Michael Bennett Cohn

Props for trying to turn Total Recall into a melodrama. But the results are as you might predict. I'm all for intelligent, complicated, genre-bending movies, but this was just not interesting and the payoff was just not worth it.

I can't say enough good things about this movie. Clever, well-acted, well-written, and constructed with an intricacy and a clarity that just blows me away. This movie is just plain solidly good.

Having said that, I'm amused by the critics I've read who make comments re this film to the effect of "Finally, a sci-fi movie directed exclusively at women!" I'm all for sci-fi directed at women. But let me tell you, as a hetero male sci-fi geek, I have no problem at all settling down to watch a story about time-traveling lesbians. Are you kidding? What is perhaps a bit more unusual in sci-fi is the portrayal of realistic, three-dimensional female characters, and the very natural, and, I'll say it, feminine way that they deal with the bizarre events that befall them. Particularly in genre movies, faux-feminist "strong women" are often depicted as essentially men in female bodies. The central characters in this film are strong people (well, one of them becomes strong) and it has nothing to do with gender inversion, or reversal, or some sort of overthrow of the male paradigm. Or, if that stuff is in there, it's buried deep enough that I didn't feel beat over the head with it.

The world would be a better place if the marketing machine was put to use convincing people to see movies like this instead of, to take some recent examples, Pearl Harbor and Planet of the Apes. The Sticky Fingers of Time made me feel better about being alive. I want the poster. Bravo.

Apparently not available on video or DVD as of this writing, Ace In The Hole is one of those movies where everything just seems to click. The understated storytelling meshes perfectly with Kirk Douglas's exhuberant performance. No wonder nobody went to see it, even when it was first released...the symbolism is effective but left half-buried, the "arc" is powerful yet understated. Strong images and thrown in the viewer's face one after the other...but they are secondary images, suggesting other events and relationships that we never see. There is an overwhelming feeling in this film that the viewer is intelligent enough that he doesn't need all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. Thanks to Wilder for that.