Keylimepie

This is a very smart comedy made by - and for - Hollywood insiders. It has a bit of Entourage mixed with The Player about it. It's funny, but I don't know if it translates to a very wide audience. The main character, Jackie, is a screenwriter whose life is basically a huge disappointment to her, both in her career and her love life. The scripts, many written by Laura Kightlinger who also plays Jackie, have that edgy bitterness which is very true to the "biz", that some people may find funny (I do) and others just depressing. Jackie may also come across as an awful narcissist, but then Hollywood only works because of all the narcissists operating in concert to try and make movies and occasionally succeeding. Certain aspects of the show are just dead on. Jackie is in a constant struggle to define herself both professionally and spiritually (though she would never cop to that in a million years). Kightlinger is terrific. She has a Geena Davis thing going on which she spins her own way. I recommend this to all angry, desperate, bitter, lonely people. For us it's great. If you feel suicidal once or twice a week, try it and see if you like it.

This is one of HBO's better historical dramas, miles above the vulgar-for-its-own-sake Deadwood. This series does not simply play epater le bourgeoisie so that it can appear gritty or "real." This is Deadwood's greatest failing and it is not echoed in Rome. When vulgarity is called for, it is used in an organic way, it springs from the historical record as well as the characters themselves. And the interplay of these characters is rich and wicked. It may not seem exciting all the time, but that is a good thing. There are scenes of thoughtful encounter as well as brawls and delicious bloodletting. Sex is shown straightforwardly and without a lot of superfluous yatter. Rome has the feel of a society that "gets on with it," which is one of the things which separated Rome from Athens and the more poetic and learned (but just as bloody-minded) Greeks. All in all this series is worthy of our attention for its excellent production values, good scripts, and accomplished actors. While I had to finally give up on Deadwood, Rome holds my attention much better. Its stage is so much broader (history, after all, plays across it in very human terms), the stakes are so much greater, and the juvenile need to shock the middle classes is not found in the dialogue or action. Definitely worth a look for those who have HBO. A new season begins sometime this summer (2006).

What we now know about CNN is that they kept secret many things they knew that Saddam was doing in order to keep this very Baghdad office open. In at least one instance, this resulted in the deaths of two of Saddam's sons-in-law when CNN failed to warn them that they were to be executed when they came back from the U.S. CNN knew this. They kept quiet about what they knew in order to keep their bureau open. The men came back, they were executed. Here is a link:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/20/1050777161410.html

CNN did this throughout the 90's and up until it was clear that the U.S. was going to overrun Baghdad. At that point the senior editor in chief of the Baghdad news bureau did a preemptive admission. He copped to hiding facts that might reflect poorly on Saddam and the Ba'ath Party so that they didn't incur the dictator's wrath. They needed to stay competitive and to protect their Iraqi staff (didn't other networks have this problem as well?) was the justification. My question was and is, if you aren't going to report the truth, or as much of it as you know, then what is the point of your bureau other than that it provided you with a nice income with bonus hazardous duty pay? What is the point in staying competitive when all you are doing is sending out soft stories that steer clear of the truly horrific stuff Saddam was doing? And what is the point of keeping silent about things you know when life and death are in the balance? I need to ask the same thing the guy asks Michael Keaton's character in this film: How do you sleep at night? One might also wonder, why, once CNN cemented itself in the public's mind as the brave network that stuck when others ran, that it curled up in a corner and became a network that protected its own image rather than report the truth of the outrages of Saddam's horrific rule? Whatever they gained in 1991, they lost in 2003, and not only did they lose the confidence of the public, but since 2003 the other networks' credibility has steadily eroded in the face of the multiple checks on them by pajama-clad Internet bloggers who just don't take the networks at their word anymore. This, as far as I'm concerned, is the best thing that has happened to journalism since the Sixties. This movie seems to me to be CNN trying to remind us all how important they are, but events have overtaken them, and this now looks like a display in a museum.

One reviewer here had the gall (not to mention the ignorance) to confuse this hysteria with conservative politics. For one thing, the whole fear of pedophilia has been drilled into the minds of ordinary people by the hysteria-provoking media. It is also driven by the politics of the left as well as the right. The left's guilt in this is the constant drumbeat about "the children." According to the left, "the children" are always in peril. The right is complicit in being stone-faced and relentless in the pursuit of imaginary miscreants who have done nothing wrong. They are too willing to believe the worst. But the left set the stage with one simple idea: 'children don't lie.' This one concept drove the legal issue in most of these cases which took place in the '80's.

The idea of total innocence in children is not a conservative idea at all. Quite the opposite. Conservatives believe that right and wrong have to be explained, and doing right is a process of learning. It is not innate. This is the bedrock of conservative philosophy. But in the case of the McMartins and the Amiraults and many other cases, the children were deliberately manipulated by people - "facilitators" - whose agenda had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with power and the limelight.

This film is one of the best ever made about this sad chapter. A power-hungry DA more than willing to prosecute, and women, for the most part, more than willing to harass and intimidate children into saying things that they knew were wrong. Many of these women had absolutely no formal training and had no degrees in child psychology. Yet they were entrusted with the job of indoctrination on the lowest most vile level. This film enraged me all over again at the towering injustice done this and many other families. What the prosecution did was the real child abuse here.

This film is to Leaving Las Vegas as The Howling is to Little Red Riding Hood. Under The Volcano is the most grindingly real portrayal of the true devastation of alcoholism ever put on film (I've seen them all from Lost Weekend forward). This is no romantic movie where a guy decides he will go to Vegas and drink himself to death in 6 weeks then meets a devastatingly gorgeous chick who takes care of him the rest of the way. In this film the real horrors of alcohol are convincingly portrayed as the main character loses all track of reality and cannot tell whether his wife is really her or a hallucination. And because of that intermittent fading out and in, he loses the one chance he might have had at redemption. There is no romance here. There is no fabulous girl to have sex with while he's dying. This guy lives in a world so much more terrifying than Nic Cage's world in LLV as to be about two entirely different human experiences.

Not everyone will be able to stand this. It's almost unremittingly awful. But for anyone who is an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise, or who has lived under its shadow as someone related to or in love with an alcoholic, this is textbook stuff. Malcolm Lowery was an alcoholic and died of the disease. He put all he had into this book. No punches are pulled. The benchmark of the genre.

This movie is a long, slow, earnest melodrama about small town twenty-somethings struggling to...you know...find themselves...get somewhere...grow up...ah, hell, I have no idea, really. The movie seems like it was shot through a thin layer of maple syrup, it's photographed so that we are stuck in that eternal autumn that permeates most small-town melodramas. All oranges, browns, and golds. The characters meander through their lives with little direction and no visible means of support. There's a factory which none of the characters seem to work in. Zooey Deschanel plays a very confused girl who is a virgin when she starts dating Paul Schneider. Schneider is a player (that's right, all of a sudden - totally out of nowhere - there are at least two babes in this town that we see Schneider has - inexplicably - laid. They wear professional makeup and look like the have their hair done in New York). He falls for Deschanel and doesn't screw her because he's a changed guy. It's his new self. So what does Deschanel's character do? SPOILER- MAJOR SPOILER - She screws some guy she just met at a weekend party at a lake. The whole rest of the film is devoted to the pain and inchoate ramblings of Schneider and the rest of the cast, all of whose lives seem to be hopeless and in need of doses of stiff, tough-sounding and superficial philosophies which, it appears, everyone can spout. Nothing like dead-end stultifying, small-town life to make a person a sage. The worst offenders are the virtually tongue-tied ramblings of Deschanel who can't, for the life of her - or any of the rest of us - speak in the simplest declarative sentences. While there are some rare moments of insight (the moments are rare, not the insights) in this movie, for the most part it is an incredibly self-indulgent, plodding little film dotted with stoner non-sequiturs, annoying and pointless little scenes where people, for no apparent reason, find themselves sitting in abandoned cars spouting puerile Hallmark Moments conjectures for no other reason than that the filmmakers apparently thought that would give it an art-house feel. Deschanel is fine as the wounded/wounding girl, Schneider is stiff, pasty, and dull as the boyfriend (he also wrote the story).

Most people reviewing this excellent film by Regis Wargnier (Indochine) clearly understand the backdrop of a Soviet Union in the grip of a national paranoia that flowed from Stalin himself and infected everything from the highest positions of Party power to the most banal and mundane aspects of daily life. The film explores the destructive force that a monstrous ideology can have on ordinary people, artists, athletes, and even on love itself. Stalin's Soviet Union in 1946 was everything this movie portrays it as and worse. This is not some "anti-Soviet" propaganda film by any stretch, and people who think it is need to attend to some history of the time and place. Literally millions of returning Soviet émigrés and soldiers were either executed outright or sent to the gulags on various trumped-up charges like 'actions detrimental to the State' and espionage. There was no one as paranoid as Stalin, and he either believed his own fears, or he wanted everyone else to believe them. Probably both are true. That is why I welcomed this film which tells the story of a Russian émigré physician and his French wife and child who accept the deadly invitation of repatriation to the Motherland. Against this background of terror, repression, and despair we are made to watch what the pressures of the system can do to one family.

Alexei, Marie, and Serioia go from what must have been a comfortable, bourgeois life in France to a nightmare when they end up, thanks to Alexei's being a physician, in Kiev. The story goes into detail about how Alexei has to behave against his wife's expectations – unrealistic, it turns out, and very dangerous to boot – in order to fashion the possibility of escape. The film has a very real feel to it, and one can believe that what we are seeing is what really happened. I am a bit astonished that people today either know nothing of this period, or they actually think that the film is unfair to the Soviets. The preposterousness of this idea can only be cured with information, but the willfully blind will remain so regardless of hundreds of thousands of archival pages to the contrary. This film is true to its subject, and if you can sit through the nail-biting drama - where an NKVD agent seems to appear on every corner - you will be rewarded. An excellent movie full of the pain, heartbreak, and eventual triumph over evil.

It was the Sixties, and anyone with long hair and a hip, distant attitude could get money to make a movie. That's how Michael Sarne, director of this colossal flop, was able to get the job. Sarne is one of the most supremely untalented people ever given a dollar to make a movie. In fact, the whole studio must have been tricked into agreeing to hire a guy who had made exactly one previous film, a terribly precious 60's-hip black and white featurette called Joanna. That film starred the similarly talentless actress/waif Genevieve Waite who could barely speak an entire line without breaking into some inappropriate facial expression or bat-like twitter. Sarne, who was probably incapable of directing a cartoon, never mind a big-budget Hollywood film, was in way over his head. David Giler's book is the best place to go to find out how the faux-infant terrible Sarne was able to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. If there is ever an historical marker which indicates the superficiality and shallowness of an era, Myra Breckinridge provides that marker. It embodies the emptiness and mindless excess of a decade which is more often remembered for a great sea-change in the body politic. Breckinridge is a touchstone of another, equally important vein. Watch this movie and you'll get a different perspective on the less-often mentioned vacuity of spirit which so often passed for talent during those years.

Many reviewers have spoken about the inter-cutting of footage from other films, especially older ones. Some actually liked these clunky "comments" on what was taking place in the movie, others found them senseless, annoying, and obtrusive, though since the film is so bad itself any intrusion would have to be an improvement.

In my opinion, the real reason Michael Sarne put so many film clips into Myra Brekinridge was to paper over the bottomless insufficiency of wit and imagination that he possessed. That is to say, Sarne was so imagination-challenged that he just threw these clips in to fill space and take up time. They weren't inspiration, they were desperation. His writing skills were nonexistent, and David Giler had wisely stepped away from the project as one might from a ticking bomb, so Sarne was left to actually try and make a movie, and he couldn't. It was beyond his slim capabilities. Hence the introduction of what seems like one half of an entire film's worth of clips. The ghosts of writers and directors - many long since passed on - were called upon to fix this calamitous flopperoo because Sarne sure as heck wasn't able to. This was what he came up with on those days he sat on the set and thought for eight hours while the entire cast and crew (not to mention the producers and the accountants) cooled their heels and waited for something, some great spark of imagination, a hint of originality, a soupcon of wit, to crackle forth from the brow of Zeus. Um, oops. No Zeus + no imagination + no sparks = millions of little dollar bills with tiny wings - each made from the hundreds of licensing agreements required to use the clips - flying out the window. Bye-bye.

As for myself, I hated the film clips. They denigrated Sarne's many betters, poked fun at people whose talents - even those whose skills were not great - far outstripped the abilities of the director and so ultimately served to show how lacking he was in inspiration, originality - and even of plain competency - compared to even the cheesiest of them.

The reason Shannon Tweed no longer appears nude in films is because she no longer looks good nude. The reason for that is simple: she is 43 in this movie (48, almost 49 at this writing) and showing her age. Actually, she looks older than 43. She looks grim, hard, and beat-up. These girls (strippers, soft-core porn workers) apparently don't age well, and Tweed is no exception. The problem isn't that she doesn't appear nude here (I am grateful that she doesn't. One look at her clothed and you know you do not want to see her naked), it's that this is just a bad movie.

Tweed is not a good actress and cannot convince us she is a cop. The writing is weak, the characters stereotypes, and the storyline is threadbare. Movies like this are not supposed to be good anyway, but when they try to be, in between sex scenes, it's ludicrous. Stilted dialogue, awkward direction, poor editing, bad acting, this film has them all. There aren't enough sex scenes (with younger, better-looking women than Tweed) to justify renting this.

This is a decent cop show with fairly good characters. But I will have to say that it cannot be put into the same category as the premiere cop show in America, The Shield. The differences are quickly apparent. The Shield has an immediacy and grip to it that makes it almost impossible to turn away from for even a moment. The scripts for The Shield are better, the dialogue is more powerful and more real, the directing is superior, the camera work is better. The anti-gang task force in The Shield is more realistic as it is much more likely to exist than is the "super team" multi-agency concept for Wanted. Rent any past season of The Shield and watch it again. I would wager that the comparison will not favor Wanted. This show tries, self-consciously and awkwardly at times, to ape The Shield. It has not yet found its own style, and if ratings do not improve it won't get the chance. None of this is to denigrate Wanted but merely to point out that there are good shows and there are great shows. Wanted is a good show. The Shield is in another universe entirely.