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© 2004-2010  by John Varley; all rights reserved

M*A*S*H (1970) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com

The Machinist (El Maquinista) (Spain, 2004) I don’t know why the IMDb lists the Spanish title first, except that all the producers have Hispanic names. Oh, wait, I see that it was filmed in Barcelona. I’d never have guessed.

A man claims not to have slept in a year. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but you’d figure big-time hallucinations, so we assume a lot of what we see may not be real. His life is clearly coming apart, but he doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. A loner, but not crazed. He even has a sense of humor, and is reaching out to a waitress at the airport and a whore with a heart of gold. So you wonder what is really going on, and when you find out at least it’s not some lame SF idiocy or supernatural bullshit. It worked okay, in that it was believable, but still a bit of a letdown. The movie looks great in a creepy way, and the music is pure dark and spooky.

But the real story on this movie is that Christian Bale lost 60 pounds (from 180) to play it. I submit that this is insanity. This is health-threatening, and you can’t help stare at him. Looks like he just checked out of the Treblinka Holiday Inn. Okay, De Niro porked up for Raging Bull, and it was effective, and Renee Z. added weight for Bridget Jones and took it off for Chicago, but this is ridiculous. None of my business, of course, but I can express my disapproval, okay? IMDb.com

Mad Hot Ballroom (2005) For quite some time now, schools in the five boroughs of New York City have been running a program from the American Ballroom Theater called Dancing Classrooms. About 6,000 kids enter the program, all of them 5th graders, 10 or 11 years old.

Try to remember what you were like in the 5th grade. You’d passed through that brief period when it didn’t much matter which sex you were; boys and girls played together, sometimes, though the boys were rougher. Then the segregation began, some regimented, and some self-enforced. All through elementary school girls stuck with girls and boys stuck with boys. If you were a girl you might have had a crush on a particular boy. If you were a boy, you mostly thought of girls as a nuisance. (The general rule, okay? There’s always exceptions.) Each gender was pretty much a mystery to the other. Boys were weird. Girls were hard to understand.

Now get a couple dozen of these kids together in a gymnasium and tell them to take each other’s hands, put your hands on your partner’s waist or shoulder, and … look deeply into your partner’s eyes! Most of these children have not touched a member of the opposite sex, in any way other than an accidental or intentional bump in the hallway, since kindergarten. Some of them are still on the innocent side of puberty, some are in the confusing middle of it, and a few have already been whomped upside the head with it like they was hit by a crazy stick. Very, very scary!

At the beginning, you never saw so many left feet, as each child has two of them. They are total stiffs, and they don’t much like this class. But the teachers manage to ignite a fire, and each time we see the kids they are more into it, until by the time of the Big Contest they’ve reached the point where it’s pretty much all that matters to them. For now.

But there are preliminaries, semi-finals, lots of hoops to dance through before they can go to the Rainbow Team finals (where one of the judges is Ann Reinking). And of course, there can only be one winner, which means there are lot of losers, as in all of life.

So what are you going to do? You can’t have a swim race without a winner. What’s the point? It’s a race, somebody wins. You can’t play poker without money; money is the entire reason for poker’s existence, no matter what my ex-wife tried to sell us on. (“Let’s just play for fun!” “Poker, for fun?”) You can dance for fun, most of the dancing in the world is for fun … but the plain fact is, people will work harder if they are in competition with each other, they will get better quicker, they will find an intensity few can achieve for “fun.” I think the contest at the end of this class is a good thing … but there is a price to pay. Most of these kids have never been in a hard-core competitive environment. They’ve never really lost. They don’t know the heartbreak, the sense of failure and shame. They’ve worked hard. It’s tough to watch the losers, because their grief is right out there in front. There is no stiff upper lip in the fifth grade. These children are crying, and most of all, confused. They thought they’d win. In all of our mental movies, we are Rocky, we are the underdog who wins the Big Game in the last five minutes. It’s a hard lesson to learn, at age 10, that there are always far more losers than winners, and that, in your life, in all probability, you are going to lose many more times than you are going to win. But it’s a lesson we all have to learn (except for Michael Phelps and his ilk).

The first-time director, Marilyn Agrelo, focuses on three schools:

PS 150 from the affluent Tribeca area

PS 112 from the primarily Italian and Asian area of Bensonhurst

PS 115 from Washington Heights, a Dominican neighborhood where over 97% of the residents live below the poverty line.

(And by the way, it’s always seemed odd to me that New York City gives its schools numbers rather than names. I just can’t imagine how their cheerleaders could go out there and holler “Go PS 134!” And what are their school mascots like? Letters? The PS 56 Zees? It's not as if NYC doesn’t have enough famous native people to give each school a name. There’s Fiorello La Guardia, Bella Abzug, John Lindsay, Peter Stuyvesant, Son of Sam, Typhoid Mary, Boss Tweed, John Gotti …)

I don’t know how many schools she assigned camera crews to in order to be fairly sure of having a lot of footage of the eventual winner (and she got it, the winner is one of those three), but I assume there were others. There is a little footage here and there of the previous year’s winner, from Forest Hills in Queens, which I gather is a pretty upscale neighborhood. I didn’t like their teacher.

But I loved this film. It’s been compared to Spellbound, but I liked this one better. The tension at the end was unbearable … as it was in Spellbound, but in a creepy way. The spelling bee kids were under terrible pressure, mostly from their parents, including one scumbucket who had hired 1000 people back in India to pray for his son’s victory. (The boy lost, and I’d hate to have witnessed the scene back in their hotel room.) Here, in this movie, the parents are simply supportive—those who are there; we don’t learn too much about some of the probably dysfunctional families. Some reviewers criticized the director for showing so little of the home life of these kids, but I didn’t miss it. It’s enough to know that most of the parents at PS 115 didn’t speak English … and many of their kids were still picking it up, too. I’m glad this movie concentrated on the kids dancing, with scenes here and there of their naïve and often funny but sometimes wise observations on life. Oh, they have so much to learn, and some of it will be so hard … and yet many of them look tough enough to deal with it. Others … well, it’s going to be rough for them.

It’s also about teachers. You hear stories of incompetence in the classroom, and I’m sure there’s a lot of it, but it really makes my day to see people as dedicated as these dance instructors are. They live and die by their kids, but not in a bad way. We see them encouraging and pressuring the beginners—not taking any bullshit from them—and consoling the losers, and celebrating with the winners. There’s much to be learned, win or lose. One teacher breaks down on camera while talking about what little ladies and gentlemen her students are becoming. She can’t go on.

And, believe me, though Marge and Gower Champion would never have anything to fear from any of these kids … they are good! The improvement in 10 weeks is astonishing, as we see them tackle the tango, salsa, swing, rumba, and foxtrot.

Every once in a while, life really is beautiful, if only for a moment … IMDb.com

Mad Max (1979) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him for the first time. IMDb.com

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him in some weird dome thingy. IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Madagascar (2005) Like The Lion King, this movie has to deal with the paradox of a carnivore associating with herbivores. Simba solved it by eating grubs and maggots (uh, no thanks, but I will have some of the BBQ meerkat, thank you), which just made me wonder, what about insect rights? Here, Alex the lion learns to eat sushi (actually, I don’t think he’d dig the rice, though he’d probably like sashimi) ... so, eating Nemo is okay? Heartless! A movie like this, where the main moral dilemma is predation and being a carnivore is intrinsically bad because you have to kill some sort of cute little sentient critter to survive, makes me realize the pitfalls in adopting the Disneyesque view of the world, and why Bambi was probably a lot easier to write.

What, am I serious here? No, not much. None of this is any more serious than Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits and ducks. And yet, I am, just a little bit. The movie wants you to think about a guy eating his best friend, and the solution is to eat somebody else’s best friend. Of course, the one fish we see doesn’t talk, he just lies there like a fish, but we know he does talk, down there under the sea with Sebastian the hermit crab and Ariel the mermaid.

Okay, enough of that. The film is funny and frenetic, sometimes too frenetic. CGI is so easy now, “camera” moves are unlimited and built in to the technology, that I think animators are going a bit overboard. But maybe it’s for the same reason they shake the camera these days even in a static shot. Kids won’t watch something that stays still. But stillness can be the heart of humor, as in the film’s funniest scene. Four penguins (by far he best characters in the movie) have broken out of the zoo—hurray, we’re free!—hijacked a freighter, and ended up in the paradise of their dreams: The Antarctic. There is a long shot of them standing there with their backs to us, maybe twenty seconds, four tiny dots, the wind howling, the snow swirling. You can practically hear their minds working. One turns to the others and says, “Well, this sucks.” IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Monster-In-Law (2005) So, after 40 years of retirement, Greta Garbo has decided to get back into the movie business, and as her return vehicle she decides to star in ... Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster. Or Gidget Goes to Hawaii. This isn’t quite that extreme ... but what was Jane Fonda thinking? Fifteen years she doesn’t make a movie, and then she picks this? It’s not quite as horrible as I expected, we stayed to the end. Mainly, on my part anyway, to see J. Lo getting her revenge. But this is movie-making like paint-by-numbers, and done by a director who can’t even stay within the lines for a bit of drivel like this. Lopez overacts and can’t get away with it. La Fonda overacts ... and can get away with it, she’s very good at finding the right facial expression. The bone of contention, the boyfriend, is such a clueless nerd that his only possible attractions are his considerable good looks and his even more considerable fortune.

But true love finds a way, by the numbers, the Mom From Hell reforms in the last 5 minutes ... and I timed it just right, starting the engine before the credits rolled and getting moving before the huge crowd who had come to see Madagascar and stuck around for Monster were even aware I was in motion. We were the third car out of the theater! IMDb.com

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008) Second feature at the drive in with Twilight. IMDb.com

Mafioso (1962, Italy) Antonio is a Sicilian who left the island years ago and has made a life for himself in Milano, where he is happily married with two daughters. But he feels the pull of Sicily, and returns with them to visit his family. He’s sort of an Italian Clark Griswold, he overdoes anything he attempts, so he assures the wife that it’s not what she’s heard it is, crawling with Mafia thugs, in fact, it’s paradise! You’ll love my family, and they’ll love you! They don’t, of course (though the family learns to like her later, in a well-done scene), and the place is terribly rural for these city folks, with chickens scratching under the bed, stuff like that. Antonio had done some work for the local boss, a deceptively gentlemanly piece of shit called Don Vincenzo, when he was a boy, and after calling to pay his obsequious respects to the Mafia turd, he finds out just how terrible they can be. I won’t reveal any more, but suffice it to say he finally sees the real Mafia, who do things that would gag a maggot in the name of honor and loyalty. Monsters, every last one of them. Don’t believe that Godfather crap. The movie shifts from a light comedy to scary events so subtly you hardly notice it happening, and then you’re on the edge of your seat. Highly recommended. IMDb.com

The Magdalene Sisters (2002, UK, Ireland) One of the best of the sub-genre of movies dealing with the atrocities committed by the Catholic Church, or the Catholic-dominated government, of Ireland. I’ve seen half a dozen of them, and they all boggle the mind. This particular one lasted until 1996, if you can believe it. Young women were consigned to "laundries" that might horrify a San Quentin inmate, without trial, for crimes including getting raped, getting pregnant, or just flirting with boys. And it could be a life sentence. The nuns could teach an Abu Ghraib MP a thing or two about humiliation. Excellent film, and the best thing in it is a first-time actress named Nora-Jane Noone. I’ll be looking for her again. IMDb.com

The Major and the Minor (1942) This was Billy Wilder’s first film as a director. It is also a real education in just how much the world had changed in 70 years. Ginger Rogers doesn’t have enough money to take the train home, so she dresses down and pretends to be 12 to qualify for the youth fare, but the conductors aren’t buying it when they catch her smoking. (No 12-year-old could possibly smoke in 1942! Unthinkable!) Eluding them, she blunders into Major Ray Milland’s room and convinces him she is too frightened to go back to her seat in coach. He insists she stay in his room, using the lower berth. The train stalls, and Ray’s fiancée boards it and finds this strange girl in his room, storms out. Back at the military academy where the Major works, the board is all set to can his philandering ass when he proudly presents his alibi: She’s only 12! What a collective sigh of relief! Board is happy, fiancée is happy … who could possibly not be happy to learn a 40-year-old man has just spent the night with a 12-year-old girl not his sister or daughter in a tiny train compartment …

It is simply impossible to imagine that scenario today. If a 12-year-old entered my room I would rip the door off its hinges before even talking to her, which I would do from the corridor outside the room, keeping my hands firmly in my pockets. It looks so weird to us today, that you just have to wonder. Remember, this movie was passed on by the Hayes Office, the Legion of Decency, and who knows how many other censorship bodies, and given a clean bill of health. How could this be? Did the question of pedophilia not even arise? I realized that was precisely the case. It was too ridiculous to contemplate! That a good-looking, amiable, proper gentleman in a uniform could in any way do anything indecent … well, you must have a very dirty mind to even think about it. Child molesters (if such things even exist, and we do not talk about them) are slobbering, filthy, wild-eyed monsters, easy to spot. Certainly poor, certainly of the lower classes, possibly Irish, or more likely, Negro … you know how those people are …

Other than that creepiness from today’s perspective, which it takes a while to get used to, this is a very good film. That anybody could mistake Ginger Rogers for 12 is, of course, ludicrous, but it’s a tradition that dates back at least to Shakespeare. A girl puts her hair up under her hat, she can pass for a boy, as in Sullivan’s Travels. (There’s a great visual joke here, concerning the local girls’ school who have all just seen a Veronica Lake movie … and we cut to a shot of dozens of young women sitting in a row, each with her hair combed over one side of her face.) Sexy Ginger can wear socks and flat shoes and a little jumper and pigtails and presto! She’s 12! Ginger Rogers is one of my favorite actresses of the time, even when she doesn’t dance, and she gets all the good lines here. IMDb.com

Major League (1989) The owner of the Cleveland Indians dies and his ex-showgirl wife inherits the team. She hates Cleveland (well, who doesn’t?), and wants to move to Miami. But she can’t do it unless the team draws fewer than 800,000 fans. So she fires all the best players—not that Cleveland had any at that time—and hires a bunch of weirdos, rejects, retreads, and assorted losers. Naturally, they overcome every obstacle she throws in their way and beat the goddam Yankees to win the pennant. It’s a good script with a lot of laughs, but the romance between the two ex-lovers is strictly by the book and slows the action down. IMDb.com

Make Mine Music (1946) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

Mamma Mia! (2008) I don’t know much about ABBA. I know a few of their songs, ones that got so much play that you could hardly have missed them, like “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance on Me” and something about Hernando or Fernando or Orlando (I’m terrible at hearing lyrics). I also know it’s hip to look down your critical nose at them, like the Bee Gees and John Denver and Neil Diamond. I don’t care about that. Their songs are infectious (sometimes almost too much) and have a nice beat and great harmonies, and though I’m not a dancer, it’s obvious you can dance to them. So I didn’t approach this smash hit musical (which I knew nothing about except for the rather silly plot) based on their songs with any great dread.

But I have to say I resisted this movie’s charms for a while, mainly because the first 20 minutes or so seems to consist of nothing but various groups of girls having squealing reunions and acting very, very, very silly in the upper, painful registers of the female vocal cords, at a volume that could cut sheet metal … and in fact sometimes sounded a little like that. Uh-oh, I thought. Chick flick!  (I should add that I’m a guy who does not recoil in horror at that label, but this was really too much.)

However, soon my natural love of musicals won out. That, and the amazing energy on display. There are few stretches of more than three or four minutes without a musical number, and most of them are brightly colored (like the Aegean Sea, and is it really that blue?) and full of people just having so much fun you want to join in. And that’s the impression I’m left with, of a lot of people—and I mean the actors, not the characters—having a lot of fun. And why not? Would it be too tough for you to spend a few months filming on a lovely little Greek island? I’ve often suspected that actors sometimes take roles for the opportunity to have a well-paid vacation in exotic locations. Not exotic as in Apocalypse Now out in the friggin’ swamps; I’m thinking more of Mutiny on the Bounty, in Tahiti. I even got to the point where I could tolerate listening to Pierce Brosnan singing, because he seemed to be having fun, too, and working hard not to be such a stiff.

And then there’s Meryl Streep. I already knew the lady could sing (A Prairie Home Companion, Postcards From the Edge), but I can’t recall her cutting up quite as much as she does here, and she makes it work, as she makes everything she tackles work. I understand she intended to go into opera before she became an actress. Myself, I’d like to see her do more musical work. Like, if they ever get around to doing a cinematic version of Cats (unlikely, I understand), she could do Grisabella. Or maybe Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein, the part played in the movie by Cloris Leachman, the one who, every time someone says her name, the horses whinny in alarm. I’m sure she could nail the German accent. Or maybe most interesting of all—though I haven’t seen it—last year’s Tony-nominated musical Grey Gardens, about Jackie Kennedy’s crazy relatives, Big Edie and Little Edie. It’s a two-act musical, and the same actress plays Big Edie at age 47 and then Little Edie at 56. Sounds tailor-made for Meryl. IMDb.com

Mammoth (2006) Since I recently published a book with the same title, I felt it was my unpleasant duty to watch this. So I recorded it while we watched The West Wing and The Sopranos, then watched the tape the next night.

Very soon I was making a lot of mental notes, various nasty things to say, really vicious cuts and overhand chops and knees in the nuts. But I soon lost my enthusiasm. It would be like kicking a big, steaming, fresh mammoth turd. It's just going to be all squishy, it's going to fly all over the place, and the more you kick it the more will end up on your shoes. What's the point?

I will make the observation that it obviously intended to be a spoof, or an affectionate send-up of old B movies about monsters. That can be done well: Tremors, or Shaun of the Dead, or even Re-Animator. But you gotta choose. You can't be silly, scary, and sentimental at the same time. (Maybe it's possible, but it's way beyond the talents of the idiots who made this movie.)

Another thing ... it's amazing how even a no-budget porker like this can have some pretty good CGI effects these days. By good, I mean better than Ed Wood. It's relatively cheap now. So ... why did they apparently invest more money in the opening credits than in the mammoth/mummy/alien itself, which looks like a heffalump with the stuffing falling out?

Oh, I can't help myself, I have to stick at least ONE bandillera into the putrid corpse of this film. Twenty minutes in I was feeling gloomy, knowing there was an hour and forty minutes to go. Then ... a commercial break! This movie was so bad I was eager for the commercials, so I could fast forward the tape. Hell, it's only about 85, maybe 90 minutes long, not 120! I can handle that ... IMDb.com

The Man From Elysian Fields (2001) An undiscovered gem. Andy Garcia is a novelist who wrote a good first novel and a bad second one. He meets Mick Jagger, of all people, who runs an escort service for rich women. Complications ensue. James Coburn is very good, too, as a Hemingway figure. IMDb.com

Man on Fire (2004) Denzel Washington apparently wants to be an action film leading man. I got no problem with that, I hope he gets very, very rich. But if he keeps making routine shoot-em-ups like this he’s going to lose my respect as one of the finest actors we’ve got. The first half is good, the little girl is amazing. The second half is unbelievable. Pretty much like Denzel’s last three or four films. IMDb.com

The Man on Lincoln's Nose (2000) This was the working title for North by Northwest. This film is a 40-minute documentary about Robert Boyle, who did the art direction for that movie and half a dozen other Hitchcock films, and was the production designer for many more movies. (He’s still alive, and if he makes it to October he will be 100 years old!) Since we’d just seen NxNW I thought it might be interesting, and it was. It is chock full of information about how he cheated the scenes on Mount Rushmore when the park service wouldn’t allow filming there, as well as information on the making of The Birds, Marnie, and many others. Excellent film for cinema buffs to see. IMDb.com

The Man on the Train (France, 2002). An entrancing and mysterious French film starring a guy named Johnny Hallyday, who apparently is a rock and roll legend over there. He looks a bit like a world-weary Elvis, though lots smarter. Plot is hard to describe, but I liked it. IMDb.com

The Man Without a Past (Finland, 2002). Quirky film from Finland’s most respected director. A man is robbed and beaten and loses his memory. Hollywood would have made a hash of this, but the new-born innocent falls in with a series of quirky characters, and I had a lot of wry laughs. IMDb.com

The Manchurian Candidate (2004) Jonathan Demme is remaking this with Denzel Washington as Frank Sinatra, Meryl Streep as Angela Lansbury, and someone called Liev Schreiber as Laurence Harvey. Why do they do these things? Streep is very, very good, but Lansbury had one of the single greatest scenes in cinema history in the original; not even Meryl is going to be able to top it. The Manchurian Candidate is probably the best political thriller ever made. Why do it again?

(2005) It's out on video now, and I'm going to leave this earlier comment from before I saw the remake in place, just to show you how honest I can be!

So ... it’s still a stupid idea, even though the movie is good. Quite good, in fact. But when you’re done making this quite good movie, you still have to stack it up against the original, and it fails miserably on that level. Maybe if they’d just not used the title, called it something else, I wouldn’t have spent the entire movie comparing the similarities and differences, and pondering the reasons why the changes were made ...

I don’t know. Enough of that. What’s good about the movie? Lots of stuff. Meryl Streep wisely doesn’t try to top Lansbury. They’ve changed her role and her motives and her level of knowledge and bitterness. Denzel is as good as he always is, this time in a movie worthy of his talent. Liev Schreiber is very good. I’m getting to know him better. Check him out in Spinning Boris. And the ... texture of the film is very good. It’s clear this is about 8 years in the future. The television news looks a bit different. We hear snippets of radio and TV in the background that tell of wars all over the world, and apparently US troops are getting thin on the ground. Armed soldiers in camouflage are seen here and there in public places, like outside of Penn Station. It’s clear that the war on terrorism has spread to many other nations, and that we’re a few more steps down the road to a police state.

But the original was a tour-de-force, and this isn’t. I’ll never forget that opening scene, one continuous circular panning shot that, incredibly, morphs from bored soldiers sitting, for some reason, in the middle of a lecture at a ladies’ garden society, bored out of their minds, to a demonstration of brainwashing and murder in a Chinese prison camp. One shot, no cuts, and do you know how hard that was to do in the era before CGI? Like, a lot of grips had a lot of work to do in a very short time. IMDb.com

Manhunter (1986) Terrific filming of the extremely weird Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. A very good portrait of Hannibal Lector by Brian Cox, considering how little screen time he has. IMDb.com

Mansfield Park (1999) If Jane Austen were alive, she’d be rolling in dough. The IMDb says Sense and Sensibility has been filmed 4 times, Persuasion and Emma 3 times each (not counting Clueless and other knockoffs), and Pride and Prejudice no less than 10 times. Of course, part of the reason one makes a movie from a book in the public domain is that you don’t have to pay the author.

Some critics didn’t like the fact that the director, Patricia Rozema, has taken considerable liberties with her version of Mansfield Park. Having had the great advantage of never having read the book, or in fact any book by Austen, it wasn’t a problem for me. I can take the movie on its own terms ... and frankly, I don’t see what’s wrong with doing that sort of thing. The credits clearly state that the script is based on not just the novel, but Austen’s letters and ephemera like that. I read a little about her and discovered that Rozema added incidents from Austen’s life, such as having accepted a marriage proposal and rescinding it the next day. This is in the movie. And why not? A 200-year-old novel strikes me as fertile grounds for another take on the material. I enjoy new interpretations of Shakespeare. Don’t get me wrong, a careful and faithful recreation of a period novel, as in Tom Jones and Oliver Twist, can be terrific. But I also enjoyed Oliver!, which is about as far from Dickens’ intention as one could imagine. This movie is sly and funny, and has some scenes that had me laughing out loud. I think it is true to the spirit of Jane Austen, and maybe even more fun. IMDb.com

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

March of the Penguins (La Marche de l'empereur) (2005) This French film is the most successful documentary ever, after Fahrenheit 9/11. I'm not quite sure why, but first, the things I like about it.

The life of the emperor penguin is one of almost unimaginable hardships. They live in the worst place in the world, and to reproduce they have to perform a complicated series of treks that, at first, defy understanding. I mean, why not go to Patagonia to mate? You could lay your eggs on the ground, not have to shield them from the ice 24/7 for three months. But there are predators in Patagonia, and precious few in Antarctica. We see an albatross harrying chicks, but there can't be many of them. This film, made under hardships almost as unimaginable as those the penguins endure, is a visual delight. I was continually astounded at the shots they got, and at the devotion of the filmmakers.

Also, who doesn't love a penguin? I mean, they waddle comically, they are cute little guys in tuxedos, even the girls. In fact, a human would find it impossible to tell a guy from a girl without an autopsy ... which leads me to wonder, do they ever make mistakes themselves while courting? Many animals exhibit homosexual behavior; do penguins? The film never addresses how they differentiate. Maybe no one knows.

But hey, none of this was new to me. David Attenborough covered the same territory, though not at such length. I have seen better nature documentaries, some made for television, and even a better documentary about birds: Winged Migration. So why this film? Why such a box office bonanza?

This brings me to what I didn't like. I understand the Christian Right (CR) has embraced this film. Part of it is they see it as an argument for Intelligent Design. The saga of the penguins is so bizarre ... how could it have evolved? Well, the film steers clear of most of that issue (which one reviewer thought might be one reason why the CR loved it, a whole nature film with no mention of evolution).

Here's how: A bird species which shared the child-rearing between the sexes (and lots of other birds do the same) adapted to incubating its eggs on the ice as Antarctica moved relentlessly south over the millennia. If you laid your eggs too close to the water's edge, the ice melted in the spring and your eggs and/or offspring were dumped in the drink. Only those who marched 70 miles inland survived. Eventually all penguins marched 70 miles inland. The others had drowned. Natural selection. Dumb Design. What is so tough about that that Christians can't understand it? Duuuuuh.

Another theory is that the CR sees penguins as poster critters for "family values." True, they are devoted to each other as a couple, it would be impossible for either of them to rear chicks alone, but ... Hello? They only mate for a year. At the end of that year they abandon the chicks, who have never even been in the water. Next year, they mate with someone new. This is a family?

Oh, well, screw the CR. The real worst thing about the film is that old bullshit, anthropomorphism. Assigning human values to other creatures. The narrator, Morgan Freeman, waxes eloquent on how this is a film about love. 'Fraid not, Morgan. These are birds. They follow their instincts. (So do we, but we have higher brain functions, I hope, though with some of the CR it's doubtful. If there is Intelligent Design, how do you explain the existence of Pat Robertson?) I guess you can blame Walt Disney, whose True-Life Adventures in the 1950s, like The Living Desert and White Wilderness were ground-breaking, awe-inspiring, perfectly marvelous ... and had a lot of fakery and way-too-cutesy narration. (Did you know that the famous lemming-suicide sequence was staged in its entirety? In nature, it doesn't happen.) Ever since there has been that tendency to humanize animal behavior, and it really sucks. The facts, the sights, the wonder of it all, unvarnished, is enough, as Sir Richard has shown over and over. Attenborough may overdo the solemn and awestruck business a bit, but he never embellishes.

Oh, well, it could have been worse. I understand the original, longer, French version had actual voices dubbed in for the penguins. God, that must have been awful. IMDb.com

Margot at the Wedding (2007) Roger Ebert said this in his review: “The characters are into emotional laceration for fun. They are verbal, articulate, self-absorbed, selfish, egotistical, cold and fascinating.” Hit the nail on the head, Rog, except the fascinating part. He liked it; I didn’t. Spending 90 minutes with these people was quite an ordeal. Spending the whole ghastly weekend with them would be unimaginable to me. Spending a lifetime with any of them … The best part of it was that it just abruptly ended. Cut to black, and the film is over. Big sigh of relief. IMDb.com

Maria Full of Grace (Colombia, 2004) An extremely good movie about the drug trade, and its human cost. I’m not talking about the rich and bored who snort coke, or the poor and hopeless who smoke crack. It’s about the impossibly cruel people who run the trade, and the people who risk their lives to get the stuff to a hungry America. As long as we continue this asinine and no-win “War on Drugs,” people like Maria will pay the price for it.

Catalina Sandino Moreno is a long shot for a Best Actress Oscar, but she sure deserves the nomination. IMDb.com

Marie Antoinette (2006) Today on the radio we heard a story about the Ferrari motorcar company. One popular model sells for $200,000 ... but you have to wait two years to get one. That is frightening enough in itself, that there are that many people ready to spend that kind of money for what is really just a toy car, of no practical use whatsoever. But the capper was that you could buy one on eBay or suchlike ... for $300,000. "I'm not gonna wait two years, mommy, I want my car, and I want it NOW!!!"

Unlimited wealth almost always degrades the fabulously wealthy, almost as much as it degrades the poor slobs the unlimited wealth was stolen from. You see it throughout history, in Rome, in China, in Thailand, in Vatican City, in pre-Revolutionary France, probably in Timbuk-fucking-tu. In George W. Bush's America. (You think I'm exaggerating? Check out the spending sprees indulged in by Kenny Lay before the bottom fell out of Enron.)

But don't we love to watch these fabulously wealthy people! How many times has this story been told in the movies? Hundreds, I'm sure, but seldom with the lubricious attention to the details of joyous self-degradation as in this movie. The IMDb tells me the budget was $40,000,000, not much for these times. I figured it breaks down to about $30,000,000 for costumes, $5,000,000 for shoes, and $5,000,000 for desserts. (Let them eat cake? Christ, there was enough cake on display to feed France for a decade.)

I don't suppose it's really possible to hate Marie Antoinette. She was married at 15, beheaded at 38, and had no more idea of what the streets of Paris were like than a butterfly knows the backside of the moon. No one in Versailles had much of a clue, except maybe the accountants who knew the royal family was spending beyond even their vast stolen wealth. These people had no lives, basically. Useless as tits on a boar hog, as someone said. By the end of this interminable examination of empty lives, I had built my own guillotine from scrap lumber and was honing the blade and weaving the bucket to receive the heads of nobility. Alas, there was no such payoff. The film ends with Louis and Marie fleeing. We never see their comeuppance.

I suppose I know why Sofia Coppola made this movie, but that doesn't mean I forgive her, just as I don't forgive her for almost single-handedly ruining The Godfather, Part III. ("Daddy, I want to be an actress!") Ooh, that was catty, I know, but she is a child of privilege. One opinion on the film had it that Sofia was drawing parallels with her own life ... though just what she meant to show escapes me. Do the rich suffer? Of course they do. Marie lost two children young. We see her humiliated by an examination of her hymen, we see her basically sold to France to cement an alliance, we see her stifled by the incredible idiocies of the Royals. But every time I am shown something like that I see instead the woman lying in the gutter in Paris, who has lost seven children young, who is syphilitic because whoring is the only profession open to her, dying slowly and painfully instead of having her head neatly lopped off. Give me a story of the proletariat every time. I don't really fucking care about the problems of the rich. Bottom line, I want a seat right up close to the blade, I want to toss rotten cabbages and see the blue blood spurt.

In the end, although I know I shouldn't, I kept coming back to Sofia and who she is. She strikes me very much as a dabbler, like Marie playing at being a peasant in her cozy little 9-room cottage. Mucking about in the goose shit in her finery. Maybe she raises a nice little crop of tomatoes once in a while (Lost in Translation), but then she'll raise a rotten turnip. Who cares? Daddy will pay. (Produced by ... guess who?) I hate turnips.

One more thing that narked me: She was allowed unprecedented access to Versailles, and most of the other rockpiles of Europe ... and she produces this? It must be said that the movie is a feast for the eyes. Yummy food, gorgeous locations, thousands of costumes. (We saw a selection of the dresses at the fashion museum downtown, and they are stunning.) So what does she do with it all? She backs it up with the most hideously jarring musical score I've ever heard. Her point: That Marie was just a wild and crazy teen, so why not play punk rock in the dance scenes? Well, because it ruins everything, that's why. Skip this turnip, go see Barry Lyndon. IMDb.com

Marooned in Iraq (Iraq, 2002) Probably the only Kurdish film I have ever seen, and a real winner. Some cultures are so foreign, so alien, they might as well be from Mars for all I know about them. These people have nothing, they have been torn by war forever ... and yet it is almost a comedy. Sure, there are horrors, and a sad ending, but it still manages to be upbeat. Plot: an old musician enlists his sons to cross the Turkish border into Iraq to search for a woman who left him twenty years ago. And we discover, to my astonishment ... that these men are treated like rock stars everywhere they go. Everybody knows them, and pleads with them to play their music ... which might as well be Martian music to me, but soul is where you find it, and these guys obviously have it. Highly recommended. IMDb.com

The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun) (Germany, 1979) This was a huge disappointment, and I can't say why without issuing this

SPOILER WARNING!

Maria gets married as Germany is falling apart in 1945. Her husband leaves at once for the front, where he is presumed dead. Maria looks for him and never believes he's dead, but has to get on with her life. She becomes a bar girl, picking up American GIs. Then hubby returns, finds her with a black soldier, she kills the soldier, he takes the rap and goes to jail. While she waits for him, she becomes a big success in business.

That's very bare-bones. It's all handled wonderfully. Maria has been described by some reviewers as a monster, but I don't see it. I liked her a lot. She is very smart. She is realistic. She is ambitious, but she is also scrupulously honest. She never lies to anyone, she tells them exactly what they're in for. She can only love her absent husband ... who she really doesn't know at all. Perhaps it's safer for her that way. He's in jail, he can't hurt her, and neither can anyone she doesn't give her heart to. Cold? I guess so, but why not?

There is a lot of high-falutin' critical talk that this and all of Fassbinder's movies are allegories about post-war Germany. We don't see what Maria went through during the war to wish to protect herself this way, but we know it must have been awful, simply because it was awful for all Germans in the last years.

Now I must describe the last 5 minutes of the film, 5 minutes that ruined it all for me. Maria is with her husband at last, in the big house she has bought. She is excited, they are going to make love, something that hasn't happened except on their wedding day. She lights a cigarette from the gas stove, then blows out the flame. Shortly after that she goes into the kitchen to light another, and there is an explosion. Maria ist kaput. Movie over.

I just don't get it. Roger Ebert says it's all about the randomness of life. Well, fuck that. I've seen that principle demonstrated where randomness becomes a plot element. It isn't fair to end an interesting story by saying "and then they all got run over by a truck. The End." (Okay, something very like that happened in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but the director made it work. It also happened in the aggressively awful Japon, and I wanted to find the director and beat the crap out of him. This was one of those beat-the-crap-out-of-him moments.)

The question that occurred to me immediately was ... did she kill herself? Was she that afraid to find out what her husband was really like? I mean, we saw her lighting a cigarette from the stove before, and she turned off the gas instantly. What an extraordinary thing to do, to blow out the gas flame and leave the gas on. Who would do that? Excitement and inattentiveness just don't explain it for me. I was left with the feeling she deliberately left it on ... and the only motive I can think of is suicide. And if that is so, I hated it. Just hated it.

But let's end on a positive note here. Hanna Schygulla is one of the great screen beauties, in my opinion, and the costume designer dressed her superbly. She looked stunning in everything she wore. Seldom do I notice costumes in a movie—hey, I'm a guy—but these just knocked my socks off. IMDb.com

Mars Attacks! (1996) Just plain old did not work. IMDb.com

Martian Child (2007) This is based on a novelette (later expanded into a novel) by my friend David Gerrold. David was the first professional SF writer I ever met, way back at Westercon in Oakland, 1975, where he was the guest of honor. The short version of this story won the Hugo and the Nebula award, which is a little odd because it is not really science fiction … but what the hell, a good story is a good story. I am sorry to say that I have not read it, but I’m assuming it’s good. They don’t give those awards to trash.

It concerns a recent widower (John Cusack, one of my favorite actors) who adopts a troubled young boy who claims he is a Martian. The whole story is very autobiographical, “inspired by real events.” A DVD extra, “The Real Martian Child,” shows us Sean, the child David adopted in 1992, and tells us how the real story and the fiction differed. In reality, the Martian business was a game David and Sean played. In the movie, the child seems as if he might have some odd powers over traffic lights and baseballs, but nothing is done with this. In real life, that was only part of the game; “Martian wishes,” not actual powers. The only thing the real, now grown, Sean claims he can do is tell the colors of M&Ms by taste alone. (I’m skeptical—I’m always skeptical—but I’d like to see him do it.) In real life, David is gay. In the movie, John Cusack is not.

I really, really wanted to like this film, but it just didn’t work. The little kid is talented, but I found him annoying in this part, both from the lines in the script and from his wheezy little voice. Scenes went on way too long, and many of them seemed basically repeats of what had gone before. It was desperately in need of a little humor. It’s a weird situation, but not much was made of it. It all seemed too solemn. And the ending was sheer melodrama and, again, too long. IMDb.com

Mary Poppins (1964) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

Master and Commander (2003) The best sea adventure movie I have ever seen. I am now reading my way through the Aubrey/Maturin novels upon which the movie is based (apparently picking scenes from half a dozen of the books for a rip-roaring adventure that may not be historically accurate but is wonderfully rousing), and they are wonderful at capturing a brutal and heroic age very different from our own. IMDb.com

The Matador (2005) Pierce Brosnan is a hit man who is losing his touch, big time. Greg Kinnear is a businessman recently out of a job. They meet in Mexico City and, through a series of drunken and sober encounters, become friends. Part of it is that the hit man is undeniably charismatic and seems to be a genuinely nice guy. Part of it the sneaky fascination we all have with someone who is way out of the normal run of things. When Kinnear's wife meets the hit man, she wants to see his gun. The scenes are wonderfully written and played, easing you step by logical step into how such a thing might happen. You expect a lot of bloodshed and some sort of horrible reversal, but this movie never goes where I expected it to go. I recommend it. And I must add that Pierce Brosnan is aging very well, determined to overcome the pretty-boy thing. I first became aware that he could act in a great little thriller called The Fourth Protocol, and he's been great in many things since. Not to mention that he was the best James Bond since Sean Connery. IMDb.com

Match Point (2005) Woody Allen has written and directed 40 movies since What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966. That's about one per year; in fact, he works on a yearly schedule that doesn't vary much. He gets his script, he calls up some actors (who almost always say yes), and he shoots, generally in the summer. He's got two in the pipeline now: Scoop for this year, with Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson, being edited, and Untitled Woody Allen Summer Project in pre-production with Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor. And yet his last 19 films have not turned a profit in the domestic market. Basically, most Woody Allen films only play in New York, Los Angeles, maybe Chicago, and in Europe. This sounds like a perfect description of a director looking desperately for a hit. But he's not. Woody has found a formula.

He makes these films for between 10 and 20 million dollars. He's had the same production team and producers since ... well, forever, in Hollywood terms. He can get the most powerful marquee names just by calling them up and asking if they'd like to be in his next picture, and he doesn't pay them squat, and 99% of them jump at the chance.

Why? Ah, the key question. There is some cachet in working with Woody, but I believe the main reason is, they know he will stretch them. He pays no attention to typecasting, he puts you in a role that is a challenge. He seems to work very well with actors; they love him.

There is this cliché of the "Woody Allen movie." It exists—the neurotic nebbish with good one-liners, usually played by Woody himself—but don't forget that at least half of his films don't fit this mold at all, and some of them are his best. (Some are his worst stinkers, too, and that's the thing about trying to do something different; sometimes you will fall flat on your face. Woody has done this several times.)

This movie is one of those departures. I'd say he was trying for the mainstream with a thriller ... except he refuses to indulge in the thriller formula. He takes his time, and the result has been compared to Hitchcock. I wouldn't go that far, but it's pretty good. The theme is luck. The tennis ball hits the net and bounces. If it comes down on one side of the net you win. On the other, you lose. And there's nothing you can do about it. Woody works a nice surprise twist on this image. IMDb.com

Matchstick Men (2003) I am a collector of movies about con games. This is one of the better ones, and Nicholas Cage is very good. IMDb.com

Matinee (1993) Here is one of our favorite overlooked films. It was directed by Joe Dante, probably best known for Gremlins, and stars the magnificent John Goodman as a sleazy producer of those crappy horror flicks of the ‘50s and ‘60s that featured giant radioactive insects and used gimmicks like putting joy buzzers in the theater seats. He’s come to Key West at the start of the Cuban missile crisis, and everyone’s in a dither. I got goosebumps as the kids at school ran out into the hall when the siren sounded, and knelt down and put their heads on their knees. “Duck and cover!” it was called, and it was so dishonest. This film starts out with the stock footage of A-bomb tests in Nevada that show what really happens to buildings anywhere near ground zero, and you just have to shake your head. Was anyone in Washington really stupid enough to believe that shit would do any good? I remember bomb drills at our high school, and we knew they were stupid!

Everything resonates here for a child of the atomic ‘50s like myself. I don’t know how well it would work for younger audiences. But if you’ve seen any of those awful horror films, you’ll love the one Goodman is bringing to town: Mant! The story of a man bitten by a radioactive ant. Now he’s turning into one! And his wife is sticking by him! It is so chockfull of jokes it had me laughing nonstop. IMDb.com

The Matrix (1999) I thought it was wonderfully imaginative. For once, it actually made sense that characters could fly through the air, or run through a hail of bullets and never get hit, because it was all actually a video game. Then I saw The Matrix Reloaded. Bah. Claptrap, though it had a freeway car chase that almost made it worth seeing just for that. Almost, but not quite. I didn’t even bother with Matrix Revolutions. You shouldn’t, either. What a gigantic waste of time, what a lost opportunity. IMDb.com

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) Miranda July, the writer, director, and star of this movie, is a performance artist, which, in my book, is strike one. I know there is a bit of interesting work done in that field, but 99% of it is pretentious bullshit. This film is an attempt to inject an element of poetry, maybe even magic into the lives of a group of ordinary people. It shows us some interesting scenes, some quite good ones, and then it stops. The critics raved. It was at its most interesting when it explored some aspects of childhood sexuality, not in any really offensive way, but it might make some people uncomfortable. For myself, I’m afraid it just wasn’t that interesting. No kidding. IMDb.com

Mean Creek (2004) Hollywood makes about 100 teenage fantasy films every year, and I like them if they’re done well. You know the sort. The dweeb gets his revenge. The quiet girl torpedoes the awful clique of cheerleaders. Things come out well at the end. Fun, a pleasant night’s entertainment. They seldom make a film like this one, where real teenagers face real situations, where even the “bad” guy is real, with real problems and reasons for his bad behavior. Not excuses; reasons. Bad things can happen when you try to get even, and they do here, and the teens who did the bad thing react like real kids would. Denial. Cover-up. And then ... one can hope, redemption and atonement. Highly recommended. IMDb.com

Mean Girls (2004) Every once in a while in the continual eruption of primordial stink that are “teen-age” movies, somebody gets it right. Clueless was one. This is another. Lindsey Lohan is 16, home-schooled in Africa all her life, and now has to cope with ... High School! Africa was a piece of cake by comparison. She hasn’t a clue about the anthropology of American teenagers. She eventually gets involved in bringing down the Plastics, the dominant girl clique, the alpha females. In the process, she finds she sort of likes being an alpha female, and starts behaving as bad as any of them. Naturally, she sees the error of her ways, but it is all handled very well. The script by Tina Fey is sharp and witty, there is a fine sense of the ridiculous. We laughed a lot. IMDb.com

Meet the Robinsons (2007) First feature at the drive in review. IMDb.com

Meet the Parents/Fockers (2000/2004) We had seen the first one but I didn’t remember it very well, except there was some business with a cat. So when the DVD of the second one came out we rented the first and saw it again. Funny. That genre of comedy that relies on a string of humiliating moments, which can be awful but Ben Stiller is probably the best there is at that baffled expression as if he’s been hit over the head with a lead pipe. Why is this all happening to me?

The main reason I wanted to see the sequel, which got bad reviews but made a ton of money, was the same reason I wanted to see Monster-in-Law. Why did Fonda and Streisand pick these things to return to the screen after long absences?

Well, we saw it, and I don’t have the answer. Meet the Fockers was not as bad as I’d expected. In fact, we were laughing a lot for the first hour. Okay, so it’s potty humor. I’m not proud, if the material is funny and it’s being presented in a funny way, I’ll laugh instead of spending time worrying that this is somehow beneath me. Streisand and Hoffman are good. But it really, really ran out of steam in the third act. It wasn’t able to shift from the ribald humor to the “let’s everybody make up and like each other despite the fact that we hate each other” heartwarming part. We didn’t laugh again until the very end, with some funny extra material during the end credits. IMDb.com / IMDb.com

Memento (2000) One of the best films of the year. Revelation piles on revelation, and the viewer is left just as much at sea as the protagonist, who suffers from anterograde amnesia: he can’t remember anything more than a few minutes ago, and yet still manages to discover the causes of his predicament through imagination and determination. I can’t recommend this highly enough. In fact, just writing this has made me want to see it again. IMDb.com

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) It's a good story, though melodramatic. It is totally gorgeous to look at ... though it is often a cold beauty, like Geishas themselves.

There's this endless and heated debate as to the nature of a geisha. Some say she's a prostitute, pure and simple. Maybe so. The only thing I'm sure of is, she's not anything like a prostitute as we know it in the West. It's not even very much like a high class call girl. Prostitutes in the west need know nothing except the techniques of sex, while geisha are not trained in sexual intercourse, per se, at all. They study just about everything else, all to contribute to their allure. And yet, it is clear from this movie that it is slavery.

What is prostitution, anyway? Having sex for money? Does that mean that performers in porno movies, male and female, are prostitutes? I don't think people in the West will ever understand the idea of the geisha, not really. Japanese are frequently more fascinated with ritual than with the thing itself. Watch a sumo match. 99% of it is posturing, bowing, stomping, strewing salt, bowing. The actual fight takes ten seconds, if that.

You can make so many arguments on both sides of the question, and still feel you haven't really grasped it because you haven't been raised in the culture. Yes, in the end it is demeaning ... and yet at that time and place it was maybe the only way other than marrying a rich man for a woman to better herself. Surely, in the West, we've limited women's options that badly or worse. To this day, women are treated worse than cattle in many Muslim societies. And yet again ... the purpose of the whole rigmarole seems to be to boost the ego of the man, tell him how important he is, flatter him. Is it any different, in the end, from "Oooh, G.I! You so big!" Well, at least the clothes are better.

Some people were offended that Chinese actresses played Japanese women. I wondered about it myself. Then I came across this very interesting comment from the Korean-Canadian actress Sandra Oh:

Bravo! Well-said! IMDb.com

Melinda and Melinda (2004) Much has been said about Woody Allen and his films, but there are some things seldom mentioned and I want to point out a few.

They say there is no such thing as a "typical" Woody Allen film, but there is, really. It's true that he's apt to experiment into almost any genre, or make something totally off the wall in no genre at all. But the typical Allen film is about highly-educated, very intelligent, well-off New Yorkers who natter on about culture and find a deep existential emptiness in their lives ... to the point you sometimes want to slap them and shout "You spoiled, self-indulgent brats! Don't you know there are people with real problems out there?" You're tempted to call them shallow, but they're not, really. But they are consumed with their own angst, their relationship problems, and they do glide through life with not much in their way in a practical sense except upper class problems that don't really involve money, or artistic problems such as having lost one's inspiration, being unable to get a part in a play, or realizing they actually have no real talent.

That's the downside. The upside is that they are intellectual, educated, and eloquent. They talk about things most people in films don't talk about, and express themselves well.

I realized a while ago that a typical Allen flick could easily have originated on the stage; probably would have, except Woody likes making films. But here is what I want to thank him for: His films are old-fashioned.

He likes long takes, where the actors actually have to remember their lines. He doesn't use camera tricks of any kind except the most subtle, to emphasize the emotional content of a scene. The dialogue is crisp, delivered in turns, no improvised babble, no talking over another actor's lines (only Altman can really bring that off for me), and, maybe best of all ... no whispering! (Nicole Kidman, take note! Work for Woody, and he'll make you fucking speak up!) No mumbling, no circling cameras. Scenes are staged and played very much as they would have been on the boards. Of course the actors don't project to the back rows, they can speak in normal voices, but they enunciate!

They follow an old-fashioned technical form, too. The action never begins with the credits rolling over it. He gets them out of the way, always white letters in the same typeface against a black background, and then the movie begins. And yes, I've seen some ingenious use of opening credit sequences, and more power to the directors who can pull that off, but it's refreshing to see it done this way, as it used to be done.

Now to this movie ...

The set-up: Four people at dinner in a trendy New York eatery. (Haven't we been here before? Yes, we have, and with one of the same guys, Wallace Shawn, in My Dinner With Andre. Lee pointed out that the other guy even looked like Andre.) Two are dramatists, one a money-making comic writer, sort of a tubby Neil Simon, the other a respected but not nearly so successful tragedian. The four are discussing whether life is essentially tragic or comic. Soon they are more or less dueling, taking the same situation and brainstorming how it could be done. And we begin to see the stories played out, basically the same story but approached from a comic and a tragic perspective. Neat. I like that.

Neither story is fully fleshed out, but they aren't meant to be. You are supposed to see the bones showing, and Shawn even says at one point "And now all the elements are in place for a romantic comedy." Whereupon Will Ferrell does some funny stuff, close to slapstick. Yes, I said Will Ferrell. He plays the part that was obviously written (by Woody) for Woody. If you've seen any of his movies, you know the part. And, sadly, it's a part I've grown very tired of ... when played by Woody. Bringing Ferrell in to take the part was probably the smartest thing the Woodman did here. Ferrell delivers the same wry one-liners, is the same self-deprecating schlub that Woody has played countless times, but he brings a new presence to the role and I liked it a lot.

The cast is uniformly great, again as usual. Actors work for peanuts in an Allen film, and are glad of the chance. Actors, real actors, not action heroes, like to talk, and Woody lets them pour out the words. They all make these sketched-out characters come alive.

I liked it a lot. IMDb.com

Melody Time (1948) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

Memories (Japan, 1995) Okay, I give up. I was resistant to Japanese anime for years. I guess I was prejudiced against it. Which isn’t fair, because it’s such a broad term. Basically, it’s the Japanese term for animation, and I love animation ... but I don’t love Spongebob Squarepants, and I don’t love Speed Racer, and I don’t love The Simpsons. Some people love all these things. It’s a matter of taste. The simple animation in The Simpsons turns me off ... but I love Bullwinkle, which is just as simple. Go figure. What I love the most is beautiful, imaginative animation, and there is maybe more of it in Japan than in America, because they never saw it as just for children. Animation has slowly climbed out of that pigeonhole here in America, but it was never sneered at in Japan. So I’ve come to realize that some of the best cinematic art being made today comes from Japan, and is therefore called anime.

This DVD is a three-part anthology.

Magnetic Rose. Take a little of Dark Star, a bit of Alien, add a dash of 2001, and season with a taste of Madame Butterfly and The Phantom of the Opera, and you’ll have this beautiful outer-space adventure of the mind. It was a little high-flown for my taste and the acting leaves a little to be desired, but it is so gorgeous to look at. Watch the light, and the textures.

Stink Bomb. Sort of a Typhoid Mary story, full of irony. Can’t say too much about it without giving too much away. Liked it.

Cannon Fodder. The shortest of the three, with the least plot ... but the design and the art here is the best of the three. Reminds me a little of Brazil, both in the look and the Kafkaesque sensibility. IMDb.com

Men in Black (1997) Every once in a while a fairly new idea pops up in a film. (Probably not a completely new idea; there are very few of those going around. But we are grateful for what we can get.) Ghostbusters was such a idea. This one was another. For around two hours we are introduced to a new universe, a place where things are not what they seem, or not what we have always believed them to be. And we are delighted for those two hours. “Protecting the Earth from the scum of the universe!” What a great idea! The script was full of good jokes (among the people revealed to be aliens living in our midst: Al Roker, Danny DeVito, Sylvester Stallone, Newt Gingrich, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg), and the visuals were not wasted, they showed a sense of imagination and fun. Will Smith was great in his wide-eyed but cocky innocence, Tommy Lee Jones was perfect as the seen-it-all veteran. Vincent D’Onofrio was really great as an alien insect in a human skin. (The biggest crime in that terrible “Law & Order, Criminal Intent” is the one they never investigate: the wasting of his considerable talents.) Linda Fiorentino was badly underused, but you can’t have everything. It was probably the best comedy of the year.

… and naturally they had to make a sequel. Bad idea. Ghostbusters II was a bad idea, too. You can not recapture the freshness of an idea in a sequel. All you can get is “the continuing adventures of,” and that’s not nearly so interesting. Now I see they have finally gotten Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd to agree to a third Ghostbusters picture. Bad idea. Real bad idea.

Sad moment: I can never see the World Trade Center towers, as we do here, without feeling an actual, physical pain in my gut. And I probably will never get over that. IMDb.com

The Merchant of Venice (2005) This is the first theatrical movie of this play since the silent era. Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles have done it for television, but lately people shy away from it because of the anti-Semitism. I think this is a mistake. You can’t deny it’s there, it was an anti-Semitic age Shakespeare was writing in ... but you know what? I’m on Shylock’s side. I think he’s a genuine hero, and I am sad at his final defeat. Spat upon, insulted for doing the only thing allowed to Jews by hypocritical Christians who could then eschew “usury” (I’ll bet he gave better interest than MasterCard), in constant danger of his life, deserted and robbed by his daughter with the connivance of those same Christians ... wouldn’t you want your pound of flesh? I would. The only thing good you can say about Antonio is that he was willing to honor his contract; he entered it eagerly enough, to screw the Jew out of his interest, and to provide the love of his life with the means to put on the dog in a big way for the object of his lust. Bassanio is an asshole who got himself into debt and had the balls to ask Antonio for cash he didn’t have, and he had to know Antonio was hot for him. Mr. Sensitivity! The only admirable person in sight is Portia, stuck in one of those medieval quandaries, made the prize in a game devised by her goofy dead father, and of course she’s the one smart enough to bring Shylock down. Her arguments are brilliant, and you only wish she could continue her life in court. Married to Bassanio, the only challenge to her will be ordering his dimwitted life, and it’s way too small a project for such a mind.

As for this movie, it is beautiful, much shortened of necessity for the traditional 2-hour time slot, and well acted by all in sight. Pacino is brilliant in his famous speech and in court. He never goes over the top. Jeremy Irons is always good. But I only had eyes for Lynn Collins, who before this has been seen in strictly minor parts in movies like 50 First Dates, 13 Going on 30, and Down With Love. I want to see a lot more of her. IMDb.com

Mexican Werewolf in Texas (2005) Okay, I confess, I only rented this one because I wanted that title in my movie list. With Netflix, it doesn't cost you anything except the trip to the post office. And there was always the chance, microscopic but measurable, that it might be fun. After all, would you think a movie about giant, speedy, radioactive earthworms (called "graboids") terrifying a small Nevada town would be good? If you doubt it, see Tremors.

Sorry, no cigar. I'm not a "bad movie" fan. I watched Plan 9 From Outer Space years ago just to see it if was as bad as advertised (it is), and that's about the extent of my intentional bad movie viewing. This sort of movie used to be made for the drive-in circuit. Since there are hardly any drive-ins now—more's the pity—they call this sort of shit "direct-to-DVD." Oh, it played for about a day at the Shriekfest Film Festival (no doubt for Oscar consideration), and then into the box ... where it should stay. We lasted 18 minutes. IMDb.com

Miami Vice (2006) Blame Netflix. I'd never have rented this for $4.68 or whatever they charge at Blockbuster, but with the Flixter you don't lose money taking a chance on probable crap. Just mail it back. And this is one great big turd, browning slowly on the crystal white beaches in back of the Fontainebleau. If there is any chance you want to scoop this one up and study it for a while, stop here, because I will reveal the plot ... what little of it I was able to decipher.

SPOILER WARNING

I got a lot of problems with this movie, but the basic one is I don't believe in vice. I believe in Miami—I have to, I've been there, though it is difficult to sustain that belief once you've left—but "vice" is drugs, gambling, and prostitution ... and it can be and has been and still is, depending on the jurisdiction you live in, homosexuality, anal and oral sex, adultery, promiscuity, and ripping off those DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW patches on mattresses. Vice is sin, and I don't believe we need laws against sin. MV begins with a little nod toward high-end prostitution, or maybe "white slavery" (which is and should be a crime, because the women involved are not free agents), mostly for the chance to show a really happenin' nightclub and the beautiful coke snorters who inhabit it, but that quickly fizzles out and we're back to the good old reliable "vice" of illegal drug smuggling.

I am on record elsewhere as advocating the total legalization of all "controlled substances" for people over 18 years of age. I won't go into it all again too deeply, but I can't resist pointing out once more that, yes, crack and heroin and glue-sniffing destroys lives ... and that 70 years of war on these substances has proven there's not a damn thing we can do about it. That, and the indisputable fact that the one drug that destroys more lives, both of the users and those around them, than all other drugs put together is the one mind-altering drug that is perfectly legal: alcohol. We tried banning it, to the enthusiastic cheers of the teetotalers and the Sicilian Mafia and practically no one else, and that worked so well we repealed it and went after the small fry, like marijuana and LSD. And couldn't even win that war. There has always been organized crime, but the 18th Amendment put it on steroids, and the War on Drugs made entirely new gangs from interesting and colorful new ethnic groups and put them on nuclear power. 'Nuff said about that.

So I don't like narcs. Another group of people I don't like are spies, undercover agents, moles, call them what you will. Many narcs work undercover, which makes them spies. Spying is the filthiest profession in the world, even if your goal is a laudable one. The job description is simple: liar, and traitor. You befriend your enemy and then stab him in the back. Even if your enemy is truly evil, the filth is bound to rub off on you. Nobody likes a rat, not even the cops who pay them.

But even in this moral wasteland, there should be some standards ... and in this movie Sonny the narc pisses all over them. There are three bad people at the top of this drug cartel, and one of them is a woman. (A Chinese woman, from Cuba, played by Li Gong, and I never did figure that one out.) Sonny quickly gets in bed with her ... and that makes him a whore, pure and simple. Am I the only one who sees that? Don't feed me that bullshit that they "fell in love." You cannot tell me, on the one hand, that drugs are pure evil, that the purveyors of them are poisoning our schoolchildren, and then somehow say ... "Except her, 'cause she's got a great ass." Sonny, you contemptible piece of shit, you are sleeping with a Dealer of Death! That doesn't bother you?

Apparently it doesn't, because after the entirely incomprehensible final shootout (Lee said "I wish they were wearing uniforms," so at least we'd know whether to cheer or boo when somebody got his brains blown out), he spirits her away and puts her on a boat to her homeland. You can't have it both ways, asshole. Does she have the blood of innocents on her hands, or doesn't she? Are drugs evil, or aren't they?

Moral of the story: If you're going to poison schoolchildren, make sure you've got a great ass. IMDb.com

Michael Clayton (2007) Second feature at the drive in with Fred Claus. IMDb.com

Michael Palin: Great Railway Journeys. This BBC series had 8 episodes in the ‘80s, then it shut down, only to reappear in 1994, ’96, and ‘99. The format: various people were picked (I don’t know how) to take a trip on a train. Cameras followed, and the footage would be edited into a one-hour show. Michael Palin (no relation to Sarah) made two of them. I would go anywhere with Michael Palin—we have already gone with him around the world (in 79½ days! no flying allowed), from the North Pole to the South Pole, across the Himalayas and the Sahara, and many other places. And I love trains. I have always wanted to take the Trans-Siberian across Mother Russia to Vladivostok, a 5-day journey that no one ever said was luxurious. I’d like to cross India by train. I’ll probably never do either of those, but I have been lucky enough in my life to have made some pretty darn good train journeys. I’ve gone from Portland to Los Angeles on the Coast Starlight, from Los Angeles to Alpine, Texas, on the Sunset Limited, and from Seattle to Minneapolis on the Empire Builder. (Always in a room; trips that long are hellish in coach.) My best trip was Sydney to Perth, across the whole width of Australia, on the charming little pufferbilly the Indian Pacific. I’d love to take the Ghan from Adelaide to Darwin via Alice Springs. IMDb.com

“Confessions of a Trainspotter” (1980) I don’t know if there are any trainspotters in the US. It seems to be a big hobby in the UK. What you do, you sit by the side of a rail line or in a train station, and you note the numbers on the side of the engines, or even the individual cars. You are armed with train schedules, and lists of all the rolling stock in England and Scotland and Wales. It’s sort of like bird watching, in that you keep a list, and when you see a yellow-bellied sapsucker, you mark that off your list. So when you see Engine #5590, you mark that off. Trainspotters hope to eventually see all the engines currently on the rails. Whew! I don’t know if I could handle the excitement.

Michael was a trainspotter as a youth, when there were still some steam engines highballing it through the English countryside. Now, that I can understand. Steam engines, even if they were the same model, had their own character. They are awesome behemoths of black iron, some of them painted elaborately, they have giant wheels, amazing mechanical movements that you can see, and they go choo-choo-choo, as God intended trains to do. People love them, even if they never saw them in use. You can find thousands of them in small town and big city parks, rusted solid and painted black. America has nearly a hundred museums devoted to trains, and England has a lot. That’s how Michael made his journey interesting—from London to the farthest northern terminus of British Rail at Kyle of Lochaish near the Isle of Skye in Scotland. He stops along the way to visit museums and some of the private railroads that use steam engines to take people on day trips on disused spur lines. As an ex-Python he is moderately well-known, and of course the BBC gets him access to places you and I couldn’t go. And as an ex-Python, you expect silliness and jokes, but what you get is ironic, affectionate, and gentle observations, which is better. The fun of traveling with Michael is his sometimes quirky but always interesting take on things. IMDb.com

“Derry to Kerry” (1994) Derry is what most Northern Irish call Londonderry, and County Kerry is in the far south of the Irish Republic, so this trip covers pretty much the length of the island. Naturally in Belfast he has to get a look at the results of the “Troubles.” It’s very sad. My personal favorite place he stopped was some little town where a few dozen of the residents had built their own home theaters. They were of various sizes, some fancier than others, but the thing to do of a weekend was to go from theater to theater and watch the shows. Most of them specialized: ‘50s sci-fi horror, noir, musicals, westerns, Bogart, Eastwood, etc. And they weren’t showing videotapes, either, this was actual celluloid and 16mm projectors! What a grand way to spend an evening in Ireland. IMDb.com

Michael Palin: New Europe (2005) Poor Michael Palin! Imagine, traveling to some of the world’s most remote and fascinating places with an advance crew to book your transportation and lodging and hire expert (and in this case, at least, often beautiful and female) guides and interpreters. Imagine the nuisance of having to stop off for a little chat with people like the Dalai Lama or Lech Wałęsa on your travels. Imagine being one of the small number of people who have been to both the North and South Poles. Imagine having a crew of grips to carry all your luggage, so that you have to get along with just a little shoulder bag. Imagine!

In truth, of all the jobs in the world, I think Michael Palin’s appeals to me the most. He’s been everywhere, and has always had interesting things to say about the places in these BBC documentaries, of which this is the latest to be released on video. We have seen Around the World in Eighty Days (1988), Pole to Pole (1992), Himalaya (2003), and Sahara (2002) (the only journey I’d have opted out of, but I’m glad he let me see the hardships involved), and loved them all. In a few months his longest trip, Full Circle (1996), in which he goes around the Pacific, will come out on DVD. I intend to watch it immediately upon release. That leaves only the Hemingway Adventure (1999) that still isn’t available on DVD, but I hope it comes out soon.

There is actually something called the “Palin Effect,” which means that shortly after one of these shows is aired on the BBC or comes out on video, there is a noticeable uptick in tourist going to the places he visited!

This time he stays closer to home, explaining that for most of his life, the countries behind the “Iron Curtain” were tough to visit, and might almost have been on another planet. He wanted to know more about his native continent, and so here visits 20 countries, some of them very new, some of them not even recognized by any other countries. Many of them are still adjusting to capitalism, and some are having a rough go of it. He discovers a certain nostalgia, especially among older folks, for the communist days. Sure, you didn’t have freedom and you had to watch what you said, but life was predictable and orderly. You had a job for life, and a reasonable pension, and you knew where your next meal was coming from, even if it was just turnips and cabbage and you had to wait in line for it. Now … who knows what’s going to happen next? There’s been at least a half-dozen wars among the former SSRs and in ex-Yugoslavia, some of which I’ve barely heard about. Did you know that there was a war between Moldova and Transnistria in 1992? Did you even know there was such a place as Transnistria? I admit, I didn’t, I barely know where Moldova is, but even though no one recognizes them, they look healthy and happy, and have some very sexy-looking female soldiers who really know how to goose step!

Episode 1 War and Peace - Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Albania.

Episode 2 Eastern Delight - Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey, Cappadocia.

Episode 3 Wild East - Transnistria, Moldova and Romania. Palin celebrated Transnistrian National Day, met a Moldovan self sufficient old woman, worked with Romanian lumberjacks, interviewed a Romanian tennis player (Ilie Năstase) and visited Transylvania and Bucharest with its Palace of the Parliament.

Episode 4 Danube to Dnieper - From Dniestr to the Danube, Hungary and Ukraine.

Episode 5 Baltic Summer - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia (Kaliningrad Oblast). Palin joined in the festivities with some Neopagans.

Episode 6 From Pole to Pole - Poland.

Episode 7 Journey's End - Slovakia, Czech Republic and Germany. IMDb.com

Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure (1999) One more (and, sadly, the last we hadn’t seen) long trip with Michael. This time it’s a theme instead of a place or a route. Palin has liked Hemingway since he first read one of his novels in grade school … or whatever they call it in England. Now, I’ll admit that I don’t much care for the Great White Hunter and all-around macho man, neither his prose nor his person. But there’s no denying that his life was epic. He didn’t do anything by half measures, and even though a lot of what he did isn’t anything I’d want to do (running with the bulls in Pamplona), I have to sort of envy him for his willingness to do it. By the time he was my age, 61, he had pretty much used himself up and, knowing that, he blew his own head off with a shotgun. But by the time he was 61 he had done many, many more things than I have done, or will ever do.

So Palin sets out here to follow Hemingway’s life journey. No, he isn’t idiot enough to run with the bulls, he watches from a balcony. But he tries fishing for marlin (no luck), and he tries to see a man who knew Papa, Fidel Castro (again no luck), and tries to hunt ducks in a blind outside Venice (once more, shit out of luck), and goes on safari in Kenya and Uganda (where he doesn’t even try to shoot anything). He goes every place Hemingway ever lived and tries to find him there, from Seville, where they have the most insane fireworks show I’ve ever seen, to Key West, to Ketchum, Idaho.  He talks with several people who knew him, and he has a great deal of fun along the way. There is no indication that his trips here are in chronological order, and I suspect they weren’t, as he shows up for Carnival in Venice and the Hemingway Lookalike Contest in Key West. He stages far more things in this series than in the others, setting up little jokes, being more playful. All in all, an excellent addition to this series of journeys. I hope he takes another one soon. IMDb.com

A Mighty Heart (2007) The problem with a story whose outcome you know is simple: How do you build and sustain suspense in such a situation? There are various ways, some better than others. In an epic like The Longest Day, for instance, you know the invasion will be successful, but you don’t know who will live and who will die. One of my favorite examples of a smaller incident is The Day of the Jackal. You know the assassin isn’t going to kill De Gaulle, but the process is made so interesting that you tend to forget that important point, and the tension comes in wondering how the hell will this genius of death be stopped?

We know Daniel Pearl will be beheaded by some people Allah will spit upon when they present themselves at the gates of Paradise. So we must focus on the process. Michael Winterbottom, who is a damn good director, takes the approach of making this very much like cinéma vérité, as if you were in this situation yourself, a part of it. So we concentrate on the police work, which seems to have been quite competent for a third world country. Unfortunately, the story is too complicated to follow, despite visual aids, and we know it’s futile in the end (the chief kidnapper is still alive, appealing his sentence) so it all becomes rather frustrating. The only thing that could keep me going through all this is the performance of Angelina Jolie, which is impressive. But in the end it wasn’t enough. IMDb.com

A Mighty Wind (2003) One of my favorite movies of the year. Christopher Guest has done several of my favorite movies: Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, and This is Spinal Tap (writer and actor). He has a knack of taking a group of people with an obsession (dog shows, heavy metal rock, small-town theater groups and, in A Mighty Wind, has-been folk musicians), and lampooning them while at the same time bringing out a familiar and even affectionate humanity. He has a troupe of regular actors who are the best in the business, especially Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara. IMDb.com

The Mikado, or The Town of Titipu (1987) I am on record as favoring reinterpretations of classic works. I enjoy it in music, where it has a long tradition. Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, for instance, was originally a piano piece, but it is now far more well known as Ravel’s later orchestration. I was a big fan of Walter Carlos’s performances of Switched-On Bach on the Moog synthesizer.

In drama, reinterpretation can be a radical restructuring, retaining only the plot, the most famous example being West Side Story. Or it can be as little as a change of setting, retaining the original dialogue and/or songs. There are countless examples of this. I think it sometimes allows one to see a classic piece with new eyes, and if it’s done right, does no violence to the original. I see no reason, for instance, for Hamlet to be set in Denmark. Shakespeare never went to Denmark, and I doubt he knew very much about the place. King Lear works just as well in feudal Japan (Kurosawa’s Ran) as it does in ancient England.

I’ve seen half a dozen performances of The Mikado (including one set in Texas called The Mikado, Y’all) and this one by the English Opera is my favorite. It was designed by Jonathan Miller, a self-taught opera producer, who decided to set it in an English seaside resort in the 1920s. Your first reaction is probably something like “But The Mikado is all about Japan!” But it’s not, actually. Miller pointed that out, in what became an aha! moment for me. “The Mikado is not about Japan,” he said. “It’s about Englishmen being silly.” Which, when you think about it, is what all Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are about. I realized that there is absolutely nothing Japanese about The Mikado except the title itself. Not one Japanese name, location, or custom. There is no reason it could not have been set in Venice, Denmark, or the streets of London, for that matter. G&S wrote it to take advantage of a faddish fascination with all things Japanese. Traditionally, it has been a great excuse to dress the cast in those wonderful Japanese costumes. But it sure doesn’t have to be that way …

Here we get a production that is almost black and white. All the sets are white, as are most of the costumes. The men’s suits are shades of gray, or sometimes black. When we see a splash of color, as in Yum-Yum’s red hair or Pish-Tush’s ‘orrible toupee, it is almost shocking. The cast here is all first-rate. Traditionally the role of Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, is played by a Big Name, and here it is Eric Idle, whose voice doesn’t measure up to the trained opera singers around him, but who doesn’t disgrace himself, either. Another tradition is that the lyrics of “As some day it may happen,” (better known as “I’ve got a little list”) is updated with a new, topical reference here and there. In this production all the lyrics are new, and I suspect were written by Idle, and they are very funny. If you are a Savoyard, as I am, and not a purist, as I am not, you should see this. IMDb.com

Milk (2008)This is a rather surprisingly traditional bio-pic. I say surprisingly given Gus Van Sant’s tendency to experiment, with results sometimes intriguing (Elephant) and sometimes disastrous (the horrible Gerry, and the loathsome Psycho remake). It avoids tracking Harvey Milk from his no-doubt awful childhood. You all know what that was like, you either knew somebody who everybody called a queer and liked to either humiliate or beat up on, or maybe you were that queer. Either way, I prefer it this way, taking up his life story pretty much when he began his political activism, at a time when being “out” was very rare, and very brave. Even the gay haven city of San Francisco was not able to vote in a gay councilman until they began elections by district instead of at large. I lived there during a lot of that time, and remember that even some hippies didn’t care much for faggots. (To brag about my own non-judgmental credentials, my wife and I rented a room for a while in the Haight-Ashbury to a man who called himself Tinkerbell, and was about as swish as anyone I’ve ever seen. And as nice a guy as you’ll ever meet. He had only a few teeth left, the rest having been knocked out by one gay-basher or another.)

The movie takes us down some very unpleasant memory lanes, beginning with B&W pictures of police raids on gay bars. They used to cover up their badges and just wade in with their nightsticks. Then there was the sad fact that even Eugene, Oregon, as liberal a place as you’ll ever find (I lived there for years) voted to repeal a gay rights ordinance approved by the city council. I mean, you expect it in Dade County, Florida, and in Kansas, but Eugene? Minneapolis, too. How sad. And it was a real struggle to get a majority in California to vote against repeal of a gay rights law there. They just squeaked by. (It was one of the things that set off that moral pipsqueak and coward, Dan White.) Hell, here it is 2009 and last year California voters were panicked yet again by that outrageous sophistry that “it will destroy the family,” and voted against gay marriage.

And how could I have forgotten about Anita Bryant? Lee and I both asked ourselves that question when we left the theater, and the fact is, we had forgotten about her. I guess that’s good, in a way, in that she’s now ancient history, but I had forgotten just how powerful she was for her brief moment in the spotlight of bigotry. (Gays haven’t forgotten. If I were gay—but I’m not gay, as they sing in Avenue Q—I wouldn’t forget, either.) I’m happy to tell you that she’s in retirement, basically broke, and forgotten by pretty much everyone.

The City of San Francisco really rolled out the red carpet for Gus and his crew, as you might expect. There is a lot of grainy historical footage of events, but even more new stuff in and around City Hall, and on Castro Street. And in a bit part was my friend Frank Robinson, the writer. I didn’t know it, but Frank was a speechwriter for Harvey Milk. His account of the filming can be read here. IMDb.com

2008 OSCAR WATCH: We’re trying to see as many of the nominated pictures and performances as we can before the Big Night, and Milk is a Best Picture nominee and has two nominated performances. So far we’ve only seen two of the Best Pictures, and my pick is still Slumdog Millionaire, which is not to say anything against Milk, which is excellent.

Josh Brolin is in the running for Supporting Actor, and this one is not even close, of the four I’ve seen. Brolin is okay, but I think he benefits from the “piling on” we always see at the Oscars, where a picture that was very good gets extra nominations it may not actually deserve, especially in the technical categories. (I mean, Best Costume Design? Best Editing? I doubt it, but that’s how the Academy works.) Robert Downey, Jr’s nomination for Tropic Thunder is, frankly, inexplicable. Sure, he was funny, but he’s had much better performances, and there were dozens, if not hundreds, of other performances this year better than his … including his own performance in Iron Man! Heath Ledger’s star may have faded a bit, though my guess is that he’s still the front runner … but not in my book. It was a great performance, no question, but I wouldn’t vote for him. I haven’t seen Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt. He’s sort of becoming the Meryl Streep of male actors, isn’t he? There he is, on the ballot every year. And I love him and Meryl, both, but I sort of root for other people. That leaves Michael Shannon, in Revolutionary Road, and his performance outclasses these others.

So we come to Sean Penn. There is something abrasive about him that I don’t like. Purely on instinct, I feel that if I met him, I wouldn’t care for him. I could be totally wrong. And, when all is said and done, in the right part he may be the best actor working today. My prejudice doesn’t affect my opinion on this one little bit. He is brilliant here, in what I think is a very touchy part. You know, every two-bit comic can do “gay,” usually as caricature (and yes, I’ve met many gay men whose lives are living caricature, including my old friend Tinkerbell). In my experience, the majority of gay men are not effeminate. You see them all over West Hollywood, and they mostly act perfectly normal, perfectly masculine. Then there are those, like Harvey Milk, who sashay only a little bit. You can see it in films of him: a way of holding the arms, a little catch in the step, the hint of a lisp. It would be so easy to exaggerate these mannerisms and come off comic, but Penn navigates these treacherous waters perfectly. He becomes Harvey Milk. That’s merely the physical part of the role; he is equally up to the emotional side. He makes us feel the passion, both political and sexual, the joy and the long string of defeats. What a tragedy that this good man was taken from us by a whining piece of shit like Dan White.

Millennium (1989) What a disaster. I’ve always enjoyed stories by this John Varley dude, but maybe he should stick to short stories and novels. (Both the story and the novel this turkey are based on are lots better than the movie.) The writing credit blames only him, so I don’t see how he can foist the responsibility on anybody else. Just simply an awful movie. IMDb.com

Million Dollar Baby (2004) The best movie of the year, for my money. (Lee disagrees.) Okay, we haven’t seen Sideways yet, but hope to in the next few days, and we’re probably going to wait for the DVD of Finding Neverland. If I change my mind, I’ll let you know.

There’s really not much I can say about the film, cinematically. Everything worked. But there are two issues I want to address.

I don’t like boxing. I don’t understand why anybody would want to pound on someone else, and get pounded in return. I don’t know why anyone would enjoy watching it. (I take it back; I think I do understand the attraction of boxing, on some level. Along with the foot race, boxing and other forms of hand-to-hand combat are the purest, most basic and primitive of all the activities we call “sport.” They require no equipment and don’t even require any rules. The winner in boxing is the one still standing; the winner in a race is the one that crosses a line in the sand first.)

I don’t understand why anyone would want to ride a horse cross country or over hurdles. I don’t understand why people like to climb onto big motorcycles and drive them at 100 miles per hour. I don’t know why people want to climb up vertical rock faces. But I know there are people who love to do all those things, and more power to them. I wouldn’t dream of standing in their way.

People get hurt, boxing. They also get hurt in American football, in real football, in skiing, in car racing, hockey, and bicycling. All these activities can, and have, produced C2 and C3 spinal cord injuries. But boxing is the one a lot of people want to ban. Why? I guess it’s because it’s the only sport I know of where actual bloodshed is routine, and expected. (Yeah, I know, a lot of blood gets spilled in hockey, but they’re not supposed to be pounding on each other with fists and sticks. They get penalized for it. In boxing you get points for it.) Still, the only opposition I know of to horse jumping, which broke Christopher Reeve’s neck, comes from animal rights nuts, not from people concerned about the riders. So although I dislike boxing intensely, I have no problem with those who want to do it.

And I agree with those who say this isn’t a boxing movie. My mom hates boxing, and loved this movie. I’m with her. Many of the best sports movies aren’t really about the sport itself, but about human determination. The sport is a metaphor. I don’t even think Raging Bull is really a movie about boxing. Rocky, now there’s a boxing movie, because Rocky always wins in the end. In many of my favorite sports movies, the folks we’re rooting for lose. Like Friday Night Lights. I think we learn more about ourselves when we lose than when we win.

One more thing. ... And if you are one of the three people left in the world who don’t know how this movie ends, you’d better check out right here.

SPOILER WARNING

I hate it, hate it hate it hate it, when people grab a work of art and run with it as a political football. I hate it when that pustulent gasbag, Rush Limbaugh, accuses Clint Eastwood of endorsing assisted suicide. I hate it when John Hockenberry and other advocates for the disabled howl that showing one woman’s decision not to live somehow cheapens the lives of people with spinal cord injuries who are living full and happy lives, and even wonder in print if Roger Ebert would like to go to a military hospital and pull the plug on injured Iraq war veterans. Jeeez! You know, if they want the plug pulled, they should have that choice. Most elect not to! I know that! Does that mean that Million Dollar Baby should be forced to include some sort of smarmy example of disabled people triumphing over their disabilities? I’ve seen a million films like that, and they’re fine, they’re inspiring, they’re wonderful, but that’s not the story of this woman!

I’ve known a lot of disabled people in my life, some fully as bad off as the woman in this movie. Not one of them wanted to commit suicide ... and I applaud them and rejoice for them.

I kind of think I would want the plug pulled, myself, but I could be wrong. I won’t know until I get there. However, the issue is choice, not force. The disabled have a horror of society demanding that they get out of the way of the able-bodied, of them being pressured or forced to make the choice of death, or even having it made for them, as in Hitler’s Germany ... and well they might worry about it, with assholes like Rush Limbaugh insisting they stay alive while at the same time opposing the measures that would help make their lives more productive or even tolerable. But I put it to you that denying me or anyone else the right to die when life feels intolerable is in itself the use of force. Suicide is my right, and I resent anyone who denies it to me, from the right or the left. Metaphor schmetaphor. Million Dollar Baby (and Rocky) GLORIFIES boxing, a sport that PROMOTES brain damage. Maybe with a different sport … but there’s still the predictable plot twists (even the ending that everyone’s talking about) and the clichéd characters, especially Maggie’s trailer-trash family. I really liked Morgan Freeman’s character … the first time he played it in The Shawshank Redemption. I like all these actors; they all were good. And I really expected to like this movie, which is probably why I felt kinda pissed off afterwards. Varley and I do agree on the right to suicide. IMDb.com

Millions (2004) A couple times a year a movie comes out of left field and delights me so much that I’m almost at a loss to explain the magic it makes. This is from Danny Boyle, one of the last people you might have expected it from. His previous films included the extremely hairy drug comedy/drama Trainspotting, the film that made Ewan McGregor a star, and the post-Apocalyptic 28 Days Later. Talk about a change of pace! Millions is an irresistible fantasy about two boys who have recently lost their mother. Damian is 7, and he collects saints like other kids collect footballers. He knows every one, and in his innocent decentness is a damn good candidate for sainthood himself. Anthony is 9, and as his father says at one point, in awe, “How did I get you?” The kid could beat the pants off any trader on Wall Street, he is so dedicated to getting rich.

One day a bag with a quarter million quid literally falls from the sky and demolishes Damian’s cardboard play house. He takes it home, thinking it came from God. He only wants to use it to do good, and plans to give it all away ... but to whom? Anthony won’t hear of it. He wants to invest it in real estate. Boyle could have chosen to set the film in a slum, but instead puts it in a new Liverpool suburb that’s as plastic and perfect as anything in America. Hell, it could be under the dome in The Truman Show. So these boys aren’t lacking for anything (though their father works hard for it, and knows they are overextended), except for the love of their mother. I think that was a wise choice.

Damian can’t stop himself from giving away bundles of cash. He speaks to saints, who are solid and real to him, and they are ordinary joes, and funny with their advice on life. (St Peter is proud to be patron saint of keys: “I’m on the gate, up there.”) Complications ensue, including a bad guy who lost the money in the first place ... but that’s all the plot I’m going to talk about. The rest should be left as a delightful surprise.

A few comments. This is not an SFX-driven movie, but it has some, and they are wonderful and enhance the story instead of getting in the way. I loved the way the haloes floated over the heads of the saints like they were made of clear, glowing jelly. The colors of the movie are stunning. And though it uses snappy, high-tech editing techniques, they also never get in the way, but delight me instead. Can’t think of a bad thing to say about this movie. Oh, I forgot one thing. I'm usually pretty good at Brit accents, but these Liverpuddles had pretty thick ones. Another reason I love DVDs: I could turn on the English subtitle for the hearing impaired. Didn't miss a line of dialogue.  IMDb.com

Miracle (2004) This film is rescued from being just a piece of rah-rah chauvinism by placing it firmly in its historical context, and by Kurt Russell’s excellent performance as Herb Brooks, architect of one of the biggest sports upsets of all time, the gold medal won by the American hockey team at Lake Placid in 1980 against a Soviet team that was basically the best the Red Army could provide. If a pick-up college all-star team had whipped the New York Yankees it couldn’t have been more unlikely. I hate hockey, the only team sport where you’re given a weapon. I can’t ever tell what is going on. This film performed the large miracle of keeping me knowing what was happening at all times. Very funny. It’s the New York Yankees. IMDb.com

Miracle Mile (1988) This is one of those movies I treasure. Made on a small budget, didn’t get much of a release, I’d never heard of it when I happened into the theater one day … and I was blown away. It starts out to be one thing, and then it jerks you up as sharply as a hangman’s noose. You are lulled, artfully, into thinking you are looking at a simple love story, and then within sixty seconds realize that—while it is a love story—the stakes here are a lot higher. I won’t spoil it for you by revealing the plot turn, but rent this movie! As a bonus, it gets all the Los Angeles geography right, something movies seldom do. A large part of it happens in Johnies’s coffee shop, a now-defunct institution at the corner of La Brea and Wilshire—the beginning of the Miracle Mile—that is still there, and still available for film shoots. IMDb.com

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943) I decided to see this one again after yet another news story about the much-loathed “Octomom.” You know, Nadya Suleman, the crazy lady who recently bore the only surviving (at this writing, and it looks like they will all make it) set of octuplets ever delivered. And everybody thought that was just amazing … for about 24 hours. Then the afterbirths hit the fan. It came out that she was unmarried, already had six kids, all through in vitro fertilization, and was on public assistance. Some doctor, yet to be identified, had agreed to implant eight more embryos, all from the father of the previous six (and he’s also yet to be identified), in violation of all ethical guidelines for such procedures.

This latest news story was about some brave soul who, under cover of darkness, had hurled an infant car seat through the window of Suleman’s van. Previously things had been thrown at the house, and the phone has never stopped ringing with people eager to tell her what a terrible person she is, many of whom threatened to kill her.

I have been increasingly disturbed by the spewing of flat-out hatred for this woman. Most people don’t throw dog turds or baby seats, or even make phone calls, of course, but everyone disapproves, as far as I can tell. Well, so do I, but it’s clear to me that the lady is emotionally disturbed, and after all, she is hardly the first person to have 14 children. I don’t relish the idea of paying for the no-doubt astronomical medical bills (either directly through taxes, or indirectly, through higher medical costs because the hospital will surely have to write it all off—which is shorthand for charging it all to paying customers), or the cost of their upbringing, which she is unlikely to be able to pay for on her own. But again, if she’d had them one at a time, even with no father and no job and no skills, nobody would be hating her. Many would disapprove (I sure would), but I doubt there would be this disturbing venom. Reading the comments on some of the news stories recently, it seems many if not most Americans would like the children taken away from her, and not one dime of public money spent on them. (Now there’s a great idea. I’m sure they’d enjoy seeing her living in cardboard boxes under a bridge, with her brood. Of course, the babies would mostly be dead soon … which is what I think most of these writers really want.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending her. I think she is a very sad case. But the kids are here, they are innocent of any wrongdoing, and they are going to be needy. It’s time to cool off and try, as a society, to provide the best upbringing possible in this difficult situation. If she is found to be lacking as a mother in some way, then so be it, take them away from her. But no one that I know has suggested that she hasn’t loved and cared for her previous non-simultaneous brood.

What’s saddest, to me, is that up until now, up until this very case, multiple births of 5 or more were celebrated. The family was showered with gifts, money, public acclaim. Consider the McCaugheys, who had septuplets in 1997, and who, like Suleman, rejected the idea of “selective reduction,” which would have given the remaining fetuses a better chance at a normal life. (Two of the seven have cerebral palsy; severe birth defects are very common among litters like this.) From Wikipedia:

The McCaugheys were the recipients of many generous donations, including a 5500ft² house, a van and diapers for the first two years, as well as nanny services, and even the State of Iowa offering full college scholarships to the babies upon their maturity and graduation from high school to any state university in Iowa. U.S. President Bill Clinton personally telephoned Mr. and Mrs. McCaughey to wish them his congratulations.

What’s the big difference? It’s more than just having one more baby. The McCaugheys weren’t on welfare, but who knows how it would have worked out if they hadn’t gotten all those donations and love? Mrs. McCaughey said only one in ten of the avalanche of letters they got was negative, and I doubt they got any death threats. (And she now has the gall to be a lecturer against abortion. She, who condemned two of her boys to cerebral palsy. You know what? Fuck her, and Sarah Palin and her decision to have a Down’s syndrome kid, too.) If you’re going to throw sticks and stones, why not heave some the McCaughey’s way, too?

No, I think, in the end, that a lot of it has to do with her being a single mother. If she had a husband, things might have been very different. There would still be baby-seat-throwing sub-humans out there, but not so many.

Well, I hadn’t meant to rant on so long about that, but it’s really starting to piss me off.

So how about this movie?

It’s by Preston Sturges, who was hands down the best writer and director of comedies in the 1940s. He didn’t make a lot of movies and his career ended sadly, but every one he did make is a little gem, a classic. In this one, Betty Hutton bears sextuplets. But that doesn’t happen until quite near the end. The fun is in the build-up. She draws a blank one night while carousing with a lot of soldiers about to be sent overseas, and wakes remembering only that she got married. (If she remembers consummating the marriage, she never mentions it.) She doesn’t have a copy of the license, but remembers everybody thought if would be funny if she used a phony name … and the new husband’s name is … she can’t remember, but it sounded like Ratsky-watsky. Then she finds out she is … ahem … significant (you might even say pregnant) pause … wink, wink … you know. In a certain condition. (You couldn’t say “pregnant” under the idiotic Hays Code of the MPAA, which lingered right into the mid-‘60s. They seldom, if ever, even showed a pregnant woman.) So we see very little of Betty when she would be showing what they call a “baby bump” these days, and nothing at all of her bump. We sort of slide past all that part. Which is even more insane, considering she is carrying six rug rats! Next thing we know, nurses are running down the hallways carrying one puppy after another …

Of course it is ludicrous that a woman in that situation would get married, rather than make out in the back seat (or possibly be raped while passed out), but an unmarried woman having sex could not be shown sympathetically in a comedy. She would have to be punished, and be seen as a bad person. So Sturges uses this ridiculous prudish restriction to his advantage, getting all sorts of laughs out of Betty’s attempts to make it all seem legitimate. These resolve around Eddie Bracken, professional Hollywood nebbish, who isn’t in the Army because of a nervous condition, and who loves her. And many other things are winked at. There is a short piece about the MPAA Code on the DVD, and everyone agrees that Sturges was the master of making the Hays Office look like fools. (And I just learned that the office was located literally two blocks from us, on the corner of Hollywood and Western!) She could not be drunk, so the ridiculous fiction that she got knocked on the head was brought in … and of course everyone in the audience knew she was drunk out of her mind. As for Ratsky-watsky? It’s doubtful there ever was a marriage. We never see him. The movie is full of stuff like that, and it’s a pleasure to see Sturges sock it to the prudes. Believe it or not, this movie was way racier than anything anyone else was doing at the time. IMDb.com

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008) This is based on a novel written in 1939, but as I watched it I felt it easily could have been a stage play. There are a limited number of scene changes, and it is dialogue-driven. Further, I thought it could make a real nice musical ... and in fact, in the DVD extras, I learned that Universal optioned it many years ago, intending it to be a musical starring Billie “Glenda the Good Witch” Burke. But a little something called World War II intervened. Now, almost 70 years later, we get this production starring the wonderful Frances McDormand as Guinevere Pettigrew.

The film is a sweet little trifle of the British upper classes on a day close to the start of the war. Some of it reminded me a bit of Oscar Wilde, though never quite that sharp. Miss P. is a governess down on her luck, and through comic misadventure and a bit of guile, she becomes the social secretary for an air-headed American actress-wannabe, Delysia Lafosse (real name, Sarah Grubb), played wonderfully by Amy Adams, who enchanted me in Enchanted. The lady can do “bubbly” better than anyone else around today. Miss D. has three boyfriends on the string, two that can do her good in her career—which really amounts to nothing so far, in spite of appearances—and one who is her obvious true love. Miss P., initially rather prissy and horrified by the lifestyle of these people, turns out to be quite resourceful in manipulating them and helping Miss D. get through her hectic and disorganized life. Guess which man Miss D. picks, in the end, after much comic travail? And guess what happens to the ugly duckling Miss P.? Hint: The author said she never wrote an unhappy ending. That’s cool with me. We both enjoyed this one. Oh, and my chief worry—can American McDormand, who handled Texas and Minnesota so well, do British? Yes, she can, though I wish she’d spoken up a little. We had to have the subtitles on. IMDb.com

Miss Potter (2006) A highly fictionalized account of the life of Beatrix Potter, whose books I never read. For a movie starring Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, and Emily Watson—big stars, all of them—it seems to have done very little business. It’s really not what I had hoped for. They might have mentioned that Potter was a recognized expert on fungi, and while they added a postscript that she donated most of her land holdings in the Lake District of England for preservation, I didn’t know that she played an important part in the beginnings of the National Trust, which is sort of like the American National Parks Service and National Trust for Historic Preservation combined. IMDb.com

Mission: Impossible III (2006) The 2nd Occasional Lee's-in-Oregon Film Festival. IMDb.com

The Missing (2003) Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones are wonderful actors, and Ron Howard is a great director, but everybody makes a turkey now and then. Gobble-gobble. IMDb.com

The Mist (2007) The 2nd Occasional Lee's-in-Oregon Film Festival. IMDb.com

Mona Lisa Smile (2003) A female Dead Poets Society or The Emperor’s Club, and I haven’t really cared for Julia Roberts since Pretty Woman, but this was a lot better than I had expected, mainly because of a cast of some of the best young actresses working today. IMDb.com

Mondovino (2004) I hardly know where to start in enumerating the things I didn’t like about this movie. ... Let’s begin with wine.

I know nothing about wine. You know that slop bucket Paul Giamatti poured over his head in Sideways? If you gave me a glass of that I couldn’t distinguish it from Chateau Rothschild ’65. I do know a bit about wine snobbery, though. It is my feeling that 90% of the bullshit in the world is to be found in politics. A good part of the other 10% is to be found in wine. At one point a man in the movie says that wine is culture. Where you find wine, you find civilization. Where there is no wine, there goes barbarism. Bullshit. Wine growers, wine critics, wine drinkers ... they can’t string three words together without two of them being bullshit.

The thesis of this movie is that big American wine makers like Mondavi, and now big French winemakers kissing the asses of big American winemakers, are polluting the precious culture and heritage of the great wines of the world, all of which happen to be found in France. (Well, maybe a few primitive ones in Italy.) A Chardonnay cannot be grown in California or Australia; what matters is the terroire, the entire growing environment of the grape. Ergo, a Chardonnay can only come from Chardonnay, and you don’t even dare label it Chardonnay, but only by the vineyard where it was grown.

Sacre bleu! Call out the friggin’ Foreign Legion! It is difficult for me to imagine a scandal I would have less interest in. We’re not talking about screwtop and cardboard box wine here, we’re talking only about wines selling for more than $50/bottle. And it seems possible that the people who buy and consume these wines ... i.e., rich people who fancy themselves wine experts ... are being cheated! Gulled! Hypnotized by Big Wine and Big Media and a guy named Robert Parker to accept inferior product and think it’s the real stuff! Imagine my horror to learn this!

Oh, screw it. I could carry on all day about the fatuousity of the wine culture, and I have other things to complain about. Things like cinematography.

When I was 21 in San Francisco, I picked up a great old Bolex 8MM camera (like this) at a pawn shop. I shot a roll of film. One of the things I shot was a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge in our car. I got the film back and looked at it. Lesson One in hand-held photography: Don’t shoot from a moving car. The footage sucks. It seems like half this film is shot from a moving car. We actually see footage taken crossing the Golden Gate Bridge! Or jerky footage of an airliner passing overhead. Or things by the side of the road, which we can’t see because the camera is too unstable. Unbelievable!

My old Bolex didn’t have a zoom lens, that first refuge of the incompetent filmmaker trying to make his crap more visually interesting. Without rhyme or reason, the camera will zoom in for a few seconds, focus, then pull back jerkily. Hey, asshole, this is supposed to be a movie about wine, not nose hairs, zits, old acne pits, and receding hairlines. Yeah, yeah, I know they teach a special course of shaky-cam in film schools these days ... and please, please, somebody make them stop! They actually jerk the camera around, even if it’s on a tripod, to give it “edginess,” “immediacy,” “tension.” Anything at all to avoid the dreaded “talking head.” Well, folks, when you interview people it’s inevitable that you’re going to have a talking head here and there. Get used to it. There is another transparent technique, which is, when you don’t like someone, when you want to make him appear as a villain, shoot from the hip. Better yet, shoot from the ground. It makes him look sinister, looming. It gives you the subconscious feeling that you’re seeing footage from a concealed camera, that you’re catching the guy off guard. We get a lot of that here. Listen, I already knew where your sympathies are, idiot, you don’t have to beat me over the head with it by shooting the Mondavis out of your hip pocket.

Sheesh. I know this film isn’t worth all these words, but seldom has a film punched so many of my angry buttons, nor punched them so hard. But one last gripe. The film is 135 minutes long. (The French version was 159! But then I imagine the French could watch a much longer film that puts down the Americanism their wine industry has embraced.)

After all that, I do have to say one good thing about winemakers. Apparently they love dogs. Without exception (well, the dealer in the backseat of his car, who never seems to leave his car except to sit in his awful office) they have one or more great dogs. Whatever you can say against them, they aren’t cat people. IMDb.com

Monsieur Ibrahim (France, 2003) I’ve always liked Omar Sharif. This Egyptian man can pass as any kind of Middle Eastern to American audiences, and this time he is a Turkish Sufi who has run a grocery store in Paris for many years. He befriends a Jewish boy whose father is depressive and cold. It all works very well, if maybe a little predictably. A great performance by Sharif. IMDb.com

Monster (2003) All 5 Best Actress nominees this year were very, very good, but 4 of them ran into the monster performance of Charlize Theron, who I swear I would never have identified through 109 minutes if I hadn’t known it was her. It is simply the most awesome performance in a decade. Maybe more. It was much, much more than just make-up and a 30-pound weight gain. She seemed to be inhabiting someone else’s body, she seemed to be channeling the unquiet, horrific spirit of Aileen Wournos. The film does not approve or condemn; her first killing is totally justified, I wanted to pull the trigger myself. The last is sheer butchery. The director simply shows you a tortured soul who had never believed she could love or be loved, and the horrible things that such a person could do for love. One of the best films of the year. IMDb.com

Monster-In-Law (2005) Second feature at the drive in. IMDb.com

Monsters Inc. (2001) Pixar can do no wrong. Wonderful. IMDb.com

Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) Second feature at the drive in with Star Trek. IMDb.com

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) I’d been reading The Palin Diaries, 1969-79, what I hope is just the first volume of Michael Palin’s 40 years of daily writing, so I’d learned a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about this movie and Life of Brian. I wanted to see if it was still as funny as the first time through. It was. It was made on a tiny budget, before Monty Python made it really, really big in America. The ending is a bit of a disappointment, but other than that it grabs you from the first time King Arthur comes riding into view on an invisible horse, his servant hopping along behind him clapping coconut shells together to imitate hoofbeats. Insane! IMDb.com

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) I’ve seen this several times, the first time at what used to be Graumann’s Chinese Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard, most recently to take the taste of blood out of my mouth after watching The Passion of the Christ, for my sins. It’s one of the best comedies ever made. Now I can never see Christ nailed on the cross without that lovely little jingle "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" running through my head. I’m very happy for that. IMDb.com

Moon (2009) Several people have written to me, recommending this modest, independent movie, saying it was good hard SF. And it was, in some ways. However …

Plot: (CONTAINS SPOILERS) A man has a three-year contract to run a moon base, all alone. Already I’m frowning … but never mind. He’s going a little bonkers. (Well, duuuh.) He supervises four big robot harvesters that are collecting Helium-3 to send back to Earth to power fusion plants. Okay, that’s feasible. The Power Company that owns the base provides 70% of Earth’s energy. That’s a bunch of power, but okay.

When he’s outside in his spacesuit, he performs the one-sixth-gee Armstrong Shuffle well enough, but when he’s inside he walks normally. Um … gravity would be the same inside and outside, dude. But I realize it’s very tough to imitate that, and the budget was low, so I’ll let it go.

Outside in vacuum everything goes clank and clunk, roars, hums, chugs, does everything but go choo-choo-choo. Okay, no one’s gotten the silence of space right since 2001: A Space Odyssey, everybody but scientists and nitpickers like me expects it by now … I’ll let it go.

They’re on the farside of the Moon, but there is seldom any two-way communication. The guy sits there and listens to messages from his wife, very much like Dave did in 2001. (In fact, the whole movie was deeply influenced by 2001, from the look of it to a concerned AI computer that sounds very much like HAL, called GERTY.) (It’s Kevin Spacey.) They’re communicating through something called the “Jupiter” link. Does this mean the signal is being routed through Jupiter? Sort of like routing your call to a guy across the street through Tierra del Fuego. But when the Company wants to talk to him—surprise!—they get right through. Explanation: the relay satellite is unreliable. They have only one relay satellite? For a facility that is harvesting 70% of the world’s energy, they haven’t invested in a spare? And the guy buys it? I’m getting antsy. There better be a good reason for all this. And by the way, when the guy does manage to get a call through to Earth, there is no time delay at all. As I recall, it’s about three light-seconds, round trip, Earth to Moon and back… but I’ll let that go.

And here’s the spoiler: The Company has made multiple clones of the guy, and they’re each good for about three years, then they start to fall apart. And this I just can’t let go. The Company has the money and resources to build this large base, which must have cost many, many billions, with an even larger hidden basement to house all the sleeping clones … and they can’t spring for carfare back and forth for a decent-sized crew of normal people to keep everybody sane? Investing in this massive, hugely expensive cloning facility is saving the Company money? Mention is made of “the cost of training a new caretaker,” and that’s simple bullshit. What we see this guy do could mostly be done by an orangutan. Or by GERTY, for that matter. I would be in favor of a human crew, but I’d want at least six, and married couples would be good. Now, I bow to no one in my contempt for corporations. I believe that the corporation as we know it, as a legal entity, should be utterly abolished. I believe they are capable of anything if it benefits the bottom line … but that’s the problem. I simply don’t believe this is a profitable thing to do. They are willing to commit multiple murder just so they don’t have to train somebody else do to simple tasks? Bullshit. They turn a multi-billion dollar enterprise over to a single person, who is almost certain to go bugfuck in three years all by himself? Bullshit.

See, this whole situation was manipulated artificially to get to the thing writer/director Duncan Jones (who is the son of David Bowie, by the way) really wanted to explore, which is a man meeting and interacting with himself. Because three clones of Sam Rockwell are the only people we see in the flesh in the whole film. Now, that’s a damn good idea to explore. I’ve done it myself in a couple of stories. But the setup has to be plausible, for me, and there is nothing plausible in this whole scenario. Which is a damn shame, since there was so much potential there.

Can’t end this without two more gripes. They’re on the farside—again, as part of this elaborate ruse so the guy can’t communicate with Earth except when the Company wants him to. But there is more Helium-3 on the nearside. And they must be right on the freakin’ edge of the farside. The guys go out in a crawler, state that they’ve traveled about a hundred miles from the base … and there’s the Earth, hanging quite a bit above the horizon. I just don’t believe one hundred miles would make that possible.

Sorry, but when you set yourself up as “hard SF,” you’d better be ready to explain massive goofs like this. IMDb.com

Moonlight Mile (2002) Excellent. Wonderful cast, led by Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon. A young man’s fiancée is murdered, and he moves in with her parents, and they all deal with their grief in different ways. IMDb.com

The More The Merrier (1943) There was no actress better in the screwball comedies of the late 1930s and early ‘40s than Jean Arthur. You want proof? How about The Talk of the Town, The Devil in Miss Jones, and that wonderful Frank Capra trio, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Joel McCrea was no slouch, either. After this one, for some reason Hollywood kept casting him in forgettable shoot-‘em-ups … probably because westerns were so popular then. But I think he was wasted there. He’s much better in a comedy like this, or Sullivan’s Travels. His deadpan delivery is not at all like Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, but it works very well. And Charles Coburn was one of the best character actors in the business. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role. Put them all together under director George Stevens, who could do both comedy and drama equally well, and you’ve got one of the best comedies of the 1940s. It is set in Washington, DC, where there was a severe shortage of both housing and eligible men during the war. (Eight girls for every boy! There are several hilarious scenes where newly-emboldened women scare men to death with their brazen advances.) Coburn is an eccentric who finagles his way into the spare room Jean Arthur had patriotically made available. He then takes it on himself to break up her engagement with a stuffed shirt and match her with McCrea, who sublets his sublet. The comic situations multiply, and not a joke misfires. Stevens even plays with us: The stuffed shirt wears an incredibly bad toupee, and in one scene there are two blatant opportunities for it to come off for a cheap chuckle … but it’s funnier that it doesn’t come off.

Sadly (for movie fans, but not for her), Jean Arthur retired after two more films, as soon as her contract at Columbia was up. She had come to hate making movies, and was very happy to be out from under the thumb of crazy man Harry Cohn. She was lured back twice more, once for George Stevens again in Shane, and once for Billy Wilder in A Foreign Affair, and she made a short-lived television show, but that was it. She taught drama at Vassar (where one of her students was Meryl Streep!), and lived the rest of her life as a semi-recluse in Carmel. IMDb.com

Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) The 1960s was an exciting time for British film. Directors there were experimenting, taking chances their American counterparts wouldn’t be tackling for some time. A year before the summer of love in San Francisco, at the beginning of the Beatle phenomenon, people still thinking in terms of mods and rockers. Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, Twiggy. This movie tells the story of a man maybe a bit ahead of his time. In a few years his behavior would not seem so odd … or at least he’d have a lot of company. Morgan is a wild man, an artist, a working-class communist/socialist (brought up that way by his dear mum, played wonderfully by Irene Handl), childlike, obsessed with animal imagery, particularly the great apes. Leonie is his upper-class wife, who is divorcing him. It’s easy to see why. He is terribly needy, and prone to destructive antics. It’s also easy to see why she loved him, and still loves him. She has a wild streak, but it’s not enough to put up with Morgan 24/7/365. Morgan needs a special sort of woman, as crazed as he is, and Leonie isn’t that woman. It’s inevitable that she would settle back into her comfortable existence, and no one is ever going to be comfortable around Morgan. The form of this B&W film is experimental, with freeze frames, camera under-cranking, and frequent cuts to scenes from Africa, old Tarzan movies, and King Kong. Mostly it works, though it no longer looks as revolutionary as it was when I first saw it, brand new. It was the first starring role for both Vanessa Redgrave and David Warner, and they both shine. Redgrave was nominated for an Oscar—one of her co-nominees was her sister, Lynn!—but lost to Elizabeth Taylor. Warner had been in only one film previously, masterfully playing the craven coward Mr. Blifil in Tom Jones. IMDb.com

Morons From Outer Space (1985) One of my favorite little comic movies. Aliens from space crash-land on Earth and turn out to be stupid trailer trash. I laughed a lot. IMDb.com

Morvern Callar (2002) I’ve seen good movies about alienated youth, but there has to be some attraction, and this Scottish effort doesn’t. Morvern is so disconnected from life that when her boyfriend dies of an overdose, she steps over his body, which lies in a doorway in their apartment, never bothering to move him. Yuck. IMDb.com

Mostly Martha (Bella Martha) (Germany, 2001) Mmmmmmmm-mmmm good! I love food movies. Eat Drink Man Woman, Chocolat, Big Night, Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate ... there’s all those and plenty of others, and I can’t think of one I didn’t like. Is it just good luck? Or is there something that inspires a director to go that extra visual and emotional mile when the loving preparation of food is the metaphor for family, emotion, love of life ... and all that jazz? I don’t know. I suspect that a movie that had nothing going for it but the food would not be a good movie ... but I haven’t found an example, and I hope I don’t. All I know is, when a movie really loves the food, it’s already got at least two and a half stars in my book.

In fact, the only thing I didn’t like about this movie was the title. I found out that the working title in German was Drei Sterne, which means Three Stars. That’s not a great title, either, but it’s better than the one they went with, which tells me nothing.

Martha is the “second-best” chef in Hamburg, working at an upscale nouveau Italian place called Lido, where she runs a kitchen with Germanic efficiency and precision and a great deal of art and love. The rest of her life sucks. She’s going to a shrink, but all she can talk to him about is food. There really is nothing in her life she feels safe about but food. Obviously she needs a bit of shaking up, and it happens when her sister dies and she is left with an 8-year-old niece she isn’t prepared to handle. Then a new Italian assistant chef shows up in the kitchen to help during this tough time, and she views him as a rival. What follows is predictable, but so what? It’s warm, and funny, and I liked everyone in the story except a few asshole customers, who Martha never hesitates to blister for their nitpicking ignorance of good food. A trifle, a bon-bon, but never wienerschnitzel. Savor it. IMDb.com

The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) (Spain, 2004) I am not an admirer of Che Guevara. In fact, I don’t like him at all. Like so many revolutionaries he probably started out with his heart in the right place, and then lost his heart entirely. He was apparently an enthusiastic torturer of political enemies. He was a Maoist, which is synonymous with murdering madman in my lexicon. He wore a Rolex to the Bolivian “revolution,” where he got his just desserts. This movie shows him as a young man taking a long, Quixotic trip across the Spanish-speaking parts of South America with his best friend (who is still a doctor in Cuba), getting laid, having asthmatic attacks, seeing injustices, doing some good here and there. Having his consciousness raised as we’d put it today. They end up volunteering at a leper colony in Peru, then back home to become radicalized, one assumes.

Along the way they see a lot of social injustice. I found myself wondering what it would be like to re-trace their route, 50 years later. I concluded we’d see even more social injustice, with appalling violence bequeathed by people like Che and the Shining Path added into the mix. We’d see 5-star “jungle” hotels, eco-tourists out the wazoo. We’d see a lot less rain forest and a lot more squalid cities. We’d see hordes of evil, grasping peasants earning $300 per year doing their evil work to force cocaine up the noses of innocent Americans who earn $300,000 per year, and Americans soldiers in helicopter gunships shooting at them to make sure the mighty flowing Amazon of dope money keeps flowing and the price remains high.

What have we learned? I’ve learned that 99% of revolutions involve nothing more than replacing one set of rat bastards with another set of rat bastards, often even worse rat bastards. Does that mean we should stop fighting against injustice? No, but we sure have to be careful how we do it, and who we follow. I’d follow this young man on the screen. And he would have led me to the one-man dictatorship and authoritarian fascism that is Cuba today. I hope I would have had the sense to leave before the truncheons were brought out.

The film is very pretty — my, there are some interesting corners of the world I’ll certainly never have the time to see — and sometimes funny, but you know it would never have been made if Che hadn’t turned out to be such an important historical figure. There just isn’t enough happening here for that, and on the other hand, not enough real connection with this young innocent and the man he became to be of real interest. IMDb.com

The Mouse on the Moon (1963) Richard Lester’s first feature film was something called It’s Trad, Dad!, which is very hard to find. This is his second. The one following this one was A Hard Day’s Night, and he was off to the races. I’d sure like to see that earlier film, and a short he did called The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, because something must have impressed the Beatles to hire him for their first movie, and it sure wasn’t this film. It’s a sequel to The Mouse That Roared, which starred Peter Sellers in three roles. This film desperately needed Sellers. Both movies are about the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick, an English enclave in Europe. This film has funny situations and some fairly funny moments, some of the political satire works, but the pacing is off, the comic timing is off, and in the end it fails to deliver. Amazing that Lester could move from this rather pedestrian exercise to the brilliant antics of the Beatles films and my personal favorite, The Knack … and How to Get It. IMDb.com

The Mouse That Roared (1959) Much better than the sequel, The Mouse on the Moon. Peter Sellers plays three roles. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick, smallest country in the world, declares war on the United States … and wins! IMDb.com

FIRST FEATURE: Mr. 3000 (2004) I had few expectations about this one. I knew it was about a ballplayer who got 3000 hits, then quit baseball in the middle of a pennant race because he was such a self-centered asshole. Nine years later it turns out 3 of those hits were recorded twice, so he’s only got 2997. He wants to be in the Hall of Fame but sportswriters hate him. Now he has to get back in shape and try for those last 3 hits. I figured it would be a silly little comedy — and it is quite funny, mostly from dialogue and Bernie Mac’s personality. The last thing I expected was for a damn good baseball game to break out. The photography of the action is exciting. And at the same time, like all good baseball movies, it’s about a lot more than baseball. I don’t know why, but the “American Game” seems to be the sport best-suited to exceed the genre of the sports movie. The best of them, like The Natural, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, and even Damn Yankees, aren’t really about baseball at all, they are metaphors, even fantasies. Mr. 3000 doesn’t fall prey to that almost universal cliché: winning the Big Game at the end. I did see the ending coming, but only after I was halfway through the film, when it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a Big Game movie. And seeing it coming didn’t hurt at all; it was emotionally satisfying. It is sly, funny, informed, well-written and acted, and even exciting. IMDb.com

SECOND FEATURE: Without a Paddle (2004) This, on the other hand, is Deliverance with the degenerate morons inside the canoe as well as outside, and no great banjo music. I’m not sure why we didn’t start the car and leave. I guess it was because there were a few laughs, but so few and so widely separated that I almost missed them as they sped by. Avoid this turkey. IMDb.com

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) This one putters along in a likeable fashion for almost an hour and a half as nothing more than a silly entertainment. Then it stumbles into a pop-up shooting gallery ending, as so many talentless writers and directors settle for these days. BING! Up pops the metal rabbit. BANG! Down falls the metal rabbit, to be replaced by twelve more rabbits. They actually shoot at metal rabbits, at Coney Island, early in the film, and it’s more exciting than killing 100 “real” “bad guys” (I can’t even remember who they were; Big Business? Big Government? Something like that.) (Who cares?) IMDb.com

Mr. Baseball (1992) I thought a better title might have been Mr. Besuboru … but then most people wouldn’t know what it meant. That’s the way Japanese speakers pronounce baseball. No kidding. Tom Selleck is a ballplayer whose best years are behind him (haven’t we seen this story before?). He gets traded to a team in Japan, where large white guys can sometimes beat the tar out of little Japanese guys, at least in the hitting department. Selleck is a head taller than anyone around him most of the time. It reminded me of being in Hong Kong, walking down the street, seeing nothing but a sea of black hair as viewed from above. He has a hard time adjusting to Japanese customs and ways of doing things, partly because he doesn’t want to. Japanese teams tend to devalue the individual, just as Japanese society does. They usually try to seek a consensus where an American would stick to his guns, or even fight. If a team loses, the manager and even the owners lose face as well as a game. They are less likely to take chances, holding on first base when an American would charge for second. Americans probably tend to over-glorify individualism, but both ways of living have their points. The best solution is probably somewhere in between, and this movie makes that point by having Selleck gradually see the merits of the other system, and at the same time show the team some new and more aggressive ways of play, and (surprise!) fall in love with the manager’s beautiful daughter.

I don’t know if all the things said about Japanese baseball here are true, but there are serious differences in the two games. In Japan you can have tie games after 15 innings, or 10 o’clock, whichever comes first. The dimensions of the field are slightly smaller.  The pitching is different. We see several playing fields in this movie, and all but one of them have dirt both on the base paths and covering the whole infield. It’s ugly as hell; I’m surprised the beauty-loving Japanese stand for it. On the other hand, one field does have a grass infield … and on all the base paths, too. It looks like cow pasture baseball, with the bases just sitting there on the grass. Japanese fans are just as rabid as American ones, and much more demonstrative, waving flags and throwing confetti and such, never letting up for the entire game. And, of course, instead of crackerjack and hot dogs, they eat bowls of noodles and tasty dried squid on a stick.

The movie is a lot better than I expected, with a lot of good lines and a plot which, though fairly standard, takes me places I haven’t been before. Worth seeing. IMDb.com

Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007) The 2nd Occasional Lee's-in-Oregon Film Festival. IMDb.com

Mr. Brooks (2007) There’s this serial killer (Kevin Costner), see, who is also a rich, successful businessman, loving husband, and father … and already my bullshit alarm is going off. He has an imaginary playmate (William Hurt) whose origin is never explained, but who keeps goading Mr. Niceguy to kill innocent people. Only Mr. Brooks fucks up and a guy across the street takes pictures of his latest kill. Blackmail? Well, only in the sense that the photog wants to kill, too, and learn at the master’s feet. What phenomenal luck! I thought. Of all the people who could have observed him … But wait, it gets better. There’s this cop (Demi Moore), who is rich ($60,000,000) and going through a messy divorce from a grasping asshole, and follows hunches a lot. She’s being stalked by another serial killer (that’s two, and a wannabe) she sent to prison but he escaped … and who just happens to pull into a 7-11 while Brooks and the wannabe are stalking a guy they plan to kill (who, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn, was probably another serial killer, and his dog and his pickup truck and his wife, too, only we never find out) … and right in the middle of this Brooks learns that his beloved daughter probably killed a guy with an axe at Stanford, mostly likely because she enjoys it … only we never find out if she was a killer or not, but we are treated to one of the lamest “Oh, god, it was only a bad dream” sequences I’ve ever seen … enough, enough, enough! How we made it through to the end of this piece of shit I’ll never know. Maybe I was just too stunned at its surpassing awfulness that I didn’t have the strength to hit the EJECT button. IMDb.com

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007) Here is a magical film that seems to have everything in place to be a real delight, but they seem to have forgotten one element: the magic. I can’t imagine how they misplaced it, but they did. It is written and directed (first time) by Zach Helm, whose Stranger Than Fiction was wonderful. It stars Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman, two actors who have always been good. And yet it just sits there like a colorful lump. It reminds me of another film, Toys, that aspired to magic and was important to its director and laid a big, colorful egg.

There is no edge to the movie, as in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. It is sorely lacking in conflict. Mr. Magorium is about to die, and he’s fine with it. His assistant fears she’s not up to taking over. And then he dies, and she takes over, the end. Sorry, Zach, that’s not enough story. This is another movie like Speed Racer, where you really, really wish the writer had had one tenth the imagination of the real heroes of this flick, the art director, production designer and the set decorator. Let me hail them here: Brandt Gordon, Thérèse DePrez, and Clive Thomasson. Hats off to you folks, you did a fabulous job, almost good enough to make the movie worth watching … but not quite. IMDb.com

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (1996) I thought this might be another attempt to turn a Disneyland ride into a movie, like the popular Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, or the big Eddie Murphy flop (and how long has it been since you didn’t have to put that word after his name, except for Shrek? Maybe he should look for more jackass roles), The Haunted Mansion, but apparently not. It was originally released—very, very ineptly—as The Wind in the Willows, and seems to be that rare case of the Disney organization completely screwing up something. It was reviewed well, and it should have cleaned up simply on the strength of having four of the Monty Python crew, albeit Michael Palin was in the pretty small part of “The Sun.” (Terry Gilliam was to play “The River,” but had scheduling conflicts, and Graham Chapman offered his usual excuse of being dead. That’s starting to wear pretty thin, Graham.) All parts are played by humans with minimal make-up. Eric Idle as Rat has a tail and whiskers, Terry Jones as Toad has a green face. The weasels all have the same hair style, but you know them by their long brown coats. That’s all you really need if the script is good, and this one is. The special effects are clever. The story gets rather elaborate toward the end, and strays quite far from the original, but I don’t object to that. John Cleese is particularly good in the small role of Toad’s defense attorney. Terry Jones is good as Toad, and he also wrote and directed. IMDb.com

Mr. Woodcock (2007) The 2nd Occasional Lee's-in-Oregon Film Festival. IMDb.com

Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) Stephen Frears is better known for more serious fare than this, such as Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, and My Beautiful Laundrette. This one is light-hearted, and does some things very well, not so well on others. 1938, London, and recently-widowed Mrs Henderson, rich and clueless, is looking for something to do with the rest of her life. She buys a theater, hires Bob Hoskins to manage it, and they decide on an American-style Vaudeville format, continuous shows. The gimmick: female nudity. However, the girls can only be nude if they don't move. Tableaux are okay, hootchy-kootchy is not. They are a big success. This is the part that works. The tableaux are very nice, the music is wonderful.

Comes the Blitz. The Home Office (or whoever is in charge) wants to shut them down. Too dangerous to stay open with bombs falling. Mrs H argues that the troops, who may never get another chance, need the opportunity to catch a little glimpse of tit. Outcome: they never close. This never quite came off for me. I have absolutely no problem with nudity or even sex onstage, no problem with posing, burlesque, striptease, porn, any of that. But it would be a pretty sad sack of a soldier who couldn't get laid during his last leave before heading to the front. Believe me, there were prostitutes, sympathetic single girls, and even willing WRENS in London in 1942. There is a curious prudery in never even mentioning this. It's somehow a throwback to movies actually made in this period, where GIs and stiff-upper-lip British soldiers behaved more like overgrown boys than men. Maybe that was the intent, but it didn't work for me. IMDb.com

Mulan (1998) Saturday Night at the Toons! IMDb.com

Munich (2005) So what's it gonna be, God? An eye for an eye, or turn the other cheek? You are such a confusing Asshole, that's probably a good part of the reason I stopped believing in You. If one looks long enough, one can find justification for anything in Your book.

I think it was Harry Kemelman in his rabbi David Small books who first pointed out to me that "turn the other cheek" was not a Jewish concept. It was Jesus who said that, and you know how they feel about him. However, Jews don't have a monopoly on vengeance. It's a worldwide trait, and it leads to all sorts of trouble.

I've never been a turn the other cheek sort of guy. My policy has always been, if you fuck with me or mine, you're going to pay if I can possibly manage it. I don't believe killing is always a bad thing. We're all going to die, and some of us deserve to die a lot sooner than others, and I can feel morally justified in helping them along. I will confess to you that I sometimes fantasize about being alone with Osama bin Laden. Me, him, and a gun in my hand. On my charitable days I put one into his forehead and that's the end of that. On my other days (far more frequent) I put one in each kneecap, one in his belly (careful not to hit any major arteries), and sit back to enjoy the show.

Would I enjoy it? I have no idea. Probably not, I'd probably put that fourth shot into his skull fairly soon. But I don't have any real doubts that I'd kill him. If that makes me a bad person, so be it. I'm prepared to shoulder the moral burden.

But would I suffer for it? Again, who knows? I do know that a lot of macho cops who talked as tough as I am talking find themselves plagued by guilt, nightmares, and anxiety years after the most righteous of self-defense shoots. There's no real way to know until you get there. With Osama and a few others, I'd be prepared to risk it.

However, I'm pretty sure that if I engaged in the sort of bloodbath the Israeli hit squad in Munich engaged in, I'd end up like the hero does. Paranoid, sick to death of killing, questioning everything in my life. It takes a special sort of psychopath to do these things and sleep like a baby.

Munich offers no easy answers, so naturally Spielberg was vilified by both the Palestinians and the hard-line Israelis. People who can only see things in black and white terms. I will not condemn the assassins. The Black September terrorists did a horrible thing, and they deserved to die. You say the terrorists have wives, children, they had a point of view that deserves to be heard? No question, but so did the Israeli athletes they slaughtered. You pick up the AK-47, don't expect to die peacefully in your sleep.

But what good did it all do? Killing one terrorist spawns more terrorists.

On the other hand ... would you really feel good about saying "Oh, well, it was a damn shame, but what can we do about it?" That approach sickens me, too.

I don't know what to do in the Middle East except keep talking. It seems even less likely to happen now than in the past ... and yet it has happened, from time to time. A little progress is made ... and then someone plucks out another eye in repayment for the eye lost by a countryman. It seems obvious that if you go for an eye for an eye in all situations, pretty soon you've got a country littered with bloody eyeballs.

I hope for a miracle over there, and I don't believe in miracles. But one happened, in my lifetime. South Africa, for most of my life one of the moral shitholes of the planet, somehow transitioned from sanctioned slavery to a majority-rule government without major bloodshed. I have no idea if it will last; the poor blacks are still very poor, and if things are still the same in 20 years I'd say all bets are off. But it's working so far.

The Middle East desperately needs a Nelson Mandela, somebody who can think outside the box everyone has eye-for-an-eyed themselves into, somebody with credentials so impeccable everyone has to stop, look around and say: "Well, hell, if he can forgive those who tormented him and stole half his life away, if he's not looking to do some major eye-plucking ..."

I don't know who that might be, but I can tell you a lot of people who it won't be: George W Bush and clueless crew, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, the PLO, and the governments of Israel and Iran.

The usual gang of idiots. IMDb.com

Muppet*vision 3-D (1991) Basically an episode of “The Muppet Show,” in 3D, presented in a special theater to enhance the effects. As usual, it’s produced on a budget, so nothing works very well, Miss Piggy is insulted and stomps off in a huff, and general chaos ensues. In fact, near the end a giant cannon comes out at the back of the theater and blows about a dozen holes in the theater walls. IMDb.com

Murder on the Orient Express (1974) Every once in a while a movie is made that strikes me as damn near perfect. There is nothing I would change. This is one of them. You start off with the amazing cast, headed by an absolutely brilliant performance by Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. (Agatha Christie was on record as saying he was by far the best Poirot ever, and in fact this movie was the only adaptation of her work that she approved of.) He was nominated for an Oscar. And my god, the competition that year! Jack Nicholson for Chinatown, Al Pacino for The Godfather, Part II, Dustin Hoffman for Lenny. And who wins? Art Carney for Harry and Tonto. (Art, I loved the film and your performance, but this was a wrong vote. Who would I have chosen? Any of the other four.) The script by Paul Dehn manages to take an extremely complicated (and extremely unlikely, but all Christie stories are unlikely, and that’s part of the fun) story and make it comprehensible, while at the same time putting in a lot of sly humor in it. The costume design by Tony Walton is terrific, and his production design made sets that brought the then-extinct Orient Express back to life. The music by Richard Rodney Bennett is perfect for the 1930s, and includes two themes so memorable that I still recalled them 35 years later. The cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth is spectacular, particularly the shots of the train itself consumed by the smoke and steam of a vanished railway age. The direction of a technically challenging shoot (the sets were tiny, as they had to be) is wonderful. All those people but Lumet were Oscar-nominated, but it was the night of The Godfather. I won’t go through the cast, except to say that seldom has such a group been assembled (forget about turkeys like The Longest Day, where the actors were just picking up a paycheck and didn’t bother to do much). Each of these big stars turns in a memorable performance. One of the all-time classics. IMDb.com

Muriel’s Wedding (Australia, 1994) We rented this because we were so impressed with Toni Collette in Japanese Story. We were delighted. It’s the kind of movie where you think you know where it’s going, and it does get there, but by a route that keeps surprising you. If we had seen this one first I’d have thought "Gee, she sure slimmed down!" But it was exactly the opposite. Apparently she gained 40 pounds to play this role, and it’s even more impressive than De Niro's famous flabbing-up for Raging Bull. IMDb.com

Music and Lyrics (2007) Picture this if you will (I have a hard time doing it, and I just saw it!): Britney Spears (or Michael Jackson, or somebody with a similar sort of show) comes out on stage to a spray of fireworks, smoke, lasers, swirling spotlights, pounding bass, all the rigmarole that such concerts have become these days. She’s wearing not much, and so are the two dozen hip-hopping dancers all around her. She thrusts her pelvis and belly button and boobs at the audience for five minutes to the beat of something that might be music or might be one of the turbines at Hoover Dam having a nervous breakdown. The crowd goes wild! They’re standing on the seats, they’re foaming at the mouth, they’re ripping up the linoleum! Brit does this for five minutes, gives ‘em a big finish, and finally the opening number is over. Then she quiets the crowd and says, “And now, for the second number, here is my good friend Barry Manilow, to sing ‘Feelings.’” And that old has-been comes out and sits behind the piano, unaccompanied, and begins to croon. And the audience sits still and listens!  Not only that, they cheer him when he’s done!

That’s how this movie ends, only it’s Hugh Grant at the piano, and he’s singing some dreadful song he’s written, off-the-cuff, to win back the heart of Drew Barrymore, who is in the audience, but the movie has lost me long before it reaches this level of stupidity. No need to get into more specifics of the plot: Boy meets girl (well, he’s only 47), boy loses girl, boy gets girl, right? An amazingly easy formula to screw up, and they’ve screwed this one big-time. Let me just add that, if your romantic couple spends all the movie writing a song that’s going to be a big hit, you’d better have a song that’s pretty good to deliver at the end. They don’t have any good songs here. IMDb.com

The Music Box (1932) Available on a compilation DVD with four others. We ordered it from Netflix because we recently visited the famous steps, which are still there between 923 and 937 Vendome Street, though not looking much like they do in the film. They're encroached upon from both sides now. This is probably my favorite Laurel and Hardy two-reeler, though it's a hard pick. Sons of the Desert and half a dozen others are right up there. These guys were the living embodiment of Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Then things that could not possibly go wrong, go wrong. Then things that couldn't go wrong in your wildest nightmares ... you get the picture. This is knockabout slapstick but not mean, like The Three Stooges. L&H are dumb, but in an endearing way. You can't even dislike Oliver, who is pompous and patronizing to Stan, but always engineers his own comeuppance. So picture these two trying to wrestle a player piano up 131 concrete steps (which the postman they consult refers to as "the stoop") and into the house at the top. Recipe for disaster. The house is still standing at the end, but just barely. IMDb.com

Must Love Dogs (2005) But you don’t have to, you know. Not every dog. Especially this one. Don’t let this DVD into your house or it will piddle all over your carpet and hump your leg. IMDb.com

My Architect: A Son's Journey (2003) Nathaniel Kahn is a bastard. Literally. He is the barely-acknowledged son of Louis Kahn, the famous architect, who had one real family and two illegitimate ones. Louis only visited sporadically, and died when Nathaniel was 12. So the kid has a unique perspective on the great man, and sets out to learn more about him. No one else could have made this movie, and that’s both good and bad. Nathaniel’s naked need to have a father is almost embarrassing at times.

I recently wrote the obituary for my own father, and I notice the contrast, and the difficulties. My father was a good man, but he didn’t leave much mark on the world. Nathaniel suffers from a syndrome we’ve all seen before, living his life in the shadow of a “great” man, knowing no matter what he accomplishes he’s not going to rival his father, and it’s made worse by the old man’s almost total neglect. He visits his father’s buildings (which look better from the inside and close up than from the outside, in my opinion, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since people have to work in these places). He interviews other well-known architects: I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, all of whom say Kahn was a greater artist than they are, and I get the sense that Nathaniel almost hates this, because it makes him aware of what he missed.

He finally achieves something like peace in Bangladesh, where Kahn’s masterpiece, the Capital Building in Dhaka, was finished after the old man’s death. It is a breathtaking building, and a Bangladeshi architect, tears in his eyes, sees Nathaniel’s pain and tries to tell him that great artists like Kahn can’t belong to their families, that they belong to all mankind. I think Nathaniel finally accepts that. IMDb.com

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) When Lee suggested we rent this one I thought I had already seen it, but it turned out I hadn’t. Must have had it mixed up with something else. Anyway, it is one of the excellent Stephen Frears’ first movies (Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons) and also one of Daniel Day-Lewis’ first appearances. The Rotten Tomatoes site gives it 100%, so I was very hopeful.

There’s not much of a story as such. We follow a Pakistani family and a few others for a few weeks in the less-prosperous districts of London, and then it ends. This sort of thing is fine with me, but I have to care for the characters, and I didn’t, much. The most interesting fellow, and top-billed, was Saeed Jaffrey, who I remember vividly as the Ghurka Billy Fish in The Man Who Would Be King. IMDb.com

My Family (Mi Familia) (1995) Did you know ... that in the 1930s, thousands of Americans of Mexican descent were rounded up by the Federal, State, and Los Angeles governments, put on boxcars, and sent to Mexico? (Estimates vary from 10,000 to 400,000, and by the very fascistic, vigilante nature of the enterprise—no records were kept—it's impossible now to know just how many.) About 60% of them were American-born citizens, just like the Nisei a few years later. Many of them had never even been to Mexico. There were no trials, no due process of any kind. It was a bad time to have a suntan in Los Angeles. If you were brown, La Migra rounded you up and boxed you up and shipped you off. The railroad company got $14 a head for taking them, not to the border, but deep into Mexico, so it would be tough to get back. This is exactly how the Gestapo was operating in Germany at the time.

The rationale? It was the Great Depression, Americans were out of work, and all these brown people, citizens or not, were taking jobs away from white Americans. Bear that in mind the next time you think about the current immigration debate. I don't know what the solution is to our current problems, but with all this talk of a 2000-mile Berlin Wall along the border, I do know where this sort of racism can lead.

We saw this film when it was new, and loved it. It holds up on a second viewing. The deportation is a central fact of the multi-generational saga of the fictional Sanchez family, as the pregnant matriarch is deported and has to walk back to her home. It takes her two years. The family has plenty of ups and downs, but on balance, it is a good life. The film stars most of the emerging Hispanic stars of the last decade. It is gorgeous, colorful as a serape, and only goes over the top now and then. (I had trouble near the end when a young boy rejects his father; a little too manipulative.) It was directed by Gregory Nava, who did El Norte, and I highly recommend it. IMDb.com

My House in Umbria (2003) A group of people with nothing in common except they were all blown up by a terrorist bomb on a train stay with the wonderful Maggie Smith in her Italian villa. Not a great movie, but fun and entertaining. IMDb.com

My Knees Were Jumping (1996) In 1938 a lot of Jews in Europe could see the way things were going. Some got out, many tried, but couldn’t find a country that would take them, since Germany and Austria wouldn’t let them take any money with them so they’d arrive penniless ... and let’s face it, they were, well, Jews. But after kristallnacht the British agreed to accept some children. No adults. (The US and Canada didn’t accept anybody at all.) Thus the kindertransports were organized. About 10,000 children got out. Families were torn apart, 90% of them never reunited. This is a film about those children, and their children, and their grandchildren, made by the daughter of one of them.

They recognize they were the “lucky” ones. In other words, they were simply shattered, rather than exterminated. Sad world, when that’s “lucky.” Sad world all around. What have we learned since then? Jack shit, apparently. I could reel off the list of horrors since then, but you’ve heard it all before. Right now, 2004, it’s happening again in Sudan. We’re horrified. A few years from now we’ll all be regretting it. “How could this have happened?” we’ll ask. “Why were we just a little too late ... again?”

And what are we going to do about it the next time?

Jack shit. IMDb.com

My One and Only (2009) Here we have the odd and true (mostly, I suppose) story of George Hamilton, his mother, and brother, as they make their way across the country from New York to Los Angeles, and how he accidentally stumbled into a mediocre movie career. His mother is a sort of Tennessee Williams character, not awaiting her gentleman caller but actively searching him out—object: matrimony—and always finding the wrong one, and rather reliant on the kindness of strangers, of which she doesn’t find very much. The sons are long-suffering with her eccentricities, her refusal to see the truth, and her pride in not wanting to return to her cheating bandleader husband. It is well-done, but a bit detached. I didn’t feel very involved in it. IMDb.com

My Sister Maria (Meine Schwester Maria) (France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria 2002) It’s hard to describe this film about the older sister of Maximilian Schell. It’s certainly not a normal documentary; it’s as far from cinema verite as you could get, each shot being carefully composed, absolutely nothing spontaneous. Maria was a very popular actress after the War, both in Germany and in the US, where she worked with Yul Brynner and Marlon Brando and Gary Cooper, among many others. Throughout the movie we see clips from these performances. But Maria is now 76, in ill health. A ruin, physically, of the beautiful woman she once was. They also say her mind was going, but when she speaks she seems cogent enough. She abandoned her career in the ‘50s and withdrew from the smart set, which she never liked. Now she spends her days in bed, watching her old films on three TV sets, and her brother and family say she is reliving those old stories. I’m not so sure, but maybe. The thing is, every scene in this movie is staged. She and her family are given lines to say, playing themselves. We know this because of the care given to camera set-ups and angles, which are always mounted on tripods. Sometimes we see the same “real life” scene from different angles. You don’t do that by just turning your camera on and letting life happen in front of you. Trust me, to get footage like this takes a lot of planning on the part of the director, Max, and rehearsals. So what's the deal with Maria walking with excruciating care over a snowy path? She falls. Was that scripted? It’s all a bit disturbing, when you think about it. However, it’s a fascinating glimpse into her life, and worthwhile for that. IMDb.com

My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) I guess the best I can say about this is "well-intentioned." I could say worse, but I won't bother. Basically, it starts out with a good idea, and then plods its way through every predictable situation a hack writer can think of, totally missing a thousand opportunities. Premise: Who says a superhero needs to be well-adjusted? What if the meteorite bestowing super powers lands on a neurotic, needy, insecure girl? Then your obligatory awkward schlub dates her for a while, realizes he doesn't love her, and dumps her, only to find out he's dumped Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction. Luke Wilson as the schlub has some good moments, and there are a few laughs, but only a few. I was struck by how little these things have changed. Except for some tame sex, this might have been made with Jack Lemmon and Doris Day in 1960. There's the cutesy sound track with pizzicato strings punctuating the dialogue that could have been written by Frank De Vol. There's slapstick enhanced by CGI SFX. All it really needs is canned laughter to be a sitcom. IMDb.com

Mystic River (2003) This movie is so far above your typical murder mystery that it would be better to invent a whole new genre to contain it. I read the book—twice. Once when it was new, as I'm a major fan of Dennis Lehane, and once again when the movie was about to be released, because of the complexity of the plot, and because I didn't want to miss any detail, any nuance, if it was as good as I was hoping it would be. It was all that, and more. Aside from the fact that I'd have cast someone other than Sean Penn in the lead (mostly because it always takes me 10 minutes or so to get past the fact that I really don't like Sean Penn, and to the point that I admit, once more, that he's a helluva fine actor in spite of my prejudice) (sort of like Tom Cruise, though not so extreme), there is nothing I would do differently here. Clint Eastwood has done it again. This is a story that contains three of the absolute worst things that can happen to people. It is about how our past follows us and can condemn us, about the things a terrible loss can push us to do, and about the effects of having done something while believing you are right and then finding it was terribly wrong. But it goes even further. Suppose you had done something awful, something you would have thought it was impossible to live with. ... and then found that not only could you live with it, but that you had to, that suicide or even turning yourself in would only compound the horror and destroy more innocent lives. What does that make you? A monster? On one level, to be sure. But there are always other levels. And in the end it is you who will be carrying the burden of your great sin to your dying day ...

Completely off the subject of Mystic River ... I see at the IMDb that Clint Eastwood seems to be finishing up an amazing project: two films are scheduled for 2006 release. One is Flags of Our Fathers in October, which is about the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, the ones in that Pulitzer Prize photo. The other is Red Sun, Black Sand in December, which is about the defenders of Iwo. What a concept! If he can pull it off, it should blow that old war-horse Tora! Tora! Tora! out of the water! IMDb.com

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