AbandonedRailroadGrade

I read one of the books some 20-25 years ago, I think. My memory of it is a little hazy, but I know I loved it. What an awesome idea: The entire human race, every saint and sinner who ever lived, all 36 billion of us, spewed out all at once, randomly along the shores of an alien planet.

I expected this TV adaptation to be trash, but to my surprise I actually sat through the whole thing while defragging my computer.

Sure, there were a lot of cheap TV-movie qualities. I didn't remember this apple-pie Captain Kirk American astronaut from the book. (Fellow IMDb commentators remind me that in the book he was the complex Romantic English adventurer Burton.) And the African priestess was awfully cheesy and inauthentic for our sensitive and politically correct age. (She's a cross between a corny "native" of 1930's jungle flicks and a more modern stereotypical angry black woman. But she's easy on the eyes, and maybe that's all that really matters.) And the whole Valdemar thing was your standard "Xena-like" action fare, as other commentators have so aptly put it.

But the main idea of Riverworld remains powerful. The actors are quite good. The gorges and beaches of New Zealand are stunning. The special effects and the riverboat are more than adequate. All-in-all, better than average TV fantasy adventure.

Yup, yup, yup, I saw it as a kid, too. I think I first saw it on the big screen at my elementary school in the late 1960s. I was enchanted and devastated. One of those half-mystical childhood experiences that haunts you the rest of your life.

Today I caught it on Turner Classic. And I have to wonder: To what degree has this film actually influenced the course of my life? It idealizes the pathos of the loner, who has his own special magic and beauty that brings out the worst in his peers, teachers, priests, and mass transit officials. But in the end, the purity of his love carries him to a better world (we hope). Dare I say I can relate to that? Or was I TAUGHT to relate to that, by this film?

Such is the haunting power of childhood experiences. At the risk of exposing myself as an old fart, I wonder if the children of today have similar fodder for thought.

This weren't as bad as some people say. There's three reasons to watch it: (3) There is actually some funny and witty material here, (2) the photography is gorgeous--both the interior shots and the glamorous locales of mid-1960's New York, and (1) Natalie is stunningly beautiful.

I loved the Matrix, too, but Virtual Nightmare is a totally different type of sci-fi movie. It's the kind with "unknown" actors, average special effects, and little if any bloodshed, that relies primarily on a story that is equal parts technological extrapolation and social satire. It's simple, but smart. But not too smart--it doesn't think it's better than you.

I probably would never have seen it, except I felt like setting my VCR to tape something, and it happened to be in the listings. Even then, I was debating whether I really wanted to waste my time watching a movie I had never heard of, so I happened to check IMDb, and I saw I bunch of people in England liked it, so I watched it, and it was very enjoyable. Thanks England!

I've been doing some research: Even the part about the journalist's glasses at the end is true.

What a good-looking film this is (for a made-for-TV movie), and surprisingly faithful to the historical record. I felt as if I were a first-hand witness to Germany's most tragic turning-point.

Up till now, I've never been comfortable with the glib dismissal of Hitler as a "madman," feeling that this is a cheap oversimplification that won't help us to prevent future Hitlers. Then, too, like most people, I've been bedazzled by Hitler's apparent genius as a manipulator of people and politics. Surely, he had everything planned out from the beginning. Who could possibly have stopped him?

But in this film, we see another Hitler: a flailing, angry, perverse little pit bull of a man who by all accounts should have self-destructed years before he had a chance to destroy anyone else. He SHOULD have been swallowed up by the simmering scandal of his relationship with his niece. He SHOULD have been murdered by his own Stormtroopers when he inevitably turned on them, or knifed in the back by any of the other lowlifes he associated with. He SHOULD have become the laughingstock that brave journalists like Fritz Gerlich (Matthew Modine) tried to expose to a wilfully ignorant public.

But instead, deluded friends continued to offer him their advice and support, and bumbling politicians surrendered to his tricks. Here, he doesn't conquer, so much as everyone else fails.

I may be overanalyzing, however. At it's heart, "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" is simply a straight-forward, and vivid, historical reenactment based in a cautious and broad assessment of modern scholarship. As such, it's a good primer for newbies who want to get the basics on the Nazis' rise to power, as well as a very satisfactory sensory indulgence for those who are already familiar with the story.

***SPOILERS UP THE WAZOO*** No one seems to know what this film is about. That's just as well, 'cause then I can go on believing that it's ultimately about the mental disintegration and tragic suicide of some nameless, forgotten, wannabe Hollywood starlet. Who was she? Was she a bright-eyed blonde girl from Canada? Or was she a sultry, exotic, raven-haired vixen? Both? Neither? Was she a lesbian? Or was she just in love with herself? How much of her story is dream, how much reality?

In the process of telling her story (stories), David Lynch bombards us with his signature menagerie of quirky characters and bizarre vignettes. If you don't like this kind of stuff--if you didn't like "Eraserhead" or "Twin Peaks"--you're not going to like this one.

But if you think Lynch is the genuine article--if you believe he's sincere in his portraits of the world as a place of both sweet innocence and stark horror, and the dreams and images we all use to attempt to stitch reality together (sometimes to our detriment)--you'll like what he's done here.

Others have said it, but it bears repeating: What's remarkable about this film is that it is utterly lacking in melodrama and there is no contrived sentimentality. Also, there's not much of a "plot" in the normal sense. It doesn't need one. It is a historically accurate and sumptuously detailed chronicle of a civilized European city's (Warsaw, Poland) descent into hell, and one man's experience of it.

The protagonist, a pianist name Szpilman (pronounced "Shpeelman"), is a hero, but not in the classical Hollywood sense. He tries to look after his family; he tries to pull a young boy to safety (but only because the men who are savagely kicking the boy are on the other side of a tall wall); he smuggles a few firearms for the planned uprising against the Nazis. But when the uprising finally comes, he is watching from a distance--his fear and hunger having led him to seize an opportunity to escape the walled-off "ghetto" without second thoughts.

At first you're a little disappointed that he doesn't join in on the uprising. You want him to lift up a piece of furniture from the apartment where he is hiding and heave it onto the heads of the Nazis who are shooting his former comrades. But then you appreciate the honesty of the moment; you realize that this is a true story. He does what you or I would probably do--he sits, and cowers, and watches. He just wants to live.

After that, he does a lot of watching from windows, usually from quite a distance above street-level. This becomes quite odd. You wonder if the rest of the movie is going to be this guy watching the destruction of Warsaw from a window. He might as well be watching a documentary on television. This removal from the action might be bothersome, but the things we are watching are fascinating nonetheless, and this odd perspective again reinforces the appreciation of the fact that this is a true story. And, ultimately, it's not like television, because at any moment those bullets and flames and artillery shells can, and do, come flying through the window, and Szpilman is on the run again, in his hopeless quest for safety.

Fascinating and exhausting--you won't come away from this film feeling ennobled or enlightened or uplifted. You'll feel like a survivor from a world you hope you never experience first-hand, but a world that is as real as Warsaw 1944, Cambodia 1977, Rwanda 1994, Grozny 2000, Israel/Palestine 2003. (And the list could go on.)

One more thing: Plan on sticking around through the entirety of the closing credits. It's just a pair of hands playing a piano, but it's nice music, and it will give you a welcome chance to decompress before returning to your world, and you won't be the only one sitting there.

To see the ads for this film, you'd think, "Wow, Spike Lee has gone and made an action film about white people." But you'd be wrong in the first respect--there are no gun fights or car chases--and only partly right in the second--the story is about a group of friends in proudly multicultural New York who just happen to be mostly Caucasian. Come on, this is Spike Lee we're talking about! Did you really think he had "gone Hollywood"?

As you probably know, the friends are spending their last night together before one of their number goes off to prison for selling drugs. But it's pretty tame--your grandma might like this film--and it's told in a generally naturalistic style. The friends talk, they laugh, they cry, they get drunk, and talk some more. Deep down, they're all pretty decent people, even though one is an arrogant Wall Street broker, one is a convicted drug dealer, one is contemplating sex with an underaged student, and one is a girl basking in the luxuries afforded her by drug money. Their lives go on, even as the clock ticks down to something that is taken for granted in most movies, but is as traumatic and tragic in this film as it is in real life--prison.

Which brings us to the controversial visual references to 9/11. In my opinion, their inclusion is a stroke of genius on Spike Lee's part. Sure, it is quite jarring when you see the actors speaking their lines in an actual shot in front of the hellish pit that is all that remains of the World Trade Center and the 2,800 human beings who died there. What the hell was Spike Lee thinking? The movie, the dialogue (most of which was written before 9/11) is so trivial compared to the reality of that pit. The juxtaposition of art and a real-life horror could be considered obscene, except that no one can really doubt that Lee--who grew up practically a stone's throw from the WTC and is a New Yorker to the bone--feels the grief of 9/11 as much as anyone. But still, is it just bad filmmaking? Like some awe-struck school kid with a camera, was Lee unable to resist memorializing a historic moment because he happened to be filming nearby, disfiguring his story in the process?

In response to such concerns, let me say, first of all, what choice did he have? Here he was, filming a "realistic" film about New Yorkers, filming in the summer after New York's greatest disaster. Was he supposed to ask New Yorkers to remove all the post-9/11 American flags from their windows and cars? Even if he did have the audacity to do that, then the film would be about the past, or else would be situated in some fairy-tale New York like in the TV comedies where 9/11 will never happen. But he wanted the film to be about the REAL New York as it is NOW. Is that such a crime? 9/11 happened, and it intrudes constantly into the consciousness of New Yorkers even as they get on with their lives and go about their business (which includes making movies). And that, really, is what 25th Hour is all about. It's about how life goes on when bad things happen--even very bad things. It's about how the pettiness of the Wall Street broker is nothing compared to the sexual obsessions of the school teacher, which are nowhere near as bad as the sh** that the drug dealer is in, which in turn is downright laughable when it's being discussed near Ground Zero. There's not necessarily a tidy moral to this fable. But that's life. And the context of post-9/11 New York helps us to see that these characters, despite their shortcomings, aren't really such bad people, and allows them to recognize it, too, which reinforces the underlying sweetness of this film.

Boy, a lot of people don't seem to get this film! It's not a kids' film, despite having been reinterpreted as such by the folks responsible for the English-language version. And it's not just some dumb quasi-medieval fantasy with an Oriental twist. It's a very intelligent, deeply humanistic examination of the problem of Humans vs. Nature, of the reasons why we pillage the natural world. Lady Eboshi, the wonderfully ambiguous villainess, is ultimately ravaging the land for the sake of the lepers and whores and outcasts--she truly wants to enrich and empower all of humanity, but at what price??!

For a REAL experience of a very intelligent foreign film, this is what I recommend, get the DVD version (first, get a DVD player if you don't have one), then FORGET ALL ABOUT THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE VERSION. Instead, use the set-up options to listen to the original Japanese version (it doesn't matter if you don't understand Japanese--the point is to escape the English-language dialog, as well as enjoy the original sounds), and then enable the subtitles--NOT the closed caption subtitles (which are just a transcription of the American dialog), but the "literal translation" subtitles, which will give you a better idea of the depth and intelligence of the original Japanese script.

That being said, I can't say this is a truly great film. It got kind of tedious in spots, even during the battle scenes, and several of the main characters were rather shallow and uninteresting. But I give it an A+++ for effort, and for having its heart in the right place, and for teaching the moral and practical lesson that you can't blame all the evil in the world on clear-cut VILLAINS, but rather, we all have a responsibility for making sure our collective desires and cross-purposes don't get out of hand and muck up the world.

As for the Night Walker, I don't think he was supposed to be a destroyer except when he was deprived of his head. In his death-agony, he threatened to take the whole world with him, just as we will all go down if we destroy the rainforests and ecosystem and biodiversity. I don't think he was supposed to be the Supreme Being, either. He was just a symbol of all of Nature--both nurturing and dangerous, and absolutely essential for our well-being and the well-being of our planet.

Ride With The Devil is a dead serious film, its mission an unsparing, unsentimental portrait of the horrors of the Missouri-Kansas guerrilla conflict during the U.S. Civil War. History buffs ought to revel in the attention to detail, from the formality of speech and mannerisms, to the authentic Missouri locales that change from summer to winter to summer again, and the frightening reenactment of the bloody raid on Lawrence, Kansas (filmed in tiny Plattsburg, Missouri, whose timeless resemblance to thousands of other present-day Midwestern towns imparts a jarring sense of familiarity and immediacy for those who know the American heartland). Students of the human soul will appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of the characters, who live and die and love according to their passions and prejudices. With no heroes, only survivors, this is not an easy film to watch, but you will feel that you've come as close as you dare to the realities of a tumultuous time, and glad to have been challenged by this opportunity to reflect upon the sources of good and evil, tolerance and hope.

This is not a bad little film. It is fairly intelligent, yet light-hearted and easy to digest. The characters are comical, but multi-faceted. It is a gentle meditation on ambition, resentment, and the reasons why people sometimes do things that are less than honorable.

A likeable, romantic, low-key, low budget road movie about a handsome alien trying to find his way back to the mother ship with the help of an earth lady he has abducted. With minimal special effects, Jeff Bridges convincingly conveys a sense of his complete alienness and lack of ease in his cloned human host body. One suspects that his bird-like head movements and impaired neuro-motor skills have provided the inspiration for subsequent portrayals of extraterrestrials trying to pass themselves off as earthlings.

A sweet, funny film.

Spike Lee's films are candy-coated bitterness. Granted, you know you're there to be educated, but you want to be entertained too, and Spike is happy to indulge you for awhile with his fast-paced cartoonish style and funny jokes, but at some point you realize he's stuffing something nasty down your throat and you're not sure (at least if you're non-African, like me) whether it's medicine or pure bile, and you leave the theater feeling like you've seen some kind of German film--that is, confused and depressed.

Bamboozled is Lee's definitive statement against entertainment: He doesn't like it. He thinks if he makes you smile he must be a minstrel clown, or at best a pretentious black intellectual, like Damon Wayans' character, whose desperate attempt at social satire is really an expression of self-hatred.

And why is this? It's because America has embraced black culture as never before: Black entertainment, black celebrity, black athletes. It's because many of the most blatant manifestations of old-style racism are disappearing: Good liberal white folk are genuinely shocked by watermelon jokes, and the white producer played by Michael Rappaport worships at the altar of black athletes and is himself married to a black woman. And yet, the Rappaport character is the most odious, insensitive and unreflective non-African in the movie. America is immensely proud of itself for its love affair with its own Africanness, but Lee is here to tell us that it's just a sham--a prepackaged, Hollywoodized, Madison Avenue sham. All is not well. The gulf between African and non-African is as wide as ever. As in his other films, he leaves it pretty much at that. He tells us America still has a whole bunch of unfinished business, then he sends us home, where we can agonize, or more likely sit down in front of the boob tube and anesthetize ourselves.

This is the way we younger Baby Boomers would like to remember the 1970's--a sweet, silly time where promiscuity, sex with minors, alcohol and drugs had no negative consequences. And why the hell not? Most of us survived. So leave your 1980's/90's reactionary Angst at the ticket booth, and enjoy the ride. But, to tell you the truth, don't expect a whole lot of sex and drugs. There's enough so that I can't call this a "family movie," but it is pretty darned innocent overall. Frances McDormand's professorial mom is the voice of authority and reason. She can rough up any young pot-head whippersnapper with Goethe quotations better than Charles Bronson wielding a crowbar. And people actually listen to her. Did kids listen to their moms in 1970's? Well, as our own kids approach that age, I guess we'd like to think so.

I sometimes feel that Tim Burton's luscious visual style comes at the expense of substance. I could be wrong, but my sense is that in Sleepy Hollow Burton took what might have been a very intelligent script about a rational man of the Enlightenment coming face-to-face with living proof of the supernatural, and he merely played that aspect up for laughs, and for camp (as with Ichabod Crane's bizarrely fantastical portable crime lab). Also, to the degree that this was about a rational man confronting the irrational, Burton's depiction of 1799 as a time of transition from brooding medieval darkness (symbolized by the prison and the smokey New York skyline) to an Age of Reason (symbolized by the proto-Victorian "White City" at the very end) is questionable, narratively as well as historically. Reason lost a battle simply by discovering that unreason exists, and was able to conquer the supernatural only with the aid of the irrational--i.e., love and witch's charms. That being said, it wasn't a bad movie at all--a visual treat, and a nice homage to one of the best old American fairy tales.

It's hard to get into this movie at first. Much of it is done in a stylized realism reminiscent of 1970's movies, with jerky camera movements and editing, echoey sound, mumbled lines, and deliberately mediocre dialogue. But the realism serves to counterbalance what is fundamentally a very old-fashioned (practically Victorian) melodrama about a poor girl being crushed by society's indifference, and the synthesis of documentary-type immediacy and heart-string tugging is quite effective. Bjork's character is such a sweet little child-like dreamer, but with a very adult--even heroic--sense of responsibility as a single mom, that it would be hard not to fall in love with her. It's not an upbeat film, to put it mildly, but if you've made the effort to get into it, you'll be rewarded with a riveting and disturbing perspective on social injustice far more powerful and memorable than the bigger, slicker, self-congratulatory morality tales trotted out by Hollywood from time to time.

This is the kind of run-of-the-mill, economy budget, shot-entirely-in-LA film that helps me to pass the time while I sit staring at the television screen, and in that context, it's fairly well done. The plot set-up is engaging enough, and the normally spastic Lawrence is brought to earth just enough by his role as a hardened criminal reluctantly impersonating a hardened cop that he's actually rather funny. My only complaint was at the end (SPOILER!) where he double-crosses and then ends up shooting his archrival--it seemed rather unnecessary and jarringly cruel. In movie morality it's okay to for a "good guy" to shoot someone in self defense, but the way it was presented, it was as if he knew the guy had another gun hidden in his belt when he turned his back on him. The pizza delivery scene seems to have gotten under the skin of European commentators. If they tried ordering pizza in a large American city they might appreciate it more.

This is hardly the dumb martial arts flick I was expecting. The film I can compare it most to is Terry Gilliam's 1985 comic fantasy nightmare, Brazil, except it's even better. It's all about life spiraling out of control--an individual's life, a society, a civilization, maybe even God himself. That Fight Club seems to have earned the accolades of both nihilists and moralists, as well as repelled others of both stripes, is a testament to its even-handedness. Underneath its absurd viciousness, there's a truth to the desperation it sees in the lives of ordinary men who find themselves cogs in the Machine, men who yearn to tear it all down. But if there's sympathy for their taste for manly struggle, for the pungent reality of blood in their mouths, and their misty dreams of a Kaczynskiesque hunter-gatherer caveman utopia, there's also no doubt about the dark roads down which such formless rage will lead, where jack-booted armies and madness are the only rewards for despair. And the real answer might have been under a man's nose all along. It's a great film.

*SPOILER WARNING! DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW UNLESS YOU'VE ALREADY SEEN THE MOVIE* My cousin Jaimee dismissed The Thirteenth Floor by saying it was "like a TV movie." I must admit that despite its interesting premise, and its luscious, atmospheric and utterly convincing recreations of 1930's Los Angeles, there is something unidentifiably smallish and cheesy about this film. Maybe it's because the cartoonishly boyish Craig Bierko fails to convince as a leading man. I don't know. But whatever it was, I didn't let it bother me too much, because The Thirteenth Floor is good science fiction (as well as being pleasing to the eye, if I may risk repeating myself). Like any good science fiction story, it works on at least two levels: Exploring the implications of technological and social development in the future, and saying something about the nature of our lives in the here and now. In the latter regard, The Thirteenth Floor touches, broadly but poignantly, on the existentialist problem of the value of our lives after we come to view our thoughts and experiences as so many electrical impulses (be they in microchips or neural tissue). But the film inexplicably shies away from a head-on confrontation with nihilism, perhaps out of a simple desire to make an unambiguously happy ending. I didn't notice this the first time I saw the movie, but Gretchen Mol's character could easily be interpreted as the real "bad guy." Not that she's supposed to be; you're not supposed to notice her manipulativeness, her scheming. But I think the story could have been more interesting if this issue had been addressed honestly. And her husband's supposed to be this scary psycho-killer, but his only victims are computer animations, as far as we know. Couldn't his character have been used to illustrate the "banality of evil"--the ease with which seemingly average people can convince themselves that other thinking, feeling beings are less "real," and thus less deserving of life? Is he a murderer, or just a video-game creep? Is he himself murdered, or merely reprogrammed? If these questions, which arise naturally out of the provocative subject matter, had been articulated, they might have lent the grande finale a complexity that could have distinguished The Thirteenth Floor from a "TV movie" in anybody's eyes.

***WARNING: POSSIBLE QUASI-SPOILER IF YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THIS FILM IS ABOUT. I had never, ever heard of this film before I happened to catch it on cable recently. It starts off like some kind of hip, offbeat coming-of-age comedy about a guy from Pennsylvania who moves to Los Angeles. You don't want to believe it when, early on, the flash-forward narration says there are bad things ahead. The characters are too cool and too likable; you're pretty sure it'll all work out (whatever it is) and be a fun, light-hearted romp on the way. But this is a serious film about drug addiction, and there's really no place to go, except straight down to hell. Even so, it's an interesting ride up to a point--it's all pretty believable in a colorfully seamy way, and the acting is great. At the very end, there's a pointless revelation about the Pennsylvania guy's past--maybe it explains some things about the character, but it detracts from the "message" (if there is any) that almost anyone could get slowly sucked into a destructive lifestyle. There actually isn't much of an end, which is perhaps true to the film's realism, but is cinematically unsatisfying. Nevertheless, this movie is a neat little flawed gem to discover in the jungle of cable TV.

Wow! Frequency seems to have generated so many warm, fuzzy feelings among movie reviewers and imdb commentators alike, I wonder if I was just having a bad hair day or something. It wasn't a horrible flick, but kinda like a "TV movie," as they say. Chock full of cliches, cinematic rip-offs, poor writing, uninspiring sets. I knew I was in trouble from the opening sequence, which is a blatant pillaging of the magnificent astronomical overture to the movie Contact. (Perhaps not coincidently, Contact is another movie about a kid who loses a father and knows how to use a ham radio.) A lot of the story just seemed kind of thrown-together, with no attention to detail or authenticity. For instance, a detective supervises the exhumation of a skeleton by waving his hand and saying, "Be careful with the bones, and keep some of the dirt around them." I assume the New York Police Department has trained experts who follow a careful procedure for such things. Or take the scene where Quaid's character spontaneously and effortlessly uses a credit card to break into an apartment. How does this softball-playing family man happen to know how to pick a lock with a credit card, especially the lock of a New York City apartment? Couldn't it have been more realistic, and just as dramatic, if he had been frantically buzzing the downstairs bell and pounding on the front door of the building (which would allow him to leave fingerprints and be seen by neighbors), and then run upstairs to find the apartment door unlocked? It's as if the writer, realizing the overall plot was so goofy to begin with, couldn't be bothered with little touches that would add to credibility. Other stuff was irritating, like when Caviezel's character, with complete confidence and without explanation, says that a particular woman "was the first victim [of a serial killer], so she knew the killer." Apparently, the viewer is expected to be familiar with Silence of the Lambs (or its hundreds of imitators) and with this "fact" about serial killers. The sentimental family sequences at the beginning and end were artificial and unoriginal--mom dancing to the radio as she cooks, parents smooching while the kid watches fondly, people spraying each other with the garden hose while washing the car (please! not that one!), etc. Like I said, it wasn't a bad film. Some of the time-travel stuff was pretty neat, and when I realized where they were going with the cigarette theme, it almost brought a tear to my eye. If it weren't for the disturbing glimpses of some nasty crime scenes, I'd even say it could be a good kids' film. But it could have been a whole lot better if the writer had tried for more originality.

I saw this film a few years ago at a UCLA showing of Nazi-era German films. It's a big, fluffy blend of music, comedy and romance with several story lines, and is very well-crafted and entertaining. You forget you're watching a Nazi film until someone gives the occasional Hitler-salute, or someone speaks of "chopping up Englishmen," and then you're unpleasantly--if temporarily--jarred back into an awareness of the historical and political context of the film. Thus, it is a valuable springboard for reflections on the nature of mass entertainment, escapism and propaganda, both in Nazi Germany and one's own country, and also suggests (as has been focused upon in recent historical scholarship) that for the average German, life in the early years of the Third Reich wasn't all that "unusual" or ideological by modern standards. The elderly German man sitting in front of me in the theater was quite excited by the many cameo appearances of mid-20th century German entertainers--much as my parents would be delighted to uncover an old gem featuring Bogart, Hayworth, Abbott & Costello, etc. So, it's all very interesting.

The Messenger is based on a true story. (It's worth pointing that out for those who don't know it; otherwise, who would believe it?) In medieval France, an illiterate peasant girl, claiming to be guided by voices and visions, leaves her village to become a military leader, a tragic martyr, a national hero, and a bona fide saint. The filmmakers succeed in offering a plausible scenario for this odd tale as it unfolds in a desperate, demoralized country, ruled by a frightened, disorganized elite who possess just the right mix of gullibility, cool calculation and deference to popular opinion. The world of the Middle Ages--superficially so "primitive" and alien to our own--comes to life in a tapestry of recognizable motivations and personalities, and one is convinced that fundamentally society has not "advanced" in the last half-millennium as much as we would like to think. Joan of Arc herself is portrayed as being apparently quite insane, which lends this film a dark intensity that might appeal only to fans of the "mad genius" genre. Except, she's really not that much of genius--she's just mad. It's her sheer single-minded fanaticism that moves armies. That is a rather unsettling perspective as we ourselves leave behind a century that has given us Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and towards the end, the film bogs down considerably in its very awkward but well-intentioned attempt to address the paradox of a warrior saint. The answer to the riddle will likely anger Joan of Arc's modern-day admirers, be they of populist, socialist, feminist, or French Catholic variety (I sat in stunned indignation as the final credits rolled), but it's certainly food for thought. Jovovich, as Joan, does perhaps the best she can with her character's one-dimensional fixations, but the other actors are free to be more appealing, including the affable French actor Tcheky Karyo as the bemused, exasperated, but loyal commander who is forced to work with Joan, and Desmond Harrington as the prim and serious young officer who befalls a thankless job as Joan's personal attendant. John Malkovich is good at being John Malkovich, which works out fine here in his role as the half-baked and insecure Dauphin. Overall, The Messenger may be too uneven, ponderous, and dark for most tastes, but if you like political intrigue, brutal medieval battles or historical soul-searching, it might be worth checking out.

It's 1991, and in the first chaotic hours after the Persian Gulf cease-fire, a band of opportunistic American soldiers led by George Clooney realize they can pull off one of the biggest gold heists in history by raiding one of Saddam Hussein's bunkers of stolen Kuwaiti loot in the nearby desert. "We'll be back in time for lunch," Clooney assures his men, which nicely sums up America's post-Vietnam military doctrine in this brilliant satire of the Persian Gulf War, the media, and modern life in general. You don't have to be "anti-war" to appreciate this film; I, for one, think Saddam Hussein was a dangerous player who needed to be put in check, and George Bush did about as good a job of it as could be done. But this film serves to remind us that war by its very nature cannot be "surgical" and "clean," that bullets do great damage to the human body (presented as an artsy conceit that some people might find irritating, but I think it's a good point), that the powerless are just as likely to be trampled upon by their "liberators" as by their oppressors, and that even sadistic Iraqi Republican Guardsmen have families. Besides that, it's extremely funny (the cell phone scene was fantastic, and the "day job" scene also comes to mind, among many others), tense and action-packed. It doesn't get any better than this. See it!!

What a great film! I've seen bits and pieces of it throughout my life, but never paid it much attention because I figured it was just another old monster movie. Not true! For whatever reason, I paid attention when I caught it on cable this afternoon, and I was MESMERIZED! It's so complex, and well-acted, and enlightened. The story revolves around a beautiful Gypsy woman, pleading for the rights of her people against pervasive anti-Gypsy prejudice--a problem in the Middle Ages as it was when the film was made in 1939. (In real life, Hitler was just a couple of years away from attempting to exterminate the Gypsy people, which would leave some 200,000 to 300,000 Gypsies dead by the time this film was six years old.) She is loved by practically every man who meets her, among them a grotesquely deformed bell-ringer, a starry-eyed itinerant singer/poet/writer, a dashing police captain, and the bitterly warped Chief Justice Frollo. The acting is great, the characters are three-dimensional. Laughton, with just a few grunts and grimaces, conveys all the sorrow and pathos and innocence and madness behind hunchback's mask-like face. And one can feel sorry--almost--for the evil Frollo; there is indeed a human being down there somewhere, just as Esmeralda says. The passions of the mob are realistic, as they vacillate between merciless sadism, sentimentalism, and a thirst for justice. All these characters, and all the social and political forces of medieval Paris (and 19th-century Paris, and 1930's liberal Hollywood) come swirling together, and it's not always clear who's right and who's wrong, and the results are fascinating!