds of love, it’s an off-kilter – and off-putting – mix of humor, sex, and Stockholm Syndrome obsession that never quite gels into something believable or appealing. Nutjob Ricky (Antonio Banderas, sporting a Norman Bates haircut that goes with Ennio Morricone’s Pyscho-esque stalker theme) escapes from a mental ward and kidnaps B-movie actress (and former porn star and smack addict) Marina (Victoria Abril) because he believes – on the basis of an anonymous one-night fling with her years earlier – that she’ll fall in love with him once she gets to know him. Love does blossom, largely via both of them caring for each other (he cooks her breakfast, she nurses his wounds after he’s beaten up stealing drugs for her), and Almodóvar expertly frames shots with doorways and bedposts to visually convey the couple’s constrictive passion. Still, given Marina’s eventual voluntary submission and the sub-plot about her current acting job (she’s filming a horror film – or is it a romance?), Marina and Ricky’s relationship comes across as some sort of tedious role-playing exercise. There are reasonable gripes to be made about Marina’s degradation and the implication that women like to be controlled and mistreated by men because, you know, the abuse comes from a loving place. But since the film is so preposterous, the whole thing really just feels like a long-winded joke without a punch line.

The Hunted (2002): C+

William Friedkin’s The Hunted is lame on so many counts (its underdeveloped hunter-becomes-the-hunted story, its uneven pacing, its shoddy peripheral characters, perhaps the worst single-scene performance by Benicio Del Toro ever, in which he teaches a girl about the sacredness of animals) that it’s hard to believe there’s actually some worthwhile meat on its bruised and bloody carcass. Tommy Lee Jones plays a tracker (and once-special ops trainer) who comes out of retirement to stop a renegade former pupil (Del Toro). Johnny Cash’s august intro narration about Abraham killing his son lays out the story’s biblical underpinnings, and Friedkin’s visceral hand-to-hand combat scenes (shot with gritty beauty by Caleb Deschanel) vigorously express the nastiness of unhinged masculinity. The Hunted’s portrait of the murderous bestiality lurking beneath man’s civilized façade – and the responsibility fathers have for giving birth to such monstrousness – makes the film more than just another entry in the “Tommy Lee Jones chases a criminal” genre. But be prepared to endure pounds of painful preposterousness in return for the film’s pint-sized pleasures.

Thirteen (2003): B-

Big girls, they don’t cry…but they do, according to Catherine Hardwicke’s sensational Thirteen, begin stealing, doing drugs and getting homemade piercings shortly after they become teenagers. A rather basic tale about the perils of going along with the in-crowd and the extremes to which teenagers will act out for attention, the film details former straight-arrow Tracy’s (Evan Rachel Wood) radical rebellion against her hippie mom (Holly Hunter), her well-behaved brother (Jeremy Sisto), and her absentee father (Brady Corbet). Supposedly authentic because it was co-written by its young co-star Nikki Reed (who pulls double duty as horrible whorish influence Evie Zamora), it’s an after-school special made bracingly gritty by fearsome performances by Wood, Zamora and Hunter and a welcome disdain for melodrama. It’s also, however, far from a tell-all expose of out-of-control youth. Clinging too tightly to its rote storyline, and too desperate to shock us into submission by piling on Tracy’s vices, Thirteen tries to scare us into accepting a commonly held fact – that angry and resentful teenagers frequently defy authority by behaving recklessly. On behalf of the world’s former teenagers, let me simply say: Well, duh.

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968): B

Atheism is no match for Catholicism in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, the third installment of Hammer studio’s crimson-smeared vampire saga starring Christopher Lee as the lascivious hemoglobin-guzzling Count Dracula. Twelve months after the events of the last film, a priest finds a woman with bite marks hanging dead inside his church bell, a discovery that further convinces the parishioners that this place of worship – which is touched at dusk by the shadow of Dracula’s castle – is tainted by the unholy. A visiting Monsignor, disgusted by the townsfolk’s fear of an already vanquished monster, takes the priest up to the Count’s castle and places a giant golden cross across the door, though not before a storm causes the priest to fall down the mountain and bleed, conveniently, on the shattered ice that was imprisoning Dracula. Free to resume his demonic business, the Count goes after the Monsignor and his pretty blond niece Anna, who’s in love – much to the Monsignor’s disapproval – with a God-denying baker studying to be a doctor or professor (or something else “intellectual”). Lee’s enormous cold eyes turn deep scarlet when his bloodlust is aroused, and, as in Dracula: Prince of Darkness, he “turns” a promiscuous woman but really has a craving for the pure, undefiled juices of the virginal Anna. A scene in which he mounts Anna (who’s splayed out on a bed) and rubs his face and mouth against hers before engaging in some pointy-toothed necking is indicative of the film’s more pronounced concentration on the sexual aspects of Dracula’s appetite. Freddie Francis’ direction employs a visual schema that’s both decadently classy and decrepitly moldy, but there’s just not enough of Lee’s Dracula – who, as in later films, becomes almost a side character – to sustain one’s interest throughout the sometimes tedious expository scenes featuring Paul and his co-workers at the local tavern. Although he shares with his nemesis an aversion to religious iconography, Paul eventually crosses himself in a sign of holy conversion after impaling Dracula on a gigantic cross, thereby providing a triumphant conclusion – for believers, at least – in which noble faith conquers that wretched condition known as godlessness.

The Law of Desire (1987): B

Narrowly beating Fatal Attraction to the screen in 1987, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Law of Desire concerns a similarly unhealthy relationship, although in the director’s colorfully kinky Spain, the dangerous romance is shared by adult film director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) – a sexually promiscuous artist whose last lover Juan couldn’t quite reciprocate Pablo’s love and thus left to work at a coastal town’s lighthouse – and his new stalkerazzi lover Antonio, who’s fandom quickly morphs into frightening obsession. The director embellishes this primary storyline with incest, rampant cocaine use, promiscuity, and jabs at the Catholic Church, as well as with a secondary plot involving Pablo’s transsexual lesbian sister Tina (the sensually chic Carmen Maura), a budding actress taking care of her ex-lover’s daughter while working on Pablo’s stage version of Cocteau’s The Human Voice (a monologue about a woman and a suitcase that formed the basis for Almodóvar’s subsequent Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). The plot is set in motion by Pablo, who, dissatisfied with Juan’s first letter home, writes an idealistic replacement letter that expresses the longings and sadness Juan didn’t convey in his own letter, sends it to Juan to sign, and then has Juan send it back to him. When new boy-toy Antonio discovers this missive, his clingy behavior goes from mild to maniacal, eventually throwing both men’s lives into sweaty, sexy tumult. Pablo’s typewriter and, by extension, his fiction writing – not only the author’s screenplays and plays, but also this fake letter to/by Juan – becomes both an outlet for his desires and frustrations (he’s writing a new play about Tina’s transexuality) and the cause for his sexual and emotional frustrations. Almodóvar’s affection for his characters’ foibles and fetishistic carnal appetites makes his engagingly loopy narrative more than a simple Telemundo-on-acid joke, and his boldly candid depiction of homosexual love – including a couple of amorous go-rounds between Pablo and Antonio which exude the heavy panting hysteria of unbridled lust – contributes to the film’s hot-blooded vigor. That said, I can’t help but shake the feeling that, had Banderas exhibited similar homosexual desire in his American movie debut, the dashing Spanish actor’s Hollywood career would have sunk faster than a stone.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966): B-

Perhaps the least effective Hammer horror film featuring Christopher Lee as the fly-by-night Count, Dracula: Prince of Darkness features an awkward silent performance from its star as the titular monster, whose ferocious snarl and lack of dialogue makes the character more feral monster than debonair, courtly spawn of Satan. Yet despite a less-than-stellar turn by Lee, Terence Fisher’s 1966 film – which is technically the third Hammer Dracula film after Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula, although the latter doesn’t feature Lee and, thus, doesn’t truly count – has a gothic mustiness that perfectly suits its tale of aristrocrats gone lost. A group of English fuddy-duddies ignore a priest’s warning and head off into the Carpathian mountains, where their driver abandons them for fear of getting too close to Count Dracula’s castle. There, the prim and proper travelers are picked up by a mysterious carriage that takes them to the ominous castle, which is being kept in order by the Count’s eerie servant Clove. Fisher tantalizingly hints at the coming horror when one of the two female travelers sits on her bed and remarks on its lumpiness (is the mattress made of bodies?), and Clove doesn’t waste much time bleeding one of the two men dry in order to resurrect Lee’s towering villain. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the film seems to be punishing these arrogant, idiotic nobles for recklessly avoiding the townspeople’s warnings about the dangerousness of their sightseeing trip and, thus, treating the nasty, brutal world as their playground. This being a Hammer production, the Count is naturally a sexually virulent beast, and, as in many of the series’ subsequent films, Dracula has a classic moment in which he tosses aside the needy, slutty vampiress (who he’s already defiled with a bite) in favor of attempting to slurp from the neck of a pure, noble – and thus symbolically “virginal” – blonde beauty. The climactic Dracula death is completely nonsensical – if running water is the bane of Dracula’s existence, why does he have a castle surrounded by it? – but the castle itself has a lascivious opulence that matches these films’ baroque blending of the regal and the bodice-ripping.

Horror of Dracula (1958): B+

From the late ‘50s through the ‘70s, no one did horror like England’s Hammer studios, and the crown jewels in their terrifying oeuvre were the gothic Dracula pictures starring the incomparable Christopher Lee as the blood-sucking prince of darkness. Horror of Dracula (also known simply as Dracula) marks Lee’s first turn as the Count, as well as Peter Cushing’s initial performance as the indefatigable vampire hunter Van Helsing, and it’s likely the most tantalizingly creepy entry in this series of cinematic nightmares. The story, only loosely adhering to Bram Stoker’s plot, has Van Helsing going in search of John Harker (John Van Eyssen), who has infiltrated Dracula’s castle in order to destroy him but has instead fallen victim to the devilish villain’s undead curse. Van Helsing liberates Harker’s soul, but soon realizes that the Count has designs on Harker’s fiancé Mina Holmwood (Melissa Stribling), and teams up with Mina’s brother Arthur (Michael Gough) to finally do away with Dracula. Lee’s silky deep voice, severe wide-eyed glares and imposing stature make him a formidable Dracula, although it’s hardly befitting a centuries-old monster like the Count to be running around scared as much as he does in this Hammer film. Nonetheless, director Terence Fisher elegantly shrouds the film in worn, muted tones that stand in disconcerting contrast to the film’s copious amount of ketchup-red blood. The film sometimes seems like it was set in Austria rather than Transylvania, what with Van Helsing’s bushy fur-collared coat, the opulently designed castles, and Arthur drinking from a hefty beer stein, and the good doctor’s advice to Arthur after he’s undergone a blood transfusion – that he should drink wine to alleviate his lightheadedness! – seems misguided unless he intends Arthur to get absolutely wasted. Still, the always-magisterial Cushing has a dignified British graveness that perfectly fits Van Helsing’s somber determination, and his climactic battle against the dastardly Dracula culminates in a thrillingly acrobatic killing that none of the subsequent Hammer films ever truly matched.

What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984): B+

Gloria (Carmen Maura) is a put-upon maid who, in order to stay alert while toiling away at multiple jobs, pop No-Doze pills like candy. Still, these uppers hardly alleviate the frustration and anger of contending with her loutish tax-driver husband (who once published a forged collection of Hitler’s letters, and is in love with German opera singer), her crotchety mother-in-law (who owns a pet lizard named Dinero and constantly bitches about moving back to her home village), her drug-dealing older son, and her young boy, who’s having sexual affairs with old men. In What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Pedro Almodóvar takes comedic aim at the miserable plight of working-class women in modern Spain, and, in the process, delivers the first satisfyingly unruly film of his career. The director’s controlled mise-en-scène is deliciously deadpan, and his film smoothly segues between farcical silliness and poignant melodrama, most gracefully during by an unsettling confrontation between Gloria and her husband that devolves into a lethally humorous slapstick sequence. Almodóvar pokes equal fun at the working and upper classes (embodied by a wealthy married couple attempting to publish a fictional version of Hitler’s diary), but his real affection is naturally reserved for Gloria and her outlandish demimonde friend Cristal, a bubbly, flamboyant stylish prostitute who lives next door to Gloria’s fractured clan. The film is one of Almodovar’s many tales of triumphant women sticking it to their callous, no-good men, as well as a somewhat harsh critique of a Spanish culture that dooms women to indentured servitude. Money is the root of Gloria’s unhappiness – she can’t procure any from her husband for groceries, and the lizard Dinero is just the latest annoyance created by the unbearable grandmother – and thus her husband’s and Dinero’s near-simultaneous deaths represent Gloria’s economic, emotional, and physical liberation. Carmen Maura is pitch-perfect in a glorious performance that gracefully mixes exasperation, anger and wit, and Almodóvar’s kinky, ribald humor is in fine form, whether it be his ironic TV commercials (here a coffee ad in which a woman being served breakfast in bed is horribly scalded when her beau trips), Gloria’s plans for revenge against her intolerable mother-in-law, or the inclusion of a telepathic child that seems straight of a Steven King novel. Not all of this stuff makes sense, but as with Almodóvar’s best stuff, many of the film’s best jokes seem to have been thrown into the mix simply because the director (correctly) thought it was funny.

Dark Habits (1983): C

Pedro Almodóvar’s Dark Habits has plenty of premise but little payoff. Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual), a nightclub singer and smack addict, watches her prick boyfriend overdose on heroin laced with strychnine and, fearing the police will blame her, flees and takes refuge at a convent called the Order of Humble Redeemers. The convent, however, is anything but angelic – the nuns running the place all have drug and/or S&M habits, and firmly believe that salvation comes through humiliation and degradation. “Very soon, this will be full of murderesses, drug addicts, prostitutes…just like before. Praise be to God!” says Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano), a dopehead who hopes that, by bringing in a fresh horde of social outcasts, the religious house’s holy women – all of whom sport ridiculous names like Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), and Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave) – will once again fulfill their calling. The convent is on the brink of closing down because its recently deceased benefactor’s wife, the greedy Marquise (Mary Carrillo), isn’t interested in giving money to the nuns, forcing Mother Superior to once again engage in secular vice by blackmailing the nasty old biddy. And vice, to be sure, is these women’s specialties. While Mother Superior satiates her heroin fixes and lusts after Yolanda, Sister Damned tends to her pet tiger, Sister Manure walks around zonked on acid (visualized with some delightfully cheesy Almodóvar effects), and Sister Sewer Rat secretly authors a phenomenally popular line of smutty romance novels. These characterizations form a rather rudimentary critique of the church, which is presented as hypocritically practicing exactly what it denounces. Yet like Buñuel, Almodóvar’s satire exhibits a genuine fondness for its wayward characters, and there’s no denying that despite the nuns’ numerous failings, Yolanda is nonetheless “saved” by film’s conclusion. Unfortunately, none of this is half as absurd as it might sound. The nuns are undergoing a spiritual crisis (mirrored by the convent’s crumbling walls), but their devolution into rampant drug use and sneaky sin is sluggishly handled by Almodóvar, who utilizes his trademark primary color palette to decent effect but whose flat compositions and clunky rhythm – made worse by the film’s subdued performances, which don’t take advantage goofiest possibilities – render the film’s attempts at sacrilegious naughtiness inert.

Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980): C+

“You’ve got a new life ahead of you. Wake up!” are the final words spoken in Pedro Almodóvar’s directorial debut Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (a.k.a. “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap”), and it’s an optimistic sentiment that speaks to the revolving series of identities and personas the film’s characters try on in search of happiness. The vibrant, outrageous outfits worn by Pepi (Carmen Maura), Bom (Olvida Gara), and the cross-dressers and transsexuals who populate Almodóvar’s colorful, flamboyant, sexually accepting Madrid are external manifestations of their search for personal expression, freedom, and – in certain cases – liberation. Almodóvar, who in his early years was a provocateur along the lines of John Waters, personally inserts himself into a dick-measuring scene, and pads out his narrative-lite film with vignettes featuring Pepi being raped by a cop and the married, uptight, S&M-loving Luci (Eva Siva) falling in lesbian love with radical punk rocker Bom after the latter urinates on her face at the kitchen table. The film’s cavalier, non-judgmental attitude toward all forms of sexual expression is unique in that it posits its cast of weirdoes not as outsiders but, rather, as part of mainstream Spanish society, and Carmen Maura’s exuberant Pepi – who becomes an advertising executive with campaigns for diaper-like women’s underwear – is the vehicle through which Almodóvar gently mocks the pop culture he cherishes and draws inspiration from. Still, for all its grungy, anarchic charm, Pepi, Luci, Bom is annoyingly amateurish, and its depiction of women as slutty, profane, and constantly degraded by men seems to go beyond the bounds of decency (Luci’s sadomasochistic relationship with her hubby is particularly questionable). The director does make sure his female protagonists are in control of their destiny – their ultimate triumphs are in accord with the film’s theme about evolution through regeneration – and I also have the nagging feeling that the ladies’ brazenness has something to do with women empowering themselves by rejecting their traditionally submissive roles in Spanish society (a role that Luci eventually decides to embrace). This seminal effort only barely hints at the director’s future talents as a melodramatist and satirist, but die-hard Almodóvar fans may well enjoy its John Waters-esque crudity.

The Longest Yard (1974): B+

Robert Aldrich was more interested in anti-establishment outcasts and their codes of honor than in morality, and in The Longest Yard, the director pits a team of prison inmates led by Paul Crewe (Burt Reynolds) – an ex-footballer who bet on games, and was tossed in the slammer for trashing his woman’s car and beating up some cops – against the football-loving guards. That the film’s heroes are criminals doesn’t really matter to Aldrich so long as his incarcerated murderers, rapists, and disgraced former pro athletes learn valuable life lessons about selflessness, sacrifice, and fighting The Man, here personified by Eddie Albert’s callous Warden Hazen. As in The Dirty Dozen, Aldrich’s film is most alive during the team recruitment scenes where we meet Crewe’s supporting cast – including sidekick Caretaker (James Hampton) and a lumbering giant played by Richard Kiel (a.k.a. James Bond’s nemesis Jaws) – and the training sessions in which the players learn to put aside their personal differences and band together against their fascist jailor. The warden loves football because its brutality jibes with his view of America as a kill-or-be-killed meritocracy, and thus when he blackmails Crewe to lead a team of jailbirds against the prison’s organized pigskin crew, his real goal is to crush the inmates’ spirits and assert his ruthless dominance. What this cruel dope doesn’t seem to realize, however, is that he’s messing with Burt Reynolds in his hairy-chested 1974 heyday! Even without his trademark moustache (which is shaved according to prison regulations), Reynolds is a virile stud whose eye-rolling non-conformity allows him to command respect from black and white compatriots alike, and his nonchalant machismo helps him easily bed the film’s only female character (a very young Bernadette Peters as the warden’s beehived secretary). More importantly, however, Crewe’s point-shaving scandal makes him the pre-Pete Rose Pete Rose, and the character's eventual triumph via honesty, courage, and a bit of gridiron ass-whuppin’ suggests that a no-holds-barred baseball throwdown between the real Pete Rose and Bud Selig’s cabal of MLB owners might be the only way for Charlie Hustle to get into Cooperstown.

The Cooler: D

Like Three Card Monte, Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler is a pointless, money-depleting waste of time to be avoided at all costs. Bernie Lootz (a solid but familiar William H. Macy) is such a loser that he’s hired by a Las Vegas casino run by Shelly Kaplow (a hammy Alec Baldwin) to spread his bad luck around the gambling tables and, in effect, cool off the winning patrons. Bernie, whose awful (and awfully obvious) last name sounds like a cross between “loot” and “lose,” wants to ditch his job, but his plans go awry after meeting Natalie (Maria Bello), a sexy blonde waitress who surprisingly falls for him and, in the process, turns his luck around. The unlikely couple have sweaty sex in which we learn that Macy’s naked derriere is in much better shape than Bello’s, but Bernie’s inability to spread his unlucky influenza to the casino’s patrons soon sends Shelly into a tizzy, especially since he’s trying to prove to investors – who plan to transform the ‘50s-era Shangri-La casino into a modern money-making monstrosity – that the old ways of operating a gambling joint are better and (give me a break!) purer than the new ways. Everyone except Macy overacts, Kramer’s script (written with Frank Hannah) is full of contrived plot twists that are telegraphed five minutes beforehand, and the film’s vision of a grimy, dour Sin City is largely photocopied from Leaving Las Vegas. There’s a misogynistic streak at work in the gratuitous and nasty mistreatment of Natalie, and it’s hard to figure out why we should agree with the film’s dewy-eyed nostalgia for the old Vegas. Who, for example, cares that Shelly’s tacky casino is going to be transformed into a modern palace? Is Joey Fatone (the club’s new *NSYNC-ish lounge singer) really that much worse than Paul Sorvino’s heroin-addicted Rat Pack crooner? The only thing cool about The Cooler is that, after 100 excruciating minutes, it mercifully ends.

Dark City (1998): B+

While The Matrix received most of the credit for bringing the sci-fi paranoia of William Gibson (“Necromancer”) to the masses, it was Alex Proyas’ Dark City – released a full year before the Wachowskis’ bullet-time, “dream is a reality” revolution – that first envisioned a dystopian nightmare lurking beneath our everyday existence. John Murdock (Rufus Sewell) awakens in a dilapidated bathroom tub to find that he’s wanted for a string of grisly murders, but he can’t remember anything about his life. Hunted by gaunt men in black overcoats and hats known as the Strangers, Murdock discovers that he has some sort of telekinetic power called “tuning” that’s only wielded by these ghostly hunters. On the run from both the Strangers and a hardboiled inspector (William Hurt), Murdock reconnects with his estranged wife Emma (a ravishing-as-usual Jennifer Connelly) and the Strangers’ mysterious human cohort Dr. Schreber (Keifer Sutherland), eventually uncovering a reality-shifting conspiracy being perpetrated against the city’s sleepy inhabitants. Proyas’ hauntingly beautiful metropolis is a hallucinatory architectural hybrid of ‘50s rigidity and glossy modern expressionism, and the Strangers’ regular reorganization of both the city’s physical structure and its citizen’s memories creates a palpable sense of inescapable terror. This ominously amorphous setting, however, never overshadows the film’s superb cast, and Connelly and Sutherland – as a traitorous but sympathetic modern version of Dr. Frankenstein (or is he Igor?) – are particularly excellent, bringing a feverish passion and panic to the mind-bending story’s revelations about humanity’s status as lab rats for a withering alien race. Dark City has a bluesy soul that fits with its depiction of the universal desire for home, identity, and peace, and Proyas’ elegantly fluid direction – marking a significant leap forward from his noir-ish work on The Crow – accentuates the film’s unsettling depiction of reality as elusive and ephemeral.

The Day of the Triffids (1962): C+

Doctors say not to look directly at a solar eclipse, but in Steve Selky’s overgrown plant thriller The Day of the Triffids, it’s a meteor shower that screws up humanity’s delicate corneas. A U.S. naval officer (Howard Keel’s Bill Masen) undergoing eye surgery in Britain misses out on the meteor lightshow of the century, but when he wakes up the next morning and removes his bandages, he discovers that everyone who saw the astrological event is blind. That would be bad enough, but to compound mankind’s problems, the meteors also sprinkled seeds that grow into giant man-eating plants known as Triffids. The Triffids move slower than molasses, and their slithering is accompanied by a sound effect akin to a bong clearing (or the noise made by blowing through a straw into a glass of milk), but people are nonetheless petrified, primarily because they’re blind and can’t see how ridiculous the tree branch-waving creatures actually look.

28 Days Later’s Danny Boyle must have been a fan, since his zombie film replicates Triffids’ finest element – Masen wandering around a deserted, end-of-times London populated only by the occasional sightless fool. For the most part, however, this campy ‘60s sci-fi adventure is decidedly short on awe-inspiring moments. Masen leaves the U.K. and travels to France and Spain, picking up a surrogate daughter and wife along the way; simultaneously, a marine biologist couple holed up in their lighthouse lab on a deserted island off the British coast try to fend off the encroaching monsters. This side-story, one can assume, is included for ironic thematic purposes – they’re in a lighthouse, but no one can see! – and as a means of introducing scientist characters who’ll eventually save the day. What it provides instead are two bickering fish lovers (one’s a drunk, the other’s a nag) who, in all their unbearable glory, almost make Masen and his new clan’s dull, episodic cross-country trek seem like Lawrence of Arabia.

Masen’s use of an electric fence to repel the horde of Triffids, as well as a showstopping cinematic aside involving an airborne plane piloted by, and carrying nothing but, blind people, have an apocalyptic liveliness, but unlike its ‘50s and ‘60s counterparts, there’s no social commentary lurking beneath this fantastical façade. The Day of the Triffids was based on a novel by famed British author John Wyndham (whose "The Midwich Cuckoos" was turned into The Village of the Damned), but his original story's apparent analysis of man’s bestiality has been wholly jettisoned in favor of quaint set pieces like the one in which Masen’s car gets stuck in the mud while hungry Triffids approach. Even worse, Wyndham’s original, pessimistic ending has been replaced by an 11th-hour cure for the Triffid plague that makes next to no sense. I mean, didn’t anyone just have some weed killer handy?

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): B-

Given the unnerving Cold War climate, science fiction films from the ‘50s naturally exhibited a fevered, panicky fear of atomic annihilation, and few were better than Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. An alien named Klattu (Michael Rennie) and his giant robot Gort (Lock Martin) land their flying saucer on the Washington, D.C. Mall, promptly scaring the shit out of everybody and causing one anxious American G.I. to shoot Klattu immediately after he’s disembarked from the ship. Fortunately, Klattu is a forgiving guy, and asks to speak with leaders of the world to discuss a secret message that, one eventually leans, concerns the danger Earth’s nuclear weapons pose to intergalactic peace. But when he hears that the strained relationship between the U.S. and Soviet Union prevents him from simultaneously addressing every country’s leader in person, Klattu – who looks just like a regular middle-aged man – goes undercover to think things through, eventually taking up residence at a boarding house where he befriends a kind single mother (Patricia Neal) and her son (Billy Gray). Wise’s sci-fi masterpiece was the first Hollywood film to posit aliens as sympathetic pseudo-humans sent to warn us about our civilization’s wayward ways (as opposed to ravenous creatures bent on conquest), but that doesn’t explain the illogicality of Klattu’s advice. Apparently, aliens are governed by a United Nations-style organization that uses robots to mete out unspeakable punishment against violent races and worlds. But if aliens use the threat of violence as a deterrent to chaos and war, then why does the spaceman oppose the U.S. and Soviet Union’s nuclear standoff, which is essentially the same thing? I guess Klattu just didn't trust us irrational Earthlings to reign in our homicidal urges. Anyway, it's probably best to avoid reading too much into The Day the Earth Stood Still's goofy paranoia, and to just sit back and enjoy the silly sight of Gort (who shoots destructo beams from the slit in his head) and the hilarious repercussions of Klattu’s temporary disabling of the world’s electricity. The milkshake machines no longer work? THE HORROR!

Spellbound (1945): C

Freudian symbolism and Salvador Dali surrealism uncomfortably coexist in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychobabble classic Spellbound, which despite its pedigree – Hitch, Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, Notorious screenwriter Ben Hecht – now stands as one of the famed director’s most laughably dated films. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives at Green Manors psychiatric hospital and, while cultivating a relationship with sexually repressed coworker Dr. Constance Peterson (Bergman), begins exhibiting some serious mental health problems of his own. Dr. Edwardes freaks out whenever he sees lines on a white background, and can’t remember anything about his own book “Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex,” hinting (quite obviously) at his own guilty conscience about a traumatic past event. One of Hitchcock’s first American films, and a project instigated by legendary producer David O. Selznick after his own therapeutic experiences with psychiatry, the film may have been a topical groundbreaker in 1945, but in today’s culture of Prozac, repressed memory revelations, and pervasive therapy, its infatuation with hokey medicalese can be pretty embarrassing. It also doesn’t help that Peck and Bergman have virtually no chemistry together, and that the film, despite thematic concerns about memory and identity, takes its bland Macguffin – namely, What is it from Peck’s past that’s plaguing him? – more seriously than its marquee stars’ tortured romance. The film’s most memorable moment is the trippy dream sequence created by Dali, yet even with this interlude’s chilling, mysterious beauty (and its apt reference to the iconic Dali/Buñuel collaboration Un Chien Andalou), it's hard to ignore the silly second-rate stuff – Dr. Peterson’s exaggerated frigidness, her faux-erudite haughtiness, and Peck’s ridiculous-looking fainting spells – surrounding it. As always, Hitch’s camera exhibits its usual expressive, inventive magnificence (such as a shot through Peck’s drinking glass), but compared to the master of suspense’s previous and future knockouts, it’s tough to be mesmerized by Spellbound.

The Rundown: C+

So this is what Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia would have been like had it been made with a Hollywood budget and starred a wrestler-turned-actor. The Rundown, Peter Berg’s jokey action/adventure film about a buff bounty hunter (The Rock) sent to a rundown Latin American town called El Dorado to retrieve his boss’ wayward treasure-hunter son (Sean William Scott), is the kind of film that sounds worse the more you talk about it. Nonetheless, it’s still superior to the Rock’s previous (and subsequent) outings meant to cement his status as the next Schwarzenegger – who, surprisingly, makes a blink-or-you-miss-it torch-passing cameo. Like Midnight Run, The Rundown’s primary asset is the cantankerous relationship between the Rock and Scott, whose humorous bickering includes Scott mocking his ripped-bod captor with questions like “How often do you work out?” Unfortunately, the film’s wildly uneven pace and reliance on slower expository scenes has the unfortunate effect of diffusing the comedy that keeps the mundane CGI and wire work-enhanced fisticuffs engaging. Scott is in search of a legendary gold statue known as the Gato, much to the dismay of an exploitative jungle imperialist (Christopher Walken) who fears the Gato might be used by a group of rebels to empower the poor peasant population currently enslaved in his mines. In this respect, the Rock’s whirlwind ass-kicking can be seen as an act of Marxist heroism over capitalist exploitation – if, that is, you can take the film’s proletariat call-to-arms seriously after watching juvenile scenes involving monkeys dry-humping the Rock’s face and jokes about a handcuffed Scott needing to unzip his pants to pee. Rosario Dawson sleepwalks through her nothing role as a mysterious sidekick, and those looking for Walken’s one funny moment from the film’s TV commercials – in which he disbelievingly yells “Ow!” after a gun is shot out of his hand – will be disappointed to find that Berg chose a different, less funny take for the finished film. As with Walking Tall, the Rock’s character abhors guns, but unlike that lame-o rednexploitation remake, The Rundown breaks down for one brief climactic scene and lets the big guy have a little fun blasting anonymous soldiers with a shotgun. After all, the Rock is no candy ass….

The Party (1968): C

After the back-to-back successes of The Pink Panther and its sequel A Shot in the Dark, Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers – perhaps thinking that anything they immortalized on film would be uproarious – re-teamed to make the largely improvised The Party, a middling comedy that plays like leftovers from the Panther films. Sellers stars as Hrundi V. Bakshi, a moronic Indian actor who – after being blacklisted for sabotaging a big-budget Hollywood epic – is accidentally invited to the angry film producer’s hoity-toity party. There, in a tribute to Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, Sellers’ Bakshi fumbles his way around the producer’s modern Art Deco home, failing to properly operate the automatic doors and furniture and vainly navigating the house’s numerous pools. Sellers, whose character is Indian only to prove that the actor can affect a decent Bangladeshi accent (or is it a subtle form of post-colonial imperialism?), is most delightful during a dinner feast run amok and a scene in which Bakshi attempts to feed a testy parrot. The free-form film falls apart, however, by resorting to overly extravagant bits like having an elephant (painted with ‘60s slogans about love and peace) receive a good scrubbing during a monumental bubble bath in the middle of the house’s swank living room. One can understand Edwards’ desire to end this screwball film with a euphoric bang, but it’s never a good sign when a comedy’s opening scene – in which Bakshi’s incompetent movie performance as a military bugler causes his army comrades to turn their rifles on him – is its funniest. Despite Edwards and Sellers’ credentials, there’s little reason to RSVP to this party.

A Shot in the Dark (1964): B+

“Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world!” rages police commissioner Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) about his blundering French inspector in the second Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark. What writer/director Blake Edwards should have given this wacky film, however, was a bit more of the pink feline. Where’s the Panther in the film’s animated opening credit sequence? Where is Henry Mancini’s legendary “da-Dum-da-Dum” theme song? And what about the diamond itself? Edwards completely overhauls Harry Kurnitz’s play (with the help of William Peter Blatty, future author of The Exorcist) for this breezy comedy, and despite the absence of the giant cat/jewel, he wisely situates Sellers’ idiotic investigator as the axis around which the film’s slapstick shtick revolves. Sellers is at his buffoonish best while getting his hand caught in a spinning globe (“I’ve got Africa all over my hand!”) and practicing foppish karate chops with his Japanese servant Kato (who constantly barges into Clouseau’s apartment at inopportune moments to attack his employer), and this is the first Panther film to exploit the actor’s gift for impersonations by having him don a number of disguises. Edwards mines repetition as a source for laughs – the repeated sight of Clouseau being mistakenly hauled off to jail, Kato’s surprise assaults, Clouseau’s speeches to his patient, oft-criticized partner Lajoy (Graham Stark) – and the director pulls of a nifty opening shot that details the multiple adulterous liaisons at a wealthy gentleman’s mansion. The negligible plot involves the clumsy detective’s budding love affair with a beautiful maid (Elke Sommer) suspected of murder. Yet despite this central romance, A Shot in the Dark’s real passion emanates from Lom’s commissioner Dreyfus, whose exasperation over Clouseau’s behavior manifests itself in the form of a hilarious eye twitch that gradually seizes control of his face. Dreyfus’ developing insanity – like Clouseau’s moronic antics – more or less function in a story-less vacuum, but the film’s freewheeling, go-for-broke joviality makes this Panther-less sequel perhaps the series’ most effervescent entry.

Walking Tall (1973): C+

Southern exploitation flicks never enjoyed the popularity or critical respect received by their urban African-American counterparts, but Phil Karlson’s Walking Tall is about the closest the genre ever came to mainstream success. Shown endlessly on TV during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the 1973 film (very, very loosely based on a true story) is a hopelessly melodramatic revenge fantasy in which ex-Marine and former professional wrestler Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker) returns to his hometown with his wife and two kids and discovers that rampant vice has corrupted the idyllic hamlet. After being left for dead by thugs operating a lucrative casino/prostitution ring (though not lucrative enough to have the prostitutes work inside the building; instead, they do their dirty work in trailers stationed in the parking lot!), Pusser gets himself elected sheriff, grabs a giant stick of wood and begins beating the snot out of the town’s insidious miscreants. Vigilantism is glorified with an unsentimental, un-ironic coldness as Pusser becomes a psychotic David to the ruthless gambling industry’s Goliath, and Joe Don Baker’s hunched posture and grimacing puss give his character a lumbering Frankenstein fearsomeness. Yet Pusser’s heroism is undercut by a superhuman ability to survive three point-blank attempts on his life. Walking softly but carrying a big stick, Pusser teams up with local blacks and disenfranchised locals to battle the town’s crooked cops, dishonest judges, seedy corporate pimps, and moonshine bootleggers – anyone, in fact, who might be part of “the system” (which, I assume, is run by “the man”). Ultimately, however, the film’s legacy has less to do with its anti-establishment leanings than with its uproariously politically incorrect flourishes. Any film featuring an adolescent boy (played by Leif Garrett!) loading a rifle next to his dad’s hospital bed as a nurse silently smiles and nods in approval is indeed walking quite tall.

The Pink Panther: B-

What made Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau so brilliantly funny was not simply all those perfectly calibrated pratfalls, but rather the looks that followed each of the sleuth’s gaffes – with wide eyes and pursed lips, Clouseau always looked slightly embarrassed and eager to ignore his own clumsiness by pretending that nothing ridiculous had just occurred. Sellers’ self-confident but nonplussed Clouseau was the actor’s finest creation, but Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther is, because of Clouseau’s supporting character status, perhaps the series’ least interesting entry. While we get Henry Mancini's classic theme song and some brilliantly executed slapstick moments – a perfect introduction to Clouseau’s clumsiness courtesy of a spinning globe, a bedroom fiasco in which Clouseau’s wife hides two men from her husband, and the detective’s bumbling behavior while wearing a suit of armor at a costume party – there’s far too much time spent with David Niven’s master thief Sir Charles Lytton (a.k.a. “The Phantom”) and Claudia Cardinale’s ravishing but tedious Princess Dala. The Phantom wants to snatch the princess’ famed Pink Panther diamond, but what I wanted was less romantic dilly-dallying between Niven, Cardinale, Robert Wagner (as Lytton’s sneaky nephew) and Capucine (as Clouseau’s wife), and more loopy Sellers bits. Edwards is the kind of go-for-broke comedic director who throws a barrage of silly jokes at the audience and hopes some of them hit their mark, and while The Pink Panther is hardly what one might call “hilarious,” Sellers is at the top of his game, looking goofily sure of himself while Niven and Capucine conspire to steal the world-famous pink diamond behind his back. Future installments of the series aren’t quite as polished as the original, but they’re also less uptight and more anarchic than this seminal Clouseau mystery. Still, as an initial introduction to Sellers’ infectious, straight-faced zaniness, The Pink Panther is essential viewing.

The Ladykillers (1955): B

Alec Guinness had a deadpan English wit that brightened up many ‘50s Ealing Studios comedies, and his charm is on full display in Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers. Guinness, partially hidden beneath a garish wig and monstrous fake teeth, is Professor Marcus, a courteous crook who robs an armored truck with a gang of goofy British gentlemen (including Peter Sellers, sporting a shaggy hairdo in his screen debut). To keep a low profile, Marcus and company, disguised as a musical quintet, stage their operation from the home of little old Mrs. Wilberforce (a delightfully perturbed Katie Johnson). The film, like a stage play, is evenly bifurcated – the first section details the crew’s attempts to deceive their elderly landlady, and the film’s latter portion involves their inability to escape with the stolen loot after Mrs. Wilberforce discovers their true identities. As an early Technicolor comedy, Otto Heller’s cinematography utilizes a hyper-realistic, slightly ruddy color scheme, but like this outdated visual palette, the film itself hasn’t aged all that well. Mrs. Wilberforce’s constant interruptions of the quintet’s “rehearsals” – they sit around discussing their plan while a phonograph plays – is quaintly cute, but most of the slapstick set pieces warrant a polite smile rather than a hearty guffaw. The crooks’ ridiculous attempt to capture Mrs. Wilberforce’s parrot features a man falling through the seat of a chair and another guy awkwardly navigating the house’s roof, but like so much of the film’s humor, the scene never rises to truly lunatic heights. The gang eventually decides to do away with Mrs. Wilberforce, but since they all fancy themselves proper English gentlemen, no one is willing to execute the hit. Instead, each criminal attempts to abscond with the money, leading to a murderous conclusion that's at odds with the preceding comedy of manners. With his creepy grin and his bug-eyed cordiality, Guinness manages to make The Ladykillers pleasantly silly, even if the film doesn’t fully live up to its clever premise’s potential. We’ll have to see how the Coen Bros’ upcoming remake fares in the next few days…

Gothika: D

“Logic’s overrated,” says Halle Berry’s frazzled Dr. Miranda Grey at the conclusion of Gothika. Apparently, director Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine) wholeheartedly agrees, since his ghost story/murder mystery succeeds in making every plot twist more unbelievable and irrational than the last. Grey is a psychiatrist at a mental ward, but after a rainy night encounter with a deceased teen’s apparition, she wakes up in her own hospital as an inmate accused of murdering her husband (Charles S. Dutton). Everyone thinks Grey is crazy, and her recurring visions of a dead girl with wet spaghetti hair and a disjointed gait don’t do much to dispel that assessment. Like The Ring, The Others, The Sixth Sense, and innumerable Asian horror films, a ghost returns to the mortal world in order to undo a wrong and find closure. Gothika, however, doesn’t really care about the physical and sexual abuse at the crux of its story; it just wants to provide a few familiar jolts as it meanders toward its thoroughly implausible climax. Robert Downey Jr. discards any trace of his mischievous affability as Grey’s new doctor, and Penelope Cruz goes haywire playing a nutcase with delusions (or are they?) about being raped by the devil. Berry, asked to carry the film from start to finish, looks quite fetching even with flat hair and a nondescript outfit (white t-shirt, hospital pants). Unfortunately, the actress’ torrents of teary-eyed histrionics fail to suggest that her character has anything resembling an internal life. Kassovitz, in spite of his gimmicky CGI-aided camerawork, does an adequate job creating a spooky atmosphere, but the film doggedly lurches and lunges in increasingly ridiculous directions. The villains’ motives, Berry’s escape from the asylum, the ghost’s decision to viciously abuse Berry as a means of enlisting her help – absolutely nothing in this cockamamie thriller makes sense. Next time, a little logic might be just what the doctor ordered.

April Fool’s Day (1985): D

Fortunately, it’s eight days before April 1st, meaning I’ve narrowly avoided having to write a faux-positive review of 1985’s April Fool’s Day. So on to the critical butchery! A girl named (I kid you not) Muffy St. John (Deborah Foreman) invites a group of her friends to spend vacation at her family’s remote island mansion. One by one, the guests are killed. Who could the murderer be? Well, Muffy seems to be acting mighty strange, there was that ferryman’s assistant who got horribly injured while trying to tie a boat to the dock, and of course Arch (Thomas F. Wilson) – a.k.a. Biff from Back to the Future – was always really nasty to Marty McFly. Cultivating mystery, however, requires that you don’t give away the major plot twist in the film’s title. Director Fred Walton bungles each and every murder, forgoing gore or nudity (traditional, and necessary, ‘80s horror movie elements) and not even bothering to show us a few of the slayings (either out of laziness or editorial incompetence). Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians is mentioned to hammer home the story’s source material, but uttering Christie’s name in the same breath as April Fool’s Day – a film best known for its terrific knife-behind-the-back VHS artwork – is almost sacrilegious. I’ve seen this film before…as an episode of The Golden Girls. And Muffy St. John, you’re no Dorothy Zbornak.

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986): C

Thank God – or do I mean the horned guy down below? – for Reverend Kane (Julian Beck), the wrinkled spectre in the wide-brimmed hat and black-and-white suit who haunts the Freeling clan by singing “God Is In His Holy Temple” throughout Poltergeist II: The Other Side. Without him, the movie might self-implode (like the Freeling’s first haunted house) out of sheer embarrassment. One year after the first film’s events, JoBeth Williams (Diane) and Craig T. Nelson (Steve) have relocated the family – sans oldest daughter Dana (the recently deceased Dominique Dunn), who doesn’t even get a passing mention – to Diane’s mother’s house. The grandmother tells Carol-Anne (Heather O’Rourke) that they both share similar psychic powers, but that doesn’t stop creepy medium Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) from sending the family a spiritual Native American protector named Taylor (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Will Sampson, doing his best to promote hokey cultural stereotypes). Before long, those darned demonic forces have reincarnated themselves as Reverend Kane, a cult leader who held a ritualistic mass suicide party in a cave under the Freeling’s original house during the 19th century. Kane, it soon becomes clear, has come looking for Carol-Anne.

As one might expect, things soon start going haywire in the house, although this time around we get elaborate – um, I mean elaborately laughable – claymation special effects, such as when Kane possesses Steve via a tequila worm that, after causing a bit of indigestion, is subsequently regurgitated as a lame H.R. Giger slimy humanoid. To make up for the fact that Mom did all the heroic grunt work during the first crisis, Dad gets to save the day this time around, although first he must choose between two disparate role models – authoritarian demigod Kane (who he temporarily becomes), or tolerant, wishy-washy Taylor. This decision provides a mildly interesting subtext about men’s parental instincts, but it can’t make up for the film’s crushing tediousness. Director Brian Gibson attempts, and miserably fails, to emulate Tobe Hooper (or should I say Spielberg?), and Jerry Goldsmith’s score is entirely unremarkable. An early scene with Robbie being attacked by his braces nicely taps into young kids’ nightmares about their metal-enhanced teeth, but by the finale – in which the pink-swirled netherworld looks like the inside of a cotton candy cone – you’ll desperately wish Kane had just killed the Freelings when he had the chance.

Cry-Baby (1990): B

As with all John Waters films, Cry-Baby – a goofy homage to ‘50s melodramas and musicals crafted in the Grease template – lavishes affection on freaky and misunderstood teenagers living on the outskirts of mainstream American society. In 1952, rockabilly greaser Cry-Baby (Johnny Depp, gently poking fun at his own 21 Jump Street teen idol status as a Wild One-inspired leather-and-Brylcreem stud) falls in love with blonde WASP Allison (Amy Locane), sparking a war between Cry-Baby’s gang of delinquent “drapes” and Alison’s former boyfriend’s group of “squares” For its first half, the film amusingly ridicules preppies, racists, devout religious zealots, and homophobes. Waters, however, seems to lose focus mid-stream, and the ensuing focus away from the zany cartoon characters toward cute musical numbers dilutes much of the film’s manic energy. In the final tally, Cry-Baby successfully works in fits and starts. The opening montage of the high schoolers getting shots cleverly demarcates the drapes (who seem to get a sexual kick from the penetrating injections) from the squares (who grimace throughout the ordeal), and Waters’ casting – including Patty Hearst as an overly cheery homemaker, porn star Traci Lords as a firecracker besieged by her uncool parents, and ‘50s heartthrob Troy Donahue as a disheveled delinquent father – gives the film a wink-wink wittiness. On the other hand, I could have gladly done without Depp’s lackadaisical and momentum-sapping jailhouse rock. But if nothing else, Cry-Baby provides one truly great line when, turned on by his goody-goody girlfriend’s switch to the drape dark side, Cry-Baby tells Allison, “You got it Allison. You got it RAW!”

The Hills Have Eyes (1977): C

If the hills really did have eyes, I’m sure they rolled them after watching Wes Craven’s (initially X-rated) follow-up to his seminal horror show The Last House on the Left. In The Hills Have Eyes, the director takes a page out of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw playbook and strands a bunch of middle-class white people in the barren country so a group of homicidal mutants can feast on their flesh. Like Craven’s earlier films, it’s not very frightening or well acted, although Dee Wallace-Stone brings some understated class to the cannibalistic mayhem and Michael Berryman’s conehead murderer Pluto is disturbingly freakish. The family’s caravan breaks down on a detour to a gold mine located on a plot of land used by the army for atomic weapons testing, and the insinuation is that the cannibals are the result of U.S. military progress, and that the family gets what it deserves because of their attraction to money. Since military weapons have turned the family into monsters, and because their ensuing savagery against the family (even the God-loving mother) motivates the milquetoast travelers to defend themselves with brutality, we’re presented with a vision of man endlessly trapped in a cycle of violence. Yet this One Big Theme – that all men have the capacity to kill, and that killing perpetuates only more killing – is largely subsumed by the director’s now-outdated attempts to sicken us with mutilated animals and un-ironic murder. That the final survivors triumph by using ingenious traps straight out of “The A-Team” shows a lack of imagination on Craven’s part, but the ho-hum finale is largely in keeping with the film’s lack of originality.

Hairspray (1988): A-

John Waters’ affinity for the weird, wild, and whacked-out took more mainstream form in 1988’s Hairspray, a loving ode to early ‘60s music, fat chicks, and racial and sexual tolerance. Waters’ dedication to period detail reveals a fetishistic fascination with the artificial, whether it be “The Corny Collins Show” – a cheeky, brightly colored version of “American Bandstand” – the hairspray-sculpted coiffures, or the ultra-cheesy slang tossed about his high school protagonists. Waters employs artifice as a means of both critiquing and paying homage to the decade’s stifling conservative values. Ricki Lake’s “pleasantly plump” Tracy Turnblad becomes a celebrity on Corny Collins’ dance-o-rama, much to the chagrin of the show’s skinny, whitebread established star Amber von Tussle (Colleen Fitzpatrick). Amber’s campaign against Tracy is a battle not only between WASP and outcast but also between segregationist and integrationist, as their feud soon becomes intertwined with efforts to allow black dancers to regularly strut their stuff on Corny’s show. Tracy’s best friend Penny Pingleton (Leslie Ann Powers) falls hopelessly in love with a black teen named Seaweed (Clayton Prince), and Waters hilariously skewers whites’ fears of black people by sending Penny’s prejudiced mother into the Baltimore ghetto to save her daughter from a voodoo dancing session. The director also, in a bit of subversive casting-against-type, appears briefly as a creepy psychologist bent on exorcising Penny’s jungle fever through hypnotism. Divine handles dual roles as Tracy’s mother and a racist television station owner, Jerry Stiller pops up now and again as Tracy’s gag-loving pop, Ric Ocasek and Pia Zadora cameo as frightening pot-smoking beatniks, and Sonny Bono and Deborah Harry ham it up as Amber’s cutthroat parents. Yet despite the plethora of stars, it’s Lake’s exuberantly reactionary Tracy and the choreographed dance numbers set to early ‘60s hits from Chubby Checker and Lesley Gore that steal the show. The film may be a long way from the shocking grossness of Waters’ early work, but Hairspray is perhaps the defining moment in the auteur’s career-long dedication to lionizing Baltimore’s misfit population.

Pink Flamingos (1972): B

Pink Flamingos is vile, disgusting, and outrageous – in other words, just as John Waters wanted it. The film, about two monstrous women competing for the title of “Filthiest Person Alive,” is a carnival of weirdoes, outcasts, and deviants that’s custom-designed to offend. The amazing thing, however, is that even in our current age of repulsive Fear Factor-style gags and seemingly non-stop sexual imagery, the film still succeeds as an all-out assault on good taste. Waters is a provocateur with an eye toward the grotesque and a soft spot for cultural outsiders, and he stages his freak show with a scattershot abandon and general lack of interest in narrative conventions. Divine (playing a variation of herself) is given the dubious title of “filthiest person alive” by a local tabloid, which sends Connie Marble (Waters regular Mink Stole) and her husband Raymond (David Lochary) into a tizzy. Connie and Raymond are dyed-hair-in-the-wool lunatics who believe their kinky sexual escapades and illegal adoption ring (they impregnate kidnapped women and hide them in the basement until childbirth) make them more lewd than Divine. What ensues is a seriously disgusting competition between two monstrous creatures infatuated with self-debasement.

Waters’ grainy hand-held cinematography and penchant for setting scenes entirely to musical montages of ‘50s and ‘60s standards recall the director’s seminal films Hag in a Black Leather Jacket and Eat Your Makeup. This rough-around-the-edges aesthetic suits Pink Flamingos just fine, since it accentuates the grime infesting every nook and cranny of Waters’ frame. A sex scene between a man, a woman, and a dying chicken; a shot of semen being inserted into a woman via a syringe; incestuous fellatio; a barbeque talent show featuring a very flexible naked man – Waters’ sordid set pieces reflect his infatuation with the nature of celebrity, sexual identity, pornography, violence, lower-class American life, and scandalous tabloid tackiness. At the heart of this depraved collage is trash diva Divine, who (love her or hate her) dwarfs everyone else in the film. In Pink Flamingos’ signature flourish, Waters stages a chance encounter on a Baltimore sidewalk between a hungry Divine and a defecating dog. The scene, like much of what’s preceded it, is both pointless and shocking, but it’s also an unparalleled gross-out achievement – the cinema’s only literal shit-eating grin.

In the Cut: D

(Originally posted on 3/10/04)

In the Cut, Jane Campion’s grimy, misogynistic faux-murder mystery seems stuck in a time warp. From Mark Ruffalo’s ‘70s porn star moustache and the grungy New York City setting to the film’s offensive and outdated notions of female sexuality, the film is like a long-lost relic from an earlier period best forgotten. Meg Ryan, mistakenly making a bid for art-house credibility by showing off her underwhelming mammaries, is Frannie, a sexually repressed English lit professor attracted to dangerous men. Frannie longingly watches a man enjoy fellatio from an anonymous blonde in a pub bathroom, but her juices don’t really start flowing until a lewd cop named Malloy (Ruffalo) shows up to tell her that the girl from the bar has been murdered. Although Malloy and the guy enjoying head at the bar both have the same tattoo, Frannie (as well as her flighty sister Pauline, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) ignores the warning signs and decides to enjoy some uninhibited sex with the police officer. The more cruelly and profanely Malloy acts, the more Frannie becomes aroused, but Ruffalo is so repulsive and Ryan so creepily gawky and weepy that the whole thing plays out like a preposterous thesis paper on how women yearn to be dominated by uncouth pricks. As if to add to the aura of kinky degradation, Campion has cinematographer Dion Beebe shoot everything through what seems to be a thick filter of vaseline, giving her images an oily, unfocused pretentiousness. This grating visual approach complements the anachronistic Manhattan setting, which is dominated by dilapidated pubs, sleazy strip clubs, and garbage-strewn streets that are as embarrassingly phony as Frannie’s impolite perversions. Some women may like to be treated poorly by their men, but no one -- myself included -- enjoys a movie that’s as insultingly idiotic as In the Cut.

Tightrope (1984): B

(Originally posted on 3/7/04)

Richard Tuggle helmed 1984’s Tightrope, but the film’s modest construction seems to confirm rumors that star Clint Eastwood had a hand in directing this psychological thriller. The jazzy score, the even-handed mixture of establishing shots and close-ups, and the film’s opening shot over the Louisiana coast (which seems to foreshadow a similar image from last year’s Mystic River) all point to Eastwood having spent some time behind the camera. Yet regardless of who did what, the film is a surprisingly tightly wound serial killer mystery in which recently divorced cop and single father of two Wes Block (Eastwood) hunts a butcher who likes to handcuff and strangle prostitutes. Thing is, Block intimately knows the victims -- despite his sunny home life, the detective has been sneaking out of his cozy two-story house to frequent the French Quarter’s ladies of the night. To highlight his dual nature, Block is regularly shot with his face partially cloaked in darkness or seamy red light, and its not long before he’s worrying that he’s just like the killer. The cop’s fondness for prostitutes is a subconscious longing (created by his wife’s desertion) to control women, and the other women in his life -- his motherly daughters and the confrontational rape/self-defense counselor Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold) -- represent his competing desire for strong, independent females. The story’s police procedural elements could put a speed freak to sleep, and the killer’s motivation is so stale I could smell its stench from my couch, but that’s not to say Tightrope isn’t worth your time. Eastwood is fascinatingly inscrutable as the sex-obsessed Block, and the film is oozing with lasciviousness -- the neon lights, the mud-wrestling strippers, the younger daughter’s interest in learning the definition of “hard on” -- that effectively mires us in tawdry New Orleans grime. I’m not sure why Clint would include his real-life daughter Alison in such a sordid, sexually explicit enterprise, but hopefully she learned this valuable lesson from her dad’s character: Investigating a murder, no matter how horrific, is always preferable to attending a Saints home game.

Day of the Dead (1985): B-

(Originally posted on 3/7/04)

Day of the Dead, the final chapter of George A. Romero’s zombie trilogy (which also includes Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead), had fans demanding a piece of the director’s flesh when it was released in 1985. Fanboys wanted more tension and suspense, art film connoisseurs wanted more of the social commentary that lurked beneath the original installments’ rotting veneer, and everyone wanted a lot less yapping. The criticisms, nineteen years later, are still somewhat valid. Romero’s script, which concerns the last stand against zombie nation by a group of scientists and soldiers holed up in an underground military base, aims for claustrophobic creepiness. Yet a good portion of the film is dulled by endless arguments between the lab rats (who, led by Richard Liberty’s Dr. “Frankenstein” Logan, are experimenting on captured zombies) and the grunts (who want to shoot their way to freedom). Romero has never been much of a visual stylist, but Tom Savini knows his way around gory effects, and the zombies moan -- and maim -- disgustingly well. Yet even if Day of the Dead doesn’t significantly raise one’s heartbeat, the film’s frosty pessimism about mankind’s future does eventually get under your skin. Dr. Logan’s humane efforts to train Bub (Sherman Howard), a gentle zombie, speaks to humanity’s more noble aspirations, especially considering that -- unlike its predecessors, which portrayed the creatures as distinctly inhuman -- the film makes clear that the zombies are fundamentally human. Yet the doctor’s demise at the hands of lunatic Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) exemplifies Romero’s nagging dismay over man’s selfishness, brutality and anger. Nominal hero Sarah (Lori Cardille) and her two comrades may eventually wind up lounging in the sun, but it’s a false ending, one that superficially speaks of hope but in fact exudes nothing but despair. Man’s hubris, not those pesky flesh-eaters, is the film’s ultimate villain.

Matchstick Men (2003): B

(Originally posted on 3/4/06)

Ridley Scott’s career has, with a few notable exceptions (Alien, Blade Runner), been a case of style over substance. Scott, who came to prominence directing flashy commercials for the likes of Apple computer and Channel, is one of the cinema’s foremost visual artists, but he’s usually at a loss when it comes to infusing his luscious images with anything more than a superficial, calorie-free vacancy. Matchstick Men is further confirmation of Scott’s limitations, but it’s also a lot more fun than most of the director’s pompously inflated output. Roy (Nicolas Cage) is an expert con man plagued by obsessive compulsive disorder who never saw a door he didn’t want to open or close three times, or a carpet he didn’t want to protect from muddy shoe prints. He’s a prisoner of his compulsions, which compel him to eat tuna fish by the barrel, religiously scrub his apartment Lysol-clean, and dispose of two leaves found floating on top of his crystal blue pool by shoving them down his kitchen sink garbage disposal. With his protégé Frank (Sam Rockwell), Roy helps bilk little old ladies out of money using a telephone scam, but the stakes are raised once Frank suggests they go after a big score. Their plans are complicated, however, by the sudden appearance of Roy’s 14-year old daughter Angela (a stunning Alison Lohman), who immediately takes to her long-lost dad’s criminal profession like a thief to big bags of $$$.

As in a sturdy noir potboiler, the second Roy attempts to improve his lot in life by overstepping his boundaries for a little extra cash, it’s pretty clear that he’s headed straight into the gutter. And considering Nicholas and Ted Griffin’s script’s debt to David Mamet, it’s tough not to sniff out the surprise con lurking beneath the action’s shiny surface. Fortunately, Matchstick Men’s liveliness is derived not from its unpredictability but from its spirit of dapper ‘50s cool. Scott, working with cinematographer John Mathieson, illuminates everything with sleek, stainless steel blues and sunburst bright yellows, and there are few directors that compose in widescreen quite as beautifully (check out the early scene in which Roy and Frank, sitting in a car, are perfectly separated in the frame by a sparkling reflection from another car windshield). The soundtrack’s old standards working in tandem with James Michael Dooley and Geoff Zanelli’s frivolously bouncy score, the retro minimalism of Roy’s house, Roy’s plaid short-sleeve button-down shirts, and Dody Dorn’s jazzy editing and scene transitions all complement the mood of debonair Rat Pack-ish charm. Lohman, who showed superstar potential in the otherwise forgettable White Oleander, is a radiant delight, but it’s Cage’s performance that helps distract from the film’s conventional twisty-turny narrative. Roy’s tics and twitches are a veritable grab bag of enticing acting gimmicks, but Cage transcends these showy gesticulations by rooting Roy’s problems not in irrational craziness but rather in anguished feelings of shame and insecurity. As he and Angela begin to form a father-daughter bond, Roy’s spastic gestures slowly subside, and the beauty of Cage’s masterful work is that he makes the transition not seem as blatantly schematic as it is.

Lost in America (1985): B

(Originally posted on 2/27/04)

I don’t really get Albert Brooks. The guy is mildly witty in a West Coast Woody Allen-ish kinda way, but his apoplectic fits of neurotic exasperation leave me indifferent. With that out of the way, I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by Lost in America, Brooks’ fantasy about turning off, tuning out, and hitting the road à la Easy Rider with nothing but a Winnebago and a “nest egg” of retirement savings. Brooks and SNL alum Julie Hagerty play David and Linda Howard, professional stiffs who quit their stultifying jobs for a life of unplanned adventure on the American highway. The first stop on their odyssey is Las Vegas where they plan to renew their wedding vows, but disaster strikes when Linda, feverishly fixated on the number 22, blows the cherished nest egg playing roulette. Thus, the two are left to fend for themselves in menial jobs in Podunk, Arizona. The couple never really make it very far across the country, but there are some inspired bits along their truncated journey, including David’s confrontation with his boss (in which he utters the phrase “F--- you” like a huffy ten-year-old girl) and his interview with an employment officer who can’t believe David is searching for a $100,000 salary in their small town. Hagerty is her usual ditzy self and Brooks is, well, Brooks, but as an exploration of one unhappy couple’s impulsive rejection of the middle-class American dream, Lost in America is an amusingly bumpy ride.

Shadows (1959): B

(Originally posted on 2/27/04)

In 1959, while Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless was heralding the arrival of the French New Wave, John Cassavetes’ equally groundbreaking Shadows was igniting the independent American film movement that’s now blossomed into Sundance, Miramax, and all those small quirky films starring Patricia Clarkson. Yet despite its daring innovation in both subject matter (interracial relationships) and filmmaking technique (gritty hand-held cinematography, an improvised script, oblique editing, a jazzy score), the film is more interesting as a piece of cinema history than as a compelling narrative of racial prejudice in beatnik-y ‘50s New York City. As was his trademark, Cassavetes’ film is completely improvised, but his actors’ amateurish performances are drearily limited and inexpressive -- the problem, time and again, is that we can see them struggling to act. Cassavetes’ on-the-fly guerilla filmmaking style is chiefly characterized by close-ups -- some of which are so extreme that only parts of people’s faces are visible -- that impart a vibrant, expressionistic intimacy. Similarly, the rough-around-the-edges black-and-white compositions and syncopated, jazz-influenced editing exhibit a crude grace. Ultimately, the film’s underlying strength is its wrenching portrait of resigned despair over the world’s inescapable prejudice. Benny trudging through the night after a beating; the look of Lelia’s older brother Hugh’s face when his baritone singing performance is cut short by white go-go dancers; Tony’s repulsed discovery that Leila is black – in these dazzling scenes, Shadows transcends its rudimentary construction and meandering digressions and achieves a startling emotional sincerity.

Poltergeist (1982): B+

(Originally posted on 2/26/04)

Although I was disappointed to find that my favorite scene from 1982’s Poltergeist -- the one with the paranormal expert tearing his face off in front of the bathroom mirror -- employs a lame fake head for the gruesome effect, the film otherwise holds up incredibly well twenty years after it first made people afraid of television static. According to Hollywood lore, executive producer Steven Spielberg, displeased with director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), more or less directed the film himself, and there’s no ignoring the abundant early-‘80s Spielberg touches -- the distinct sense of time and place (here, a California tract house community), an intimate familiarity with suburbia and its inhabitants’ lives (I love the parents smoking pot once the kids are asleep), and the intrusion of wonder and terror into this everyday environment via the supernatural. Of course, the gauzy widescreen compositions and tender affection for the nuclear family are also cut from the Spielberg mold. As in The Goonies (another Spielberg production), ruthless residential developers are the story’s true villains, but the film also quaintly critiques television as possessing the potentially dangerous ability to co-opt the minds (and perhaps even the bodies?) of the nation’s youth. Joe Beth Williams is tantalizingly sexy as the brood’s fiercely protective mother, and Heather “They’re heeere” O’Rourke is creepily porcelain as Carol Ann, but the film’s true star is Zelda Rubinstein who, as the psychic high priestess Tangina Barrons, dresses like a ‘70s gypsy and speaks in an unsettling, slightly condescending sing-songy cadence. Rubinstein’s bizzaro performance remains the highlight of this suspenseful supernatural chiller, and until the gaunt Reverend Kane appeared in Poltergeist II, it was Tangina -- not the glowing lights or flying furniture or slithering steak -- that scared the bejesus out of me as a kid.

Pickup on South Street (1950): A-/B+

(Originally posted on 2/25/04)

Sam Fuller’s films are raw, gritty, emotionally turbulent, and vicious, and his 1950 noir potboiler Pickup on South Street is 80 minutes of breathless genre fun infused with pure, uninhibited passion. Fuller’s tight close-ups capture the sweaty, wild-eyed emotions of his characters, and his energetic camera’s quick, jarring zooms and pull-backs amplify the freewheeling, anarchic action. Noir icon Richard Widmark, his devilish Cheshire cat grin taunting any and all notions of propriety, is a charming weasel of an ex-con named Skip McCoy (great name!). On the NYC subway, Skip lifts a woman’s (Jean Peters) wallet, only to discover that he’s stolen government secrets that were being delivered to communists. As the cops and the communists both vie to attain the important microfilm Skip has accidentally pilfered, the thief must decide what’s more important -- money or country? The story’s fear of an insidious threat that compels cops and criminals to work together toward a common patriotic goal is, as critic Luc Sante points out in the new Criterion DVD’s liner notes, reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s M. It’s also a quintessential Red Scare melodrama given an extra bit of loopy, action-packed flavor by Fuller’s bristling direction. The romance between Widmark and Peters (who looks better than she acts) feels nonsensically grafted onto the story out of duty to noir conventions, but Widmark’s typically impassioned, slightly zany performance -- as well as a stunningly empathetic death scene by Thelma Ritter as motherly police informant Mo -- help make Pickup on South Street a prickly, hot-blooded gem.

Battle Royale II (2003): F

(Originally posted on 2/25/04)

Holy anti-Americanism, Japan! After the violent delirium of Battle Royale, director Kinji Fukasaku -- along with his son Kenta, who finished the film after his father passed away in 2003 -- returns with the despicable Battle Royale II. It’s three years after the first film’s schoolchildren were forced to hunt each other on a remote island, and our surviving hero Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) has become the leader of a terrorist organization dubbed Wild 7 that’s waging war on Japan’s adult world. Sound stupid? Well, to make matters moronically worse, Wild 7’s terrorist actions include blowing up skyscrapers resembling the World Trade Center towers and ardently idealizing Islamic “freedom fighters.” Yes, you heard me right – this is a film in which the heroes are al Qaeda surrogates and the villains are Japan’s militaristic government and, lurking in the shadows, the impudent, infantile, bomb-happy USA. Cue my uncontrollable retching! There’s a story buried in here about a new class of students forced, via the government’s BR II protocol, to infiltrate Shuya’s island headquarters and kill him, but -- putting aside the film’s frighteningly simple-minded political subtext -- the film is just a derivative war movie infatuated with aping Janusz Kaminski’s jittery, washed-out cinematography from Saving Private Ryan. The kids eventually band together and, after far too many inane monologues, beat back Japan’s grown-up army and retire to the idyllic Afghanistan mountainside for a little R&R. That the film is bereft of any well-defined characters or plot points makes it a crappy follow-up to the playfully satiric original. That it romanticizes Islamic terrorism while ridiculing American counter-terrorism efforts, however, make it a fundamentally misguided, naive, and dangerous piece of anti-Western civilization propoganda.

Battle Royale (2000): B+

(Originally posted on 2/24/04)

A metaphor for adolescent angst? A satiric look at 21st century Japanese society? Or merely a twisted, trashy black comedy about kids forced to murder each other? Either way, Kinji Fukasaku’s hilariously energetic Battle Royale -- a jazzed-up hybrid of Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, and “Survivor” based on the novel by Koshun Takami -- races along with the swift, brutal precision of a samurai sword cutting through cotton. In a dystopian near-future plagued by delinquent kids and skyrocketing unemployment, Japan decides to perform some corrective surgery on its population by placing one class of students each year on a remote island, giving each boy and girl a weapon and a map, and having them play a three-day game of “last man standing.” The kids -- nerds, outcasts, drop-outs, bullies, sweethearts, and various other high school archetypes -- either ruthlessly embrace the game’s kill or be killed ethos or simply refuse to participate by committing suicide. Fukasaku’s film has a throbbing, bloodthirsty verve, and the sports ticker text that announces each kid’s death (and provides a count of how many are still alive) gives the action its chilling gallows humor. In gauzy flashbacks, we witness the kids’ turbulent former lives -- Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) lives in a foster home because his mother ran away and his father committed suicide, while bitchy elitist Mitsuko (Kou Shibasaki) battled a drunken, whorish mother and her pedophilic paramour -- and this underlying portrait of parental neglect becomes a possible explanation for Japan’s youth run wild. Takeshi “Beat” Kitano is creepily transfixing as the former teacher who nominates the kids for Battle Royale, and even if his character’s motivations are frustratingly underdeveloped, the film’s delirious bloodlust washes over most of the screenplay’s deficiencies. The “fight the power” ending is disingenuously optimistic and one-sided, but Fukasaku’s Battle Royale nonetheless provides an acute depiction of the way in which self-preservation instincts amplify teenagers’ already fickle notions of friendship, loyalty, and love.

Before Sunrise (1995): B+/B

(Originally posted on 2/28/04)

As the Italian countryside zooms by in an indistinct flash outside their train window, two strangers (scruffy American Ethan Hawke and dainty Frenchwoman Julie Delpy) strike up an intimate conversation in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. As in 2001’s Waking Life, Linklater’s preoccupation is the magic of conversation -- a notion verbalized by Delpy when she tells Hawke she believes God truly exists in the space between two people when they’re fully engaged in discussion. This sweet romance, about two travelers spending a heady day and night together in Venice, acutely captures the free-flowing, tangential nature of passionate, gripping speech, with both actors bringing a genuine blend of heady excitement, trepidation, and hesitation to their scattershot discourse about love, relationships, human nature, and the afterlife. Yet whereas most cinematic dialogue sounds as if it’s being dutifully recited from the written page, Linklater’s partially improvised script succeeds because Hawke and Delpy actually seem to be listening intently to (and thus learning about) one another. Like Hawke’s idea for a cable access TV show -- which would document 24 hours in the life of a random person -- the film’s lackadaisical pace and lack of action make us feel as though we’re eavesdropping on Hawke and Delpy’s experiences. Before Sunrise tends to drag roughly two-thirds of the way through, with the couple’s endless talk becoming slightly stagnant and borderline pretentious, but the film remains agreeably alluring courtesy of its blithe, lively tone.

Los Olvidados (1950): A

(Originally posted on 2/12/04)

A young boy, no older than five, his face scrunched up in an expression of exhausted, hopeless misery, pushes a carousel in a circle along with a handful of similarly despondent kids. His repetitive, circular path offers no chance for escape, much as the Mexico he inhabits, teeming with abusive or neglectful parents, offers children few opportunities other than backbreaking labor or crime. This brief image -- quickly contrasted with the sight of a beaming young girl, clearly the beneficiary of affluence, sitting astride one of the ride’s wooden stallions -- is almost an aside in Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, a vividly unsentimental depiction of Mexican kids surviving, albeit barely, on society’s fringe. Yet more than any other moment, the sight of this nameless, forsaken boy epitomizes the heartbreaking cycle of cruelty and desolation that’s at the heart of Buneul’s masterpiece.

The film, which earned Buñuel a much-deserved Best Director prize at 1950’s Cannes film festival, begins with the director’s voiceover proclaiming that the film does not seek to posit solutions to the (then-burgeoning) problem of youthful delinquency, and it holds true to that promise. Buñuel’s direction is firmly rooted in the neo-realist tradition, employing Gabriel Figueroa’s black-and-white cinematography to convey a dirt-beneath-the-fingernails griminess that reflects the emotional, psychological, and physical squalor that ensnares its protagonists. Still, despite its unwillingness to succumb to preachy sentimentality, Buñuel’s film is heartbreakingly sympathetic to its pint-size ne’er-do-wells, whose troublesome antics are positioned as the unavoidable consequence of unloving and uncaring upbringings. Pedro’s (Alfonso Mejía) penchant for committing petty crimes with his fellow hoodlums is vividly portrayed as a petulant response to the cold, violent mother who refuses to reciprocate his love, while the devoted Big Eyes (Mário Ramírez) is left abandoned by his father in a busy market square. As the crotchety blind musician Cacarizo (Efraín Arauz) tells Big Eyes before taking the lad under his wing, such desertion happens all the time.

Buñuel abandons most of his surrealist impulses for Los Olvidados, which is not only starkly beautiful but diligently economical in both its narrative and aesthetical construction. The director frequently uses matching transitional fades, so that a scene ending with someone running off-screen to the left is followed by a scene beginning with a different person running on-screen from the right. Such harmonious simplicity is a trademark of Buñuel’s mise-en-scène, and provides a relentlessly pessimistic and haunting portrait of a world bereft of kindness.

Yet this is not to say that Buñuel forsakes the stylistic flourishes that characterize his best work. Pedro’s famous dream sequence, in which his mother offers him a slab of meat while a dead boy crawls out from under his bed, is a sumptuous chiaroscuro nightmare in which cottony blacks and whites are tinged with inescapable malice. The film’s ever-present farm animals come to represent innocence (Pedro’s murder of a hen while at reform school is a confused psychological repetition of his mother’s abuse), while milk, championed as a holy, revitalizing agent by numerous characters, becomes a symbol of the maternal love the kids have been denied. And, as with any Buñuel film, fetishistic images of women’s naked legs are employed to give the proceedings an air of kinky sensuality.

If Buñuel reserves much of his scorn for the city’s parents, he has Cacarizo embody the inherent difficulties of rectifying what he views as a plague of adolescent vice. Cacarizo is, on the one hand, a kind soul disgusted by the indifferent callousness of the kids' parents, and his decision to care for Big Eyes is a product not only of selfishness but also stubborn altruism. Yet when Jaibo is shot dead by the police at film’s conclusion, Cacarizo -- who, throughout the course of the film, has espoused stern beatings as a means of deterring kids from crime -- eagerly calls for every misbehaving street urchin to suffer an identical fate. What Cacarizo fails to realize is that his advocation of physical punishment is, rather than a solution, merely a reiteration of the problem that ultimately dooms kids such as Pedro to be unceremoniously thrown away like so much useless trash.

Wrong Turn: D

(Originally posted on 2/10/04)

Now here’s some suburban paranoia about rural America for you. In the wretched Wrong Turn, homicidal mutant cannibals in the West Virginian backwoods hunt pouty Eliza Dushku and her group of Abercrombie & Fitch buddies, with the unavoidable implication being that rural America is nothing but a breeding ground for monsters intent on defiling pristine Anglo-Saxon teens. Grunting and cackling as they bludgeon and impale their victims, the fiends -- who, done up in silly prosthetic masks, resemble overgrown "Fraggle Rock" rejects with severe hygiene deficiencies -- have no discernable motive except to slaughter humans for their bone and gristle stew, and thus any attempt to discuss them as elemental forces opposed to the encroaching wave of modernity is probably a stretch. The film is, at heart, merely the latest pathetic progeny of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to replicate the scenario of Tobe Hooper’s classic while failing to imbue it with any (conscious) political subtext. Sex-obsessed pot smokers are the first to go, while Desmond Harrington’s blank stud and Dushku’s heroine -- recently dumped by her boyfriend and, thus, virginal by horror movie standards -- successfully make it back to civilization with the knowledge that inhabitants of the country’s red states are gruesomely evil. Wrong Turn is headed in only one direction: straight into the toilet.

Jeepers Creepers 2: C

(Originally posted on 2/10/04)

Jeepers Creepers 2 fares relatively well as a follow-up to its 2001 predecessor, itself little more than an over-hyped monster movie blessed with some seductively shadowy cinematography. Director Victor Salva’s widescreen compositions and digitally enhanced color palette are eerily beautiful, especially with regards to the film’s abundant golden cornfields, which are ominously radiant by day, menacingly opaque by night. Unfortunately, the director’s obvious framing -- such as when, immediately before his demise, a man lighting road flares is too conspicuously seen in the background of a conversation -- diffuses many of the film’s mild frights. The real disaster, however, is the ludicrously overblown creature. With 747-size wings, slimy horned skin, and a flapping third nostril that smells humans’ fear, the nameless monster is akin to an unintentionally funny hybrid of Batman and a blowfish. As with too many modern studio horror films, Jeepers Creepers 2 becomes so infatuated with its deadly killer that it repeatedly loses focus on the terror he inspires in his victims -- in this case, a group of teens trapped on their broken-down school bus in the middle of rural nowhere. The film never overcomes its gore-first, suspense-later construction, although Salva does admirably attempt to subvert familiar horror movie conventions by painting the all-American WASP as a racist and a homophobe, while allowing the usual victims (the African-American, the homosexual, the blond cheerleader) to triumph in the end. Ultimately, however, the obviousness of this modus operandi is merely another example of the film’s insidious predictability.

House of the Dead: F

(Originally posted on 2/6/04)

The unabashed laziness of mainstream horror films need not be recounted here, but even given the recent degradation of the genre, I’d be remiss in not singling out House of the Dead as both last year’s crappiest film ( it would have made my Worst of 2003 list had I seen it earlier) and one of the most astonishingly idiotic pieces of entertainment I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through. A group of Ken and Barbie look-alikes bribe a gun smuggler (Jürgen Prochnow) to take them to a happening rave on an island named Isle de la Muerte (“Muerte means death in Spanish” explains Albert Einstein, er, I mean Ron Howard’s bro Clint). They arrive to discover that the ravers have been turned into zombies who, for inexplicable reasons, have changed out of their loud, garish outfits and into drab work shirts and jeans. The personality-deprived zombies skitter and leapfrog around the woods, but it’s tough to be scared by creatures resembling deformed clowns swathed in white make-up and lipstick. Director Uwe Boll incessantly displays his inability to grasp The Matrix’s bullet-time special effects, and inserts lightening-quick footage of the film’s videogame source material for scene transition effects. What’s amazing, however, is that the film manages to be less frightening (or profound) than the game, which itself amounts to nothing more than a glorified "Duck Hunt" with monsters instead of birds. Nothing -- not the peripheral romantic subplots, not the evil villain’s sepia-toned origin story, not the perplexing, slow-motion final swordfight -- makes a lick of sense, but the film’s main criminal offense is that it fails to make such incoherence even mildly campy. House of the Dead is the kind of film that gives videogames and horror films (and the people who enjoy them) a bad name.

The Puppetmaster (1993): A-

(Originally posted on 1/21/04)

Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s fascination with history’s pervasive influence on the present continues in 1993’s The Puppetmaster, the story of Tianlu Li, a celebrated puppeteer whose first fifty years coincided with Japan’s occupation of Taiwan from 1895 to the end of WWII. The film is told via a combination of dramatized reenactments of Li’s life, narration from Li himself, and documentary-style monologues in which Li occasionally recounts an event that we’ve seen a few scenes prior. Through this stylistic amalgamation, Hou creates a bridge between fiction and fact, memory and reality, in which Li’s courageous evolution from abused child to national treasure -- involving stages of violent emotional and physical subjugation, rebellion, subtle resistance, and finally resurrection -- mirror his country’s national struggle for identity. By having Li tell us slightly different versions of stories we’ve already witnessed minutes earlier, Hou masterfully conveys the passage of time by asking us to experience the film’s events in both real-time and -- through our own act of reliving certain scenes more than once via Li’s delayed narration -- the past. This technique further reinforces the notion that our perception of history is irrevocably fictionalized through memory. Hou’s trademark long takes and master shots (frequently framed in doorways, and bereft of cut-aways or close-ups) are matched by his sublimely atmospheric sound design, lending the film a rigorous beauty. Whether working with a mountain troupe or the Japanese propaganda puppeteers, Li’s artistry (seen in unbroken shots of the gifted puppetmaster’s performances) is stirring, and in Li’s forthright autobiographical commentary, The Puppetmaster becomes a tribute to art’s, and the artist’s, power to help us comprehend and confront the world around us.

S.W.A.T.: D

(Originally posted on 1/15/04)

Is there an actual character in S.W.A.T.? A plot? A single intelligent or exciting sequence? If so, they must have made an appearance while I was watching my cats sleep, because all I saw was the second straight crappy Colin Farrell movie (after the Mamet rip-off The Recruit) to feature the Irish actor intensely wailing on a punching bag and asking someone if his assignment was "just a test." What I can tell you is that remaining conscious during Chuck Johnson's LAPD action film is certainly as difficult as the S.A.T. (which, come to think of it, is just one "w" away from the film's title), and about as much fun. Farrell is a disgraced S.W.A.T. team member who's given a second chance to prove his mettle by Sam Jackson's legendary badass, and half the film is spent watching the two of them recruit the rest of the team -- which includes the underutilized LL Cool J and Michelle "I let my eyebrows do the acting" Rodriguez -- and compete in limp training exercises. After wasting a considerable amount of time on the crew's standard-issue spiteful commanding officer, the film provides us with a vaguely defined French drug lord (Olivier Martinez), who, upon his arrest, promises a $100 million payday to anyone who can bust him out of prison. For a moment, the film seems headed toward unbridled mayhem, as every gang in Los Angeles crawls out of the shadows to earn the hefty reward, but the film swiftly abandons this scenario in favor of a worthless climactic showdown between noble and turncoat S.W.A.T. commandos. Besides a scant few personality details (Farrell is honest and determined; Jackson is a loyal renegade; Rodriguez is a tough-as-nails bulldog with a soft spot for her daughter), the characters appear about as lifelike as the cardboard cutouts posing as hostages in the team's hijacked plane training drill. S.W.A.T. shares the title and theme song of the short-lived 1970s television show, but its real predecessors are the legions of forgettable cops-and-robbers B-movies up to and including the producers' previous Fast and Furious misfires.

Ichi the Killer (2001): C

(Originally posted on 1/15/04)

Japan's Takeshi Miike has become a filmmaking phenomenon for his ultra-violent Dead or Alive trilogy, the nightmarish Audition, and for this film, a sizzling, orgiastic celebration of bloodshed and depravity. Ichi the Killer follows platinum blond mobster Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), a ruthless masochist searching for his missing crime boss, as he embarks on a collision course with a sexually confused sadist named Ichi (Nao Omori). Ichi, used as a pawn by a former cop named Jijii (Sinya Tsukamoto) who's bent on pitting Kakihara against his rivals, plays videogames by day and murders the bullies of the world while dressed in a superhero costume by night. Miike has little use for narrative lucidity, obscuring the plot's incoherent silliness by focusing on the endless images of rape, torture, and mutilation that characterize his sleek, frantic mise-en-scène. The film's brazen impropriety seems like a response to cherished Japanese notions of modesty and decorum, and Ichi's unbridled hysteria and fury -- the product of anger and misery caused by repressed childhood traumas -- may be the director's critique of a society that encourages people to hide their feelings behind impenetrable public facades of deferential politeness. Searching for social commentary amidst this chaotic carnage, however, is probably giving the film more credit than it deserves. Miike's gleeful staging of a dead skin mask sliding down a wall or Kakihara slicing off his own tongue reflect the filmmaker's desire to create iconic images of gonzo gangster madness, and in the figure of Kakihara, he almost succeeds. With slits running from the corners of his mouth out into the middle of his cheeks (the wounds held together only by two ring piercings) and a sexual appetite for S&M-tinged beatings, Asano's Kakihara is a demonic monster whose moral vacuity is simultaneously frightening and comical. He's not enough to elevate the pointless Ichi the Killer into something worthwhile, but his extreme indecency does make the endless degeneracy slightly more bearable.

Cure (1997): A-

1/14/04

Kyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, made in 1997 but released in the US in 2001, is -- with the possible exception of Takashi Miike's chilling Audition -- the single best horror film I've seen this century. Kurosawa (who's not related to that other Japanese filmmaker), is a genre specialist, and he instills Cure's serial killer story with a suffocating sense of modern dislocation and insidious psychological and emotional instability that's far removed from the jolting scares of American frightfests. The film begins ominously, as a man returning home decides to club a naked woman in his bed to death and then carve an "x" in her throat for no discernable reason. When identical motive-less crimes begin cropping up, detective Takabe (Shall We Dance's Koji Yakusho) pins the blame on a mysterious stranger with amnesia who responds to interrogation with more questions. Takabe eventually comes to believe the man (whose name appears to be Mamiya) is using hypnotic powers to force people to kill their colleagues and loved ones, but Mamiya's repeated query, "Who are you?" hints at the film's subtext about identity crisis and spiritual alienation. What begins as a standard-issue serial killer thriller soon evolves into a spellbinding collage of tenuously tethered moments and images that defy easy explanation, and part of the fun is struggling to decipher what the film's second half is telling us about its characters, Japanese society, and human nature. Kurosawa's eerily deliberate master shots give the film its brooding, omnipresent terror, and his provocative staging of the film's shocking final scene -- which is sure to have many viewers reaching for their remote's rewind button -- is grounds enough to label him a master of terror.

Pumping Iron (1977): C

(Originally posted on 1/14/04)

Having been bitten by the documentary bug, I finally saw Pumping Iron, the 1977 bodybuilding documentary that gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his first taste of the mainstream spotlight. Yet besides a few revealing moments of Schwarzenegger on the road to his sixth (and final) Mr. Olympia title, the film is a rather amateurish, rough-around-the-edges affair that doesn't tell us much about weight lifters except that they train really, really hard for those gargantuan pectorals and deltoids. Mike Katz, a middle school teacher and amateur bodybuilder, reveals a rather predictable motivation for wanting to inflate his physique to He-Man proportions when he discusses his childhood experiences with bullies, but the film's more prevalent homoerotic subtext -- seen in the subjects' infatuation with their own, and each others', bodies, as well as in a strange shot of a nude Arnold and his friend/colleague Franco Columbo in the shower admiring Arnold's bulging bicep -- goes unmentioned. Rather, we see Arnold smoke some dope, hear him equate the burning sensation one feels from lifting weights to having an orgasm ("I am coming day and night! I'm in heaven!" he laughs), and expound on the psychological (as well as physical) edge he holds over his competition. He backs up such claims by psyching out a young, seemingly unconfident Lou Ferrigno, but considering the mental fitness of his opposition -- whose typical comments don't extend far beyond shallow, egotistical clichés -- I can't say I'm overly impressed.

Biggie and Tupac: B+

(Originally posted on 1/14/04)

Biggie and Tupac, Nick Broomfield's tantalizing investigation into the rappers' murders, is short on concrete evidence but long on compelling insinuation. Released shortly after Chuck Philip's Los Angeles Times report fingered a possible gunman in Tupac Shakur's death, Broomfield sets his sights on the killing of Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace, whose death was largely explained as retribution for Tupac's murder. Speaking with Mrs. Wallace, Biggie's associates, former L.A. police offers and Death Row records executives, Broomfield uncovers a conspiracy orchestrated by the LAPD and Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight to suppress the culprit in both killings. According to Biggie and Tupac, Tupac's imminent departure from Death Row records -- which would have been followed by a lawsuit over money the label owed him -- convinced Knight to have the rapper killed, which he subsequently insinuated was arranged by Biggie and his sidekick/producer Sean "Puffy" Combs. Then, to deflect attention away from his own culpability, Knight had the corrupt cops on his payroll (apparently, the LAPD allowed its officers to work during their off hours for music labels involved in gun- and drug-running) execute Biggie to make it look like both men had been killed because of the much-hyped East Coast-West Coast hip-hop feud. While Broomfield never finds the smoking gun linking Knight and his cohorts to the crimes, the avalanche of circumstantial evidence he uncovers is thrillingly persuasive. Even if the film is ultimately an entertaining but unstable house of cards, Broomfield's interview with Knight in prison is a nearly awe-inspiring feat of courage given the prior stories we've heard about the CEO's intimidating violent streak.

Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992): B+

(Originally posted on 1/14/04)

On the cusp of seeing Monster and Nick Broomfield's new documentary Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer, I revisited Broomfield's sterling 1992 documentary on the country's "first female serial killer," Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Unlike the two newer releases, Broomfield's original doc focuses less on the life, motivations, and case against Wuornos and more on the nefarious machinations of the adopted mother, self-serving lawyer, and money-hungry police who all sought to profit from her sensational crimes. Wuornos, a Florida prostitute, was charged with (and convicted of) killing seven male clients during 1989-1990, and during her journey through the judicial system she was adopted by a devout Christian woman named Arlene Pralle, who promptly hired shady musician-turned-attorney Steve Glazer to represent her. The two try to milk Broomfield for tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for an interview with Aileen as they simultaneously convince Wuornos to plead no contest (in effect, as good as a guilty plea), allowing a damning portrait of cold-hearted greed to emerge. Pralle and Glazer, eager to make Wuornos a shining example of Christian repentance, come across as nothing more than fervent, mercenary missionaries. Meanwhile, the cops prove just as unethical by working with Wuornos' lesbian lover Tyria Moore -- who testified against Wuornos during her trials -- on a TV movie based on her crimes. Broomfield is a persistent, scrupulous investigator, even if his narcissistic penchant for interjecting himself into the drama can become wearisome (still, he's immeasurably more bearable than the insufferably egotistical Michael Moore). His films function as chronological documents of his investigations, and in the case of Aileen Wuornos, Broomfield succeeds in making his filmmaking journey as compelling as his conclusive portrait of limitless avarice.

Underworld: C+

(Originally posted on 1/10/04)

What do you get when you cross The Matrix with Blade, The Mummy, and countless videogames? Why, you get Underworld, a film so derivative that it barely registers as a film unto itself. Rarely has a film "borrowed" from its genre predecessors this wantonly or profusely, with everything from its color palette (pale grays and blues), its slow-motion gunfights, its dilapidated Gothic metropolis setting, and its shiny black leather fashion sense lifted from one recent action film or another. And yet despite its wholesale unoriginality, I must confess that I had a pretty good time watching this icy, kinetic battle between aristocratic vampires and savage werewolves. Director Len Wiseman's frantic direction is a combination of Wachowski Brothers acrobatics and first-person shooter videogame flash, and his action scenes are largely a jumbled, incoherent bore. Similarly, the mythos about vampires and werewolves is a bunch of convoluted rubbish. Yet Wiseman's plagiaristic tendencies are also his greatest strengths, as the film's consistently seductive tone and style turns Underworld into an engaging if familiar experience. The film's trump card, however, is slender, porcelain-delicate British hottie Kate Beckinsale as a vampire assassin decked out in skin-tight leather jumpsuits and a flowing black cape and armed with automatic pistols. She's a delectable sci-fi creation whose every graceful back-flip and somersault put The Matrix's Carrie-Ann Moss to shame, and her detached, no-nonsense demeanor helps give this chilly adventure an S&M-inspired eroticism.

Cold Creek Manor: D

(Originally posted on 1/9/04)

Don't call it a comeback. Sharon Stone returns from moviemaking purgatory -- actually, for anyone who's seen 2000's god-awful Beautiful Joe, it was more like cinematic hell -- with Cold Creek Manor, a worthless thriller about a rich New York City family who buy a house in the sticks and, in the process, royally piss off the redneck former owner (and recently released convict) who wants his home back. Director Mike Figgis tries to conjure up the ghost of The Shining via dreamy transitional fades and lots of slow, ominous shots of the titular country mansion, but unlike Kubrick's haunted house classic, the bogeyman isn't metaphysical but, as personified by the taut and tan Stephen Dorff, just a wacko psychical specimen named Dale Massie who's annoyed that some snooty city folk are getting comfy in his pa's home. For no good reason other than to give Dorff's psycho access to the family, the film has Stone and Dennis Quaid's Leah and Cooper Tilson hire the lunatic as their carpenter, and soon he's terrorizing them and their two kids by planting venomous snakes throughout the house and then killing their daughter's horse. Quaid's Cooper is a documentary filmmaker who begins working on a film about the previous family's strange history, and thus winds up uncovering the wholly unsurprising revelation that Dale might have murdered his former family. Wow. You mean the violent lunatic who claims that his family just up and disappeared might actually be a killer, thus setting up a climactic showdown in the rain atop Cold Creek Manor in which Dale attempts to dispatch the new tenants just as he did his wife and two kids? Get outta town! For anyone who makes it past the first fifteen minutes, at which point Dale's entrance marks the end of the film's mystery and suspenseful, be prepared for some supremely listless and scare-free nonsense.

Out of Time: C

(Originally posted on 1/8/04)

See Denzel steal. See Denzel get framed. See Denzel run around Florida like the hero of a second-rate Hitchcock thriller. Carl Franklin's Out of Time is so depressingly average, so unworthy of genuine praise or vitriolic scorn, that there's very little one can say about it. Denzel Washington plays a police chief who steals impounded drug money from the station to help his girlfriend pay for experimental cancer treatment. But when her house goes up in flames and all signs point to him being the arsonist, Denzel discovers that he's been framed, and must figure out a way to recover the money before the DEA discovers it's missing and clear his name before his ex-wife -- a homicide detective played by Eva Mendes - pins the case on him. It's a rather straightforward "average man trapped in seemingly dire circumstances" narrative, and might have provided some thrills were it not for Franklin's lazy direction -- couldn't his compositions have featured someone on the edges of the frame? - and Washington's serviceable but unremarkable performance as a desperate but determined cop on the run. As is, I ran out of patience with Out of Time almost as soon as the opening credits had finished rolling.

Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star: D

(Originally posted on 1/6/04)

One my trip to London for New Year's, British Airways offered a variety of movies for my viewing pleasure. Since I figured I'd try to get some sleep, I chose Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Unfortunately, I didn't get any sleep, and thus I have only myself to blame for suffering through this wince-inducing comedic atrocity. David Spade, once again testing his audience's threshold for condescending, snarky put-downs, plays the titular washed-up kid actor, who, in a desperate bid to get cast in Rob Reiner's new family drama (and thus regain fame and glory), pays a suburban clan to let him move in and pretend to be one of their kids. The plan, it seems, is for Dickie to experience the everyday life he missed out on because of his TV career, and thus the embarrassing childish stunts in which Dickie makes a fool of himself soon yield to earnest revelations about what really matters in life. Having sat through all of Dickie Roberts -- a truly idiotic and incompetent film that only exists to pathetically cash in on America's never-ending fascination with yesteryear's TV personalities -- I can spare you the hour and a half and just tell you what really matters in life: Getting up from the couch, going outside for some fresh air, and avoiding this miserable little film like the plague.

Dust in the Wind (1986): B+

(Originally posted on 12/19/03)

"What can we do?" asks an aged grandfather in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 1986 critical hit Dust in the Wind, a meditative film about one teenage Taiwanese couple's journey from their rural hometown to the city. The old man's question, spoken solemnly while sitting alone on the steps of his house, articulates the film's fixation on man's inability to halt the forward march of time. Wan and Huen are childhood sweethearts who, seeing the limited opportunities of their small town lives, move to Taipei, where Wan gets a job working at a printing press and Huen finds a position at a tailor's shop. The two seem ill at ease with their new surroundings, and Hou -- interested in criticizing the burgeoning urban migration movement -- uses deep-focus master shots that feature disharmonious spatial organizations (such as whenever Wan speaks to Huen at work through iron metal bars) to illustrate Wan and Heun's isolation, desperation, and increasing despondence. When Wan discovers that his motorcycle has been stolen and attempts to steal another despite Huen's objections, the sight is one of abject moral degradation. Recurrent images of watches/clocks and forward-moving trains -- including breathtaking first-person shots from the front and rear of a locomotive -- highlight the theme of time's inevitable progression. Although Wan's failure to make it in the big city leads to thoughts of suicide, he eventually returns home for a brief visit, only to learn that he's been drafted by the National Army to serve a two-year stint on an island off the coast of mainland China. A touching farewell meal with his father, in which the regularly drunken patriarch lights his son's cigarette and then gives him the lighter as a gift, serves as Wan's ceremonial entrance into adulthood. After his letters to Huen are returned, Wan learns that she has married a postman in his absence. In a gorgeous final tableau, Wan, his family, Huen and her husband are frozen in profile, and the image represents Hou's final attempt to stop the inexorable progress of human life and, specifically, the quickening pace of urban migration. Such a goal is dubious at best -- the director's characterization of the countryside as bucolic and the city as malignant is ludicrously simplistic -- but Hou's intense sympathy for rural communities in the face of modernization, as well as his sorrow over Wan and Huen's decimated affair, is nonetheless anguishing.

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985): A-

(Originally posted on 12/12/03)

The Time to Live and the Time to Die is the first film I've seen by renowned Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and it strikes me as a near-masterpiece. A challenging, immensely moving semi-autobiographical portrait of two decades in the life of a Chinese family displaced from mainland China to Taiwan in the 1940s and 1950s, the film is, in certain respects, reminiscent of the Italian neorealism movement and the work of Satyajit Ray and Yasujiro Ozu. Hou favors long, unbroken takes and unintrusive master shots (i.e. wide shots that capture the entire scene from start to finish) that turn his film's action -- mostly made up of mundane events such as people washing the floor and kids playing in the street -- into beautifully naturalistic snapshots of everyday life. Yet while the film shares with its aforementioned cinematic predecessors both a relaxed, fly-on-the-wall immediacy and emphasis on detail and mood over melodramatic action, Hou's gorgeously sweeping camera and ethereal editing -- which blends scenes together with dreamy, almost subconscious grace -- are all his own.

The film focuses on second-oldest son Ah-ha (based, in part, on Hou), who moves with his family first to Taiwan to escape the communists, and then from North Taiwan to the South to accommodate his father's debilitating asthma. The film's cheery first half, which charmingly depicts the family's inter-personal relationships, soon segues into heartrending turmoil as both parents die and Ah-ha becomes a delinquent. Hou's cinematographic style lends the film an air of isolation, especially when it comes to the family's father -- shots of the ailing man amidst his temporary wicker furniture elegantly symbolize the disjunction between the characters and their new environment. Yet despite its sadness, the film conveys an overpowering sense of nostalgia through its clear-eyed presentation of Ah-ha's maturation. The increasingly delusional grandmother repeatedly gets lost trying to find a bridge from her native home, and a scene featuring her and Ah-ha juggling fruit in the afternoon sun while pretending to be back on the mainland reveals a deft balance between humor and wistfulness. The free-flowing narrative structure sometimes makes it easier to connect emotionally to specific moments rather than the characters themselves, but The Time to Live and the Time to Die is, in the end, much more than the sum of its parts.

Bronco Billy (1980): B

(Originally posted on 12/12/03)

Clint Eastwood's underappreciated Bronco Billy is an affectionate ode to the fading myth of the American West and the enduring power of the American Dream. Eastwood, in one of his first roles to examine his own Western icon status, plays the titular cowpoke, a former New Jersey shoe salesman-turned-sharpshooter. Billy is equal parts showman, dreamer, and den mother to a clan of outcasts that includes a Vietnam deserter (Sam Bottoms), a disgraced doctor (Scatman Crothers), a Native American and his wife (Dan Vadis and Sierra Pecheur), and a thief (Bill McKinney). The troupe makes a meager living putting on a cheerfully hokey cowboys-and-Indians show at carnivals, orphanages, and insane asylums, believing that fame and fortune -- or at least enough money for a few beers at the local watering hole -- waits just around the corner. At one out-of-the-way stop, Billy recruits as his new assistant Antoinette Lily (Sondra Locke), a snooty heiress who's just been deserted by her dim bulb husband (Geoffrey Lewis). Slowly, he teaches her that life isn't something that's given to you, but what you make it. "Who do you think you are?" she asks Billy with a sneer. "I am who I want to be," he replies, verbalizing the film's steadfast conviction that the American Dream is alive and well. What's on its last legs, however, is the legend of the American West. Billy's crew, playing to dwindling audiences, represent the last vestiges of a bygone era of gunslingers and Native American warriors. The story can sometimes be silly -- Lewis' stay in a mental institution is both contrived and burdened with clunky symbolic baggage -- and Locke, as usual, gives a performance that's equal parts feisty and cloying. Yet the film's sincere affection for the antiquated cowboy is palpable, and allows slightly heavy-handed moments like Billy and company performing their climactic show in a patchwork tent made of American flags to retain their subdued, authentic poignancy.

Gerry: B+/B

(Originally posted on 12/11/03)

Gus Van Sant's hypnotic Gerry is like the love child between Samuel Beckett, Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tar (who Van Sant admits was a huge influence on the film), and Van Sant himself circa 1985. Similar to the Polish Brothers' inferior Northfork, Gerry is absolutely transfixing at one moment and unbearably boring the next. Two guys (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), both of whom are called Gerry, drive out into the middle of nowhere, follow "the path" toward some unspecified "thing," and then get lost in the wilderness, where they battle exhaustion, the elements, and a disquieting sense of existential doom. The film is primarily comprised of long scenes featuring Damon and Affleck walking silently through rocky ravines and dusty plains interspersed with time-lapse images of ominous cloud formations engulfing the sky. What little dialogue is spoken is both cryptic and banal (the film was improvised on set by both actors), and there's no getting around the fact that almost nothing happens in the film -- the most action involves Affleck jumping off a big rock after ten minutes of deliberation. Cinematographer Harris Savides' camera alternates between distant panoramic compositions that juxtapose the two men against the enormous expanse of the natural world and tight shots of the actors' faces, and the best of these is a gorgeous close-up of Damon and Affleck walking at dusk in rhythmic synchronicity. With its haunting visuals (the five-minute opening sequence from behind, and then inside, a driving car is spellbinding) and eclectic soundtrack (a collage of Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel," swirling ambient sounds, and the crunching sound of footsteps), the film leaves itself open to endless interpretations. It could be about people's inability to relate to one another, a disintegrating homosexual relationship, the disconnect between modern man and nature (hinted at by the film's finale in a middle class family's minivan), the endless search for the object of desire we seek but cannot attain, or the painful process of killing part of one's self in order to become "whole" or "healed." I'm not sure I fully understand what Van Sant is after, but Gerry's trance-like inscrutability is, I think, its best quality.

The Brood (1979): B-

(Originally posted on 12/9/03)

David Cronenberg's pleasurably twisted The Brood (1979) may be the most damning movie ever made about psychiatry. Wacko therapist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) is the preeminent practitioner of psychoplasmics, a revolutionary form of treatment in which the good doctor goofily role-plays with his unbalanced patients by earnestly pretending to be their neglectful fathers and abusive mothers. Cronenberg, showing his contempt for this buffoonish hack, tips us off about Raglan's craziness by making the character wear turtlenecks underneath a leather jacket and by encouraging Reed to speak in a frustratingly inaudible hushed whisper. Frank Carveth (Art Hindle), the husband of Raglan's patient Nola (Samantha Eggar), correctly deduces that psychoplasmics is a crock and demands that his wife be released from Raglan's prison-like medical facility. However, in this alternate (read: Canadian) universe, people undergoing psychiatric treatment cannot be disturbed for fear that contact with the outside world will permanently screw up their fragile minds. To complicate matters, Carveth's parents-in-law are murdered by dog-faced children dressed in snowsuits resembling the one worn by Carveth's stone-faced daughter Candy (Cindy Hinds). This being a Cronenberg movie, it's only a matter of time before fantasy and reality collide amidst penetration/expulsion imagery, and wouldn't you know it, the monster children turn out to be physical manifestations of Nola's conscious (and unconscious) rage. Nola's painful childhood has left her terrified of abandonment and generally pissed off, and this anger is so great that she's actually spawned a horde of these pesky pint-sized creatures. Even though she's gone through the trouble of developing an external birthing organ to breed these tykes -- thus presumably making it very hard to walk around -- Nola nonetheless cares very little for her ugly new children, who are forced to reside in a bunk bed-filled attic when not doing their mother's dirty work. Things come to a head when the evil little buggers kidnap Candy, forcing Carveth to confront his loony spouse. Cronenberg, seemingly intent on condemning psychiatry as a menace to humanity, makes sure that Raglan is the brood's final victim. Yet the quack doctor's demise is preceded by the film's unforgettable, spectacularly repulsive vision of maternal love: Nola greeting her thoroughly freaked out hubby by giving birth to a bloody baby and then, like a cat confronted with a saucer of milk, licking the goo-covered infant clean.

Prison (1988): C-

(Originally posted on 12/2/03)

As readers of this site will undoubtedly come to learn, I have an abiding fascination/obsession with horror films, good or bad. Case in point: this weekend's Saturday night rental, Prison, a 1988 junk-a-thon directed by Renny Harlin (pre-Die Hard II, post-Nightmare on Elm St. IV: The Dream Master). Starring Viggo Mortensen as a convict with a thing for James Dean/Montgomery Clift hairstyles, the film is a low-budget, fright-free laugher about a ghost terrorizing a -- you guessed it! -- prison. A mean ol' warden named Sharpe (Lane Smith) executed an innocent man and then covered it up thirty years ago; now, he's been assigned to oversee the very prison (not used since the '50s) in which the crime was committed. There's a debate early on over whether prisons' objectives should be punitive or reformative, and the film's plot certainly can be seen as an anti-capital punishment screed. But please, don't go looking to Prison for intellectual stimulation, since it is, at heart, nothing more than an '80s horror film in which staging gruesome deaths becomes a lame substitute for creating tension and eeriness. A bunch of peripheral characters (including Tom "Tiny" Lister in his WWF Zeus days) waste time developing Calista Flockhart-thin subplots, and Viggo does a bit of pre-Lord of the Rings brooding with his shirt off. But the main problem is the evil spirit itself, which amounts to little more than glowing blue light and, on a few special occasions, glowing blue lightening bolts. Watching Mortensen and Smith -- who, with his mouth perpetually open in a look of constipated anger and shock, seems to be in a fly-eating contest -- react to this low-budget villain is not only embarrassing, but a little sad as well. Still, Prison does provide a few unintentionally funny moments along the way, such as every single second the idiotic Italian inmate Lasagna (I kid you not, that's the character's name) appears on screen and talks about his homoerotic affection for Rambo.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 4-Disc set: A

(Originally posted on 11/30/03)

Earlier this year, I stated (in the pages of Stumped? magazine) that Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers paled slightly in comparison to The Fellowship of the Ring. However, after watching New Line's four-disc extended version of the trilogy's second installment, I now enthusiastically revise my opinion. Featuring forty minutes of additional footage not found in the theatrical cut, this extended Two Towers is a significantly improved, and astonishingly fleshed-out, adventure. While I found the extended Fellowship's new footage interesting but not vital, the same can't be said of this disc's new scenes. Whether it's learning about Aragon's advanced age, witnessing the relationship between brothers Boromir and Faramir and more of Merry and Pippin's adventure with the Ents, or relishing hints about Golum's nefarious plans to reclaim the ring from Frodo, this longer cut is richer, more exciting, and a more fulfilling build-up to next month's Return of the King. In fact, it's now clear that the theatrical cuts of these films are just rough drafts -- or, one might say, studio-mandated neutered editions -- that function as tantalizing previews for the fuller, more mesmerizing, final versions released months later on DVD. Even though I'm sure the success of these discs merely further encourages studios and filmmakers to unwisely tinker with their films for profitable (but unnecessary) "Director's Cut" DVDs, when it comes to these comprehensive, supplement-stuffed extended Lord of the Rings discs, one can only salute Peter Jackson for creating what are undoubtedly the greatest fantasy films of all time.

Once Upon A Time in America DVD: A-

(Originally posted on 11/17/03)

Sergio Leone was a master of genre revisionism, and yet it's funny to find that few people characterize his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, as an example of such. A hallucinatory, melancholic meditation on grief, ambition, and betrayal, Leone's film purports to be a gangster film but, in reality, is something more like a romantic evocation of a gangster film. Like his groundbreaking spaghetti westerns (of which Once Upon a Time in the West, coming soon to DVD, is the finest), Leone uses familiar genre tropes as a means of creating a dream-like collage of images and sounds that seek to convey an emotion, a passion, rather than a traditional narrative logic. In Once Upon a Time in America, Leone marries a European art-film sensibility -- embodied by the film's two framing devices and an intricate flashback structure -- to his flamboyant and slightly cartoonish trademark cinematic mannerisms (tight close-ups, charged revealing shots). The result is a haunting, thematically complex movie that, instead of a straightforward genre film, works like an elegiac poem about the cost one pays for dreaming big and trusting blindly.

Childhood pals-turned-Prohibition-era gangsters Noodles (a powerfully understated Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods) are the film's yin and yang, polar opposites who are nonetheless inextricably bound to one another by a shared dream of power and success. The film follows an elderly Noodles in the 1960s after he is mysteriously summoned back to New York. His journey home leads to recollections of his youthful escapades -- drinking and fighting with friends, running petty scams, and his love affair with the ethereal Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a girl and Elizabeth McGovern as a woman) -- and eventual rise to prominence in the crime world. Along with pals Cockeye and Patsy, Noodles and Max become bootleggers and business owners, and eventually become entwined with a union leader (Treat Williams) who's slowly shedding his idealistic morality.

Noodles' journey is an act of self-discovery in which the veil of illusions he has lived under throughout his adult life is torn away to reveal a reality of greed, treachery and pathetic wastefulness. Yet after Noodles discovers that what he thought was real was simply a carefully-executed deception, the story's reliability is called into question by a final image of a stoned De Niro brightly smiling at the camera (through a veil, no less) in an opium den. The implication is that the entire film has, perhaps, been merely one petty criminal's guilt-ridden fantasy from his spiritual deathbed. However, answering this tantalizing question -- Is the film a dream? -- is beside the point. Leone is interested in the mood, the atmosphere, and the grand gestures of the gangster novel primarily as a means of reaching some larger truth about human interaction - how man's dreams and desires are driven by feelings of self-interest, self-loathing, and self-doubt, and how one's motives are always inscrutable to others. It's an entrancing and stirring epic from one of the cinema's most expressionistic artists, and one of the most consistently fascinating films I've ever seen.

DVD: As for the DVD, Warner Bros. has done an absolutely smashing job with the audio and video restoration. A few minor specks of dirt can be seen on the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, and the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack isn't quite as enveloping as one might like, but there's really nothing to complain about when it comes to this audio/video presentation. The extras, on the other hand, are a bit of a letdown. We get an all-too-brief 20-minute excerpt from the documentary Once Upon a Time: Sergio Leone, and a commentary from Time magazine critic Richard Schickel that, simply because of its length (the film is, after all, 4 hours long), provides only sporadically enlightening material.