All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)

If you get a bunch of assorted critics and film snobs into a room and start them talking about the work of Douglas Sirk, the conversation will eventually devolve into the topic it always does: which of the two films Sirk made that are universally regarded as his best was better, All That Heaven Allows or Imitation of Life? (The debate is generally so close that even in They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?'s survey of 1,360 professional film critics of the thousand best movies of all time, Imitation came in at 244, All that Heaven Allows at 245.) Well, I've now seen both of them, and I have to say I liked Imitation of Life more. But All That Heaven Allows is still a pretty fine movie, both for the stylistic quirks that make it such a critical favorite and for the satire on sanitized fifties life that it presents.

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is an upperclass widow whose friends are encouraging her to get out a bit more. They even contrive to get her into the same place as often as possible with the town's most eligible bachelor. Cary, however, finds herself attracted to rough, blue-collar tree farmer Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), who'd done some gardening work for her. Romance blooms between the older woman and the younger man. While Ron's friends are warm and accepting, Cary's friends-- and her children-- are scandalized.

Sirk is sometimes guilty of making his characters shallower than they should be in order to get his point across more clearly, but at least he recognizes the importance of couching that point in a good story, unlike so many other seemingly-dissident filmmakers, and that makes all the difference. What I find most interesting is that Sirk's pastiche of effects here, most notably the expressionist color scheme and the famous framing shots, put me very much in mind of Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. (Betcha no one's ever made THAT comparison before!) Because of that, I think they may have had less of an effect on me than on most folks seeing the film for the first time; after all, I'm already used to them, and used to them in the capacity of attacking societal mores. But still, the story itself is still solid. A bit melodramatic, but then, Sirk was the King of the Weepies, no? ****

* * *

Die!, Die!, My Darling! (Silvio Narizzano, 1965)

How can you not like any movie called Die! Die!, My Darling!? Especially when it contains Tallulah Bankhead's final onscreen performance, as a religious wingnut determined to preserve the purity of her dead son by imprisoning his former fiancée, Pat (Stefanie Powers), in her secluded house. Pat, however, is engaged again, and new fiancée Alan (The Abominable Dr. Phibes' Maurice Kaufmann) is sure to notice her disappearance eventually. (Isn't he? You never know, this IS a Hammer horror film, after all.)

Ah, the scenery-chewing! Powers and Bankhead are great foils for one another, with Bankhead lording it over Powers (and the rest of her equally insane household) while Powers tries to find various methods of escaping, getting a note to Alan, or anything else that might help her out of her jam. There are other characters of note-- specifically, rising star Donald Sutherland in one of his early roles for Hammer-- but the movie would be just as fun if it were just Bankhead and Powers in one room. No one will ever confuse this for immortal cinema, but if you happen to catch it on the Saturday afternoon creature feature, you'll find it a pleasant surprise. ***

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Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

I've been going through the hundred best films of all time, as rated by the massive collection of critics' surveys and the like housed at the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? website, and I've found that most of them deserve (or seem to) the accolades. But there are some movies that make me wonder what all those critics were thinking, and Pierrot le Fou is one of them. Yes, I get that Godard was one of the leading lights of the New Wave in French cinema. But it's kind of like billing Woody Allen as the greatest comic filmmaker of our time; I just don't see the attraction.

The plot of the film starts off simple: Pierrot (“my name is Ferdinand!”) (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a man bored with his stultifying life, runs away with his babysitter, Marianne (Anna Karina), an old girlfriend. He soon finds out he got a lot more than he bargained for as the plot gets ever more complex, but paradoxically plays less and less a role in the film as Godard wanders off into pointless sociopolitical posturing. It's an attractive film, competently directed, but barely coherent at best, a thin canvas of movie disguising a rambling political statement. **

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American Hardcore (Paul Rachman, 2006)

Ever since I heard Steven Blush was adapting his book for the screen, I held my breath in the hopes that someone, somewhere, would get the brilliant idea to try and get the members of Husker Du together in a room somewhere, and then film the resulting chaos. Unfortunately, this did not occur (and the members of Bad Brains, Cro-Mags, and other bands with fabled acrimony involved with their break-ups are interviewed separately), but American Hardcore is still a pretty fun movie if you were there. And maybe even if you weren't, though some younger music fans are likely to take offense at the (dead accurate) assertions of some of the interviewees here that we haven't seen a real punk band since about the last Tuesday of never.

And, honestly, that's the problem. Not with the movie, or the book upon which it is based; they're great. Rachman (Four Dogs Playing Poker) combines present-day interviews with archive footage of performances and takes the Errol Morris approach (stay out of the picture and let the subjects ramble on as they please). It's a great trip down memory lane for those of us who were there. But those who weren't? Why will they care? Short answer: except for that rare kid (and I'd assume they get rarer with each passing year) who stumbles upon a Dead Kennedys or Black Flag tape for the first time and is transported the way we were... they won't.

Music, it seems to me, is the most difficult of documentary subjects to make a film about which anyone not involved with the genre is going to care. Be honest: if you're not a jazz fan, did you watch Ken Burns' epic? Did anyone who wasn't a metalhead or a TV preacher watch The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, Part II? Of course not. I think American Hardcore will have a similarly vertical audience, though if you're a youngster who's always wondered what's missing from the current crop of “punk” bands, you'll find your answer here as well. Just be prepared, the people interviewed here are just as elitist and annoying about the subject as I am. *** ½

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The Red Shoes (Yong-gyun Kim, 2005)

If you're going to adapt a fairy tale these days, the obvious choice is Andersen's The Red Shoes, what with the current click-lit shoe obsession. Kim does so here. Unfortunately, I have to review a cut version of the film; the directors' cut has never (as of this writing) been released outside of Korea.

Sun-jae (Three... Extremes: II's Hye-su Kim) is a young career woman on the verge of opening her own optical center. Her young daughter, Tae-su (Yeon-ah Park, in her screen debut), wants to become a ballet dancer, and is attending dancing school. One evening, Sun-jae finds a pair of red shoes in the subway and takes them home-- but soon comes to realize that death follows in the shoes' wake.

Okay, yeah, so “adapt” is a loose term there. (The actual fairy tale, Andersen-style, is much more closely followed during a flashback sequence near the end of the movie.) Still, it's not a bad little film; Kim has given us some decent, if not fully-fleshed, characters. The main problem with it is that it's pretty obvious that Kim had seen Hideo Nakata's Dark Water not long before he began shooting here; there's a great deal of similarity in setting and atmosphere. If you can overlook that, however, it's not a bad way to kill an hour and a half. ** ½

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Albert Uderzo, Asterix and Obelix All at Sea (Dargaud, 1996)

Spartacus-- oh, excuse me, Spartakis-- has managed to steal Caesar's galley out from under his nose, and is fleeing for the indomitable Gaulish village. The Romans are in hot pursuit, so the Gauls get ready for the battle. No one's paying attention to Obelix... and we finally find out what happens to him when he drinks the magic potion. Hey, we only waited three decades! That alone is worth the price of admission here, but there's another clue to something upon which Uderzo might eventually expand (keep your eyes sharp!). Good stuff. ***

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Kaavya Viswanathan, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life (Little, Brown, 2006)

Everyone remembers (at least, I hope you do-- it wasn't all that long ago) the Kaavya Viswanathan scandal, in which the entire literary world destroyed the reputation of a first-time author because a few sentences in a three-hundred-plus-page novel bore a good deal of similarity to a few sentences from another novel written by someone else. If nothing else, at least it taught the world how to spell “Kaavya Viswanathan.” Otherwise, it's really too bad, because for chick lit, this really isn't too bad a book. I've read a bunch of chick lit-- certainly more than the quota for the average American male. And no one's ever going to mistake Opal Mehta for Eudora Welty (or, for that matter, William Faulkner), but this is as good an example of the genre as you're likely to find. For one thing, its protagonist is not obsessed with (and, perhaps, has never even heard the name of) Manolo Blahnik.

In fact, the protagonist knows nothing about fashion. Or culture. Or anything, really, except academics and welding. (Welding? Yes, welding.) She's a single-minded, driven straight-A student whose entire lifetime goal has been to get into Harvard. Well, anyway, that's the goal her parents have set for her, and she's just kind of followed along. But when her early-admission interview goes disastrously because she has no life outside academics, her parents devise a new plan: get Opal a life. Of course, this is related to the old plan of getting her into Harvard, but still, it's a pretty radical redefinition. And because of it, Opal starts to question not only her own motives, but those of everyone around her.

I get the feeling that those who have been trashing the novel on Amazon, usually with one-liners, fall into two camps: those who haven't read it and are shocked (shocked, I tell you!) at the fact that one writer would plagiarize another (I'm assuming you've all heard of Virgil, yes?), and those who managed to get all the way through high school without ever being embarrassed by their parents. To the latter camp, I salute you. (The former, I just scrape you off my shoe.) The rest of us, however, can identify all too well. Viswanathan has given us a good, solid character roster here, at least for her main characters. She even throws in a curve ball by having the leader of the popular clique at school not be a two-dimensional airhead. And you know what? You can't plagiarize characterization. You can try, but everything you didn't plagiarize won't hold up on its own. Kaavya Viswanathan has talent. And once the world has gotten over this ludicrous idea of “intellectual property,” hopefully people will realize that. *** ½

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The Maid (Kelvin Tong, 2005)

Now, I'll say right off that, yes, the critics of this movie have it right: there's nothing here we haven't seen before. But you know what? There are thirty-six plots. Total. (And that's the liberal estimate. I've seen the estimate for the total number of plots in the world whittled down to nine convincingly.) As Al Jourgensen said back in the early nineties, “it's all been done already.” What you have to try and do, if you're a writer, or a musician, or a filmmaker, is to present it another way, with your own style. I've seen a lot of derivative Asian horror movies recently, and of the lot, The Maid stands out. Why? Because Kelvin Tong has a lot more style than those other guys.

Alessandra de Rossi plays Rosa Dimaano, a young Filipino woman hired as a housekeeper by a cosmopolitan, if old-school, couple in Singapore, the Teos (Huifang Hong and Shucheng Chen). The Teos have a mentally challenged son, Ah-Soon (Benny Soh), and Rosa and Ah-Soon quickly become friends. However, the house is haunted, and the Seventh Month celebration (roughly analogous to a month-long version of Dia de los Muertos) is coming. Singaporean society has a long, complex set of rules on how to get through Seventh Month without the dead coming to plague you, but Rosa doesn't know them, and gleefully stumbles through her existence breaking them right and left until the dead start noticing her.

This is good stuff. Tong spends most of his time building tension rather than going for the jumps and relies heavily on atmosphere to do his dirty work for him. It doesn't work as well as it would if the movie weren't quite as predictable as it is, but this is mitigated by a cast of intriguing characters. Benny Soh, especially, plays Ah-Soon with the perfect mix of childlike innocence and the menace of an adult who can't tell right from wrong. And de Rossi, the most experienced actor in the cast by far, brings a wonderful naivete to her part.

I liked it. See it on the big screen if you can. Surround sound and a dark theater will definitely get you into the spirit of things. *** ½

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Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

I find Ikiru a very difficult film about which to wax lyrical. I'm not sure why this is, because the film begs praise; it is a work of absolute brilliance in every respect, perhaps Kurosawa's (if not the Japanese film industry's) single finest moment. But how to explain why? All I can do, all any of us can do, is lay it out for you. It takes Akira Kurosawa to make it come alive.

Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is the chief clerk in a department on Tokyo City Hall. He has worked there for thirty years, and accomplished nothing of note. As the film opens, we are told that he has gastric cancer, and will soon be dead. Soon enough, Watanabe himself finds this out (more through the idle banter of another old man in the waiting room than his duplicitous doctor), and realizes that there has to be more to life than this. The rest of the film chronicles Watanabe's search to figure out how to live, and his quest's effect on those around him.

The film would not be what it is without Takashi Shimura, who takes Kurosawa's script and turns a paper Watanabe into an amazing character, a man struggling to throw off the boundaries imposed upon him by job, culture, and family. Shimura's performance alone would be enough to make this an above-average film, but everyone here turns in fine performances. Kurosawa, of course, was a master director, and he shows it off here; the movie is paced slowly enough to let us get to know Watanabe and those around him, but it never drags. (Pretty amazing for a two and a half hour film about an existential crisis.)

I do find it amusing that a number of reviews I've read recently have commented on the film's “feel-good factor.” While it's there, and there's no doubt about that, I'm wondering how such an interpretation of the film fits in with the subtle, but devastating, final scene of the film. (Obviously, I can't say what happens without giving away the whole thing, but trust me on this.) This is a subject about which I'd love to wax lyrical, but I'm going to have to wait till you've all seen it. Let me know. *****

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Kids (Larry Clark, 1995)

Once all the furor has died down, Kids will be remembered as the movie that started the careers of Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson. Of course, it's been twelve years, and the furor hasn't yet dies down. I'm a little confused as to why.

The story, though it takes Clark a while to get around to it: Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce) are skate kids in New York. Jennie (Sevigny) is a girl Telly had had sex with in the past. She accompanies her friend Ruby (Dawson) to the clinic so Ruby can get an HIV test; Ruby turns out negative, but Jennie is positive. The rest of the movie is Jennie trying to track down Telly before he can sleep with anyone else and tell him.

First off: watch the movie with subtitles on. It won't offer a complete translation, but it'll probably help. Telly and Casper's dialogue is often unintelligible. It may lend credibility to the characters, but sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit of credibility so as not to lose your audience. (Interestingly, almost every male in the movie talks in the same odd patois; I can't remember a single female in the movie doing so.) Second, the pace here is all over the map; it seemed as if Clark were working entirely without an idea of pace until the main story starts up (which happens far enough into the film that it seems as if it's going to be a plotless slice-of-life flick for a while), and once the main story does appear, the movie wanders off into tangents that sabotage the pace even more. Parts of the film that should have been minor scenes to advance the plot are dragged out, while valuable character-building scenes are jump-cut.

I got the feeling I was supposed to be shocked by the ages of the participants, as well. First off, that's a gimmick at best, and a transparent one; second, are there really people who don't know what teenagers are like these days? (And “these days” is a misnomer-- it's been a long, long time since I was a teen, and we were like this then, too.)

It's not bad, and does contain some good performances, but it's certainly not the groundbreaking masterpiece I'd been expecting given the twelve years of raves I'd heard about it. ** ½

* * *

Yoshihiro Togashi, Yuyu Hakusho: Training Day (ViZ, 1991)

The elimination match continues! Really, that's the entire plotline for this fourth entry in the Yuyu Hakusho series. Don't let that fool you, though, this is fun stuff. Nonstop action, inventive battles, and all-around fun. ****

* * *

Yoshihiro Togashi, Yuyu Hakusho: Focus Your Mind As One! (ViZ, 1991)

Yusuke has done some training, and now it's time to go take on the world. Koenma's got a hefty assignment for the crew: rescue the Ice Princess, held captive by a member of something called the Black Book Club. (You'll find out why as time goes on.) Such a rescue is liable to put the entire team to the test, as they have to fight their way into Black Book headquarters. If you like the series so far, you're going to like this one as well. ****

* * *

Yoshihiro Togashi, Yuyu Hakusho: The Dark Tournament (ViZ, 1992)

Togashi fires up a major story arc in this volume. After the rescue of the Ice Princess, Yusuke and co. are off to the Dark Tournament, a multiple-elimination match among sixteen teams of demons to see who's the best fighter. Of course, getting there isn't going to be a breeze, as some of the other possible competitors have already heard about this bunch, and want to knock them out of the competition before it gets underway... the series really perks up when there's something way off on the horizon, and this book is a very good example of that. ****

* * *

Grande Ecole (Robert Salis, 2004)

Salis (Living Naked)'s first non-documentary feature is an adaptation of a Jean-Marie Besset play which, I confess, I have neither read nor seen. So take this review with a grain of salt; most of the aspersions I'm going to cast here may have less to do with Salis than with Besset.

The plot: Paul (Gregori Baquet) and Agnes (Alice Taglioni) are dating. Agnes wants to move in together; Paul would prefer to live on campus with roommates. It quickly becomes obvious that Paul would, specifically, rather live with Louis-Arnault (Jocelyn Quivrin, recently of Syriana). Despite Louis-Arnault having a girlfriend himself, Agnes makes Paul a bet-- whichever of the two seduces Louis-Arnault first can have him. To add onto the complexity, Paul also finds himself drawn to a university worker, Mecir (Selim Kechiouche), who's more open about returning Paul's affections than is Louis-Arnault.

There's a whole lot going on here, and Salis wants to pack it all into this film. That's all well and good; the many subtexts here are well worth exploring. Unfortunately, what suffers is the main story itself; what could well have been a sumptuous erotic buffet ends up neither sumptuous nor erotic. The obvious crux of the whole thing is Paul's confusion, but there's never a point where Paul (or Baquet; hard to tell whether the fault is with character or actor) seems at all confused. Which might be excusable if we had any indication that he was manipulating everyone else-- but, of course, we don't get that, either. We've really no idea what Paul is doing here, other than wandering through the movie, barely reacting to the events around him. The rest of the characters are scarcely better; Agnes manages to work up a head of steam every once in a while, but seems to be suffering from sleeping sickness most of the time. Louis-Arnault's hapless girlfriend Emeline has an excuse, at least, as everyone involved is keeping her in the dark, and Louis-Arnault himself manages to show some emotion now and again. Louis-Arnault, in fact, quickly becomes the movie's most intriguing character; one can never be sure whether he's oblivious or leading Paul on, and unlike the rest of the cast, Quivrin pulls the role off with flair. Unfortunately, the longer the movie goes on, the less important Louis-Arnault is to it.

I wanted to like this movie. I really did. The best of intentions, however, sometimes can't produce results. So it was with both Grande Ecole and my reaction to it. **

* * *

Rene Goscinny, Asterix and the Normans (Dargaud, 1966)

The indomitable Gauls have to face both the Normans, who don't know the meaning of the word “fear,” and modernity, in the form of Vitalstatistix' Lutetian nephew Justforkix. Justforkix has been sent to the Gaulish vilage to “make a man of him;” what better way than a bunch of rapacious Normans? The usual fun. ***

* * *

Herge, The Castafiore Emerald (Methuen, 1963)

According to Tintinophile, The Castafiore Emerald was an attempt by Herge to see if “he could maintain suspense throughout sixty-two pages in which nothing happens.” He succeeds quite wonderfully.

The plot is monstrously complex, and cannot be summarized without spoilers, but involves a broken step, Bianca Castafiore, a band of gypsies, the press, a parrot, and of course the Castafiore emerald itself. For a book in which nothing much happens, an awful lot seems to, and that's the fun of it. ****

* * *

Albert Uderzo, Asterix and the Secret Weapon (Dargaud, 1991)

Asterix and Obelix take on their most formidable enemy yet: feminism! Bravura, a new bard, comes to the village, causing Cacofonix to leave in a huff. She soon has the women of the town standing up for themselves, which causes the men to go off and set up camp in the forest. Meanwhile, Claphamomnibus, Roman agent, is on his way to the village with a secret weapon he guarantees will defeat the Gauls. (We've heard that one before.) Asterix and Obelix to-- well, no. Bravura to the rescue! The problem with this one is that it's kind of tired. Uderzo recycled a lot of old material here, and the resolution to the problem may cause some alarm bells to go off in the heads of those sensitive to stereotypes. Not one of the series' better entries. ** ½

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Albert Uderzo, Asterix and the Falling Sky (Dargaud, 2005)

I'm not terribly sure what Uderzo was smoking when he came up with this one, but as a tribute to Walt Disney, he has the indomitable Gaulish village invaded by... space aliens? Yes, you heard that right. You can expect some of the punning, but nothing else that's made the series so much fun over the years is to be found here. The worst book in the series to date. **

* * *

Duncan Crosbie, Life on a Famine Ship: A Journal of the Irish Famine 1945-1850 (Barron's Educational Series, 2006)

You know, I have to give Duncan Crosbie mad props. (And I have never used the term “mad props” before in my life.) What kind of twisted mind does it take to first say “hey! I'm going to write a kids' book about the horrible conditions on ships that came to America as a result of the Irish potato famine!” and then follow that thought up with “wouldn't it be cool if we made it a POP-UP BOOK?”. I mean, the very concept of this book is just wrong. Wrong on so many levels it's almost impossible to even know where to start. This is a book I was pretty much predestined to love, and it fulfilled my every expectation.

The title tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this book; it is what it says it is. Crosbie doesn't whitewash the subject for kids, though obviously one must leave a good deal of stuff out in a twenty-four-page book. But still, if you've got a warped sense of humor, or your kids do, you need this in your home. *** ½

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City of Rott (Frank Sudol, 2006)

I'll warn you up front: in order to explain my rating of this movie, it's going to have to spoil the major plot twist. Therefore, if you have any intention of seeing this movie, I warn you: stop reading RIGHT NOW.

Okay, now that everyone else is gone, the first thing to note: I was unaware (presumably, if you're considering buying it, you are not) that City of Rott is an animated movie. Yes, folks, cartoon zombies. How cool is that? Well, kind of. But it does get kind of repetitive after a while. Fred, our main character, dodges zombies, kills zombies, meets other survivors, watches them get killed, dodges zombies, kills zombies... you get the idea.

Where this movie could have made a right turn to greatness was halfway through. Exactly halfway through. You see the pivotal scene, and you ask yourself “okay, this movie's only halfway over, what are we going to do for the next forty minutes?” The answer... we follow Fred around as a zombie. Now, I'm not one hundred percent certain about this, but I'm relatively sure no zombie movie made to date has followed its main character acround both as a living creature and as a zombie. The very concept is brilliant. Unfortunately, Sudol-- who's pretty good at making shorts-- is not the guy to do it in a full-length movie. The Fred-as-zombie half of the movie quickly becomes as repetitive as the first half, and we're pretty much back to square one.

But someone needs to take this concept and run with it, and Sudol gets serious points for coming up with the idea in the first place. ** ½

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Kill Devil (Yuichi Onuma, 2006)

How impressive is it to have seen a movie that's not even listed on IMDB? The funny thing is, it's not all that hard to come across; Urban Vision Entertainment has done a pretty fine job with the U. S. DVD release. Unfortunately, that's the only good thing I'm going to say about this flick.

Tell me if this sounds familiar, Japanese horror fans: Shougo (Masked Raider Phi's Yoshika Kato) wakes up with no memory on a secluded island, where scientists track his movements as he forms alliances with a number of other kids who have lost their memories-- all of whom have to defend themselves against various other kids on the island, whose entire purpose for living is to kill them. (That's not an exaggeration; Onuma hauls out the good old XYY hypothesis and dresses it up in scientific-sounding language in interminable cutscenes that worked far better in Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies.) Yep, you've seen this one before. And in all honesty, it wasn't all that great the first time around, when it was called Battle Royale. The difference is that BR had a few characters you could identify with; the characters here exist for the sole purpose of advancing the plot or playing into Onuma's ludicrous “as you know, bob” scenes with the scientists.

Okay, I'll say one other good thing about this movie. If you actually sat through the whole thing, you have to watch the alternate ending. I can't seriously believe that anyone really ever thought “hey, let's end this movie with a dance routine,” so I assume it was filmed later specifically as a DVD extra. I could, however, be wrong in this, as the credits go to great lengths to inform us that a number of the minor characters in this movie are members of the boy band Diamond Dogs, so who knows? And while the alternate ending will have you wondering what your perverted neighbor mixed into that bowl of chili you ate earlier in the evening, it's not worth sitting through ninety minutes of derivative schlock. *

* * *

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland (Ernest Benn Ltd., 1946)

It is one of the great travesties of literature in translation that of the fourteen legendary Moomin books written by Tove Jansson, three of them have, as far as I have been able to tell, weathered over half a century without being translated into English, despite the great success of the other eleven. It's a twist of the knife that The Little Trolls and the Big Flood, the first of the series, is one of the three. (Note: the book has, in fact, been recently translated, but it only available, as of this writing, in Finland.) Thus, for over fifty years, English children delving into the Moomin books (and they have been legion) have started their journey here, with the second book, Comet in Moominland. And while it's a decent book, it's not the highlight of the series by a long shot. Would it be better if we had access to the first? I've no idea. I hope to find out eventually.

* * *

The Sentinel (Clark Johnson, 2006)

Back before this movie came out, I was a little confused-- it got very little marketing for a movie with a cast as respectable as this one has. Well, now I've seen it, and I think I know why-- I'm guessing Fox, once it saw the finished product, was a bit reluctant to release it. That, or embarrassed. Clark Johnson (probably best remembered for his acting-- he played Meldrick Lewis on the wonderful Homicide: Life on the Street) is very good at directing for the small screen-- he's done some great work on The Shield, including the pilot episode-- but as his big-screen adventures have shown, it's not translating well.

The plot, for those of you who missed it in the trailers: Pete Garrison (Michael Douglas), a decorated Secret Service member, is accused of being a mole. His former best friend, David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland), is pursuing the case with, shall we say, a good deal of overeagerness thanks to a fallout between the two some years before. Meanwhile, the real mole is planning something dastardly having to do with the President (United 93's David Rasche).

Much of the movie's lackluster pace and overall silliness can be pinned on scriptwriter George Nolfi (whose previous claim to fame was Ocean's Twelve; need I say more?), but its disheveled appearance is all on Johnson. You'd think someone who can make The Shield almost palpably slimy would be able to work with this stuff. And I've never quite figured out why it's so tough for successful TV directors to make the switch to the big screen, but The Sentinel provides more evidence for the hypothesis that it's so. **

* * *

The Ghost of Mae Nak (Mark Duffield, 2005)

Low-budget cinematographer Mark Duffield takes a seat in the director's chair for his firt outing, a Thai horror flick that had a great deal of potential, but ended up going nowhere. Mak (Siwat Chochaicharin) and Nak (Pataratida Pacharawirapong, both making their acting debuts) are about to be married, and have scouted out a house that American real-estate agents, if feeling overly generous, would term “a fixer-upper.” Problem is, the house comes with the ghost of a much older Nak (Porntip Papanai, recently seen in the states in The Elephant King), who is envious of the couple's love for one another, and is willing to go to any lengths to make sure they stay together.

The first half of the film steadfastly refuses to descend into the world of the typical young-and-beautifuls effects-heavy slasher flick. Deliberately paced and beautifully shot, it feels more like a documentary about marriage traditions in Thailand than a horror film. Duffield sets up a relatively complex web of corrupt and malicious people around the couple, though, and when it's time to go to town, my, he does go to town. It's at this point that the movie devolves into a pale reimagining of a whole lot of Southeast Asian horror films that have come before it. Much of the fun of watching the last half of the movie comes from playing the “hey, Duffield got that scene from movie X!” game.

I think Duffield may have promise as a director, but he'll need to figure out how to put a slightly more original spin on his ideas first. * ½

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Proof (John Madden, 2005)

Okay, so by now it's pretty well known that I will watch anything with Jake Gyllenhaal in it. I mean, I actually watched The Day After Tomorrow all the way through. (For which I still have not received my medal, Mr. Emmerich.) So when I found out Gyllenhaal would be one of the principals in John Madden's adaptation of David Auburn's engaging play Proof, I was pretty much champing at the bit. And I was not disappointed.

Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Claire (Six Degrees' Hope Davis) are sisters, the daughters of Robert (Sir Anthony Hopkins), a disturbed mathematician. Claire moved away years ago and made a name for herself in the financial world; Catherine stayed at home to take care of her father and follow in his footsteps. Gyllenhaal plays Hal, a graduate student of Robert's. The main thrust of the play centers around a complex mathematical proof Catherine claims she wrote; neither Claire nor Hal believe her. We get to sit back and watch the fallout as these three characters ride the emotional rollercoaster, intercut with flashback scenes giving us pieces to the puzzle of whether Catherine or Robert was the actual author of the proof.

“Nakedly manipulative” is the most tactful way I can put the mystery portion of the whole thing. Auburn (who also wrote the screenplay) knows exactly how to keep the viewer confused, but still thinking he's got a handle on things. To his credit, he does it very, very well. The present-day scenes didn't need a script, really; if you put three actors of this caliber in the same room and hand them a one-sheet scenario, you'd be able to film the improvisation and come up with something worth watching. If the movie's got a dark spot, acting-wise, it's Paltrow, who comes off as shrill and unlikeable at times. Still, that's a minor point here; there's a great deal of good in this film. ***

* * *

One Missed Call 2 (Renpei Tsukamoto, 2005)

It seemed, for a while that every movie Takashi Miike released added more weight to the hypothesis that Miike is currently Japan's greatest living director. Now we have a new line of evidence: sequels of Miike's films, directed by people other than Miike, are simply not as good.

Horror director Tsukamoto (no idea if he's any relation to Shinya) turns in his second feature, which adopts the tactic of “take the basic premise of the original film and build on it until it's outrageous.” Here, the same mode of death is offered up (people get calls on their cell phones from themselves a few minutes in the future, and soon die in the prophesied way), but this time, the virus causing the rash of deaths burrows into the contact lists on everyone's cell phones, soon leading to an epidemic of deaths all across Southeast Asia. A trio of main characters-- the daughter of one of the victims, the daughter's boyfriend, and a plucky reporter (there must always be a plucky reporter) try to figure out where the calls are coming from, and why. It's a pretty hackneyed plot, but in more capable hands, it could have at least been slick. Here, it's just tedious. There are some interesting twists at the beginning, but nothing ever comes of them, and the plot descends into predictability and excuses to pull out the special effects budget. Stick with the original. **

* * *

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

I often feel like an iconoclast when it comes to Alfred Hitchcock movies. While some of them are brilliant, I have found that the ones most loved by critics everywhere leave me not cold, exactly, but wondering what all the fuss is about. Spellbound joins these ranks. It's a good movie, to be certain, but one of the best ever made? I'm not even sure it's one of Hitchcock's five best.

The plot: Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) is a young doctor at a mental institution whose head, Dr. Murchison (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s Leo G. Carroll), is retiring. Arriving to replace him is one Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck). Petersen is powerfully attracted to Edwardes, which causes her no amount of conflict when she finds out that Edwardes may not be who he says he is.

Yeah, it works. Of course it does, it's Alfred Hitchcock. However, it feels at times-- especially during the first hour-- that Hitchcock hadn't quite decided whether he wanted to make his usual thriller or wanted to simply delve into romance territory. And it's not the idea that it's Hitch doing a romance that doesn't work, it's the indecision of the thing, which leads at times to the movie having all the pace of a snail on quaaludes. Once it gets going, it's as fine as any piece of Hitchcockiana, but it does take a while to get going. ***

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The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)

When, at the end of a film, you are pounding on things, throwing things across the room, and yelling how you're going to fly across the ocean and strangle the director, there is one inescapable conclusion to be reached: that film has done its job, and admirably. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu does just that, though there is nothing at all admirable about the film itself; that is one of the sources of its power.

Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) is a sixty-two-year-old widower living in squalor with three cats. He gets up one morning with a headache, to which a stomachache is later added. Self-medication doesn't work, so he calls the hospital and asks them to send an ambulance. Thus begins a six-hour trip through the Romanian socialized health system that is absurd, outrageous, and all too plausible. Things are complicated by a massive bus crash that has every ER in Bucharest overflowing. Lazarescu's only champion is Mioara (Code Inconnu's Luminita Gheorghiou), the paramedic who originally came to pick him up.

It is all too easy to fall into identifying with Lazarescu and Mioara here, and Puiu has certainly given us some characters who embody everything that is horrible about medical care; I can't imagine anyone watching this movie and not watching to perform some amateur brain surgery on a couple of these doctors. I'm not sure, however, that that was the entirety of Puiu's intention here. If he's wanted to create a one-dimensional screed against the Romanian health care system, he'd have made it, well, a lot more one-dimensional. Instead, there are a number of health care workers here (Mioara is the most notable, but a number of the others are also praiseworthy) who, despite various levels of stress and exhaustion, do their best to make sure that Lazarescu gets the treatment he needs. While, ultimately, none of them are successful (and this is not a spoiler; the title of the film tells you all you need to know, doesn't it?), a number of them try. There's a lot more under the hood here than one might expect, given most reviews of the film to date. Matters are made worse by the ephemerality of the relationships everyone in the film, save Mioara, have with Lazarescu; none of the others is with him long enough to get a decent idea of his condition. We see him sliding further and further into dementia; the medical professionals, to a person, put it down to his being drunk. (And judging by the recipe for the alcohol he's been drinking given to Mioara by Lazarescu's neighbor at the beginning of the film, that's not entirely surprising.) The film is as frustrating for the fact that the viewer can understand the positions of both sides as it is for the horrendous way in which Lazarescu is treated.

I have to say that if this is an example of a Romanian comedy, I'd hate to see what they produce as a tearjerker. I've never seen a comedy this bleak. However, it's also the case that few comedies I've seen are anywhere near as compelling. I'll add my voice to the ever-growing pile recommending this film with all our collective heart. **** ½

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Frank Miller, Booze, Broads, and Bullets: 11 Sin City Yarns (Dark Horse, 1998)

Booze, Broads, and Bullets is the sixth of the seven (as I write this) Sin City collections, and as the subtitle suggests, it's a collection of short-shorts that tell other small tales that take place around the major story arcs or fill in what character X was doing at time Y. It's not a bad little book, but it's disjointed, fragmented, and it lacks the power of the other books in the series. Still, if you're invested in the series already, you'll like it. ***

* * *

Desmond Morris, Horsewatching (Crown, 1988)

Morris turns the method of Catwatching to horses, addressing a number of common trivia questions about horses with short, easy-to-understand passages. If you're a horse fan, but don't actually know much about horses and their history, there's a great deal of information to be gathered here. Horse nuts, on the other hand, are likely to find a good amount of material in here of which they're already aware. In other words, how much you like the book is likely entirely dependent on how familiar you already are with its subject. ***

* * *

John Warner, Fondling Your Muse (Writer's Digest, 2005)

I was unaware, until faced with the cover of this book, that Warner was the editor of McSweeney's, and as soon as I saw that, I had a good idea of what to expect. Warner didn't disappoint me; the book is mildly amusing at times, but never anywhere near as funny as it thinks it is, full of annoying political snipes that have nothing at all to do with anything, and easily forgettable. In other words, a lot like McSweeney's itself.

That said, buried beneath the satire there could well be a pretty good how-to book. A lot of Warner's core advice (or the opposite of a lot of Warner's core advice, depending on the topic) is sound. Naturally, there's nothing you haven't seen before, but then, when was the last time you picked up a writing book that had anything truly original to say?

A little more consistency and a better sense of humor and I'd have recommended this. **

* * *

Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie (Dutton, 1995)

Sometime during the early nineties, Joyce Carol Oates went from being a writer of important, ponderous tomes to being a writer of stripped-down tales. The same innate fascination with the basic meanness of humanity is there, it's just a little more naked than it used to be. The ensuing years have produced some of Oates' finest work, and Zombie fits right into the mold.

It should be obvious relatively early on, even to those who aren't serial killer fans, that Zombie is based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. (Greg Johnson substantiates this in Invisible Writer.) Because of that, the book's plot is easy: we have a serial killer. We have a victim. But plot is not, as it rarely is in these new Oates novels, the centerpiece of the work: Oates is interested in getting inside the mind of the creep and presenting his point of view to the audience. This is what makes Oates' newer work compelling; you get to see the thing from inside.

Because of this, it should be clear that if you are a person whose enjoyment of a book lies in the plot rather than the characters, you'll want to avoid pretty much anything Oates has written since 1991. (Her older material should work for you, and the Rosamond Smith novels are pretty much tailor-made.) Zombie is no exception. But if you enjoy seeing through the eyes of a character, getting that character's take on everything gong on around him, you're going to like this. Despite being perhaps the single most prolific writer of the past fifty years, Oates' writing is always top quality, so no worries there. I liked it; I hope you will, as well. *** ½

* * *

Michael Houellebecq, Platform (Vintage, 2003)

According to the spreadsheet, it took me two hundred eight days from the time I first opened the cover of Platform to the time when I opened the window, checked to make sure no one was under it, and then forcefully defenestrated the book. I'm not terribly sure I can write a full review of it; I would probably run out of synonyms for “awful” too quickly.

Explain to me, please, how one can write a novel centered on (if not obsessed with) sex and make it entirely non-erotic. (As far as I could tell, this is by design.) Michel, our not-so-humble narrator, comes up with the idea of starting a package-tour business for the sex industry. He comes to this idea very, very slowly in the first third of the book, while on a (non-sex-industry) package tour himself. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, save Michel is the most annoying, unlikable narrator I've come across since the shrewish mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin. He's self-important, sex-obsessed without managing to be at all interested in the subject, proudly prejudiced against every minority group he runs across, and frighteningly dull. And we're trapped in his head for three hundred pages.

Judging by Amazon's page for the book, a whole lot of critics liked it. I am not one of them. It's still early in the year, but Platform currently holds the top spot on my list of worst reads of 2007. (zero)