Cinema Archive

i'd be shocked if this story didn't end up on the golden screen some time in the not too distant future:

The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.

A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law's VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal -- a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.

Here are some famous movie quotes graphed.

Makes my inner geek smile.

There's a really interesting profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire.

It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. Now television's most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, but his words have never stopped.

* * *

Roger Ebert can't remember the last thing he ate. He can't remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn't happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory -- it wasn't as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz's ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren't they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.

Ebert's lasts almost certainly took place in a hospital. That much he can guess. His last food was probably nothing special, except that it was: hot soup in a brown plastic bowl; maybe some oatmeal; perhaps a saltine or some canned peaches. His last drink? Water, most likely, but maybe juice, again slurped out of plastic with the tinfoil lid peeled back. The last thing he said? Ebert thinks about it for a few moments, and then his eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he looks out into space in case the answer is floating in the air somewhere. It isn't. He looks surprised that he can't remember. He knows the last words Studs Terkel's wife, Ida, muttered when she was wheeled into the operating room ("Louis, what have you gotten me into now?"), but Ebert doesn't know what his own last words were. He thinks he probably said goodbye to Chaz before one of his own trips into the operating room, perhaps when he had parts of his salivary glands taken out -- but that can't be right. He was back on TV after that operation. Whenever it was, the moment wasn't cinematic. His last words weren't recorded. There was just his voice, and then there wasn't.

Like many of my generation, I grew up watching Ebert argue with Gene Siskel over whether a movie deserved a thumbs up or down on At the Movies. After Siskel passed away, I didn't watch the show much anymore. I wasn't a huge fan of his replacement.

I would hear about Ebert here and there, but it wasn't until I heard a story on All Things Considered about this company from Scotland that was reproducing his voice from old recordings so he could speak that I heard anything about his health issues.

I find what has happened to him both sad and uplifting. I wish him all the best. Clearly he's getting along just fine despite what must be an almost intolerable situation. It's certainly nightmarish to contemplate it happening.

More info:

Don't tell me that Mr. T was unavailable? If anything smacks of desperation more than this, I'd like to see it.

Saw the latest Star Trek opus last night in a mostly emtpy theater in Sao Paulo. With a few minor places where the movie looked too much like Starship Troopers, it was quite good. It's probably not going to win any Academy Awards, except maybe some technical ones, but it's worth a watch, especially for casual fans of Star Trek-interesting to see the main characters as young men and women.

The casting of movie was excellent, most notably Zachary Quinto as the young Spock. The guy is just so perfect. Looks right. Sounds right. Is right. Simon Pegg as the young Scotty was also an inspired choice.

I was sort of disappointed that none of the aliens spoke in any language other than English. I was expecting to have some trouble with that part of the movie as the subtitles would have been in Portuguese. I even prepared Raquel that she would have to translate for me, but it turned out to be unecessary. The last time I saw a movie in Brazil, The Lord of the Rings, I completely missed on everything the Elves said because there was no translation in English. No problems on that end here.

Tonight I'm going to see North By Northwest at the old Art Deco Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland. I've never been to this theater and I've never seen North By Northwest on a large screen, so it's very exciting.

North By Northwest is one of my favorite movies. It's a Hitchcock classic, a color Film Noir about an innocent Madison Avenue exec (Cary Grant) who gets mistaken for someone else and winds up trapped in a nefarious plot that he cannot control. The movie feature Cary Grant at his best along with James Mason and very early performances in the careers of Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau.

I've never been a huge fan of the cineplexes and I mourn the closure of every large scale theater. The Paramount doesn't show movies every night, only on a Friday, but it's a start. The Paramount is such a throwback theatre, it has a full bar. The bar opens an hour before the curtain so I should be able to get in at least one martini before the screening starts.

Now I just need to find a decent restaurant in downtown Oakland...

On a friend's recommendation, I recently rented Winged Migration. It wasn't a perfect film, but I really enjoyed it. The photography is simply spectacular. If you enjoy Nature and Wild Kingdom, you'll probably dig this movie.

Granted the narration is a little weak. It doesn't even come close to something like March of the Penguins, and some of the story, which you can see in the special features on the DVD, is just unbelievably contrived. They didn't just go out and photograph the geese flying. Sometimes they would put the gander in a particular situation, release them so they could be photographed crossing the street, for example.

But the shots of the geese are so compelling, it makes up for the minor transgression here and there. Some of the imagery is so beautiful and close that it doesn't look real. It looks like CGI, but it's not. It really has to be seen.

There's a featured on the DVD that describes how they made the film which is truly fantastic. Using the work of legendary psychologist Konrad Lorenz, the production team raised geese and imprinted them to an ultralight plane which they used to guide the birds on their migrations and from which they were able to take their amazing close up shots of the flying geese. Truly amazing.

I discovered the documentary about Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Team, The Road to Paris, while I was reading Bob Roll's Tour de France Companion. I had never heard of it. I went immediately to Netflix to order the DVD, but they didn't have it. I was bummed. Then I tried You Tube and found the entire thing, split conveniently into 11 8 minute and 41 second vignettes. I love the internet.

Over the next couple of days, I watched all the episodes. The movie follows Lance Armstrong's US Postal Service for 27 days of training before the Tour de France. You get insights into both how a major cycling team functions on the inside, how they prepare for races, not just the Tour de France, but the entire European season, who does what on the team. You are privy to the internal machinations and the thought process behind training for the Tour. Finally you actually see Lance training in the rain and the snow and you get a sense of the amount of dedication it takes to win. It's truly amazing to see.

Listening to Johann Bruyneel discuss what it takes to win the Tour, trust in the team, how difficult it is to wear and defend the Yellow Jersey and why it's important not to have until absolutely necessary—all the demands, the media, the drug testing, etc, wears on the riders has given me new understanding for cycling and the Tour.

Here's the first episode:

It's a little hard to find the next episode once you've finished one, so here they all are:

1 Epiosde 1
2 Epiosde 2
3 Epiosde 3
4 Epiosde 4
5 Epiosde 5
6 Epiosde 6
7 Epiosde 7
8 Epiosde 8
9 Epiosde 9
10 Epiosde 10
11 Epiosde 11

The AFI is out with its latest set of lists, this time 10 top 10 lists. There's no list for just "Comedy", only "Romantic Comedy" (When Harry Met Sally should be number one), which is odd. So there's no place to honor The Big Lebowski, definitely the best comedy and one of the best films ever produced (thank you Joel and Ethan).

So while it's an interesting set of lists (and designed to foster debate like this), there are some things that I have a problem with.

I don't know why Field of Dreams is in "Fantasy" and not "Sports". That doesn't make any sense to me. Groundhog Day also appears in this odd "Fanstasy" category and should be in "Comedy", a category the AFI just left out. I'd probably include Presumed Innocent along with "Courtroom Drama". Star Wars: A New Hope is listed as #2 on "Sci-Fi, but I think Empire Strikes Back, which didn't make the list, is a superior film. Raiders of the Lost Ark is nowhere to be found, which is a crime. Nor is The Princess Bride, which should be #1 in "Fantasy" instead of the The Wizard of Oz.

Worst of all, The Natural, probably the 2nd best sports movie ever made (behind Raging Bull), is not even on the list. What a tragedy.

Part of the problem is that so many good movies cross genre boundaries and are particularly hard to categeroize. At the end of the day, it's just a few lists which are totally subjective.

Anyway, just for fun, here's my list of the top 10 American comedies (sorry, Monty Python)

10. Love & Death
9.   Raising Arizona
8.   Fast Times at Ridgemont High
7.   A Fish Called Wanda
6.   Blazing Saddles
5.   Airplane
4.   Fletch
3.   Office Space
2.   Groundhog Day
1.   The Big Lebowski

Honorable Mention: Stripes, Trading Places, Caddyshack, Top Secret, This Is Spinal Tap, Better off Dead, History of the World Part I, Kentucky Fried Movie, Napoleon Dynamite, Austin Powers

Did I miss anything? I'm sure I did since I made this list when I was sitting in a boring meeting and didn't give it much thought. Are they mis-ordered? Let me know.

Okay, Okay. I know you're unlikely to see any movies about fonts in your lifetime, but if you see one (is there more than one?), it should be Helvetica. The film is an in depth look not only into the history and origins of the font in a type foundry in Switzerland, but also about it's pervasive ubquity in the corporate world. Experts in the history and design of fonts are featured discussing their feeling about Helvetica which break down intto essentially two schools.

I finally saw Al Gore's movie this weekend. It was everything I expected. Depressing, disturbing and maddening. Clearly we have a problem, but it seems as though if we act collectively, we can change the disasterous course that we're currently headed down. And what I kept thinking about while I was watching the movies was there's going to be a point, sometime in the not too distant future, where it's going to be too late. We might act, try to change our behavior, but we have passed the tipping point and all efforts will be futile.

The other thing that I always think about when these stories come up, when there's a debate about the science or I hear our morornic president say that the jury is still out on climate science or how he won't sign the Kyoto Treaty because it will be bad for business is that we have a two choices, do something or nothing and there are two possibilities, that the climate is getting warmer, we're causing and it's a problem or the climate is not getting warmer, we're not causing it and there's no problem.

From here you can build a basic four box matrix where there's a problem and we do nothing or we do something and where's there's not a problem and we do nothing or we do something. Or if you look at it another way, we can do nothing and there's either a problem or no problem or we can do something and there's either a problem or no problem.

It seems to me that looking at this matrix, that the benefits of doing something far outweigh the costs of doing something or doing nothing. There is no benefit to doing nothing, even if bamboozlers like Senator Inhofe are right and there's no problem. Regardless of whether or not there is a problem, the efforts that we would make to reduce greenhouse gasses, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and general become better stewards of the environment, would greatly improve our quality of living. And while there is no real debate amongst experts as the the cause of Global Warming, there is great debate about the cost or benefit to the economy of acting.

The head in the sand crowd would have you believe that placing environmental restrictions, improving fuel efficiency, and seeking out alternative sources of energy are going to be detrimental to economy. The truth is the exct opposite. Change is inevitable and there is going to be a new paradigm for living beyond petroleum and coal. Either we are going to stick to our guns or we're going to lead the way. New technologies are coming whether we like it or not. Are we going to be the innovators and bring new technology to the world or is the rest of the world going to innovate and bring us along kicking and screaming? That's the really the only question that matters at this point.

We have a huge opportunity as a country to lead the way, investing in new technology and change the way we live. We need leadership that recognizes this fact and challenges the country to find solutions and solve problems. Sadly, we lack that leadership. This brings the Inconvenient Truth story back to the messenger. Who out there thinks that the US and the world wouldn't be better off if the Supreme Court didn't install the current president in the White House and we'd had someone with the heart, the work ethic and the morality of someone like Al Gore, jr. leading this country and the world?

Comes out tomorrow. Is there anyone who thinks this movie will be anything less than the biggest dog of the year (if not the decade)?

I saw The Machinist last night. I don't know why this flick hasn't gotten more publicity. It's a remarkable film. Christain Bale stars as Trevor Reznik, the paranoid insomniac, anorexic machinist searching for truth through the haze of his self-inflicted disorientation. His performance is amazing. For one thing, he's in every single scene in the movie. His character is dillusional, often confused, on the brink of collapse, and Bale makes it all so believable, all the more so because Bale, who was famous previously for working out like a machine to develop his body for American Psycho, lost a 1/3 of his body weight for film, from a heathy 180 to a sickly holocaust survivor-like 117. His fauce is beyond gaunt. His rips are protruduing. He looks like something from an anatomy class. Apprently he lost the weight by simply not eating. He continued to lose weight during the 40 days of the shoot, It's hard to believe that anyone would have such a committment to a role that he'd be willing to essentially destroy his body, but that is exactly what Bale has done, and you have to respect him for that.

The Machinist is a throwback, full of homages and allusions to Hitchcock and fits nicely into to the genre of modern Film Noir. It's not shot in black & white, but it as well have been as the colors have all been bleached out of the film and the DP shot it with all sorts of interesting, contrasty shadows. So visually you are transported into the bizarre, disorienting world of Trevor where nothing is as it seems. The score which is haunting and subtle could have been pulled right out of a Hitchcock thriller. Best of all the story is told in a flashback. When we first meet Trevor, he's disposing of a dead body. The narrative leads both the audience and Trevor down the path of understanding what went wrong.

There are a few standout performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh and the Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, but it's worth seeing just for Christian Bale.

If you liked films like Fight Club & Mememto, you will love The Machinist

I can't tell you how excited I was when I heard on NPR that Steven Soderbergh is working on a documentary about Spalding Gray on Fresh Air today. The idea, says Soderburgh, is that he has access to a huge collection of Gray's journals, home movies and other writings and he's going to try to create a completely new monlogue from all that material. I don't know if he will be able to put it off, but it will be fantastic to see if he can.

I'm huge fan of the late, great monologuist. I saw one of the last performances he gave in New York right before he committed suicide in April of 2004. I've read most of his books, seen most of his movies, and I feel like like his death was a massive tragedy for world drama.

Soderbergh is hoping to have a cut of it together by this summer or fall so it should come out some time next year. Can't wait.

***UPDATE Three years later, the movie, And Everything Is Going Fine, is done and screening at "Slamdance"

First all, let me say that I really liked Munich. It was a brilliant piece of film making, played out with dramatic flashbacks, great attention to period detail, a period, the 70s, which I think is very challenging to recreate without producing a cartoonish world full of caricature actors. Speaking of which, Eric Bana was scintillating, a huge surprise. Daniel Craig was great (I believe now that he will make a fantastic Bond). Ciaron Hinds, who plays Caesar in HBO's Rome, was also excellent. Geoffrey Rush, as always, sublime. There were many notable performances from actors who I am not familiar with but who played a huge role in coalescing this ensemble cast.

That's all good and well, but it's the subject matter that really interesting to me. As a Jew, this is a very difficult piece of history to come to terms with. I was 2 when the hostages were taken and murdered, so I have no memory of it, but I have seen documentaries and historical retrospectives, so I was probably more familiar than most of the people of my generation about what happened in Munich. It was a disgusting act that achieved very little other than the destruction of several families and the Olympics ideal of nation's competing in the peaceful forum of sport. Israel is still there. The PLO no longer exists in any kind of cohesive form. Palestinians might be on a path to having a national homeland, but who's to say that it wouldn't have happened long ago if not for a series of barbaric acts.

Now, Israel came into existence in 1948, but Jews have been living on that land continuously for at least 2000 years, probably much longer. Who knows when they first came there. If you believe the bible, Abraham, the mythical first Jew, moved there from Ur in Sumeria, but there are no dates. And I don't believe it anyway. What I do know is that we have records from the Romans in text and in monument that the Jews were there. Judea was a country that actually existed. It was sacked by Titus in 79 AD (for more information read about the Arch of Titus). Jews were dispersed around the known world, sent into exile and slavery. Before that Nebuchadnezzar from Babylon invaded Judea, sacked the place and sent the Jews into slavery in what is now Iraq. Judea was ruled by the Babylonians, the Macedonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, briefly by the Crusaders, by the Ottomans again all the way up until World War I when the Turks were defeated by the Allies and the British took control of the Holy Land. They called it Palestine, which was a bastardization of Philistines from the Old Testament. In 1948, after World War II, the UN decided to partition the country giving half to Jews to form Israel and half to the Arabs to form Palestine. Jews weren't all that happy but accepted it. The Palestinians said all or nothing and went to war. Thinking that the war would be quick and decisive, they convinced much of the population to evacuate to the neighboring Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and especially Jordan, which then included all of the West Bank). More Arabs were forced off the land during the subsequent battles for terriotroy, but fuck, it was a war, that shit happens. Unfortunately for the Arabs, they lost the war and they lost the land. Subsequent wars in '52 and '67 lost the Arabs even more land including the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai from Egypt (mostly the 1967 war). Many Arabs never returned to Israel, still hold hope in their hopeless cause for "Right of Return". Meanwhile Arabs who never left are Israeli citizens (How many Jews do you think are citizens of Arab countries?).

Anyway, I digress, but you get the point with my shorter history of Israel. By 1972 Israel was an established military power and the Arabs, fearing that they would not be able to defeat the Jews in a conventional war, turned to terrorism. The result is played out in Spielberg's Munich.

I went through such a range of emotions during this movie. I was angry and bitter. I was amused and laughing (nothing like Jewish humor to a Jew). I was perplexed and enraged. I was morose and disturbed. The movie tells the story of the secret operation to kill all the parties responsible for the 1972 Munich attack, but it was more about what it means to be a Jew and what it means for Israel to exist. The issues are so complex that I have a hard time getting my head around it and articulating my feelings.

I'm strong supporter of Israel. I also want there to be peace in the Middle East. I know this probably will never happen. I know there are people who will never accept Israel despite whatever treaties are signed or agreements formed. Israel, as long as it exists, will be in a perpetual state of war, the sort of war that the Bush Administration wants Americans to think they are in, but in Israel it's real. Suicide bombers explode themselves up in coffee shops and pizza parlors and buses. Katyusha & Qassam rockets are shot over the border from Lebanon and Gaza. As soon as they put up a wall, terrorists find a way under it around it or through it.

Meanwhile, Israel has been fighting these attacks since 1972 and struggling with what it means to be a democracy that sends out killers to eliminate hostile actors, bulldozers to mow down houses, engineers to erect security barriers, soldiers to occupy Arab lands. Many people think that the Jews are some monolithic block that thinks and acts alike, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Israeli society is fractured politically, socially, religiously. As many Jews want to built settlements in the West Bank, many more have tired of the ordeal and moved to Brooklyn or Encino where they don't have to carry a gun or worry about their kids being blown up on the bus, but can still walk to shul and find kosher corned beef.

I don't know. I'm kind of babbling now. Like I said, I don't have much clarity on this issue, just a lot of emotions. I'm not a believer. I don't believe in god. I don't believe in organized religion. But I believe in Israel. But if there were a god, I'd be thanking him every night that there are strong people, Jews, men and women, willing to live in Israel and to die in Israel to preserve the ideal, however conflicted, of a Jewish Homeland.

Back to the movie. As I said, I enjoyed it. And this is despite what I think is a fatal flaw of movies where the actors are not playing American characters, yet they speak perfect English to each other. Israelis do not speak English to each other. They speak Hebrew. If Jim Caviezel can learn lines in Aramaeic or whatever for Passion of the Christ, then Eric Bana and the rest of the non-Jewish cast can learn Hebrew to play Israelis. I know they never will. This is one of the ways Hollywood makes movies more accessible, and I get that, but it irks me nonetheless.

Saw it tonight. So many many thoughts. I need to sleep on it. One thing I will say now is that what happened to the Eric Bana who played a marble statue in Troy and a wooden soldier in Blackhawk Down? The guy was simply amazing as Avner.

Is it me, or does Owen Wilson pretty play the exact same character in every movie he's ever been in?

Has anyone out there seen Before Sunset with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy? I picked it up today at the Oakland Public Library and it srtuck a chord with me. It's about two young people who meet traveling in Europe when they are 23, arrange a rendevous that never happens and lose track of each other for 9 years because in their young, idealistic minds, there was no need to exhange contact infomation. They meet up again in Paris when Celine (Delpy) finds out that Jesse (Hawke) is on a book tour selling his semi-autobigraphical work about their brief fling. This movie is basically a naturalistic conversation about love and what could have been with Paris as a backdrop. Only when I was watching the featurette did I find out that it was a sequel to an earlier film, Before Sunrise, shot 9 years ago, with the same cast about how they met on a train in Austria and fall towards love. I queue'd it up my Netflix and I am so interested to see it.

If Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn't win the Oscar for Best Actor for his tour de force performance as Truman Capote something is wrong with this world. Hoffman is one of world's greatest actors and it's time his incredible body of work is recognized by the Academy. If you want to se his amazing range, go see Capote and then rent The Talented Mr. Ripley where he plays the incomprable snob Freddie Miles. The guys is simply the best.

Considered by many to be one of the best James Bond films ever made, this second outing moves between Venice, Istanbul and other European locales as agent 007 tries to nab a top-secret Russian decoding machine. Features the first appearance by Q (Desmond Llewelyn), a blond Robert Shaw playing a nasty heavy, and even Bond author Ian Fleming in a brief non-speaking cameo during a scene at the train station.

This is description of From Russia with Love from AMC which is showing the movie as part of it's Complete Bond series. Somehow, in all my years of watching Bond films, I never caught a screening of From Russia with Love. So it was refreshing as hell to see Sean Connery in a new setting with a new plot after seeing all the other films god knows how many times. On top of that, AMC is showing completely remastered versions in, get this, letterbox. Holy fucking shit, will wonders never cease.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is great. Here's the cast list:

Peter Coyote .... Narrator
Andrew Fastow .... Himself
Ken Lay .... Himself
Jeff Skilling .... Himself

What more do you need to know? If you're from California or were in California during the rolling blackouts in the early part of this decade, you're going to want to see this movie. It's truly jaw dropping.

I saw it at the Parkway Theater in Oakland which has a restaurant downstairs and couches in the theater. So I lounged back with a pint of Newcastle and soaked it all in.

I finally saw Sideways last night. I had wanted to see it on the big screen when it came out, but I'm actually glad that I waited until last night. That's because if I saw it in the theater, I wouldn't have had a great meal and a nice bottle of wine in front of me. I wouldn't have had steamed artichokes with melted butter. I wouldn't have had seared ahi tuna. I wouldn't have had a baby green salad with blue cheese crumble and balsamic vinaigrette. And I wouldn't have had a bottle of Bonny Doon Big House, nor would I have been able to share it with my friend Jennifer. It was the perfect way to watch the movie.

For the record, I thought Sideways was great. It made me laugh out loud, and it wasn't just because of the wine. I enjoyed the repartee between Miles and Jack. Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church had great chemistry and even though they are so different, you could easily buy into their friendship, especially described by Miles, "I'm not Jack, I'm just his freshman roommate from San Diego State." That just struck a chord for me about the randomness of relationships.

I sense that I am like a lot of guys who related completely to Miles, but secretly wanted to relate to Jack. Miles was a sad and pathetic loser, and I'm not a sad pathetic loser (yet), but there were elements of his character that I see in myself. There's very little of Jack that I see in myself except enjoying wines that taste good without having to understand every little facet of its production.

I'm very familiar with the landscape of the film. I can't count the number of times I've driven the 101 between northern and southern California, passing through the wine country between Santa Barbara and Paso Robles. Solvang and Buellton are incredibly cheesy, but you can't help love them.

Miles seems to fit into that setting perfectly. He's as comfortable around the vineyards as he is uncomfortable around women. His interactions with Virginia Madsen made me want to cringe because I've seen myself do some of the same things. I've even looked at myself in the mirror and said something like, you're such a fucking loser, under similar circumstances. But in the end, even though his novel is unpublished and his life is just as much of a wreck as his car, he is redeemed through the love of a good a woman. That's really any of us on the road to pathetic loserdom can hope for.

I finally saw Ray last night. I enjoyed it. I'm a big Ray Charles fan. I thought Jamie Foxx was brilliant. But I don't think this was a great film. There was a few things that really bothered me. The lip synching for one. I know, I know. It's hard to ask Jamie Foxx to sing like Ray Charles, but the guy is so talented, it would have been much better to have him sing than to have Ray Charles' real voice incongruously coming out of Foxx's mouth. It just didn't fit. The other thing I didn't like was the archival footage of towns Ray would visit. It felt slovenly and lazy for the filmmakers to stick these shots in rather than try to recreate them. This wasn't like JFK where archival footage of all sorts of mediums moved the story along. In Ray, it just didn't work. It felt out of place. It was wrong. That said, I loved the one short shot of LA where you could actually a Red Car moving along the street. When I was growing up in LA, I heard a lot of stories about the Red Car, about how LA was different place before cars and freeways, but I had never actually seen any video, let alone color video, of the Red Cars in motion.

So, to sum up:

Ray Charles :: awesome
Jame Foxx :: brilliant
Ray :: not so awesome
Red Car :: excellent

Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels was on Bravo the other day and I just had to watch it even though I had much better things to do. The movie is now officially on the list of flicks that I will watch whenever, wherever it's on. The story, the accents, the characters, the editing and the cinematography, and the insane drinking scene after the boys are free and clear all make Lock, Stock a keeper. What movies can you watch again and agian and again?

There is a continuum of love/hate that is generally linear, but at the far extremes, the line bends back around to form a circle so that only things that you love passionately, can you also hate with equal fervor. The same emotional calculus can also be applied to movies. Some movies are so bad that they actually whip around the continuum and become good. Case in point: Napoleon Dynamite.

The first time I saw Napoleon Dynamite it was a painful experience. I laughed a little, there were moments, but mostly I looked on in horror. Who could make such a bad movie and why the fuck were people telling me to see it? It was appalling.

It was only the following weekend when I was talking to some my sister's friends at the her house that the brilliance of the film hit me. I was telling them how bad the movie was, but it was always followed by, but there was this one scene, or this time Napoleon says this or did that. I went on and on. I was had myself in stitches just thinking about the movie.

Then I saw it again. It was fucking hilarious.

It could have been that I was seeing with other people who had been talking about it all day, but I don't think so. Some of the freakish genius that is Napoleon Dynamite just ignited peels of laughter. It's so awful, so bizarre, so freakish, so uncomfortable, so insane, that's it's funny.

You just have to see for yourself. In the meantime, enjoy this. I'm off to go wolverine hunting in Alaska with my grandpa.

I don't know how Danny Deckchair ended up in my Netflix queue, but I'm glad it did. I haven't seen a movie that charmed me like that in a long time. It's a modern day fairy tale with just enough Aussie quirkiness to keep it interesting, odd though, since it was written and directed by an American.

Deckchair stars Rhys Ifans in the title role as the disaffected Sydney suburbanite. If you don't recognize the name offhand, you might know Ifans from his role as the wacky Welshman in Notting Hill. He's perfect as Danny, a character you will fall in love with.

Here's the blurb from Imdb:

Based on a true story, the tale of a cement truck driver named Danny, whose long awaited vacation is cancelled thanks to his scheming girlfriend, Trudy. Danny escapes his grim life in suburban Australia and blasts into the skies in a chair tied with helium balloons. A mighty thunderstorm blows him clean off the map, and spits him out far away over the lush green town of Clarence. In this new town, he rockets into the world of Glenda, the town's only parking cop. While the media back home becomes obsessed with the story of his disappearance, Danny gets to reinvent himself in this new town, and in his great adventure, he discovers a true soulmate in Glenda. Fate catches up with him eventually, as Danny's true identity is revealed and Trudy--now a tabloid celebrity--comes to the idyllic town to claim Danny and drag him back to Sydney. Danny, however, is a changed man; he's discovered what it means to be happy and has found a new self-worth. Saying farewell to Trudy, Danny makes a dynamic re-entry to the town of Clarence--determined to win Glenda back again and embrace his newfound zest for life.

My Netflix queue is growing thin these days. I'm finding it harder and harder to find good movies to watch. Very little that comes out in the theaters interests me and browsing the stacks at Blockbuster is a pure horror show. Anyone out there in internet land want to recommend some good flicks for me?

{If you want to recommend a movie, please leave a comment, rather than replying by email, so everyone can see it. Also, if you're on the mailing list and no longer desire to be, just send me an email I will remove you. Honestly, I don't recognize half the addresses signed up for notification, so it's probably a good time to purge the list. Thanks.}

Here's a list of movies I've seen this year:

Shaun of the Dead ****
Liberty Heights ****
The Third Man *****
Team America World Police ***
Napoleon Dynamite ***
Friday Night Lights ***
De-Lovely ****
The Aviator ****
Control Room ***
Day Without a Mexican *
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ****
What Planet Are You From? **
King Arthur *
Shattered Glass ****

If you want to see a really crappy film, go rent King Arthur. I stayed away when it was out in theaters, but curiosity got the best of me, I Netflix'd it and I really wish I hadn't. If you're at all a fan of the Arthurian legend, you're going to hate this take where Arthur is nothing more than a pawn of the Roman government of Britain. Who's knows if there's any veracity to it, but who cares? Why take a great legend and spoil it with historical accuracy when the new story is so mundane?

Here's the basic storyline. Arthur is the leader of a group of horseman conscripted by the Romans as youths from their province where Eastern Europe is now and taken to Britain to keep the peace against the Saxons on the north side of Hadrian's Wall. On the eve of their freedom, a bishop from Rome commands that they take on one last mission, to save a Roman family behind enemy lines. Of course, there are subplots and a few twists and turns including Arthur rescuing Guinevere from a Christian torture chamber. Some of the fighting scenes are spectacular, but shit, the movie as a whole is a piece of excrement.

I have a hard time getting over the Leonardo DiCaprio's boyish looks. He's a fine actor, underated, definintely. However his look turns everything he does into a cartoon. He's brilliant in something lighthearted like Catch Me If You Can, but it's hard to take him seriously in a dramatic role like The Gangs of New York, Titantic or The Man in the Iron Mask.

The same could easily be said of Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, that is, until the end of the movie when DiCaprio transforms himself into a Hughes. The scene where Hughes testifies before the Senate is magnificent. If you could give an Academy Award for just one scene, surely DiCaprio would get it.

The film itself, while self-indulgent at times, is an homage not just the iconic Howard Hughes, but to the era. The music, the clothing, the style. It was all spectacularly recreated and beautifully filmed. It's a long movie, so grab some popcorn, sit back and enjoy.

I'm not a Limey Bastard, I'm a Tasmanian Bastard

Jude Law's cameo as Errol Flynn was great. He was on screen for only a few minutes, but he was perfect. His was only one of a number of standout performances from the always fantastic Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn to Kate Beckinsale's stunning Ava Gardner. There was another strong effort from the reliable John C. Reilly as Hughes' right hand man Noah Dietrich.

I finally saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. It was in theaters when I was living in Vail and I didn't get a chance to see it. Hard to believe anyone would think it was anti-semitic.

If you haven't already seen it, do yourself a favor and rent The Station Agent.

Peter Dinklage gives a slick performance in the title role as a man who moves to take up residence in a small town station house left to him by a co-worker (a short but sweet performance by Paul Benjamin) who passed away.

There's really nothing to this movie other than a small assemblage of psycological damaged characters who rotate around each other in the samll town of Newfoundland, New Jersey. But the film is beautifully shot and it deals with subjects that are rare in American cinema these days, most notably, reality.

It's charming. The music is great. Rent it.

There are some movies that you see all the time on TV, like Heaven Can Wait, for example. There are others that come out in the theaters and then disappear from the collective consciousness. The Verdict falls into this category.

I saw The Verdict when it came out. I was 12 or so. I saw it at the Mann Regent in Westwood, land of movie theaters. Even at that age, I was impressed. Paul Newman should have won the 1982 Academy Award for Best Actor for his tortured performance as Frank Galvin in The Verdict. Instead it went to Henry Fonda for On Golden Pond. When Newman won the award for The Color of Money it widely believed it was a "career award" to make up for that other slights, and well deserved too.

At the insistence of my friend Anita, I finally watched the DVD on Monday. All that I really remembered about the film was this image of Newman in a bar backlit against a pane of windows. The movie didn't disappoint. It's a little dated (can you imagine a lawyer without a cell phone and does anyone remember Eastern airlines?), but on balance it still stands up as one of the classics of legal cinema with weighty performances not only by Newman but also by James Mason and Jack Warden. Paul Newman is such an enormous talent.

Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super Size Me was just the movie to watch to keep anyone from overindulging at the Thanksgiving table.

Spulock's movie documents his plunge down the fast food dark side to eat nothing but Mickey D's for thirty days. His rules included trying everything on the menu, not consuming anything that McDonald's did not sell (including aspirin, which his doctor prescribed when he started having chest pains), and only "super-size" when asked.

This movie was truly disturbing. There are so many nasty things to choose from, but I will give you but a few.

*Spulock includes session with doctors and nutritionists pre, during and post consumption in which he goes from the picture of perfect health to someone who's liver was pickling and on the verge of heart failure.

*He barfs the first time he tries to get down a super sized Mac meal.

*He shows a group of first graders a series of pictures. More can recognize Ronald McDonald than George Washington or George Bush.

Hopefully no one out there in the world is eating McDonald's or any fast food three times a day (And I say that as a former employee and a shareholder). You just have to see this movie for yourself. You'll never look at fast food the same way again.

Just this week I watched all three of the first Trilogy of Star Wars. It's something you have to do every so often. This time the movies I saw were not the same as the ones I had seen in the theater or the even the ones I had seen on TV or on video. These new DVDs are updated with new scenes that George Lucas has added or amended to "improve" the films and remake them the way he had originally intended.

Here's what Lucas has to say about it:

To me, the special edition ones are the films I wanted to make. Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished. It's abandoned or it's ripped out of your hands, and it's thrown into the marketplace, never finished. It's a very rare experience where you find a filmmaker who says, "That's exactly what I wanted. I got everything I needed. I made it just perfect. I'm going to put it out there." And even most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work now. They've got a new perspective on it, they've got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done.

I wanted to actually finish the film the way it was meant to be when I was originally doing it. At the beginning, people went, "Don't you like it?" I said, "Well, the film only came out to be 25 or 30 percent of what I wanted it to be." They said, "What are you talking about?" So finally, I stopped saying that, but if you read any interviews for about an eight- or nine-year period there, it was all about how disappointed I was and how unhappy I was and what a dismal experience it was. You know, it's too bad you need to get kind of half a job done and never get to finish it. So this was my chance to finish it.

Of course, these are Lucas' films and he can go what he wants with them, even if it rubs some fans, like me, the wrong way. I think some of the improvements, like the addition of matte paintings of Mos Eisley in A New Hope or the changing of the song at the end of Return of the Jedi are good. Almost all of the changes give the films more texture and depth. There are only two that bothered me.

The first was the scene between Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt in Mos Eisley just before the Millenuim Falcon takes off on its abortive mission to Alderaan. Lucas cut this scene from the original release because the didn't have the money or the technology to make Jabba realistic, which is understandable considering it was in the mid 1970s and George Lucas was a relatively unproven commodity working on a film that the studio simply did not get. However I think it was a stroke of good luck that removed Jabba from the film because he became sort of mythic character until he was finally revelead in Jedi. The shroud of mystery has been lifted that make his appearance in the final film so outstanding.

The second is relatively minor in comparison. At the end of Return of the Jedi, when Luke is moves away from the celebrations at Endor and sees Obi-Wan, Yoda and Anakin in the Force, he used to see Sebastian Shaw along with Alec Guinness and the Frank Oz puppet of Yoda. Sebastian Shaw played the older Anakin Skywalker when Luke removed Darth Vader's mask. Now, instead he sees Hayden Christensen. It just doesn't make any sense. If he sees a young Anakin, why not a young Obi-Wan. He should he Ewan McGregor instead of Guinness. I know it's not a big deal, but there it is. I don't know how that could have been Lucas' original intent since Hayden Christensen wasn't even born when the first movies were made. But, whatever, there are his films and he can do what he wants with them.

These are still great, timeless films. Something about the timing( I was 7 when the first "Star Wars" came out and people were lining up around the block to see it), the casting (can you imagine Kurt Russell as Han or William Katt as Luke) and the technology were serendipitous. I will love them to the end of my days and I hope one day to be able to share them with my kids.

You're looking at him.

I didn't really know Gordo Cooper, but I felt like I did. Almost everything I know about this man comes from reading Tom Wolfe'sThe Right Stuff and repeatedly watching the movie in which he was played with great charm by Dennis Quaid. The power of both the performance and the time have etched Gordo Cooper indelibly in my mind.

Gordo Cooper died yesterday. Via Con Dios, Hot Dog

The 1972 Munich Olympics were supposed to be the Olympics of Peace, a showcase for the new democratic Germany. But celebration turned to tragedy as Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village and took Israeli athletes hostage.

On the even on the 2004 Athens games, an Olympiad many suspect will be marred by the specter of terrorism, I watched the documentary One Day in September about the events that unfolded that dark day in Bavaria.

The film details not only the attacks, but how the operations to rescue the Israelis were botched time and again by the German authorities ultimately ending in the death of 11 athletes and all but three of the 8 terrorists. The tragedy unfolds through first hand footage from ABC (thank you, Jim Makay) and subsequent interviews, including the startlingly revealing descriptions of Jamal Al Gashey, the one terrorist still living (the two others were assassinated by the Mossad after being released from prison in Germany).

It was sad and awful event not only in the history of the Olympics, but in the world. One can only hope and pray that the massive attention paid to security in Athens will have the desired effect of keeping these games safe.

It always bothers me when a great Hollywood classic like The Manchurian Candidate gets remade. What's the point? The remake is almost never as good as the original. What they should do is remake bad movies. Take some old piece of tripe from the 30s or 40s, rework the script, add some stars and a dose of modern movie magic and you could have a great film.

The idea of this updated< i>Manchurian Candidate is absurd, because the brainwashing that takes place during the Korean War when the opposition was significantly Chinese is replaced in the remake with the first Gulf War. Where are the Manchurians in the Middle East? What kind of supidity is this?

I finally saw F911 this week and I've had some time to reflect on it so here it goes. The film brought up a number of emotions and when I sat in the theatre watching it, I was supremely uncomfortable. The opening scene about the 2000 presidential election opened up old wounds. I can remember driving home from work on election day. I was driving up the 101 to Burlingame listening to NPR report that Gore had taken Florida. That settled it essentially, the election was over. But by the time I got into my apartment, the situation had changed.

Now I'm not a Democrat or Republican. I'm a independent moderate. I had wanted John McCain to win the election and still think we'd be far better off with the Arizona Senator in the White House than any of the 3 choices that the we had in early November 2000. I wasn't a gigantic Gore fan, but I was decidedly anti-Bush.

This quote is by far and away my favorite on-screen Brando moment. You won't see it on the news featurettes about his life where you'll hear him intone repeatedly that he could have been a contender, or scream for Stella or excoriate someone for coming to him on the day of his daughter's wedding, asking for justice without the courtesy to call him "Godfather". You will hear it if you rent "The Freshman."

After a long period during the 80s where Brando made no films, he came back strong with an Oscar nomination in "A Dry White Season" and then did "The Freshman", a comedy with Matthew Broderick and Bruno Kirby. In this film, he does a brilliant parody of his own Godfather persona. Like Brando himself, the role is pure genius and if you haven't already seen it, you should go out and rent it. You should go out and rent any Brando movie that you haven't seen for that matter.

I just witnessed something that was as absurd piece of television as I have ever seen. Crossfire on CNN just had a show where the topic of debate was Michael Moore's new documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. This movie has been the source of huge controversy when it was thrust into the limelight after winning the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, so it's natural that Crossfire would eventually get around to it.

The problem is that neither of the hosts, James Carville or Tucker Carlson, had seen the film. And only one of the guests Arianna Huffington, of all people, had seen the film and was there to support it. The other guest, Melanie Morgan, a conservative talk show host (is there another kind) from KGO in the Bay Area, took the position that no one should see the film, even though she hasn't seen it, which seems rather indefensible on a number of fronts.

I can understand why conservative pundits want to attack this film. Because even if Moore's assertion's don't have any veracity, and I'm not judging one way or the other, it works against their man in the White House. But while doing so, they risk at great damage to themselves coming up against first amendment arguments in the Constitution they hold so dear, and rightly so.

I recently saw Troy, the Wolfgang Peterson epic based loosely on The Iliad. I went into the theater expecting to be disappointed and I was not let down.

Some of the elements of the movie were just plain comical like the "Port of Sparta" (Sparta is in the middle of the Peloponnese peninsula and landlocked. Peterson could have meant the port of Cranae, but why not say it?) And the sun rising over the plains of Troy which face west was absurd (I've stood on the plains of Troy, and I have a good sense of direction). And Odysseus certainly did not get his idea for the Trojan Horse from seeing a foot soldier whittling one. Paris comes into Helen's boudoir at the beginning of the flick, Helen turns to him and says, "Last night was a mistake." Oh, come on. The fact that Achilles is far better looking than that Paris is something we just meant to ignore, I suppose. Helen didn't leave with Paris for his sparking wit.

Then Peterson takes a few liberties with the story. Let me give you a few examples. The Greeks decide to go war and the next thing you see is a flotilla of ships heading out to Asia Minor. What about the ten years the Greeks spent at Aulis waiting for a favorable wind? (And the war takes ten more years, so the characters would have aged two decades by the time Troy finally falls to tickery). What about Agamemnon sacfricing his daughter Iphegenia to appease the gods, who were notably absent from the picture? What about Achilles trying to save Iphegenia which set the tone for the conflict between him and Agamemnon during the war?. Hector kills Menelaus ending a duel that was supposed to be between Paris and the Spartan king, but in the literature, Menelaus survives the war. He is visited later by Telemachus, the son of Odysseus in The Odyssey. (That's Book 4, in case you're scoring at home.) Priam's wife Hecuba is cut out of the story enitrely, as is his daughter Cassandra, a pivotal player in the real narrative. Then at the end, when the Trojans are fleeing, Peterson takes a page out of Virgil's Aeneid by including a young Aeneas who takes instruction from Paris to go forth and found a new Troy, which he does, according to legend, on the River Tiber in the Italian peninsula. But in myth, Aeneas was not a young man during the war, he was one of the major warriors and when he flees, he does does so carrying his father Anchises on his shoulders, not the work of the young man pictured in the movie.

Am I nitpicking? Maybe. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. A real classicist could cut this film ribbons, and deservedly so. Why does Hollywood have an obligation to get it right? Because more and more people in the world are relying on movies for facts. How many people are actually going to take the time to read The Iliad let alone learn ancient Greek and read the material in the original? Hollywood therefore needs to be more circumspect than ever about putting out crap like this that hoi polloi will take for authenic.

I'm not talking about ex-Cons. I'm talking about Con-Artists. I'm talking about The Grifters, The Usual Suspects, The Thomas Crowne Affair (both the Steve McQueen original and the Pierce Brosnan remake), and Confidence.

For my money, the best hands down is David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner with Campbell Scott as the dupe Joe Ross and Steve Martin brilliant in the role of Julian 'Jimmy' Dell, the slicker than slick con-man, proving once again that former comedians make the best actors.

The plot twists and turns and you suffer along with Ross as he muddles his way through and falls into a trap set by Dell. The pace is subtle. The music is sublime. The film is eminently watchable.

The only major problem with the film is Rebecca Pidgeon, an astonishingly horrible actress who only manages to work because, well, she's fucking the director.

I recently saw Diner again, one of my favorite flicks and possibly the greatest work by director Barry Levinson, in his directorial debut, I might add. A great part of the genius of the film is the casting. It's perfect. The movie launched the careers of previously unknowns Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Timothy Daly, Ellen Barkin and Paul Reiser. However, the tour de force performance is by a young Kevin Bacon in the role of Timothy Fenwick, jr. If you haven't seen this movie, go see it for Kevin Bacon. He's simply brilliant.

I leanred a interesting behind the scenes details when I watched the documentary on the DVD. The most incredible, though hardly surprising, is that the studio, Warner Brothers, didn't like the film. They didn't know what to do with it since Diner didn't really fall into any set genre of the time. The plot is of secondary importance the relationships between the characters. There are no really outcomes or conclusions or closure, per se. The focus instead is on the importance of relationships between friends, between family and between people and place. So Warner Brothers shelved the movie. It was only after Diner was given a rave review in the New Yorker, who had somehow gotten ahold of a print, that the studio was shamed into releasing the movie.

All you have to do is watch the trailier to realize that the studio had no idea what this film was all about. Their tag line for the flick is "Suddenly, life was more than french fries, gravy and girls." What the hell is that? Stupid idiots. It's amazing how grossly overpaid the incompetent idiots are who run major studios.

Of the many great conversations that take place in the film, the most memorable, and probably most pivotal to the theme, is the one where Modell (Paul Reiser) asks, who would you listen to if you were making out, Mathis or Sinatra?

No Question. Old Blue Eyes. Hands down.

If you haven't seen Diner, go down to the video shop and rent it. You can thank me later.

Last night I went to the video store to pick up a few DVDs and I experienced a familiar sensation. There are so many crap movies on the shelves, I had a hard time finding something I wanted to dedicate two hours of my life to. I can't believe half this shit gets made let alone watched.

It's not that there are no good movies in the world. There are tons. They just seem to be pushed off the shelves by this crapola, Ernest goes here, Ernest goes there. American Psycho 2, endless aisles of shit flicks. Do these movies really need to be in the digital format? I don't think so. Let's leave these horrible movies on VHS where they belong.

Maybe there should be some body of film experts that determines whether or not a movie is fit to be released on DVD. Back to the Future 3 would certainly not make the list. This would spare us the trouble of sorting through this garbage.

I ended up renting Citizen Kane (because I haven't seen it in ages and I wanted to see something good) along with Bowfinger and Bringing Out the Dead, neither of which I have high hopes for.

I recently saw War Photographer, a documentary about one of my personal heroes, James Nachtwey, considered by many the greatest war photographer ever. The film was both moving and incredibly disturbing, but having pored over Natchwey's photos, I was expecting that.

What I really enjoyed about the film was seeing the methodology of this great photographer. The documentary film makers attached a micro-videocamera onto Natchwey's Canon 1-V so that you could see over his trigger finger right into the action he was shooting. You could see him change shutter speeds and aperture settings. I saw that he used 400 speed film, which is a surprise since his pictures are so sharp. You could see how meticulous he was about taking notes, and about keeping his camera clean in less than ideal circumstances. You could see how he traveled. You could see how interacted with his subject matter. You could see how close he was to the action. It was amazing.

If you want to check out some of Natchwey's work, and I highly recommend it, though it's not for the faint of heart, here are some sites:

James Natchwey's site
www.jamesnachtwey.com/

Salon: James Nachtwey
http://dir.salon.com/people/feature/2000/04/10/inferno/index.html

Times - James Natchwey
http://wtc10048nyc.free.fr/174.html

There's an Italian Film Festival playing at the theater across the street from my brother's place. The festival is showing classics like Cinema Paradiso and Il Postino, but it's also got some current movies. Today I saw Sunday Lunch or Il Pranzo della Domenica

Here's the description:
This is the family portrait of an urban tribe of our times. The film begins with an accident that happens to Franco during her ritual Sunday lunch. The old lady slips in the kitchen and breaks here hip. She is taken to a hospital where she will have to spend a few months, looked after her by her daughters. The story recounts what happens to her and her family during this long convalescence. All the tangled knots in the emotional and sentimental relationships and sentimental relationships of her nearest and dearest are brought out into the open. Underlying tensions explode. (actually, wackiness ensues).

Sounds horrible, right? I don' know who wrote the text, but I don't think whoever did saw the movie. If I had to pay for it (the festival is free), there's no way in hell I would have gone after reading that. But the movie turned out to be brilliant, humorous and full of wickedly interesting characters.

The story is about an overbearing matriarch of an Italian family whose accident (broken femur, not hip, incidentally) is the catalyst for a series of vignettes about the troubled lives of her three daughters. The blonde daughter is married to nursery owner with bad ticker but a good heart (quelle le paradox). The redhead is married to a bleeding heart liberal who's unable to control his temper and keeps getting fired from jobs (remind you of someone?). The brunette daughter is married to a philandering lawyer (cliché, yes, but the guy is hilarious).

Try to see it anywhere you can.

There's an interesting article on Salon.com about Mel Gibson's forthcoming movie, "The Passion", an anti-Semetic opus about the life of Jesus. The basic complaint is that the movie portrays the Jews "as bloodthirsty and vengeful" killers. I find this a trfile disturbing. When are people going to get over the "Jews killed Jesus" thing? I suppose never. Apropos of nothing, but didn't the Pope absolve us a few years back?

There are a few of "Jesus killers" amongst us in Samoa. For me, it's not such a big deal, since I live in Apia and don't have to go to chruch. I have a colleague, however, who lives in one of the most remote villages off the main road on Savai'i. She told me that her faifeau, or pastor, once referred to her as the "Anti-Christ". It would be pretty funny if weren' so damn scary.

You know what I say? Thank goodness for the healing powers of organized religion.

It must be a director's dream to not only be able to completely direct every aspect of the shot, but also to have a team of the finest digital animators in the world to make it a reality. The animators at Pixar are just absolute geniuses. There's no question about it. Their unbelievable attention to even the smallest detail is amazing. I have so much respect for their work. The animation is simply brilliant.

I saw Finding Nemo last night at the Magik Cinema downtown and was floored by how good it was. There are so many aspects of the film that would be interesting to talk about, but what I liked the most is how well they nailed the accents for the fish.

It's one thing to have a grizzled Angel Fish and get Wilem Dafoe to voice it. It's entirely another thing to have lobsters with Boston accents, a Great White Shark from Australia, and dueling Swordfish speaking with upper crust English accents.

My favorite of them all was Crush, the turtle. It might be that I just swam with turtles over the weekend and have tortugas on the brain. Or it might be the California surfer accent is just so perfectly suited for the laid back easy going tortoises, that I just fell for it.

Whatever the case, I my admiration for Pixar continues to grow which each successive opus.

I rented "The Recuit" over the weekend and was completely underwhelmed. Colin Farrell's performance was really weak. It might as well have been Freddie Prinze, Jr. The music was horrible. And the story did nothing to engage me. It's all the more disappointing because this storyline of intrigue around CIA recruits has so much potential.

This all brings to mind something that I've been thinking about for years which is why movies get re-made. It seems that Hollywood has a passion for remaking movies that were good. Movies lke "Pshyco" and "Cape Fear" are good examples. This makes no sense to me at all.

What I think is that movies like "The Recuit", which sucked in the original version, should be remade. Start from scratch, fine tune the script, rework the score and turn it into a movie worth watching again and again.

Can you think of any movies that should be remade?

I just came from seeing "The Whale Rider" and I can't stop thinking about it. The movie gave me chills.

If you haven't seen it, I don't want to give away the plot, so I'll only say that this isn't "Free Willy". This film is a monument to Maori culture. The story illuminates the origin of the Moari people without glamorizing aboriginies and deals with some of the more difficult issues facing indigenous people without dehumanizing them.

"Whale Rider" is filled with rich characters, great warmth and humor in unsuspected moments. The acting, the writing, the photography are all first rate.

Most notable is Keisha Castle-Hughes. Her performance of the title role was so perfect it's hard not to believe that screenplay wasn't written for her. She was simply adorable.

The San Francisco Chronicle gave it a C+ proving once again that it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Do yourself a favor: Find out where it's playing in your neighborhood and go see it. And if you're even somewhat emotional, bring some tissues with you.

I wish someone would make a movie like this about Samoan culture.

Last night, a friend of mine rented a DVD and brought it over to my house. This movie was the Korean action flick, Shiri. Shiri was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It should be called Shit-ri.

Suppossedly, this movie was a huge box-office smash in Seoul. It's the highest gossing film in the history of the country, breaking records set by Titanic. At 5 million bucks, Shiri was also the most costly film in Korean history. Most of this money was spend on fake blood and guns rented from some outfit in Hollywood.

Perhaps the problem was that was the subtitles were lacking and made it difficult to follow the plot. Somehow I doubt that. It was just a piece of Hong Kong inspred wholesale violence piece of tripe that was popular in Korea because it dealt with the reunification of the peninsula in a modern, somewhat hip way.

One of the few pleasures of the film from comes from the name of the lead actor: Han Sukyu.

My friend Van received a package from home yesterday and amongst the various things inside was a the DVD of Amelie. We rushed back to her place to watch it.

I hadn't seen it since it was out in the theaters in the States. I caught it in a little art house theater around the corner from my girlfriend's place in Lafayette, CA.

There's so much that I love about this film, but I'll just share a few things with you.

The special effects are not ground breaking, but are really clever, things like Amelie melting after Nico comes to the 2 Windmills cafe. The one I really adore is when the 4 pictures of the same guy, the ones that Amelie wrote a note on and gave to Nico, start talking. This is both an incredible piece of film making and a bit of genius acting with the same actor doing four strands of seemless, simulataneous dialogue.

I love the artwork of the artist Michael Sowa that decorates the Amelie's bedroom perfectly embodies the light-hearted, playful spirit of the film. It's so rare to find this ideal inter-medium match. Do a search on the web for Michael Sowa. You won't be disappointed.

Then there's the great videos that Amelie sends to her housebound friend, Raymond Dufayel. They are so fanciful. I love the one with the horse jumping out in front of the Tour de France riders. It's might be the least interesting of all the clips, but it's timely with the Tour getting underway this weekend.

Of course, I'm fond (and envious) of the world trekking gnome. Wouldn't I be, though?

Probably the best thing about Amelie is that the film is so deep, so rich, so well made, that everytime you watch it, you can find something new and wonderful.

I did something on Saturday that I don't think I've ever done before in my life. I watched a movie three times, back-to-back-to-back. And this was after watching it for the first time the night before. This movie was Adaptation.

This is one of the best movies I've come across. Quite a nice surprise, since I hadn't even heard of it until I saw it on the shelf at the movie rental place next to the Peace Corps office.

There is so much to recommend in Adaptation that it's hard to know where to begin. First you have the brilliant performances by Nick Cage, Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep. Cooper won an Oscar for his role, but it was really Cage, playing the twin screenwriting siblings, who stole the show. Not only is Cage not his normal suave self, quite the opposite actually--he must have put on 40 pounds for this role, but he creates two characters at once so similar that you believe that they are identical twins and so different that you forget it's the same actor. It's is a remarkable effort.

The movie is filled with elements that I love. The story is told in a nonlinear fashion, moving seamlessly in time and between the two stories. My favorite movies all involve flashback as the main storytelling motif. Fight Club, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Il Conformisto, Sunset Boulevard and on and on.

There there's the self-reflexivity. The movie is so self-conscious. Since this is a movie about making itself, this is natural, but it's done in a way that is both funny and clever. During the course of the movie, Kaufman is trying to come to grips with his inability to adapt "The Orchid Thief" into a screenplay. You constantly see him struggle. Yet when he has an epiphany, you are rewarded with the machinations behind something that already has or will appear on screen.

I rented 8 Women (called 8 femmes, in French) last night. There was nothing particulary special about this flick, other than that the entire cast was female. Well, except for the small role of Marcel, who had no lines and was seen only from the back. It's so rare for a movie to have even one decent role for a female, and this movie had so many. Very refreshing.

The movie was essentially Clue. 8 people trapped in a house with a dead body. Everyone has a motive. Everyone has the means. Everyone has an opporunity. Very cliche.

8 Women is also a musical, which, as I genre, I sometimes find hard to palette. I don't mind the music. In fact, I generally enjoy it. What bothers me is that we're supposed to be following the dramatic plot, then not wonder at all about the characters breaking into choreographed dance and song numbers. I don't know about your town, but other than the Castro and maybe a few other places around the world, this is not a regular occurance. I find I can't suspend my disbelief.

The reason I rented 8 Women is that I'll watch just about anything with Emmanuelle Beart, the sexiest woman on film (pictured above).

I caught a screening of Apocalypse Now at Magic Cinema today. There were so few people in the theater, it was almost a private screening. There was no one in the 15 rows in front of me.

I had seen the movie many time before, but always on VHS or DVD. Seeing this magnum opus on the big screen in Dolby was truly inspiring. The film is littered with brilliant performances from Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando, just to name a few. Robert Duvall as the surfing-made air cav Lt. Colonel Kilgore might be one of the best roles ever on the big screen.

The movie seems to capture the chaos of war better than any other about the period. The journey up the river has been used as a metaphor in many genres and is ideally suited to the telling of this story through the eyes of Captain Willard.

I just rented Snow Falling on Cedars last night. (The video store next to the Peace Corps office has over 2000 DVDs in stock.) I wasn't expecting much.

I read the book a few weeks ago and it is one of the best novels I have ever read. It's beautifully told story of forbidden love told against the backdrop of a murder trial on a small island in the Puget Sound in post-WW II America.

The author David Guterson spent 10 years researching the book to make even the tiniest details of the time accurate, especially those dealing with relations with Japanese-Americans and the emotions around the internment camps.

Usually when a book is this deeply textured and well written, the film adaptation is a terrible disappointment. Simply too much detail of the novel has to be extracted in order to fit into the 2-hour film format demanded by the minor attention spans of most Americans.

Well, so Matrix Reloaded isn't going to win Best Picture, but the special effects were incredble. There were a couple of fight scenes that took fight scenes to a whole new level.

I'm not going to give anything away for those people out there who plan on seeing this movie. All I have to say is plan on enjoying it even if you don't buy into the story line, which I don't.

Keanu Reeves gives his standard stiff-as-cardboard performance, but he's brilliant in the fight scenes. Carrie Anne Moss is excellent as Trinity. Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus is one cool cat. Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith is subtle perfection.

Then there are some notable performances by new faces.

Lambert Wilson is a genius as the french speaking, wise cracking, programmer/bad guy. His wife Persephone, played by Monica Bellucci from the sexy Italian flick Malena, downright burns up the screen in her few scenes.

Go see it. It's Fun.

HEY HEY HEY! Look what we have here.

Matrix Reloaded is playing in our theaters here in SAMOA, a full five days before the release date in States. Take that!

Yes, that's right. Our little speck of an island country has the Matrix Reloaded in Dolby surround sound, I might add, at the Magik Cinema downtown right now, today.

How did that happen?

I haven't got the slightest clue and I don't care. I'm going to the 3:30 screening. I'll let y'all know how it is. Stay tuned!

Last night after I dried off and had some dinner, I cooked up a pop of popcorn and put the Talented Mr. Ripley on. There are a few movies out there in the world that I can watch again and again and Ripley is one of them. I think this movie is really underappreciated. It got skunked at the Oscars despite standout performances from Jude Law, Gwenyth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and especially Matt Damon, who in a tour de force performance as the tormented Tom Ripley, is in virtually every scene in this movie. Ripley also includes a stand out job from probably the most talented actor working today, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who lights up the screen as the philandering Freddie Miles.

Then there is the incredible backdrop of Italy on the canvas of some of the best jazz tracks ever created from Dizzie Gillespie, Chet Baker, Charlie Parker & Miles Davies, just to name a few, all right there on the cutting edge in 1958. There was an incredible energy of cool. All this wicked jazz music is complimented with a score of haunting beauty by Gabriel Yared and set against classical music that creates a wonderful tension throughout the movie.

I just saw Daredevil in a packed house (on Good Friday, mind you) at the Magik Cinema. Not a great movie, but they did a decent job with the "blind" special effects. Plus Colin Farrell was just plain freaky cool as Bullseye.

The movie reminded of another flick, If You Could See What I Hear that I watched repeatedly when I was kid. It's about the life of blind musician Tom Sullivan, played brilliantly by a young Marc Singer before crap like Beastmaster put his career in the shit can.

Daredevil really wasn't any good, but since there are so few options for entertainment here, the threshold for attending becomes much lower. As people like to say, it's good enough for Samoa.

Johnny English is probably not going to be winning any academy awards, but it's funny as hell (and good enough for Samoa). Rowan Atkinson is a physical comedy genius. There are some scenes in the flick that are classic. And the choice of John Malkovich as the villan was brilliant. His accent was fucked up, but the nationality was so perfect.

Possession is probably not going to go down as one of the great "Merchant Ivory" films, but it was an enjoyable film despite Gwyneth Paltrow with her annoyingly fussy British accent. The best part was the scenery, the shots inside the basement of the British Museum and Aaron Eckhart's wardrobe. It's so hot and humid here sometimes that I dream of wearing sweters, cords, and leather jackets instead of flip-flops, shorts and tank tops. As they in these parts, good enough for Samoa.