Reviews

Before I get to my assessment of this cinematic work, let me remind you of my bias: I hate Nazism, I hate fascism in all of its forms (and I would hate an American fascism, so it is not a matter of hating fascism because of its ties to some foreign culture), I consider Hitler and all of his associates pure evil. Even if I fit all the criteria for being a perfect Aryan by Nazi 'racial' criteria, I would rather become a Jew than a Nazi. At least as a Jew I would be able to maintain my current moral and cultural values.

Yes, it is an infamous piece of propaganda showing how completely and quickly Hitler took complete control of Germany, offering himself as a focus of national unity. Riefenstahl shows some of the best camera work to its time, advancing the great achievement of German cinematography that before Hitler rivaled anything else -- even Hollywood productions. It is worth watching as a depiction of Nazi Germany as the purest despotism that has ever existed. Much of this staging is choreography showing the extreme regimentation already in effect in Germany roughly a year after the Devil Incarnate took power. But such, alas, is now educational -- a study of Nazi propaganda, and that is the cause of my mediocre rating.

Hitler already gets treatment that rock stars of our time get even if the lyrics are banal and the music is shallow. Even if Hitler manages to avoid the infamous denunciations of foreign powers and especially the Jews -- even the arch-bigot Julius Streicher is shown calling only for Germans to protect their 'racial purity', which is no nastier than the racist rhetoric in the USA at the time. If Hitler is not responsible for the music, the music (which is the choice of Riefenstahl) is uniformly banal -- unison brass over pounding drums. The great irony is that this bad music comes from the country that gave the world Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn (excuse me -- the Nazis banned his music!), Wagner, Brahms, and Hindemith (oh, he fled!). Needless to say, any value as entertainment is sparse at best.

The choreography within the rally site is clearly the doing of the Nazi Party and its subsidiary organizations. It does with people what Hitler's paintings do -- trivialize everything human. It is hard to imagine that Riefenstahl could make any mistakes with that except to use too few camera angles. That, of course, she commands masterfully. Of course some of the regimentation looks ludicrous -- the farmers and construction workers marching with the tools of their work as if they were soldiers. But such is my contemporary bias against military-style discipline where it serves no obvious purpose other than to obliterate individuality. Much is made of ceremonies at night, with fire taking a prominent role... I can think of some American fascists who typically have their rallies at night and heavily use fire to 'illuminate' their ceremonies.

This is a Party Congress... and one must admit that it is more impressive in its pageantry than any party convention, Democratic or Republican, in the United States. Of course, in American political conventions, words and policies are not preset pablum. But that is a valid comparison -- something like the Republican National Convention of 1980 or the Democratic National Convention of 2008, both of which had far more wit and wisdom than did speakers at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress.

We get a unique insight into Adolf Hitler as a speaker -- and how fit his prose is for infantile, obedient simpletons. We get to see his pious lies about the Night of the Long Knives, a series of murders against rivals and old enemies. Hitler is not John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or Barack Obama. If you were looking for something as profound as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Churchill's "Finest Hour" speech, you will be terribly disappointed. Heck, the speech of Charlie Chaplin's "Jewish barber" impersonating "Der Phooey" at the end of The Great Dictator (which spoofs Hitler) has richer rhetoric. Hitler has learned nothing from Goethe or Schiller.

Hitler is introduced flying into Nuremberg as if a god -- consider that Hitler could exploit the novelty of flight to impress people who thought that fliers were gods. He leaves the venue by automobile. The adulation of the closest person ever to being the Antichrist is genuine enough; people are making the Nazi salute with no obvious prompting or staging. As Rudolf Hess put it, Hitler then is Germany, and Germany is Hitler on the days of the 1934 Party Congress.

>Outfoxed< shows how FoX News Channel has developed a format intended more to manipulate the thoughts of viewers than to inform. FoX, which claims to be "Fair and Balanced" is the antithesis of fairness and balance, as the documentary shows.

The creators of >Outfoxed< give credit to FoX News for slick innovations in television journalism, including the establishment of a corporate identity (one could never confuse FoX News with some other form of TV journalism), musical motifs that set the tone, and such a device as the "FoX News Alert" that draws attention to a breaking story. But they also expose the manipulativeness of FoX News for misusing the News Alert for titillating items.

The documentary shows how those who go along with FoX News' editorial opinions get the royal treatment, yet those who run afoul of it get cut down. Bill O'Reilly is shown telling his interviewees to "Shut up!" when they go 'too far' in contradicting him and, in one case, the use of odd camera angles to make someone who disagrees with him (a son of a 9/11 victim refusing to go along with the aggressive foreign policy of the Bush Administration) look like a terrorist, bum, or monster. It also shows how FoX debased reporting at formerly-independent TV stations such as WTTG (Channel 5 in Washington DC) as Murdoch took them over.

The great fault of FoX News is that although it consumes much time of a viewer it offers little news -- but much scripted analysis intended more to convince than to inform. >Outfoxed< gets FoX... right.

Forget the trashy 1982 remake; this one satisfies even with its limited resources.

For the lack of sophisticated effects and an obvious lo budget, the 1942 version is a sophisticated look into a superstitious view of the world that has much behind it -- a young woman obsessed with cats as reminders of an evil not completely disposed of in the Old Country (Serbia). The psychoanalytic angle makes sense without slipping into the usual jargon, and the script allows Irena to become what she most fears when strong passion of any kind overtakes her-- an evil that a national hero of Serbia, King John, couldn't quite drive out. Strong emotion of any kind brings out a "cat" in Irena, who at one point kills a canary much as a cat of any kind would if it gets the chance; reverting to her humanity, Irena regrets anything that she does when her feline nature emerges.

This story reminds me much of werewolf literature, but instead of a man turning into a howling wolf (typically in neighboring Transylvania), a woman turns into a devious and stealthy cat. No, it's not the harmless Siamese cat that she rejects perhaps of a reminder of the animal that can take her over; it's a dangerous and destructive black panther.

This is a horror story, but it is comparatively lacking in gore for the plot elements. It's too sophisticated for pre-teens to get, but unlike most horror movies, even some certifiably better, it's not going to brutalize the sensibilities of a child who sees this movie by accident. But whatever you do, do not take the dreadful 1982 remake, much less sophisticated and far more explicit, as a substitute.

Nearly sixty years later, >Rope< proves an effective black comedy despite having a predictable ending. Two privileged young men (but certifiable sociopaths) (John Dall, Farley Granger) have strangled another young man to his death, and they stage a party in which the casket in which they have hidden the body becomes a table for serving guests. All of the guests but one are fooled, and one guest even leaves with what would be physical evidence (the ROPE within the title, the murder weapon, is used in tying together some books that a guest takes with him. A palm reader reads one of the killer's hands and proclaims the hand 'likely to do much good'. Even some of the dialogue, as in "the best Americans die young in war", fails to shake the killers.

The reason for the killing? The men think that they can get away with it, proving their distortion of some claptrap supposedly by Nietzsche that the best and the brightest have the right to kill the stupid. (It could also be a swipe at recent Nazi practice in the "euthanasia" program, practiced by people who had their own perverse interpretations of Nietzsche). Otherwise there is no reason for the killing. But one of the guests is the college professor (Jimmy Stewart), whose teachings the men have distorted into an excuse for murder. To say more about Stewart's role and the inevitable ending -- the question that Hitchcock leaves us is not "if" but "when" is to introduce a spoiler.

Hitchcock masterfully exploits a flashing neon sign in the background to set the mood at a certain stage. Color is faded to pastel shades; whether this is Hitch's intention or the fading of the original print is very much a question. Remember, of course, that this movie is filmed in a standard format, so make sure to set the screen for a 4:3 screen ratio.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable black comedy and psychodrama with few obvious parallels. You will surely loathe the two villain characters -- which is intended -- and especially their perverse elitism.

Definitely not for children, though. The grim jokes are all perversely funny as well as intelligent.

Is it watchable nearly sixty years later? Sure. It will look old

For sci-fi, this is brainy (what would one expect from the late Carl Sagan?), clever, humorous, coherent, and family-friendly. The pretext is that we have gotten signals from life out in space -- life that has gotten the worst possible introduction from humanity, an early television signal from the Third Reich (nazi Germany, of course). Humanity gets plans for a machine that can supposedly get people elsewhere in the universe... a sort of Heaven.

To be sure, I am not convinced that the machine so much gets people to the Other Side and doesn't create the illusion by analyzing the thoughts of its 'passengers' -- but the ambiguity looks intentional.

The satire of anti-rational religious figures, UFO cultists, political extremists, and the like is exactly as one would expect from Sagan, someone who long told us that space travel to the stars would be so difficult that it might not be worth the effort. Science and technology, in contrast, offer awe and beauty just as Sagan said that they would.

Max Bialystok (Zero Mostel), a producer of musicals who has lost his knack and is living on his illusions, gets some odd tax advice from his accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder): that although the IRS audits successful plays with a fine tooth comb, it ignores flops. Bialystok, who can no longer succeed in producing successful musical comedies, gets the inspiration to produce the worst musical ever, oversell the production to little old ladies willing to make investments in his plays after he seduces them, keep the investment, and have the money that he still needs for his self esteem. Bloom, until then a thoroughly-repressed and neurotic accountant, agrees and becomes a partner.

Of course everything must fail. The music must be awful, the plot must stink, the set design must be dreadful, and the story must be offensive. So he finds the worst director, the worst choreographer to create incompetent dance scenes, the worst set designer to create a tasteless set, the worst performers possible, and above all the worst stage play available. And the worst stage play ever written is the incredibly tasteless "Springtime for Hitler", penned by an unrepentant nazi (Kenneth Mars) as a romp in the Third Reich for the 'lovable' clique of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and all the other sordid characters that "Franz Liebkind", the nutty Nazi, loves to the time.

But Bialystok and Bloom, both obviously Jewish, have to 'seduce' the crazy nazi into believing that they have empathy with Liebkind's desire to express his love for the Fuehrer and his cause, even to the point of wearing swastika armbands that they despise in his presence.

The casting for a "Hitler" finds a hippie-like actor who can't hold a tune or even make sense. The play, above all, is to have its premiere in New York City, a place where one would expect an audience only slightly less sympathetic to Nazis than Tel Aviv.

Bialystok tries to offend the critics by offering a small bribe small enough to insult the critic. The play opens with anticlimax with stale music, bad lyrics, and an incompetent dance scene. Some dancers have tasteless headdresses (including a beer stein and a pretzel). The introductory dance scene incorporates the goose step and in the end a salute with artillery.

Nothing could be a more certain failure -- but it SUCCEEDS! Then the comedy soars, with incredible consequences that result in big trouble for people that we have every cause to loathe.

For more, see this romp of a comedy of unintended consequences for Bialystok, Bloom, and Liebkind.

This movie grows on one. We get to see the same horrible crime in which a highwayman kills the man and ravages his wife -- from the bandit himself, from the woman, and from the victim from beyond the grave (which is extremely clever. But of course this is Kurosawa, so what else can one expect?) All three stories are equally plausible, as one might expect from the three different viewpoints.

The highwayman (to be sure a sociopath, as shown in a deliberately hideous laugh that underscores the ugliness of his character), doomed already, for once has the freedom to tell his owns story because what he says will no longer change his destiny The wife has her story, part of which is that she got a little choice -- in view of the lack of choice typical for women in medieval Japan, and in that momentary choice she can even talk the highwayman into settling down to a normal life and giving up crime. The dead man, the husband, has no cause to say anything but what he experienced -- of course in an unearthly way.

This was clearly a risky story (actually a trilogy within a framework) to set to film -- and Kurosawa leaves no doubt that he and only he could have done this. The imagery is, of course, spectacular; Kurosawa shows genius there too.

A definite 10 due to its uniqueness and its excellence in every detail. This is an absolute must-see.

On the surface it's not so bad -- until one sees a stage play. The movie is badly directed; it drags badly. Dolly Parton can't act, and Burt Reynolds is far past his prime as an actor. Even with the necessary bowdlerizations, the play can be fun to watch, but this movie isn't. The zany Dom DeLuise is just too foppish to pull off his role as "Watchdog" Melvin P. Thorpe; he just can't pull off the hypocrisy necessary for the villain character. The singing isn't very good, and the romance between Parton and Reynolds has no spark. Because of the subject the movie must be fun to view if it is to be effective; it isn't, so it fails.

There can be human interest in the story if one focuses on the 'working girls', but it doesn't appear in the movie. Above all, the hypocritical villain, the Melvin P. Thorpe character, which Dom DeLuise can't quite pull off -- and without an effective villain one has no sympathy for the 'working women' on the Chicken Ranch.

By far the best performer in the movie is Charles Durning, who does a superb job in "Sidestep" as the Texas Governor who lets the polls make decisions for him and pays his tribute to Fred Astaire. It's not quite Astaire's famous ceiling dance and his dance with a hat rack in >Royal Wedding< (definitely not a great movie, but at least RW has its moments). But that's about it. And Durning's routine is but trick photography.

I got to see BLWiT in a small live theater in the Midwest -- and it was an enjoyable experience, even if I had my trepidations in view of the cinematic performance.

This is one of few movie stories that compels a remake -- which statement is the definitive insult to the competence of the persons involved in making this turkey of a movie at the supposed "Chicken Ranch". Better yet, see it as a stage play.

Except for the widescreen image, one might think this a low-budget, made-for-TV movie: except that Liz Taylor was priced out of such efforts. The script is abominable, and it is impossible to develop any rapport with the over-aged delinquents that Fran Taylor (Elizabeth Taylor) and Joe Grady (Warren Beatty) portray. It is obvious enough that Las Vegas, even more the focus of low-brow, bad-taste materialism in America at the time, would be garish enough, but the domestic set is no relief.

It's hard to imagine the (then in her late thirties) Elizabeth Taylor being cast as a chorus girl, and perhaps such was the attraction of this play as a fountain of youth for her. I could imagine her as a choreographer or as a trainer of chorus girls, but not (with her build) as a chorus girl herself. Warren Beatty plays a singularly one-dimensional character, a superstitious, money-obsessed gambler, and not a good one. Both characters can hardly elicit any sympathy from either of us.

The play, should it have ever been transformed into a cinematic project of any kind, could just as well have been done as a low-budget made-for-TV movie with the use of casino scenes in Las Vegas and nearby sets. Instead, the ethos of this movie remains Warren Beatty fashioning a $100 bill into a boat and letting it sail down a drain way to a gutter. Too bad for all the starving children (adaptation of a line from the play), says Grady, in a time in which $100 was a week's salary for many people.

The investment was huge, and it seems to have gone into the gutter.

Avoid it.

>Thoroughly Modern Millie< is the sort of movie musical that you remember enough to watch once you forget what you disliked about it. It's in part a mystery, and in part a madcap story. The two themes don't fit well, and the ugly stereotypes of Asians are unforgivable. Whatever you do, do not show this movie to anyone who is of Asian origin or has any connections by marriage or commerce to any Asian culture.

Young, aspiring women of the 1920s trying to make it in the Big City, first vocational and then matrimonial, are ensnared in the white slave trade by cunning, amoral, barbaric Chinese led by the stereotypical dragon lady (Beatrice Lillie). The young women, among them Millie Dillmount (Julie Andrews) and Dorothy Brown (Mary Tyler Moore) are too insipid to catch the full flavor of the 1920s flappers.

Bits and pieces as production numbers are fine, but in between this movie drags and offends. It's hard to mix a mystery and madcap comedy, and the writing isn't up to it. One might as well buy the soundtrack instead of the movie and get the desirable portions without the dubious material in between.

The movie as a whole is best forgotten, and avoided if one ever gets the temptation to see it.

It's an untroubling movie that looks derivative. The plot has parallels to >My Fair Lady< and even has Audrey Hepburn as an undiscovered gem who must meet a Svengali-like man and submit to authority figures to realize her potential. In a plot partially parallel to that in which the uncouth flowermonger "Eliza Doolittle" of >My Fair Lady< becomes a 'lady' through the polishing of her language, she is discovered as a frumpy bookseller in a Greenwich Village bookstore that a hard-charging female editor of a fashion magazine seeks to use as a backdrop for some fashion photography when the fashion photographer 'discovers' her.

Add to this the setting of >An American in Paris<, complete with Gershwin tunes and much dancing by an actor (Fred Astaire versus Gene Kelly) who happens to have artistic tendencies (Kelly in >American in Paris< is a painter; Astaire in >Funny Face< is a fashion photographer). In >Funny Face<, the Gershwin tunes are bloated out of proportion as they aren't in >An American in Paris<. There's also >Gigi<, in which a young woman blossoms as does Audrey Hepburn as she is miraculously transformed from a highbrow poseur into a high-fashion model, a role for which she is more suited. If the movie is not itself derivative, then the plot is.

You will not likely prefer this movie to either >My Fair Lady<, >An American in Paris<, or >Gigi<; it has less wit than >My Fair Lady<, less dance than >An American in Paris< (the latter containing the most spectacular dance number in cinema as its climax!), and less subtlety or humanity than >Gigi<. Still, we are discussing superlatives among movie musicals, and although >Funny Face< falls short of the greatest, it still offers considerable wit, some fine dance scenes (Fred Astaire could always make another dancer look good!), some attractive music, and a largely feel-good (if somewhat implausible) storyline.

The casting is perfect.

It falls short of greatness, but it is a suitable alternative to overexposing some other movie musicals.

Disaster movies must convince one not only that something very bad and unforeseen can happen, but also that the victims deserve sympathy, which requires acting.

What could be more disastrous than the destruction of the great centers of civilization by a moving mountain of ice that grinds or crushes everything in its path? That's enough to bring instant overpopulation in a world whose resources are vastly diminished, which isn't quite the same as complete destruction of either humanity or the world, as through worldwide volcanism or the explosion of the sun.

The budget goes to special effects at the expense of writing and acting, as is shown in this effort at a politically-correct warning that human activities may bring the swift demise of their world. All dialogue is a shout (which is tiresome) except for the implausible monologue at the end. Much of the rest is mocked-up news footage, and there's only so much of that that we can accept.

It is scientifically implausible, which isn't the worst offense, but that does destroy much of the credibility. Although some glacial advances came very far very fast, they certainly did not arise from the freezing of floodwater, and didn't take a few weeks. A few decades, to be sure, but that scientific fact (distressing enough!) would tear at the plot. It is possible to play a sort of game of logging the scientific absurdities, but surely you have better things to do in life than to watch and analyze a dreadful flick.

Part of it is -Twister- on a larger scale (Los Angeles); the wolf scene is an obvious rip-off of -Jurassic Park-. Nothing is really new except for the scale of the disaster, and scale is not enough to redeem an unwieldy plot.

Call it propaganda if you wish; it's still good. Now that the 2004 election is over, it's history instead of politics. Fifty years from now it will be the primary image that people will have of the administration of 'Dubya', and it won't be a flattering picture.

The true test of a documentary film is that one can learn something from it without falling asleep. This is a keeper. We see Dubya as a glory-seeking chickenhawk more intent on enriching his cronies than on seeking to act in accordance with reality. We see his war as his glory, and others' tragedy, whether of Iraqi civilians or Americans killed or wounded in action. We see Dubya's war as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. We see that the military recruiters can find plenty of cannon fodder from the places like Flint, ravaged by industrial ruin (fitting allusion to "Roger & Me"), but few from the still well-off suburbs.

We see the depersonalization of the enemy as a tank crew takes delight in an obscenity-laced rap song "Die, m-----f-----" while firing at the enemy. We heard of little of this during the first Gulf War, waged honorably under the elder Bush.

We see the clever methods of media manipulation of the '43' administration -- Bush and Cheney contradicting each other on the sort of responses that Americans should have toward terrorism. "Be brave", says Bush; "be scared", says Cheney. Confusion makes people scared to oppose those who supposedly know better than we do.

I chose to not watch this film until after the 2004 elections. I had seen smears that it is all propaganda, full of lies, unpatriotic, and disrespectful of our brave soldiers. The real disrespect goes to those who least deserve respect -- the Bush administration.

Film-making is one of the most comprehensive of artistic enterprises. Whatever other artistic activities it uses, the most essential component is story-telling. One can be subtle, but one dares not confuse the audience.

Superman is supposed to be a good guy, but here he gets some "kryptonite" that instead of weakening him makes a villain of him. Yes, we can accept that Superman could weaken into a real Clark Kent if he so chooses, but turning into a bad guy whose vanity causes him to make travesties of human rituals and culture?

It is not subtle; it is confusing, and confusing a mass audience is unforgivable. Movies are storytelling, and at that this movie fails badly.

So here's how I see the tetralogy:

Superman: the movie .... 7 -- good but not great.

Superman II .... 6 -- entertaining, suitable for occasional watching, especially of one likes the genre.

Superman III .... 3 -- clearly substandard, and best forgotten

Superman IV .... 2 -- What were they thinking? Better yet, were they thinking?

It's hard to believe that this movie had ever been made, hard to believe that the cast could be so badly wasted despite the talent, and even harder to believe that the purest example of detached machismo in Hollywood couldn't pull off the role. John Wayne was a great actor, and not the hollow stereotype that he was often accused of being as his popularity waned. He might not have been one's ideal for delivering a comic line, but if anybody could force a line to have dry humor, it was he.

The script is the first disaster. The mock-Shakespearean lingo is for Shakespeare, who never set any of his plays in Mongolia. Here it is ludicrous (Chaucer would be in tune with the time, but few people understand Chaucerian English)! The costumes fail to convince one. Add to this -- Genghiz Khan was no hero; he initiated the most horrific killing spree of the pre-modern world. It's a big mistake to lionize a killer.

The great lore of this movie is that so many of the cast and crew died of cancer during some A-bomb tests near the location. That is sheer bad luck. Even without the calamity of cancer allegedly contributed to by nearby nukes, this would be a horrible movie, an embarrasment for all involved.

We know the limitations of animation, or do we? Animation can be great, especially if it allows us to see something that we otherwise wouldn't, but this effort is a disaster. Just because Warner had the rights to reshape the story doesn't mean that it was wise to do so. I suggest either the original drama >Anna and the King<, a rather adult approach with much darkness that fits the original story, or the more accessible live-action musical >The King and I<, which has the benefits of Richard Rogers' musical score. It looks much like an attempt to capitalize upon either >Beauty and the Beast< or >Aladdin<, both infinitely better.

This animated film is a disaster from the start. It tries to make a fairy tale out of a story from the nineteenth century by adding sorcery and magical devices that mock the norms of nineteenth-century thought. Sorcery and the hyper-rational nineteenth century do not mix.

Some of the animated sets, I concede, are attractive. That said, the treatment inexcusably confuses Chinese and Thai culture. (To be sure, Thailand has a large Chinese diaspora, and it is quite influential, but not dominant).

Many of the characters are over the top, including the devious Prime minister who exploits a big-screen "magic mirror" and wears a Colonel Klink-like monocle and has a stereotypical stooge as his confederate. The animals are excessively cute and unrealistic, including the sterotypical 'mischievous monkey' and the King's cuddly pet panther(?), not to mention some of the most unrealistic elephants that we have ever seen and the snakes that the evil Prime Minister conjures out of vines. We've seen it all before, and this time it doesn't work.

Forget this one. Too many valid alternatives exist for this general story. If you want magic in an animated flick, then seek something in a more mystical time (such as >Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs<} or place (the beautiful-but-creepy world of >Spirited Away<.

Don't debase your video collection with this derivative rubbish. This movie's story is too dumb for adults and too dark for children.

-The Birds- is one of two great animal-attack films; the other is, of course, -Jaws-, a very different movie. -The Birds- and -Jaws- are the only truly good movies of a genre that easily degenerates into pure schlock, exploitative, low-budget fare with bad scripts and dreadful acting. The two masterpieces of terror by animal assault the human conceit that 'we' own the world. The third best is the merely 'good' -Them-, whose overgrown ants do their predation on a bigger scale -- our scale -- than their usual world.

We may hold the land; the birds own the skies, and they can be anywhere. Only because of their small size are they generally harmless, but if they ever ganged up on us we humans would be in big trouble.

DuMaurier and Hitchcock exploit such a primal fear by turning the tables on us, exploiting our primal fear of sudden, horrifying death from animals striking from above, recalling our monkey-like ancestors who had cause to dread the lethal strike of beak and talon of a hawk or eagle. The birds have gotten organized, and they have chosen to take back their world. Unlike the shark that one never sees striking from dark aquatic depths, we see the birds coming and we fail to believe that they can do anything to us.

Plausible? Not really. At least it's well done, and that is all that we can expect, with the superb cinematography that one would expect from the great Hitch. It's second-rate Hitchcock, but second-rate Hitchcock is better than first-rate work of almost anyone else. This is the only horror film from him in which nature provides such terror. Aside from the original -Jaws- (which I think owes more to -Psycho- than to -The Birds- ), and -Them- (with the overgrown ants that result from irradiation that destroys the controls upon their growth), this is the only animal-attack movie to have cinematic worth.

Putrid, slow-moving, incompetent flick about fictional Klan activity in polarized rural Alabama. The community is in a time warp in which people haven't figured out that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 isn't in effect. Hello, there!

All of the characters have nearly no redeeming value and are cardboard stereotypes, so it's easy to understand why the Klan can be active in such a miserable place.

One star out of ten for this mess, and only because I can't give worse.

This is one of the most enjoyable of movie musicals, one that people across the spectrum of age, experience, and intellectual sophistication can enjoy. That itself is a remarkable achievement! The young romances never sag; the cinematography, sets, and costumes are impeccable and beautiful; all characters are credible. The story never slows and is free of any obvious contrivance for the introduction of a musical number; indeed, the songs aren't predictably 'set up' so that one knows exactly when one will be used, a critical fault of many movie musicals -- but not this one. Sixty years later (2004) it loses nothing. It still looks good, and it seems not to have aged in the least. There's nothing hokey about the movie, which is rare for a musical. One can almost feel oneself transported to upper-middle-class (it is definitely that) in the early 20th century and not want to leave.

The plot is slight by current standards (the prospect of a move to New York to enhance the father's upper-middle class career), but intensity of feeling that avoids going over the top allows us to empathize with the coming-of-age youth whose lives would be disrupted. Mastery of direction well conceals the slightness of plot.

The only movie musicals that I think surpass this one are >The Wizard of Oz< (if one considers it a musical; I consider it more of an adventure story), >Singin' In the Rain<, and >West Side Story<, all in AFI's Top 100 Films List -- and better than >The Sound of Music< because it is less 'dumbed down' than the hokey story of the Von Trapp family.

-The Birth of a Nation- is a technical masterpiece, one of the first convincing settings of a grand epic. Through the Civil War one has a picture little more objectionable than -Gone With the Wind- , the first movie about the Civil War and its aftermath to upstage it. -Gone With the Wind- is also racist by standards of our time.

D.W. Griffith gets obvious credit for creating a convincing story line, for innovative techniques of camera work, and convincing battle scenes. If some parts of it -- especially the racial stereotypes and the mythologized history -- look hokey, then think of how much more sophisticated Americans are ninety years later, when the Ku Klux Klan is an object of ridicule even in the South.

Whatever you say about the message, you must admit that the character of "Silas Lynch" (George Siegmann, obviously a white man in blackface), is one of the most convincing villains of the screen -- a base man who achieves great power as Lieutenant Governor after the Civil War but uses it only for base ends, somewhat analogous to the "Adenoid Hynkel" character that Chaplin created in -The Great Dictator- . Likewise, "Lydia Brown" (Mary Alden, a white woman in blackface), a conniving, devious, but ignorant villainess. Are those characters mere stereotypes? Sure. They are about as realistic as the fake dye on their faces and the shoe polish hair. In 1915, most white people didn't know that.

It is not until the Reconstruction that things get objectionable. Say all that one wants about the Reconstruction governments -- they were on a whole less corrupt and more responsive to the needs of poor people in the South than any that followed until at least the 1960s, even if the poor blacks who won some elections were often ill-prepared for holding power (as if the plantation system were intended to prepare a slave for anything other than abject servitude). The only 'good' blacks are those who subordinate themselves to white people in knowledge of their 'God-ordained, lowly place'. A white do-gooder like "Austin Stoneman" (Ralph Lewis) sees nothing wrong with black power until his daughter Elsie (Lilian Gish) becomes the object of a lurid affection from "Silas Lynch". No matter what one's views on the Ku-Klux-Klan of the Reconstruction era or of later Klans, one must admit that its 'cavalry charge' is impressive.

The great paradox is that D.W. Griffith wanted an anti-war movie, but -Birth of a Nation- ends in the triumph of the Ku-Klux-Klan, a group even more violent than the cardboard villains and crazed fools that Griffith portrays. How could the final scene -- an election in which dirty tricks are played upon potential black voters -- serve a sustainable peace?

Nearly a century later, it isn't -The Birth of a Nation- that has changed; it is we Americans who have changed. America even elected Barack Obama as President.

The very survival of America depended upon the defeat of two monstrous enemies, Nazi Germany and thug Japan, for which racism was the cornerstone of the empires that their leaders sought to build. We can no longer see this gigantic epic, half brilliant and half horrific, as people might have seen it a century ago. Thank God -- and better yet, thank Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, and other real heroes.

Stanley Kubrick's reputation of course relies upon other films, and this one is more likely to impress film students for techniques than any audiences most likely to be disappointed when they are drawn into the odd connection between Kubrick and some major movie stars more than thirty years his junior (Cruise and Kidman) who have no other connections to him. I must admit that for the first thirty minutes all I could think was "What a piece of pretentious rubbish! How could Kubrick soil himself with this?", and then it grew upon me, but not in time to convince me that Kubrick didn't make one film too many (this one) or should have made some other movie as his unintended swan song. The result is mediocrity: half masterful, and half amateurish.

As usual for Kubrick, set design is consistently masterful. Enough of this movie grates on me to damage the rest. This is not an early work of a promising filmmaker; this is the last complete work of a decayed master. Perhaps, as with the other master Hitchcock, his taste failed him as he aged. Perhaps he fell in love with a novel that he thought needed a cinematic treatment -- and bit off far more than he could chew.

Kubrick moves an expressionist novel set in Germany or Austria across an ocean and nearly a century later in New York City in the 1990s, and he gets some interesting results. Interesting, but not wholly-satisfying. Expressionism, over the top a century ago, is silly today even if recent art has gone even more over the top.

First of all, Kubrick's mastery of set design gives a beauty to an ugly story, half pornographic and half a brilliant mystery, and the opulence makes the ugliness of much of the behavior all the more troublesome. The chilly personas of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (and this is deliberate) underscore the ominous qualities of the film.

I find the short, and potentially deadly, excursion of the clinical Dr. Hartford (Cruise) into the secret (Satanist?) ceremony by overhearing a password a bit contrived. Then again, expressionism itself is obsolete because it is contrived; what was over the top then is what alienated risk-seekers search almost routinely.

Kubrick took a chance, and this one spun out of control. For good reason Expressionism did not become more than a cultural fad, dying out about twenty years after its introduction.