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This is one of those movies that could only exist with the advent of SD card-using minicamcorders, because it's obvious that the cast and the crew are the same people; there are scenes where the camera stays still in an awkward frame, then two of the cast walk to the spot that is the foreground to have a scene while the rest of the cast is in the background - literally there was no cameraman and nobody was smart enough to make a cut and then use a close-up! The DVD cover features a cast of people that don't appear in the picture (this "feature" got a lot of ire in Amazon reviews), the film just stops abruptly, and the blocking is just bizarre; everybody is always mashed up against walls like they were told not to film the center of the room. It's a real shame that Gawdawful badfilms like "After Last Season" have gone out of print and yet this pointless "Christmas" film (it looks like they filmed it in the summer!) is still available!

"Bulba" is a foreign-policy satire revolving around the staff of an American embassy on the title place, a fictional nose-shaped island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This failed pilot was leaked to YouTube mainly because cult comedian Bill Hicks played the embassy guard, a Corporal Repulski (USMC), and Hicks uses the "Hicks, Sr." voice he used when doing impressions of his father in his stand-up act. The show also features Gailard Sartain doing a French variation of Sydney Greenstreet's character in "Casablanca" while openly saying he is a spy; he also plays the pseudo-Hindu-sounding Prime Minister wearing a pith helmet(!) On top of that we get Jeff Altman right after the fiasco of the "Pink Lady and Jeff", portraying an early Yuppie/Preppie type. Armin Schimerman (Quark on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine") is also there as a teletype operator who is a bookie on the side. Possibly with a better plot and more development of certain characters, this could have been a one or two-season show....it was certainly cheap enough to make, being shot in some of the nicer bits of Los Angeles and on a sound stage. I personally think what sank "Bulba" was the name of the show.

.....whatever you do, watch it on the big screen, preferably a film print. I first saw "Stalker" on VHS in the late 1990s and you could barely tell the movie goes from sepia to monochrome, then muted color, and finally full color. You see it as a projected film and it is like watching a ballet going on in the background. I saw a "new" print in 2006 at the International House of UPENN, up in their rickety folding bleacher auditorium and it was a revelation......like "Lawrence of Arabia", this is not a movie to be seen on the small screen if you really want to appreciate the artistry involved in the color timing of the picture. I know it sounds bizarre writing about the color shift alone, but it's an intrinsic component of the film, and one of the possibly overlooked elements of it.

"Making Waves" is the story of the Low Power FM movement in America which focuses on three unlicensed (aka pirate) stations in Tucson, Arizona: KOPC, KRVL, and Radio Limbo. The first two stations were originally one entity and operate publicly, while Radio Limbo is more the traditional unlicensed broadcaster (i.e. the DJs use pseudonyms, the equipment changes location regularly, and they only broadcast at night.) Because KOPC and KRVL are open about what they do, they get more screen time. All three stations are FM mostly because there are a small number of manufacturers of such equipment, though Libo's gear looks homemade.

Founded by former public access TV fixture Shane Eden, KRVL is backed by eccentric millionaire Marshall Home and staffed by arch-libertarian Aage Nost, working out of a small building owned by Home. The trio broadcast music, free-market libertarian and anti-government rants, and go so far as to put up a sign on their building advertising their call-in number (though for the FCC, the huge white antenna lashed to the back is a dead giveaway!) Far more laid back is KOPC founder James Welborn, who broadcasts music and conspiracy theories out of a room in his house (not recommended.) While he takes great risks, Vietnam vet Welborn is far more technically savvy than the crew of KRVL, even going so far as to solve glitches and loan them a transmitter and an amp after a mysterious fire burns out their studio room. However, what does in both stations are their operators' naiveté and factional infighting at KRVL between the Santa Claus-lookalike Eden and Marshall Home, who goes to trial for driving his Benz without a license plate, and later goes to jail for not paying the fine. Welborn is busted around the same time, and never returns to the air. As of filming in 2004, Radio Limbo is still on the air.

Besides the drama in Tucson, "Making Waves" points out the ridiculous amounts of consolidation in the radio industry (where thanks to the Telecom Act of 1996, Clearchannel Communications owns a thousand stations in the US), along with cartoons which clearly depict how the FCC's licensed low power law denies most of the possible empty frequencies and the absurdity of the National Association of Broadcasters' claim that a 40 watt station could somehow interfere with a 10,000 watt one. Finally, the station mentions a number of well-known unlicensed stations, among them my hometown pirate, Free Radio San Diego. While I think it focuses too much on one of the flakier LPFM stations, "Making Waves" is a good intro into a topic that's becoming more urgent all the time.

It's sad when I have to use a quote from "Pod People" to describe a film, but in this case it's horribly true (no pun intended.) Tony Malinowski (the director and "Chris Starke") made this movie to fit some Civil War re-enactment footage he had shot God-knows-when, but only the Almighty can tell us WHY he did it. I'm guessing a quick buck on the Southern drive-in circuit. Certainly you have the glimmerings of a semi-decent '70s horror flick; a group of young people drive into desolate woods to check out a bit of property willed to one of them, their van breaks down, the "psychic" member of the group has "forbodings" but leads a seance, then ghosts emerge from the treeline. At this point (SPOILERS COMING!), you would expect an attack, or a chase, or a possession scene. NONE of that happens; instead the group feels sorry for the ghosts, and helps them complete a task "they swore beyond the grave to do." Nobody gets killed, though the protagonist is freaked out by the "psychic" chick he tried to pick up on the way to the woods. And did I mention that all of this is a flashback told by "Starke" to a member of his unseen rock band while sitting in the fakest basement bar ever? I mean, it doesn't even have a bartender!

Besides the rock bottom script and stolid non-acting, what really hurts "Night of Horror" are the endless technical glitches. In short, they would have been better off shooting it without sound and in monochrome. The vocal track sometimes buzzes, while the film itself looks like it was shot without the right filters, and every shot is either blindingly overlit or excruciatingly underlit, though at some points you can tell that parts were lit using auto headlights. And then there's that semi-triangular patch of gunk in the bottom center of the screen. Not even Ed Wood's people would shoot 7 minutes of footage with a lens that filthy! In short just avoid this, because it just isn't worth riffing.

I don't know if I'm fit to review "Mitchell" because I've only seen the MST3K version, which looks like a hacked-down UHF TV copy. But anyway, "Mitchell" is yet another mid-1970s cop movie where the protagonist is a dislikable detective investigating a narcotics case. However, unlike "Dirty Harry" Callahan, Joe Don's Mitchell is an overweight and alcoholic slob in some anonymous California police force, who aimlessly stumbles into a heroin ring run by lawyer(?) Martin Balsam ("Cummings.") Actually he starts with investigating the murder of a thief at John Saxon's house (but Saxon is considered "untouchable" because the FBI is watching him) so Mitchell does one of the world's worst stakeouts of Cummings' house. I mean, it gets to the point where Cummings invites Mitchell to dinner at his house! However, because this is a bad cop movie, Saxon and Cummings are are "business partners", but their brilliant idea of getting rid of Mitchell is putting hooker Linda Evans (!) in his bed, which results in the most disgusting sex scene since Jabba the Hutt kissed Carrie Fischer. And because she is a hempster, Mitchell drags her down to the lockup in the aftermath of "the old in-out-in-out." Interestingly enough, the booking officer is the guy who later played the first "Deep Throat" on "The X Files." But I'm rambling...what all of this boils down to is that a shipment of heroin is coming in from South America via the Mafia, and that they want Cummings' network to pick it up, but Cummings wants no part of it because of Mitchell. So, in order to make the plot even more complicated, Balsam tries to make the delivery into a chance to either get Mitchell killed, get Mitchell to kill everybody except for Balsam, or for Joe Don to finally take the hint and become a crooked cop. You guess what happens.

Besides this insanely overcomplicated plot, what sinks "Mitchell" is that there is nobody to root for and everything seems to be on autopilot. While Baker played a good lead in "Walking Tall", this movie can't seem to find what wants it's hero to be. Is he a good hearted bumbler like Inspector Clouseau, on a rumpled veteran like Columbo? What we get is a guy with the mannerisms of a auto mechanic who happens to be a cop. It just doesn't work; see "In the Heat of the Night" (the movie, not the TV series) instead.

"In Search of Noah's Ark" was the first Sunn "Classics" film about the quasi-paranormal aspects of Christianity, though it should have been the last. Narrated by the Great Bearded One, Brad Crandall, "In Search of Noah's Ark" is a collection of cheaply-filmed re-enactments surrounded by shots of Crandall talking to various pastors, "scientists", and eyewitnesses of eyewitnesses in various locales ranging from America to Turkey. The film begins by recounting the story of Noah, a Jewish man living in what is now Iraq, and how he was told by God to build an ark and populate it with all the world's animals and Noah's immediate family, "because of the world's wickedness." Somehow he is able to build a craft the size of six football fields (according to Crandall) with only his three sons as the workforce, then the animals CAME to Noah "because God had told them that Noah was their friend." All the while Noah's decidedly non-Semitic looking neighbors jeered and laughed, especially when the Santa-like Noah locked himself and his family inside the Ark. After a week the rains began, and we are treated with fake-looking waves smashing trees and buckets of water being thrown at the villagers from off camera. After some shots of a model ark in a swimming pool and the wives feeding the animals (who are mainly goats, chimpanzees, and a parrot!) the storm ends, and the ark lands on Mt. Ararat. After Noah exits stage right, the movie switches from being a Sunday school video and lurches into "In Search of..." territory. According to Crandall and the slew of "experts", there is proof of a world-wide flood in the fossil and archeological records. Unfortunately that "proof" was later debunked. (See the online "Skeptic's Dictionary" for more info.) After the "proof" is introduced, then come story after story of post-Biblical witnesses of Noah's Ark. From stories of early pilgrims who climbed Mt. Ararat in order to take bits of the pitch-soaked wood for relics (we see one of the caveman-looking dudes fall to his death,) to 19th century German doctors who saw the site and a nearby monastery filled with Ark artifacts (since destroyed by an earthquake), even an Armenian shepherd who climbed on top of the ark as a boy in the early 1900s! After 1900, the claims get wilder and wilder; in the middle of losing WWI, the Czar sent Russian troops to the Ark after Russian recon planes spotted it on the Russo-Ottoman front, but the records were lost after the 1917 revolution; that the Soviet Union did recon flights over Mt. Ararat from 1937 to 1947; that the "Stars & Stripes" Army newspaper printed photos of the Ark taken by US Army Air Force pilots supplying the USSR from Turkey duing WWII; and that a Frenchman brought bits of the Ark back in 1968. None of these claims has stood the test of time, especially the alleged "Stars & Stripes" photos. In fact, "In Search of Noah's Ark" has no eyewitness testimony, just people who claimed that they had spoken to eyewitnesses such as an illustrator who drew sketches of what the Armenian shepherd had seen, or a man who claimed to have met a Soviet Air Force pilot who said that his country had made flights over Ararat. What is weird about "In Search of Noah's Ark" is that it makes these claims, then points out how inhospitable the mountain is by telling the viewer that the mountain is rocky, avalanche-prone, and that the peak (where the Ark supposedly resides) is covered in a glacier which thaws and re-freezes every day, thus creating a dense fog. The only proof given that Mt. Ararat IS the "Ararat" of the Bible is that the Kurdish peasants in the area have a tradition that the Ark is somewhere on the mountain and have given every village in the area an Ark-themed name.

So what was the point of all of this? I mean, if you are a "Bible-believing" Christian, why do you need proof of Noah's existance? We have to remember when this film was made; the mid-1970s saw a revival of Fundamentalist Christianity and TV shows about the paranormal were beginning to be shown. (In fact, the Leonard Nimoy hosted "In Search of.." first aired in 1976; I'm guessing Sunn ripped-off the title.) So Sunn both gets the Fundy family dollar AND wanna-be Forteans cash! This "film" deservedly has been out of print on VHS for some time; I was only able to rent through the best video store in San Diego. Avoid unless you want to giggle a lot.

I've seen "Crimewave" languish on videostore shelves since 1986. I don't know what it is (maybe the box art, maybe the lack of big-name stars), but I've never seen the thing rented out. So I gave it a shot, knowing that Leonard Maltin had branded it "almost incoherent." What we have here is an attempt to make a spoof of 1940's-50's noir pictures incorporating big doses of Three Stooges-type slapstick and gobs of retro style. The problem is that while the characters act like they are living under the Truman or Eisenhower administrations, the rest of Detroit is stuck firmly in the 1980s (unless this is supposed to be another universe where an `80's-`50's fusion is going on or just a comment by Raimi & the Coens on how nostalgic the 1980's were of the 1950's.) Stylistic oddities aside, the film just does not gel, mainly because the lead couple have no chemistry. What DOES work is the S&M relationship between the two "exterminators" Paul L. Smith and Brion James; you just know that James gets his kicks everytime Smith smashes the glove compartment door on his hand when he attempts to get a cigarette! If the other reviewers are right and the studio re-edited the movie, then they are to blame for it's failure at the box office. That and the bizarre framing device; why did the cops arrest the hero? How did a jury trial convict the guy of bumping off his boss, his boss' partner, and the two "exterminator"/hitmen? Was this all just the Coens ripping off "In Cold Blood", or just an excuse to have a cliffhanger ending in a "Hudsucker State Penetentary?" I'm guessing the last one.

...is the story of a group of Israeli soldiers who have been sent to guard an outpost (the "Hill 24" of the title) overlooking a strategic valley. The time is 1948, at the end of the "War of Liberation." This four-person unit's job is simple: hold the position during the night, then put up the Israeli flag in the morning so the UN and the combatant's representatives can mark the position as Zionist territory. But before they can reach the hill, there is a long truck ride during which each unloads why they are fighting for Israel. And like "The Canterbury Tales", these stories are the point of the film. The first is about Edward Mulhare's character, an Northern Irish police officer who worked for the British in the Palestinian Mandate. We follow his investigation of a concentration-camp survivor who is in Palestine to kick the British out, and how Mulhare falls in love with the guy's architect student girlfriend. The next story is that of an American Jew who came to the Holy Land as a tourist, then became a Haganah or Irgun fighter in East Jeruselem. He is wounded, loses his willingness to fight in an ad-hoc field hospital, then regains it after getting a pep talk from a rabbi(!) The girl of the outfit (who I think is a Druze) was his nurse, so she doesn't spew her bio. Finally, there is this wiseacre Eastern European Jew who recounts how he ran into an ex-SS concentration-camp officer out in the desert while fighting Arab League soldiers. I cannot reveal what happens to them once the reach Hill 24, but I can say it is very similar to the old Humphry Bogart movie "Sahara."

"Giv'a 24 Eina Ona" really reminds me of Algeria's first film, Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers," in that both are films of struggle, and in both good foreign actors are used. The American afaid of subtitled films will be relieved that most of "Hill 24" is in English. Certainly it is a propaganda film, but there are worse bits of cinema people can waste their time on. ("Nekromantik," anyone?)

...is the story of a group of Israeli soldiers who have been sent to guard an outpost (the "Hill 24" of the title) overlooking a strategic valley. The time is 1948, at the end of the "War of Liberation." This four-person unit's job is simple: hold the position during the night, then put up the Israeli flag in the morning so the UN and the combatant's representatives can mark the position as Zionist territory. But before they can reach the hill, there is a long truck ride during which each unloads why they are fighting for Israel. And like "The Canterbury Tales", these stories are the point of the film. The first is about Edward Mulhare's character, an Northern Irish police officer who worked for the British in the Palestinian Mandate. We follow his investigation of a concentration-camp survivor who is in Palestine to kick the British out, and how Mulhare falls in love with the guy's architect student girlfriend. The next story is that of an American Jew who came to the Holy Land as a tourist, then became a Haganah or Irgun fighter in East Jeruselem. He is wounded, loses his willingness to fight in an ad-hoc field hospital, then regains it after getting a pep talk from a rabbi(!) The girl of the outfit (who I think is a Druze) was his nurse, so she doesn't spew her bio. Finally, there is this wiseacre Eastern European Jew who recounts how he ran into an ex-SS concentration-camp officer out in the desert while fighting Arab League soldiers. I cannot reveal what happens to them once the reach Hill 24, but I can say it is very similar to the old Humphry Bogart movie "Sahara."

"Giv'a 24 Eina Ona" really reminds me of Algeria's first film, Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers," in that both are films of struggle, and in both good foreign actors are used. The American afaid of subtitled films will be relieved that most of "Hill 24" is in English. Certainly it is a propaganda film, but there are worse bits of cinema people can waste their time on. ("Nekromantik," anyone?)

One of the major problems with "The Fountainhead" not mentioned by any of the IMdB reviewers is the time period the film is set in. The novel makes no bones about being set in the 1920s, but the film seems to be set in the `30s or `40s. I bring this up because the ultra-modern buildings protagonist Howard Roark designs would seem exotic before the Depression, but by the Thirties such structures were becoming accepted, and nowadays they are the rule. In the film, Roark's designs are not accepted because they aren't Classical in some sense. In any case, Roark's creations look like cartoons of Art Deco buildings, while the "Classical" buildings of his nebbish chum/antithesis Peter Keating are just photos of skyscrapers with classical facades pasted onto the ground floors. Another problem is Roark's character; the man is a sociopath with not even a tiny shred of empathy, yet he can design buildings that his clients dream about and which fit their locations perfectly. Rand's character could possibly survive as an engineer (a job Roark briefly holds in the novel), but no architect can work like that. One of the keystones of both the book and the film is that HR cannot compromise on designs either when they are blueprints or when they are under construction. My question is, what if Roark goofs? Would he tolerate a redesign if something in one of his buildings proved unfeasable? And what about people remodeling one of his buildings years after it was completed? Roark's model, the architect Frank L. Wright, often suffered design failures and pressured his clients never to remodel (namely because he also designed all the furnishings for his homes), so I can only suppose that Roark would rather let a building collapse than change his "perfect" plans.

Besides the impossible Roark, we are faced with the bizarre snob Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey is supposed to be the embodiment of evil, but he comes off on screen as a sneering Snidely Whiplash-like character whose attemps to drive Roark under look like cries for attention. Toohey is an architecture critic and intellectual public figure, but he loves mediocrity. Why we are never told, but probably because Rand equates mediocrity with socialism, and in the novel Toohey is a Red. Inbetween the two poles of Roark and Toohey are the aforementioned yob Peter Keating, Raymond Massey as proto-Rupert Murdoch Gail Wynand (and Toohey's boss), and Patricia Neal as Toohey's co-worker Dominique Francon. As you can tell, Rand loves giving the bad guys weird names, the good guys WASPy names, the love interests romance novel names, and the tools names that rhyme with bad schoolroom behavior. And you can tell what is going to happen to these characters from the outset, because despite its intellectual pretensions, "The Fountainhead" is just another noir film. Somebody will snitch, somebody will commit suicide, somebody will just dissapear from the procedings, and the protagonist will end up with the girl. I just wish that that noir film were "The Big Sleep" and not "The Fountainhead."

"Up the Creek" features the sort of plot sitcom writers co-opted and reuse to this very day: the clueless owner/manager/heir who buys/is posted/inherits a ship/motel/manor where the crew/staff/butlers are running all sorts of private "industries" on the side without the owner/manager/heir's knowledge. Then the owner/manager/heir finds out, and "hilarious hi-jinks" ensue. In this version, a certain rocket-obsessed Royal Navy Lieutenant Fairweather has been blowing up naval bases with his homebuilt experimental missiles. Because he is related to the First Sea Lord (the British equivalent of the Secretary of the Navy,) the Admiralty posts him to a Reserve Fleet ship in the wilds of Suffolk. The vessel is the HMS Barclay, an ancient sloop manned by a skeleton crew and "captained" by a wheeler-dealer Irish bo'sun. The ship has been without a captain for two years, and during that time he and the 11-man crew have developed a number of services and products which they sell in the nearby village. Fairweather's arrival puts a crimp in the style of "Barclay Industries, Ltd.", but as long as the crew indulges Fairweather in his plan to make the bridge into a launching platform for his ten-foot rocket, they can camoflage their deliveries in town. However, everything comes to a head as a horserace-obsessed admiral comes to the Navy base to do a quick inspection before hitting the track, but before that he wants soak up the nostalgia of touring his first command...the HMS Barclay. What happens next is like watching one of those monster Japanese domino displays in action.

What really drew my interest were the actors. While "Up the Creek" is programmatic, the cast features David Tomlinson (later immortalized as Mr. Banks, the head of the household in Disney's "Mary Poppins") and Peter Sellers as the Bo'sun. At this period of his career Sellers was switching from playing supporting roles as British "ethnics", Americans, or drag characters to carrying entire movies ("The Mouse that Roared" was made after this, I think.) Both Sellers and Tomlinson make the film work, and the quick pace covers for the shopworn plot. A good rainy day movie.

What I liked the most about "The Crazies" was that the film had the same vibe as the British alternate history film "It Happened Here": both are claustrophobic, gritty films where there are no real heroes or villians, just people thrown into situations beyond their control. In "IHH" the antagonist is Fascism, which is said to spread like a virus or incubate like a germ in ordinary people, while in "The Crazies" the enemy actually is a germ (code-named "Trixie" and made by the US government) which spreads through the water system of a small Pennsylvania town. The only difference is that Trixie's release was accidental. While "The Crazies" is very similar to Romero's previous "Night of the Living Dead", it displays a far greater pessimism about the future of humanity as the entire populace of Evans City, Pennsylvania either dies in gun battles with US Army troops (decked out in creepy gasmasks and white hazmat suits, by the way) or goes saliva-bubbling mad. If you thought "The Day After" was fun, this may be the film for you.

...in that the same studio (Toho) and the same special effects people made this epic along with the Gojira movies, so you almost expect the big green guy to make a showing. Part docudrama, part action film, "Zerosen moyu" tells the story of the Japanese Navy's (in)famous Mitsubishi Zero fighter through the lives of an ace pilot and a ground crew member. Hamada (the ace) suffers from the worst dubbed voice of any Japanese film; not even the "monster boys" sound as obnoxious. Mitsushimi, the armorer/mechanic sounds weirdly British, and the dialogue seems to have been written for laughs. But back to the "story." We first run across the duo running away from the Navy flight training school, tired of the getting beaten up for minor infractions. They are stopped, however, by a naval officer who then shows them the prototype of the Zero (named after the then-supposed 2700 years of Japanese national unity), and afterward he makes one of those standard pep talks you always see AWOL boot campers getting in the movies. Our young men, clad in the dorkiest sailor suits ever, agree to stay. Mitsushimi washes out of flight school and becomes a fighter mechanic, while Hamada graduates early (Japanese flight training took three to four years, a useless factoid I know.) Although he is the best in his class, Hamada never is assigned to a carrier wing (the budget was probably too small to build a fake carrier), and instead spends his naval career on Rabul after the island is taken. Improbably, Mitsushimi is his mechanic. From then on it's action, action, action as the Zeros shoot down anything the Americans send up, though the losses get to wear on Hamada. After the battle of Midway, the mechanic goes back to Japan for more training, and runs across a girl, thus beginning the goofy romantic sub-plot always seen in aviator movies. The war grinds on, as Hamada gets the chance to fumble the ball in defending Admiral Yamamoto's plane, and navy brass back in Tokyo argue about upgrading the Zero's paper thin armor (the vote is nay.) By 1943 or 1944 Hamada is badly burned after his Zero is shot down, and visits the family farm outside of Yokohama on hospital leave. He is accompanied by that same wistfull harmonica playing Kurosawa used in "Dodes' ka-den." The scene where he sees his mother tries to be a tear jerker, but only winds up maudlin. When Mitsushima sees Hamada's charred but still-usable hands, and hears that he still wishes to fly, he tries to get the girl to love him because he knows Hamada has a death wish. The forced romance (shown in a collage, with a nightclub singer crooning in the backround!) is a failure, and Hamada keeps on flying to the end, where he is blown out of the sky by US Navy Hellcat fighters. After Japan's surrender, Mitsushima asks his commander for a Zero, and in an odd ceremony the plane is set on fire while idling on the tarmac as pilots and groundcrewmen sob their guts out, hence the title "Zero on Fire".

What hurts "Zero" (as it was known here) besides the awful dubbing and the by-the-numbers story, are the technical inaccuracies. There are few flyable Zeros left, so Toho had to build full sized scale models for their actor to sit in. The problem is that the Zero evolved as the war went on, with each new model (and there were five) sporting different wings, engines, and numbers of guns. However, if we are to believe "Zero", nothing changed from 1939 to 1945, because their models are all A6M2s, the type first seen at Pearl Harbor. Squadron markings are also wrong, with late war unit codes used throught the movie. American planes are misnamed, with the F4U Corsair becoming the "F4A Corvair," and the B-29 Superfortress becoming the "Super Flying Fortress." In a scene where US Navy pilots are briefed about the capabilities of a captured Zero, all the people wearing eyeglasses are wearing contemporary fashions and there is a black pilot in the audience. There were no black pilots flying for the Navy in the Pacific theater in World War II. More obvious are the trucks used by the Japanese Navy; all of them are late 1970's Nissans. Oddly enough there are period trucks in the background, but none of them move. In summary, that goofy B-17 movie "Memphis Belle" was more realistic. Watch "Tora! Tora! Tora!" instead.

Svankmajer's first monochrome film, "The Flat" is about this late 1960's Czech everyman who has been literally flung into this dingy, primitive apartment. There he quickly discovers that reality does not work as it should; the man attempts to light a wood-fired stove, but water comes out, dousing the match; for no reason, the bare lightbulb begins swinging and lengthening it's cord, so it can bash a small hole in a brick wall, whereupon the light retracts into the ceiling. In the middle of the room there is a table with a meal (a boiled egg in a holder, soup, a tankard of beer, and a plateful of things that look like linked sausages.) The man sits down to eat, only to have the beer become a tiny doll's stein when he drinks it, then reverting to the (now-empty) tankard when he puts it down. He can't drink the soup, because suddenly the spoon has holes. He tries to break the egg, only to have it break the holder and fall through the table onto his foot, a painful experiance. The "sausages" are also inedible; they bend the fork prongs. The man then attempts to sleep in a bed, but it disintigrates into a large pile of sawdust. In the end, a man walks into the room in slow motion, holding a chicken and an axe. The protagonist takes the axe as the man glides back out through a second door. The door has no handle, so the everyman hacks it to pieces, only to find that it covers a wall. The wall is covered with names; the man adds his with a pencil.

I went to the trouble of recounting most of the film to make a point, that this is an allegory of the secret police interrogations that went on after the Soviets reinvaded Czechoslovakia during the "Prague Spring" of 1968. In such an interrogation, the subject would be more and more disoriented by placing the person in a cell with no windows where the light (from a bare bulb) was eternally on, along with nonsensical questioning, irregular meal times, and bizarre arbitrary behavior by guards and interrogators. At the end of whatever time it took to break the prisoner, he/she would be forced to sign a confession, either written by the prisoner or concocted by the secret police. I suspect that the only reason that "Byt" survived was due to the literal-mindedness of Czech censors and the secret police.

...if those people watch movies, that is. "Sacred" is the simple story of two Orthodox Jewish couples living in Jeruselem who are having problems with the lifestyle. The first, Liev and Rivka, are childless with Liev silently blaming Rivka. The second, Yossef and Malka, are a miserable match made by Malka's mother; Malka does not want to be married, and Yossef would rather be more comfortable driving about town in a truck with loudspeakers on it, imploring Jews to come to the run-down synagogue while handing out Orthodox liturature. The source of Malka's dislike of marriage lies with Yaakov, who used to study at the yeshiva with Liev and Yossef, but joined the army and drove a tank around Lebanon. She loves him, but cannot leave the group, or so she thinks. On top of this, the Rabbi is pressuring Liev to annul his marriage because he thinks Rivka is barren.

The problem with "Kadosh" is the same one that "The Holy Land" suffers from: once the film introduces all the characters, you just know what is going to be the end result. I have to agree with the reviewers that Gitai takes one point (Patriarchy is bad) and beats it to death. Like other reviewers, I wish that Gitai would have shown us a little of the joys of Orthodox living, unless that is the director's other point, i.e., that being Orthodox is a lot like being an Objectivist. Definitely the bummer movie of 1999.

When a movie has Robert Carradine as a cigar-chomping badass Army private who is also the narrator, you know something has gone horribly wrong. What sinks "The Big Red One" are not the bloodless battles, or the insipidness of the dialogue, but the fact that none of the protagonists ever gets wounded or killed. Everybody around the first squad falls like flies, but the Sarge, Skolnick, the Italian guy, the guy with the killer `riods, and Luke Skywalker walk away intact. This kills any believability, which leads to the question: is this a straight war film (like "A Bridge Too Far" or "The Longest Day") or an essay about men at war (like the recent "Thin Red Line")? I don't think that Fuller knows, so he switches from "realistic" back to "character study" whenever it suits him. So what was the point? Personally I think that "The Big Red One" was Fuller's knowing satire of the big war films of the 1950s, and a semi-satire of his own 1951 Korean War film, "The Steel Helmet." Watch this for James Coburn, he gives a good performance as the WW I vet who leads the squad.

When a movie has Robert Carradine as a cigar-chomping badass Army private who is also the narrator, you know something has gone horribly wrong. What sinks "The Big Red One" are not the bloodless battles, or the insipidness of the dialogue, but the fact that none of the protagonists ever gets wounded or killed. Everybody around the first squad falls like flies, but the Sarge, Skolnick, the Italian guy, the guy with the killer `riods, and Luke Skywalker walk away intact. This kills any believability, which leads to the question: is this a straight war film (like "A Bridge Too Far" or "The Longest Day") or an essay about men at war (like the recent "Thin Red Line")? I don't think that Fuller knows, so he switches from "realistic" back to "character study" whenever it suits him. So what was the point? Personally I think that "The Big Red One" was Fuller's knowing satire of the big war films of the 1950s, and a semi-satire of his own 1951 Korean War film, "The Steel Helmet." Watch this for James Coburn, he gives a good performance as the WW I vet who leads the squad.

(Reviewer's note: I had to see this film because I had been part of a small email campaign to get AMPAS to include the film in Oscar screenings.)

...in the US, anyway, because of the political element of the picture (though they did release "The Believer" against my prediction, so I could be wrong.) However, that would be missing the point; "Divine Intervention" is a very good black comedy about Israel's forty-year civil war, focusing on a Palestinian filmmaker (played by the director) and his father, who runs a welding shop on the West Bank. We first see the father going about his day, driving past his neighbors and pointing out which one is a collaborator with the Israeli government. He fights with the neighborhood kids over shooting their soccer ball on to his roof, dumps garbage in the back yard of a neighbor he despises, demolishes a wall built by the Occupation, and goes to work, only to have his welding equipment confiscated by Israeli police for some unspecified reason. He returns to his house, thumbs through the bills, then collapses. The film then cuts to the "protagonist", driving aimlessly from one point to another. It slowly develops that he is a director with a stalled project, and that the welder is his father (he visits him in the hospital.) The guy also has a Palestinian girlfriend, some sort of office worker, and they meet by a checkpoint to rub hands and watch as Israeli Defence Forces soldiers deny Palestinian cars entry into an area, or humiliate waiting drivers by forcing them to dance at gunpoint and sing Hebrew folk-songs. The only Arab thing that gets by the checkpoint is a red computer animated balloon with Arafat's face on it, a balloon inflated by the protagonist, which floats all the way to the Dome of the Rock. The problem with writing about "Yadon ilaheyya" is that no review can do the film justice. From the beginning until the end I laughed, even though there is little comedic dialoge. I would have to describe the picture as a semi-surrealist Arab Buster Keaton film, though the director seems to have more facial control than Keaton, if that is possible. A good example is the time when the director stops at a streetlight next to the car of an Israeli settler. The settler's small dingy car has the obligatory Israeli flag of the radio aerial, and the car itself is covered in Israeli right-wing bumper stickers. Suleiman(?) rolls down his passenger window and cranks up Natascha Atlas' cover of "I've got a spell on you." The director looks at the settler, a small miserable-looking man, who glares back. Suleiman never says anything, just gives that emotionless look he has throught the picture, then rolls up the window, and drives off when the light goes green.

Banned for many years in Czechoslovakia, "The Joke" is centered around Ludvik Jahn, at present some sort of doctor at an ill-defined institute, but in the past (the early Fifties of Klement Gottwald, first Czech communist president) a college student in Prague. Jahn, who could win a Bob Newhart look-alike contest, thinks that the past is over, but gets a rude shock when his old college flame (the baggy Helena) shows up as a radio reporter for an inteview. This meeting reawakens Ludvik's plan of revenge against Helena and her future husband Peter, because Peter began charges of anti-communism against Jahn after Ludvik sent Helena a joke postcard. For this, Ludvik was expelled from college and the communist party and had to serve in a military punishment battalion and a couple years of hard labor. Before this point, all the flashbacks are from Jahn's point of view; after, we get to see our protagonist with more hair as he is pointlessly drilled by sadistic sergents and digs out granite in a quarry. His revenge is simple; cuckold Peter by starting an affair with Helena, then dump her. However, things do not go as planned... Without the political undertones, "Zert" would be a typical example of the "manage a troi" picture Europe was cranking out during the sexual revolution. However, it's a cold film, sterile and controlled from the the first frame to the last, reflecting the social frustrations of the era. Nice monochromatic cineamatography, though.

Before Albert Band bought "Robot Jox" and made two crappy sequels, before "Nemesis" and its crappy sequels, before Albert Pyun started making movies, before anybody thought they could rip off the industrial hell look of "Blade Runner", Toho (the guys who gave us Godzilla) made this little epic about giant transformable robots, computers running islands, and actors who would never appear in anything other than direct-to-video junk. I agree with everybody that the plot mechanics don't work and that there are too many set-up scenes in the beginning, but that wasn't what this movie was about. It was about showing off the model making techniques and robot concepts that we would later see in crud like the "Power Rangers" TV shows, and a demonstration that you could make a live-action version of the "Robotech" show if you had to.

I caught this one on the SciFi channel at midinight (where it's either show this or old "Dark Shadows" episodes)and from the first minute I knew it was going to be one of those wannabe cyberpunk efforts that still plague S/F movies. The plot is rather simple: there was a war between people and robots centering around the small fictional Pacific island 8JO, and humanity won. However the supercomputer controlling the robots was never shut down, instead it has come up with a plan to turn the entire island into a reactor powered with the miracle substance Texmexium. Texmexium, which has nothing to do with Tejano music, does whatever the plot requires, besides being a more powerful source of nuclear energy. The computer has been doing this for over thirty years, when a band of scavengers fly in on a jet that is half B-17 bomber, half typical anime spacecraft. It seems that the war ruined industry and high tech doodads are worth alot, which is why they're there. Like in "Mission Impossible", most of the salvage team is killed off pretty quickly, leaving only the carrot-munching Japanese guy they call "Brooklyn", and this female Japanese cyborg who is later transformed into a robot under the supercomputer's control. As with most movies of this kind, the hero runs across another character (in this case an American woman) who knows about the computer's plan, and with two pointless children they repair one of the sentient giant transformable robots (the "Gunhed" of the title) and try to stop the computer because it will be able to control the world or blow it up if its plan works. Or something like that. What kills "Ganheddo" is that all these semi-interesing robots and set designs are tied to a creaky plot whose details don't add up. If you can find it, see "Robokill under Discoclub Layla" instead; while totaly implausible, at least that plot worked.

What a lot of reviewers of this film do not understand is that appearances are not realities. The salesmen are actually driving rented cars, the Bible publishing company probably pays for half of the motel bills, and each man only has two suits. Though it is never stated, these men are probably working commission only due to the fact that they are not "cold calling" the customers. You have to listen closely to the dialogue at the Chicago salesman's conference; the publisher only workes with Catholics, and has a deal with various parishes to put a sales display of their wares in their church's vestibule. Prospective customers (the parishoners) put their names on slips of paper and put them in a box, whereupon a company man picks up the box and sends the request slips to the salesmen. Like all publishers, the company has diverse line of products; their Bible comes in various models, they sell a Catholic encylopedia set, and missals (prayer books for the Mass.) Because door-to-door salespeople are a rarity today, we have forgotten that salesmen of that sort really dressed to impress, and even moreso in the Bible racket because they were representatives (in a way) of the religion. All that being said, "Salesman" is a grim view of door-to-door living, where the men of the trade have to use every trick to get a sale, even though it is the holiday season. Though we see three other salesmen and their bloated manager, the film focuses on Paul, who has been at the trade since 1958. He is world-weary and pensive, a former top seller who has run into a dry patch. While the other are hoping to make 25 to 35K that fiscal year, Paul is just hoping to keep his head above water, though he never says it. The pressure is also on from the company, which has fired some of the bottom performers. Though the bespectacled company rep in Chicago claims that the men are doing a religious duty, the mantra SELL!! SELL!! SELL!! is what he really wants to come across. So "The Bull", "The Shark", and "The Rabbit" give it everything they've got in the snow covered wasteland of the Greater Boston area while Paul hums "I wish I were a rich man", sometimes adding "...so I wouldn't have to drive into this sh**land" as he covers that territory. Things do not get better as the scene shifts to Florida, where the very green Rabbit attempts to sell a missal to a Cuban woman who barely understands him, the Shark and the Bull (who both resemble Eddie Constantine in "The Long Good Friday") rack up the sales, and Paul gets lost in Opa Locka. All while this is going on, the Maysles never ask any questions or provide narration. The subjects stand on their own because the film-makers believe the are compelling. And they are.

...a glitter-trash documentary about the hick who became Iraq's dictator/living god, "Uncle Saddam" (what the childern of his flunkies call him) focuses on the opulent lifestyle of the title subject, who resembles a cross between the world's worst Stalin impersonator and a "Miami Vice" Columbian drug cartel leader. Joel Soler told the Iraqi government that he was there to film how the economic sanctions were killing Iraqi children; instead he interviewed the head of the Saddam art museum, talked with Hussein's architect, filmed models of the gigantic mosque (larger than the one in Mecca) the dictator was building, and collected film of Saddam's extended family, along with footage of torture victims and executions. The dying children of the sanctions and "no-fly zone" bombing are shown, but only in a short montage with some schmaltzy music in the background, and over the end credits.

In a style reminicent of a cheap infomercial, "Uncle Saddam" recounts Saddam's crummy upbringing in Tikrit, where he was the fatherless son of a shepherding clan. Through guile he forced the family to pay for his education, where he became a lawyer, attempted assasinations on the Iraqi leadership, fled to Egypt, but later returned. He became the security man of the Ba'th Arab Socialist Party, and used his position to wrest control of the country from the Ba'th leader when that party came to power in the late 1970's. From then on, blood ran like water as Iraq invaded Iran in 1979, whose Shi'ite fundamentalists had just overthrown the Shah (not mentioned in the film.) Also not mentioned is how every weapons-producing state sold Saddam arms in order to fight Iran, then seen as a threat to the world's oil supply. Like all oil-producing non-democracies, Hussein's government quckly became rife with nepotism, as all of his close relatives became heads of various government offices. As the Iran-Iraq war drew to a close in the late 1980's, an inter-family blood feud began to see who would succeed Saddam. Most of his close relatives wound up dead or crippled by Iraq's secret police. By the time of the first Gulf War, Iraq no longer looked like a Nassarite state; instead it had become a cross between a faux kingdom and the USSR in the late 1930's, with massive palaces for the leadership and grotesque statues or mosaics of Hussein everywhere. The disaster that was the US-Iraq war fell heavily on the shoulders of Iraq's people, but the sanctions actually helped Saddam's grip over the people (something also not discussed in the film) by forcing them to either support the regime or starve, because the Iraq government was collaborating with the "Oil for Food" program. Meanwhile, Hussein lived like the Saudi royalty, and developed Howard Hughes-like habits (fear of microbes, baths twice a day), and a fetish for security (Saddam doubles, underground bunkers.)

Now that Hussein is gone, a film like "Uncle Saddam" makes for a good "I told you so" by American war supporters to those who opposed it, but both the war supporters and the film-maker forget one thing: Iraq is an artificial state, cut out of the Ottoman Empire by the British after WWI. It has never been held together except by monarchy or dictatorship, and Achmad Chalabi (whose uncle, I think, was interviewed by Soler) who has been living in London for twenty years and is wanted in Jordan for a bank scam, probably will not cut it as "president." Like Yugoslavia, Iraq will probably partition into seperate enclaves of Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish peoples, leaving only the bricks stamped with Saddam's name and this film depicting those bricks as testament to that entity once known as Iraq.

I caught "Cube" back in 1998 (where it was on a limited run) at the Ken Cinema in San Diego, though I'd first heard of the picture through "Fortean Times" magazine. With a couple of friends in tow, I plunked down my seven bucks and subjected myself to Vincenzo Natali's "vision." We just could not stop laughing, though at the end we all groaned at the crappy religious symbolism of the character who survives the cube and the light the character walks into. As many others have written here, "Cube" has a very original and existential concept which is undermined by characters who are nothing more than archetypes who mouth some of the most rediculous lines ever written by somebody not Ed Wood. On top of these defects, the film goes on too long, and the director/writer seems to have a mean streak, though whoever directed the sequel was even worse. With our luck, somebody will make a reality show based on it.

This short (made by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) was meant for two audiences: possible tourists (rum afficionados) and investors (domestic or foreign) thrilled by the possibility of cheap labor, which Puerto Rico has in scads. This is why the movie will show tourist traps like the old Spanish forts on the coastline, then abruptly switch over to shots of people working in a record player factory, then show folk dancing, then jump to Puerto Rican malls. All the while this horrendously cheesy score drowns out the WASP narrator; it sounds like the Boston Pops was parodying Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The tune itself is so tacky that they would have been better off with armpit noises. And let us not forget the hyperactive editing at the beginning and end which encapsulates every scene in the film in less that ten seconds. I think this was the Chamber of Commerce's bold statement that while South Vietnam was no longer a semi-decent place to set up shop (what with "Vietnamization" and Watergate), America still had 19th century hold outs like Puerto Rico to make a quick buck in, or a great place to drink rum.