Reviews

The heroine is a Princess whose widowed father (the Blue King) is forced to remarry and realizes no one but she can surpass the beauty of his beloved dead Queen. The girl is horrified by his proposal, but advised by her Fairy Godmother she concocts impossible conditions for the King to meet -- which incredibly he performs. The last sacrifice is to skin his prized donkey, which has yielded daily treasures of gems and gold in place of manure. Gradually she sympathizes with him and readies herself to the idea of matrimony, but the Fairy devises her escape and the Princess leaves incognito, wrapped in the filthy donkey skin. Hiding in a distant village in another realm, the regal girl is now treated as the lowliest servant. Enter the young Prince of the Red Kingdom as he passes through. He is feeling the melancholy of loneliness and ready for True Love which eludes him. He wanders through the wood and is led magically to the Princess and sees through her disguise. They do not actually meet, but the rest of the story involves the delicate steps towards restoring her to nobility, acceptability, and betrothal.

It's a very charming musical fairy-tale, teeming with metaphors as children's stories often do. Jacques Demy was very influenced by and pays homage to Jean Cocteau, utilizing many of his simple camera techniques (elegant and mysterious if done artfully .. or if performed clumsily will look like hack work): slow-motion, reverse motion, on-set trickery (like actors dressed and built into the set as living magical statues). Like Cocteau's fantasies, Demy has achieved a poetic level here. His use of color is glorious -- the strong Blues that dominate *everything* in the Blue Kingdom (or the Red color scheme for the Red Kingdom) -- and the shift to All-White in the finale -- dresses that illuminate their own light or have moving clouds projected upon them -- the fairy god-mother whose dress changes color on a whim -- the great contrast of all-red horses and riders traveling through a vibrant green wood -- a hovel which magically flickers, dressed by dozens of strobe lights.

And this is an excellent cast. The young Catherine Deneuve is of course perfect for a fairy-tale princess. Delphine Seyrig steals all her scenes as the Fairy Godmother. Jean Marais is a natural for the King (and as an old favorite of Cocteau's, adds another link to that fantastic universe). Jacques Perrin is an ideal Prince Charming. The music and songs by Michel Legrand is very good and has a bittersweet tinge to it.

I love the musical sequence of the princess directing herself on how to bake a cake. Split in two she both reads the recipe (filthy and dressed in her loathsome donkey skin) and also performs the task (dressed beautifully with a crown). It theatrically represents how the Mind itself works, showing intention and will. There are other moments like this which SHOULD be iconic. Like the burial of the beloved queen who is placed in a large crystal sphere and left in an open field, presumably to never decay. Like the cranky old hag who expectorates live toads. Like the boat ride at the end of the couple's duet, drifting down a stream and fading away ephemerally.

This episode highlights two great supporting players, ALLEN JENKINS & FRANK NELSON (plus a small part for a very strong actor, Lawrence Dobkin). Jenkins is a beat cop who mistakenly arrests Lucy & Ethel; Nelson the desk sergeant who insists he recognizes them as known criminals. When Nelson finally realizes his mistake, he shifts all the blame on Jenkins -- I just think it's fun that he also uses the actor's real name: "Jenkins! You IDIOT!" Meanwhile, Ricky and Fred are oblivious to everything around them, caught up with Friday Night Fights on TV. Watch it & you'll instantly recognize these very familiar performers. By this time viewers would already have known Allen Jenkins from the movies. Nelson had come up in radio, so they would know his voice, but in the advent of TV he'd become one of those famous faces whose names nobody knows (You know, the store clerk whose first line is always: "Yesssss?")

This is great sci-fi/fantasy, with terrific stop-motion effects by Ray Harryhausen, & they kept the Victorian feel of the original book. The characters are perfectly cast. Lionel Jeffries steals every scene as the moon-eyed Cavor, & Edward Judd -- who preferred playing the villain over leading man -- nailed the charming but deceitful Bedford. Initially Bedford seems a voice of practicality and reason, opposed to Cavor's fanciful idealism. But he's cretinous, loathsome and selfish. Cavor might be eccentric (even bipolar), but he remains creative and always growing.

Bedford: Sells a house that isn't his. Takes Cavor's own money to leverage himself as a partner in Cavor's endeavor. Drags his fiancé into this real estate swindle. Tries to unload those damn boots for the Boer War onto Cavor. And how's this for crassness: Cavor exclaims "Look at that Prism assembly!" when they discover a vast and advanced technology. But Bedford grumbles "The only thing I want to see is that blasted diving helmet"

Bedford assumes the Sellenites are evil, attacks them without provocation and has no patience with Cavor's desire to communicate with them. He invades their territory, then fears, hates and loathes them simply because they're alien. His voice registers disgust towards Cavor for trying to dialog with them. Even later in his old age, he cynically relishes in their demise.

The playful humor in the fist half changes once they enter the underground complex. It's a kiddie-movie until they turn this dark corner. The change in tone isn't the dreadful Sellenites, so much as the falling out between Bedford and Cavor. As soon as Bedford begins throwing insects into the boiling abyss, Cavor is struck with remorse. "I should have come alone. I should have come alone"

Cavor wants to dialog; Bedford just wants to get the hell outta there -- he has no use for the place since nuggets of gold aren't lying around. We could sympathize with Bedford's paranoia if the Sellenites were malicious, but they never express an evil intent. They won't invade Earth, but they're worried that MORE of these dangerous humans will pop up to spread war, pestilence and mortgage crises. Maybe Cavor's desire to stay with the Sellenites isn't so lunatic.

"Don't flatter yourself. I didn't stick my neck out just to save you." Evidently Bedford would have abandoned Cavor, but he needed his skill to fix the sphere. With this final letdown, Cavor realizes he is truly alone. He probably always was a loner, shunned by classmates and a committed bachelor. His only companions were bungling lab assistants, then along comes a charming Bedford. For the first time he lets down his guard and opens up all his secrets. So Cavor's major weakness was a poor judge of character. In these earlier scenes, its almost heart-wrenching to watch Cavor chortle and giggle as he demonstrates the sphere and reveals his great dreams. Then all his work is destroyed by this opportunist.

This documented the production of the soundtrack for Werner Herzog's film GRIZZLY MAN and was included as an extra on that DVD. I found this short documentary as intriguing and interesting as the longer main attraction. Herzog and company assembled a small group of musicians who had not, featuring Richard Thompson as the main guitar soloist. Not only had they not worked together before, but their genre and disciplines were dissimilar. A typical soundtrack would be produced in the studio only after a composer has first drafted a score, but Herzog wanted this group to arrive unprepared and develop the music together from the ground up. It was a very interesting process to watch as they experimented and made decisions about instrumentation. Although Herzog is no musician he was integral to the process and sat with them to described the various moods and styles he wanted. He also spoke briefly about his goals as a film-maker, the relationship between film and music as art forms, and of the creative process in general. Particularly impressive was a segment where Thompson was given various tasks to improvise very precisely-timed interludes. "This time we want exactly 22 seconds... " "Alright, now do a variation of that theme for 36 seconds, but re-tune one of your strings to a different key..." "This next one has to run 64 seconds." (Thompson quipped, "you're sure it's not 64.2 seconds?")

MURDER is preposterous from concept to execution:

Herbert Marshall had served on a jury that convicted a girl of ... mUrDeR! Yet she was a personal acquaintance ... now who selected THAT jury pool?? Then one day while listening to some pretty music on the radio a sudden whim sends him into a change of heart (oh drat, why oh WHY didn't he hold out for one more vote on that jury??)

So then Herbie takes up the detective work to find the real killer. The over-stagey theatricality that ensues is laughable (yes, do watch this movie; I'm not trying to steer you away from it .... you WILL laugh.) For instance, a witness is dead certain that the unseen killer had been a woman, because -- jeez-- the voice sounded feminine. Yet Marshall ducks around a corner, squeaks out a ludicrous falsetto that sounds more like a parrot (bwaack!), and -- Hey! our witness is suddenly confused about how a woman got in the house!

{SPOILER -- as if anything could spoil this flick any further} "Elementary, Watson. The drag queen did it." But to explain how or why such an anomaly as a transvestite could possibly exist, he/she was turned into a circus performer. How convenient. Now if only he'd been the bearded lady he might've eluded capture yet one more time.

(bwaack!)

MEMENTO is a film about a brain-damaged man who cannot retain short-term memories and whose sense of self is limited to whatever longterm memories he'd formed before his injury. Most folk either love it or hate it or are indifferent to it (have I covered all the bases?) but only because they either love or hate or are indifferent ... to GIMMICKY movies. A friend once asked, "How do you spell GIMMICK backwards? OTNEMEM. But they miss the point -- "Memento" is not a mere novelty nor an exercise in backwards narrative. This is an exploration of what it is to be human. What generates a mind, or how does a brain store a mind? How can a person function or an identity be formed if they cannot REMEMBER? In fact, if our brain is creating our mind then what happens to it when we fall into the oblivion of sleep? Perhaps each night we die. And each morning are recreated through the power of regenerative memory. Do concepts like "soul" even apply anymore, in this age of neuroscience where we've gained insights into the physiologic and microscopic energies of what makes up a "thought"? The backwards-chronology narrative is a brilliant device to put the viewer into the protagonist's confusion. But like any mystery, ultimately we are asking ... "what happens next? and what will the final answer be?" Returning to my harangue about neuroscience, on one level *any* film or TV show is creating a reality within your mind. At least to the extent that you let yourself get immersed in it. For what is the difference between the true external world about us and some artificial world we tune into? For all that we hear and see is filtered through our senses. The true and the false are all just impressions that we experience, whatever is "out there" is separate from us and must be interpreted by us. This is why I think mysteries are such an intriguing genre for most of us. For life itself is a mystery. Our physiologic make-up is constantly probing the world about us and asking, asking, asking "what's going on out there?" Therefore it's only natural that a book or movie is going to hook us if we get caught up in the questions, "what has happened here? Who dunnit? How will it turn out?" Because subconsciously we are constantly being presented with riddles by our own senses. And in Leonard Shelby we have a character whose senses still create a world about him, except he doesn't possess the means to correctly interpret this reality.

Fascinating clash of philosophy, classical studies and Pop Culture -- especially if you recognize the need to keep Pop Culture under scrutiny, instead of just letting it massage your brain like the narcotic it's designed to be.

The film capsulizes a number of McLuhan's conclusions about Media. Wittingly and unwittingly we've created and surrounded ourselves with this electronic environment -- but McLuhan also recognized that like any other tool (language included) it is an extension of our own physical selves. And like so many other tools we are also transformed by our own creations.

The important thing is to be cognizant of all this jive b.s. McLuhan began his public discourse on Media because his freshman students couldn't relate to Literature. I guess he began opening their eyes FIRST to the cacophonous culture they were blindly walking through, and once aroused *then* they became receptive to Wordsworth and Milton. (Though some were cheesed off that he didn't test them on Coca-Cola and Batman after spending so much lecture time on it.)

McLuhan spoke often in metaphors, which perhaps isn't a very clinical approach to codifying a new science. But it seems the man never forgot a thing he read or saw -- and thus Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" became symbolic for the dynamic fractured environment we've created for ourselves. It also has become a metaphor for his own career. Although his celebrity had fallen into obscurity, his ideas still influence those who've never heard of him or his Four Laws. I think his star will continue to rise again until -- *pop* -- look what's resurfaced outta that whirlpool.

McLuhan is more timely than ever, in an Age where what we experience is less and less an observation of the Real World and more and more an interface with manufactured concoction. I'm not convinced though -- need to surf the Internet a little more to look into this.

This film was re-monikered DIAL H FOR HITCHCOCK when I saw it recently on cable.

We get it all here. Clips from the films. Commentary about his craft. Commentary about the personal impact he had on current film-makers. Personal insights from a few people who'd worked with Hitch. A brief biography blended in with a chronological survey of some of his career highlights. We also get Hitchcock himself; both in serious archival interview as well as entertaining appearances from his trailers and TV show intros. And montages. Glorious beautifully crafted montages. We get it all. Except for that compulsive-monster stuff you can only find in the tabloid-style book THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS.

I was very impressed by the montage sequences and how they artfully chose just the right images to blend with what the commentators were saying. It didn't hurt that Bernard Herrmann's score to VERTIGO was used, both for the long opening montage as well as the closing sequence.

Commentators included several directors from today ... Wes Craven, Brian DePalma, Jonathan Demme, Robt Altman, Peter Bogdanovich.

Would have been nice to get old footage of interviewed commentators from days of old ... folk that Hitchcock had worked with. The only ones left to interview were ... Norman Lloyd (the actor who took the plunge off the Statue of Liberty in SABOTEUR and whom collaborated closely on the 50's TV show ... he also had become a very close personal friend with Alfred and Alma)... Janet Leigh, who needs no introduction ... Tippi Hendren, ditto ... Teresa Wright, the nice young lady in SHADOW OF A DOUBT... and Joseph Stefano who wrote the screenplay to PSYCHO.

Stefano's comments were very keen as he mused about where the hell such a civilized man as Hitchcock could have found the deep dark places of the human soul within himself to mine. His narration synched-up nicely with the montage, displaying short snippets of various characters in close-up, tortured souls, lonely souls ... as Stefano's comments were handed over to the voice track of Norman Bates: "we're all alone. Trapped like animals. In our own private cages."

For Hitchcock aficionados, there might not be anything new to glean here. It covers old territory like explaining "The McGuffin" theory. But it doesn't go much into technical things like his montage-approach to editing ... or the pre-eminence of building a long anxious suspense sequence, compared to a brief sudden shock. (These kinds of things are covered more thoroughly in the 1970's docu series THE MEN WHO MADE THE MOVIES ... but when will we ever get treated to THAT again??) This is still a great retelling of his life and career in a fresh style, and a nice entertaining way to spend 90 minutes. In fact I got sucked into watching part of it a second time. But this (like Hitchcock's own work) is like a rollercoaster -- you can enjoy it over and over.

I find myself laughing harder at Buster-in-decline than at the youthful genius of the Silent Era. Even as I laugh out loud at him, I'm in awe that this artiste of the pratfall had not lost his touch through the decades.

TRIUMPH OF LESTER SNAPWELL is certainly not in league with the Classic Buster of the 20's. But while the production values are minimal, you'll still come away deeply impressed by the the man's adroitness. His physical humor is fully intact and perfectly timed. You'll find yourself rewinding the tape to scrutinize how the hell he set up his gimmicks so seamlessly. (Case in point: Buster "inadvertently" closes the back of a camera on his tie, so that it's left hanging from his tie. It takes a very dexterous fellow to make clumsiness look so flawless.)

This Kodak promotional film was produced to tout the newly-released "Instamatic" which featured an easy-to-load film cartridge. So naturally they wanted to show the pitfalls of all the earlier awkward technologies. Enter Buster, who demonstrates through the ages how the photographic arts have progressed over the last 100 years.

By the way, this 20-some minute short was available on a video titled "The Lost Films of Buster Keaton" (available from Grapevine Video, Phoenix AZ). Also on the tape were two other shorts --

"Ford Van Commercial" where Buster loads up an Econoline with everything including the kitchen sink. And a lion to boot.

And "The Home Owner". This was a creative promotional for a 1950s-era prefab housing community. Buster is sold on the strength of the pretty neighbor as much as the quality of homes. And once again, I found myself hitting the rewind button over and over to admire the artistry of his surprising stunts. This guy was pushing 70 and still performing miraculous pratfalls. (I was especially jazzed by a spill into a swimming pool. He was pushing a shopping cart, got distracted by a pretty lass, the cart went into the deep end and pulled him along after it ... Buster did an amazing flip in the air to sail far PAST the cart, halfway across the pool.)

TAKEN started out promising. But proved itself to be trite hackwork.

Strong on production values, weak in every other way. The slick camerawork and not-so-slick FX attempted to cover over the weak writing and cardboard characters. It took a few episodes to realize that the emperor was buck naked.

The affected "attitudinal" Heather Donahue became unwatchable. The sibilant wise-beyond-her-years narrator, unlistenable. The cliched government conspiracy crap, undigestible.

So much dough sunk into a project rife with mediocrity.

Maybe the problem was that they were trying to pad it out to fit into a two-week mini-series schedule. That is, if it'd been trimmed down sizably they might have had a winner (say, 5 or 7 eps instead of 10.) But one of my biggest beefs was that there was tons of filler. Moody music playing over long expanses of nothing except someone driving ... long "reaction shots" of actors just sitting around, emoting ... that kinda crap.

Sole survivor of a car wreck (I'd love to write a story called "Soul Survivor"), a young woman later experiences a series of disturbing visions.

In spite of a shoestring budget, amateurish performances, and a simplistic concept, this non-gory Horror flick scores big on atmosphere and has some original and intriguing bits of camera-work. I wouldn't pass up the chance to watch it.

Debits and demerits of this very-LOW-budget film: The sound quality is groaningly bad (her dubbed footsteps sound like wooden clogs). Lots of good shocks from simple appearances of zombie-like people at unexpected moments. But unfortunately, in the end their supposedly-sinister-looking pursuit of the girl just looks stupid -- like a child's game of "Tag, You're It." The soundtrack of church-organ music doesn't quite work either. But it was laudably DIFFERENT, which also sums up the basic reason for recommending the flick. While the results were uneven, they tried -- and in the process often came through. The camerawork was particularly fresh. Example: At one point a man points down the road to give directions to a boardinghouse. The hand-held camera pans away in the same direction... pans wildly into the darkness of the night. The following edit is seamless, showing an unlit interior then the door opens as the landlady shows the girl her room.

Nice to remember that it doesn't take beaucoup bucks to include the little extra touches.

FRAILTY coulda been a truly GREAT film. Instead it's just another good Average-movie. It has an intriguing premise that could have delved deeply into topical issues about extremists who believe they are following God's will. Unfortunately it settled for being just another puzzle-picture.

The story is told in flash-back as a man is interviewed by an FBI agent. Years earlier his father had wigged-out and forced him and his brother to participate in ritual murder. The father believed these victims were demon-possessed and that God had picked him to mete out divine justice.

Past events are filtered through the man's interview with the FBI, so I'd hoped that the film would adopt a Rashomon-style device. That is, what we see is filtered through someone else's dubious account. We might have been left with some ambiguity and lots of room for interpretation. Instead we're treated to -- ho-hum -- a sudden barrage of twists at the end. Tedious. Just another puzzle picture. This could have been a truly Great Film. Instead it rates as one of those Good average-movies.

It would have been more gripping if they'd played it straight without the moody gloomy music/atmosphere. The "atmosphere" in this case just reminds you that you're watching a flick. Director Paxton should have taken a cue from the German film FUNNY GAMES, which followed two fiends around as they terrorized an isolated family. Its matter-of-fact film style -- psychotics at work in broad daylight and nice scenery, little or no music, and simple filming / editing -- made it all the more horrifying.

Have to give it credit for not sliding into cheap slasher-dom. And kudos to the young actors, especially the kid who played Fenton.

He acted rings around Bill Paxton. But a child could do that.

Even as a little kid, I could recognize from afar that the Mummy franchise was the cheapest of the Horror brands. Never bothered to watch them until the original Karloff version a few years ago. And now. Decided to brush up on my Egyptology and dusted off the mold-encrusted video I'd taped last October to view all of Universal's Kharis-model Mummy flix.

The acting is plenty cheap. And everyone who goes up against the Mummy desperately needs some fisticuff lessons... all of them rush him spastically with something in hand to bean him, but their timing is way off and they don't even begin to raise the bludgeon until his laconic hand is on their throat. This tired choreography is repeated endlessly, victim after victim.

But if you're in the mood for camp, these flicks can be quite fun. Especially if you want to play at Mystery Science Theater, and lob insults back at the screen... "You're SUCH a slut, Ananka!" and mock their delivery ... "By the will of Aman Ra and the power of the Tiki-Tiki berry, you will rise and do my bidding. You will go forth while the moon is high, and bring back to me a Domino's Pizza with all the toppings. And KILL anyone who dares top it with anchovies."

THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940) The most promising of the bunch, it featured Cecil Kellaway, George Zucco, Wallace Ford, and as our stout-hearted hero -- Dick Foran. And ex-cowboy Tom Tyler as the Mummy. Even the Undead's slow gait was a challenge for the arthritic Tyler.

THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1942) Lon Chaney Jr's first stint at the Stiff. What's intriguing here is that some of the main characters from the last installment are hauled out again... just to get KILLED this time! Dick Foran, who is even listed at the top of the credits, is the FIRST to get bumped off! (Maybe this was where Hitchcock got his Marion Crane inspiration.) These guys lost the Secret Formula to forumulaic shlock. Even lovable Wallace Ford bites the big one. THIS is just not done! --They killed off the Comedy Relief, fer chrissakes! (Okay, he was lame anyway as funny side-kicks go, so it was really satisfying to see him get stifled -- but they're not supposed to DO that!)

THE MUMMY'S GHOST (1944) Again, any interest I have in posting this drivel is to point out that we have here another strange deviation from the standard "classic" Horror formula ... NO HAPPY ENDING! The obligatory mob does NOT catch up to the fiend before he carries the heroine to a watery grave -- despite the fact that he's slow as molasses, dragging one crippled foot behind the other. No, it just ends abruptly with the would-be fiance nursing a chronic case of Blue Balls. If 1940's sensibilities were what they are today, the theaters would have been filled with bewildered sneers from the peanut gallery, like "That's just f^cked-up, man."

THE MUMMY'S CURSE Perhaps the worst of the lot. But the funniest, so don't miss it. Princess Ananka was played by Virginia Christine. Just as I was about to forgive her wooden acting on the basis of her nice figure, I recognized her as the busy-body "Mrs Olsen, the Folger's Coffe Lady" -- and recoiled in true terror. Our hero this time is more dry than the mummy. And he has the typical protagonist's congenital cranial growth -- the ubiquitous pith helmet.

These movies are best enjoyed as drinking games.

Still you have to give UNIVERSAL credit for conjuring legends out of thin air. A silver bullet to kill a werewolf. Keeping a mummy in limbo-life via an ancient formula of tanna leaves and a secret occultic priesthood. If you didn't know better, you'd think these were bona fide beliefs from Dark Ages Europe and Ancient Egypt. They created a universe of self-contained logic. As long as you buy into their goofy supernatural rules, you could kick back and watch the fiends go at it.

But they abandoned the power of the original, which was a mummy empowered. All later iterations reduced the poor fellow into being a mere dupe for a long line of self-serving priests. A junkie who needs his fix of Jujubes. The dreaded evil villain is now a strange hybrid of both "the Monster" and "Fritz the hunchback" and "Renfield", all rolled into one.

Karloff's Mummy was much more effective as a Super-Fiend. He was like a Dracula, masterfully pulling supernatural strings on all levels. And like Lon Chaney Sr's original version of the Phantom, totally in control. So I guess I have to give some grudging respect to the new versions of THE MUMMY. Although these 2 new movies are way too CGI-fixated and have lost the feel for atmosphere, at least they have a mummy who's in charge of his minions, instead of vice versa.

The CGI-meisters of today would do well to reclaim the art of cinematography and start experimenting with the largely-unexplored technique of split-screen. They'd have a long way to go before matching BOSTON STRANGLER's direction by Richard Fleischer.

The look of STRANGLER's wide/split-screen is terrific -- a wonderful narrative device that sadly has gone largely unexplored. (To get a good appreciation of the composition, a letterbox copy is a MUST.) BOSTON STRANGLER might rank as my favorite use of the technique. Other notables being the original THOS. CROWN AFFAIR, GRAND PRIX, NAPOLEON, and TIME-CODE. Most films use the split-screen more as an aesthetic effect, rather than as a narrative device. STRANGLER artfully blends the technique compositionally, psychologically and narratively. It was even daring enough to let the whole screen go blank except for a small box that emphasized the trancing eyes of the killer. That takes balls.

And STRANGLER is Tony Curtis at his best. That one long long take near the end as DeSalvo transitions from tearful fearful confusion into self-awareness and then into trance -- what a fantastic performance. Much fine supporting work particularly from Hurd Hatfield, William Hickey, and the guy who played the Psychic. Henry Fonda was the weakest link for me.

I can't think of an earlier film example of ethnic parity than Al Jolson's "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum", 1933. It's a fun musical (with bit parts played by composers, Rodgers and Hart) and co-starring Harold Lloyd and Frank Morgan. Lots of delightful rhyming dialogue. Among Depression era musicals, it's an oddity in that it doesn't dodge the poverty issue, yet remains light-hearted while dishing out the political/economic statements. I particularly liked the bank sequence where the camera tracks from the entrance, through the bank and ends behind the tellers' cages. It begins with a pair of big-wheeling businessmen discussing a deal involving an immense fortune. As successive conversations are overheard, the monies involved become smaller and more paltry. A guy can't get a loan for some small pittance. Finally one teller asks another for a measly buck is it just a dime?], and his buddy says he hasn't got one to give (this teller played by lyricist, Lorenz Hart).

Anyway, I'm off the point of the introductory statement: Jolson's the unofficial "mayor of Central Park" -- a leader amongst all the hoboes living there. And his best friend, his friend mind you -- not some Rochester-style servant, not some lackey -- his FRIEND, who alone can get in his face to defy him when none of the other bums can -- his friend is an African-American wonderfully played by Edgar Connor.

Ben Johnson, himself a library card holder and given to flatulence, once said, "Time is a bald man trying to recapture his youth by watching sappy nostalgia."

Scott Hicks' formulaic approach to Stephen King is kinda stale. Shades of THE GREEN MILE clash with STAND BY ME and FIRESTARTER.

Psychic is on the run from the government, who would deprive him of his civil liberties to selfishly use him for nefarious purposes. Boo! Hiss!

Meanwhile, Nostalgia washes over us with peaches-and-cream-complexioned youngsters enjoying perfect comradery while struggling with adolescence and bullies, all the while backed up by aptly-cued orchestra, Oldies hits, and pristinely-waxed vintage cars. Yawn.

Still, it's nicely-crafted Formula, and the two leads (Hopkins and the kid, Anton Yelchin.) make it acceptable.

Starring AL PACINO and GENE HACKMAN, these are very different kinds of roles for both of them. I rate these performances as good as any other by either star. Plus they work fantastically well with one another. Why haven't we seen more Hackman/Pacino pairings?

They play down-and-outters, nearly on the level of bums... but they have a goal: To start a business with some money saved up by Hackman's roughneck character. The Ultimate Loner, he only accepts the good-natured Pacino as a partner because... well, you should see it for yourself. I'll just say that they meet on opposite sides of a country road while trying to hitch-hike. The surly Hackman views the flaky Pacino as competition for a ride and silently rejects him. After all his hyper-active attempts at friendliness are rebuffed, Pacino makes one simple gracious gesture that wins over Hackman.

The title has to do with an attitude, an approach towards life. Pacino states that a Scarecrow is successful in its life's mission, not by using fear and intimidation against the crows, but because it is humorous, and the crow's respond graciously for the good laugh by leaving alone his crop of corn.

And our two main characters represent these two opposing approaches to life. It's amazing to see them transform and morph into one another, to adopt the other's philosophy. The pessimist begins to soften up, and the optimist loses his most precious dream. Pacino even LOOKS like a Scarecrow by the last Act of the film.

Pacino's final scene is heart-wrenching. The closing images of Hackman in a bus station are perfect. He has to scrounge up a couple more bucks for a ticket but comes up short. While the impatient teller tries to shuffle him aside to help other people in line, Hackman digs out the last few beans... I won't give away the details, but his victorious expression in the end is priceless.

I think this is one of the most overlooked/under-rated films of the 70's. But I include it as one of my favorite films of the 70's on its own merits (not just to somehow "correct" an oversight of the rest of the fans). It possesses a greater depth of psychology/allegory/symbolism than most people give it credit for. Beware any edited-for-tv version. The language is salty but essential. Also, the wide-screen cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond (aspect ratio of 2.35 : 1) might suffer in pan-and-scan.

This film moves slowly. But if you're not hopped-up on the eye-candy of the latest FX-ridden forgettable flick du jour, you might find something of real value here. Blissfully lacking the latest frenetic Shaky-Cam look of TRAFFIC et al., the cinematography of THE SCORE was steadily and slowly paced so you could pick out some beautifully subtle touches. Most of the scenes are dimly-lit, with the details standing out as white-on-black (we generally perceive things as black-on-white).

I'm not entranced by the performances of DeNiro, Brando, and Norton, which is a bit of a disappointment considering they're the greatest actors of their generations. Brando and DeNiro pretty much let the new kid do all the hard work; Norton ably fools a team of security guards with a Rain-Man style performance. In actuality he's casing a heist of a Custom's house and aiding DeNiro who plays a master thief. Brando is their Sydney Greenstreet-ish backer. It would have been interesting if he'd been allowed to play it like a queen, but director Frank Oz (formerly Miss Piggy's puppeteer from The Muppets) wouldn't have it. Brando reportedly told him, "you'd really love it if you could control me by sticking your hand up my a$$." Then he refused to film his scenes if Oz were present. (I guess DeNiro directed them.)

If Oz doesn't get extraordinary performances from extraordinary actors, at least he delivers a visually-interesting film. The slow-moving story and camera allows you to appreciate the composition of the shots. There are thematic allusions in these visuals.

It must be seen widescreen by the way. Actors are occasionally isolated from one another, standing on opposite sides of the screen at the extreme edges. I'm thinking especially of DeNiro's scene with Angela Bassett where they talked across the screen at each other through an expanse of emptiness.

Also the indoor pool scene with DeNiro and Brando seems rather symbolic. The opulent interior is marred by electrical lines and cables, parallelling Brando's character finally exposing his deepest fears to DeNiro. They sit by the pool's handrail, separated by its sharp steely diagonal line. Oh, I'll shut up now and let you sort out for yourself if it amounts to anything.

I'll just add that the ending felt a little flat. If the heist hadn't dragged on for so long, the post-heist drama wouldn't seem to end so abruptly... and they could have dealt with other things. The DeNiro/Norton tension wouldn't have stopped so abruptly. Also they'd created tension about a nemesis for Brando but left it unresolved. We're supposed to accept that he makes his payoff and lives happily ever after.

Short on substance and long on flashy peripheralia (ie, costumes, art direction, FX) -- which is my typical lament of the past ten years of film history. Mind you, it's NOT A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME, but Marky Mark, er Mark Wahlberg, can't carry the film. Estella Warren needs a few more pounds of collagen in her lips, and Kris Kristofferson's role was a throwaway. On the plus side, the humorous Paul Giamatti got a lotta laughs, and Tim Roth was thoroughly despicable and frightening.

Some of Marky's weakness is due to the script changes... the humans can talk. Ok, so then what makes Wahlberg so special to the apes? They don't even comment on his spacesuit. Talking humans is a serious stray from the crux of the Swiftian novel by Pierre Boulle, with its Gulliver's Travels -like reversal of species. Meanwhile the second half of the flick degenerates into a long chase and so-called-epic-sized battle, neither handled well. While the film surpasses the original in costumes and FX, it owes everything to its 1968 precedent. ie, the introduction and exposition of the apes moves much quicker because of our familiarity of the original.

The apes themselves are superior to the original in make-up and movement and cultural detail. The ape city is more impressive. But while the specifics of the FX are more impressive than the first, they are nevertheless over-the-top. Even the Foley artists-- every step, every wrinkle of fabric, every thump of the chest is horribly amplified (maybe it was just the damn multiplex whose volume levels were through the roof). In regards to the FX-ridden films of recent years, I was reminded of Laurence Olivier's remark about make-up (which doesn't apply to this film's make-up; it does apply to FX and film-making in general): exagerrate only one detail of a character (the long nose of Richard III, for ex.), otherwise the whole face becomes a meaningless mass of putty -- the performance becomes marred, not enhanced. The same rule applies to FX. Director Burton and most of our FX-crazy film-makers would do well to quit poring over every little technical doo-dad and spend more time on dialogue and plot.

Oh, and I can't stand physics-defying FX ... apes that leap 20 feet in the air... apes that aren't vaporized by a horrendous rocket blast but are merely stunned for a few seconds... apes that punch a man so hard he flies 15 feet off the ground (when such a force would decapitate him)... men who survive being knocked 15 feet off the ground and arise to get knocked 15 feet off the ground a second, third, and fourth time (this isn't the mark of the character's heroism; it's the mark of a director's sadism. If he's not sadistic, then he's immaturely fixated on the visuals of slinging a body through space.) The opening segment provides a more plausible explanation, if you demand some kind of logical time-anomaly reason which the first version lacked. But then the time paradox in the closing really falls flat. It seems tacked on for the sake of an obligatory Time-Paradox twist. And for the obligatory sequel.

In the art world, they use the expression `less is more', and MOULIN ROUGE is the best example of `more is less -- much, much less.' They went to the trouble and expense of creating lushly detailed sets and costumes, then edited the damn thing so fast you can't take in a bit of it. Meanwhile this jumble hangs on a tedious farce about hiding a romance from a rich suitor who not only invests in their musical but owns the soul of every person in the joint. It would have been more interesting (and believable) if the Duke had not been so Snidely-Whiplash-totally-dastardly (Muwahahahahhh, *cue: twirl moustache*), and if the courtesan had been torn between two attractive suitors. It was very uncharacteristic for such a hardened woman to so easily lose her heart.

Now frenetic wackiness and cartoonish camp could be forgivable as light entertainment, but this flick also demands us to care about its characters when they weren't even passable soap opera material. "A love that will last forever" -- right. These cardboard cut-outs can sing about love all they want, but when they scream in my face to care about their tragic lives, I shout back, `maudlin!' And when the end credit states this film is about Beauty, Truth, and above all Love – well, my wretching precludes shouting out anything at all. All this was bitterly disappointing, because the movie had opened hopefully with a full-screen proscenium and curtain and a small (life-size) conductor below, gesticulating while the 20th Century Fox anthem blared away like an overture... then it successfully transitioned into the past, and the first few impressive show-stoppers hinted that the historical Moulin Rouge was about to be transformed into a metaphor for our modern entertainments (hence a reason for our contemporary music transported back a hundred years). But instead of a witty statement about ourselves, we're given a B-grade melodrama. Hmmm, maybe unwittingly the film HAS made a statement about the 3-ring circus known as modern media.

There's also Revisionism gone wild: Toulouse Lautrec, genius of painting, is thoughtlessly converted into a lisping playwright/clown reminiscent of The Boob from `Yellow Submarine'. (Aww, isn't he cute.) Dammit, he wasn't a dwarfish court jester, but a real person with passions and pleasures and fears and fancies like the rest of us. Oh yeh, this is also yet-another flick where everyone in Paris talks with a British accent.

Music: 8/10 (Good voices from Kidman & McGregor; only devalued by a penchant to continuously repeat the wretched `Your Song.')...... Set design and effects: 10/10...... Mind-numbing editing that destroyed the set design and effects: 2/10...... Story: 1/10 (Luhrmann is no Puccini.)..... Overall: 3/10 -- a beautiful-looking disaster that severely p***ed me off.

Surely "The Man with the Movie Camera" influenced the masterful "Koyaanisqatsi" (1983). Both films are non-story-- pure arrangement of images and music. "Koyaanisqatsi" definitely has a moral to it, portraying our sped-up society as spinning out of control. Hint: its title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance."

While the older Russian film isn't as "preachy", at times I got the same sensation as conveyed by "Koyaanisqatsi"-- that the individual is lost in the masses, and we are but cogs in a larger societal machine. It's ironic that the Soviet Union government loved the Western-made "Koyaanisqatsi"-- they felt it showed the folly of the decadent West. Ironic because I got the same vibe from the Stalin-era "Man with a Movie Camera"!

Yet I don't think this was intended by the filmmaker. He just enjoys showing that the camera can go ANYWHERE and EVERYWHERE. It shows a Day in the Life of a Big City. Some of the images are interspersed with shots of the cameraman capturing the image. Other images are shown projected on a theater movie screen with fast cuts between the audience and those citizens on the screen. It got kinda surrealistic, almost like you'd expect to see the theater-goers showing up on the screen. (They should've shown the cameraman outside of the theater, taking their pictures as they were exiting!

The updated soundtrack and wild editing was fantastic. Similarly the music of "Koyaanisqatsi" (scored by Philip Glass) wonderfully matches its entrancing images.

For their day, both films were wonderfully innovative in technology and technique, and are still eminently watchable. Well, "Man with a Movie Camera" is a tad hokey at times by modern tastes, but nevertheless it's a recommendable film overall.

I finally got around to watching "The Crimson Pirate". What a blast! Burt Lancaster is the Pirate. His schemes and brainstorms are unconventional and funny.

It's a kinda goofy story, so you have to be in the mood for fun. (For example, the pirate's enemies are silly nitwits, like Keystone Kops or Hogan's Heroes.) Don't expect historical accuracy-- this is total Hollywood pirate caricature. But it's very creative, and everyone on the set, stars and stuntmen, looked like they had a blast filming it.

Burt Lancaster outdoes Douglas Fairbanks. He shows off his great acrobatic training and even paired-up his stuntwork with his old acrobat partner, Nick Cravat (btw, Nick happened to be the airplane-assaulting gremlin on the original Twilight Zone "Terror at 20,000 Feet".)

I feel like I missed out as a kid by not seeing it. Everyone has their own traditional FamilyTime movies ("Wizard of Oz" being a universal example). I wish I'd seen this one as a kid. My parents would've liked it too-- it's very enjoyable for all ages.

This documentary is about Alice Guy, the FIRST woman director. Starting in clerical work at the French studio, Gaumont, she quickly saw that so much more could be done with film. Previously cinema was limited to static, documentary street-shots. Alice had the vision to create and stage fictional drama. Before there was even the title of "film-maker", she'd begun to develop the language of cinema. Gaumont assigned her to run ALL of its production work. She was the only woman director in the world for 17 years.

Gaumont beat Hollywood by 20 years to matching sound and image, doing MTV-like filmed songs, sound synchronized with images-- color images. This was in the earliest years of the 20th century. Her studio sent Alice Guy to New York with the complicated process. The technology may not have gone over with the public, but she certainly did. She was highly-publicized in the American press and became heavily involved with the early American cinema-- pre-Hollywood.

But since then the woman has been entirely overlooked by the history books. Even at the time, much of her work was attributed to assistants or people who weren't involved at all. This documentary also described her efforts to find old copies or references to her films. Even in advanced years, she was very charming and sharp and alive. Alice Guy died in 1968 at the age of 95.