Hairy_Lime

A British soldier – the titular Lawrence - and his Arab guide Tafas have stopped at a desert well to drink. Through a mirage and the shimmering heat, we see a black speck in the distance. "Turks?" Lawrence wonders. Slowly, with minimal cutting, the speck resolves itself into a man on a horse who rides up, lowers his weapon and shoots dead the Arab. It is a beautiful, shocking and violent entrance and given the time it takes, a surprisingly economical one. We meet the second main character and juxtapose his character with Lawrence's. We see the stupid and brutal nature of the inter-Arab feuds and squabbles – which sets up much of what happens later – and the stupid and brutal nature of life in the desert – a desert which might be as important a character as Lawrence.

But as the movie plays out, it also plays off what that scene reveals. We already have some inkling that lurking under the civilized veneer Lawrence wears something darker is lurking. We know he is something of a professional risk taker – we've seen his demise, for instance, and the way his immediate reaction to learning how to drive a camel is to put spurs to it. But there is a masochistic streak running beneath it that may explain Lawrence's actions better: his trick with putting out a match with his fingers, despite the pain. It is significant that when he gets what he wants, an assignment in the desert that he thinks will be "fun" ("It is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun.") he blows out the match rather than snuff it with his fingers – the jump cut to the desert is not only beautiful and beautifully done, it indicates that the desert fulfills the need for pain that the lit match had poorly filled. After Lawrence leads a spectacular raid on Aqaba, he reports, "We killed some, too many really. I'll manage it better next time." But he also reports having to execute a man: "There was something about it I didn't like…. I enjoyed it." In the end, Lawrence and Ali have changed places: it is Lawrence who leads and participates in the bloody massacre of Turkish troops at Tafas – now where in this review have we seen that name before? - and Ali who resists violence. But then, Prince Feisal had already previsioned what would happen with Lawrence. He tells the reporter Jackson Bentley, "With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable." And Lawrence learns that the internal squabbles of the Arabs are not the greatest problem he faces. Prince Feisal had already indicated this: "The English have a great hunger for desolate places. I fear they hunger for Arabia." Lawrence has been aware all along that his superiors have designs on Arabia (the historical Lawrence, by the way, had known of the agreement between England and France all along, but in the movie he learns of it only after Tafas, when the push for Damascus is planned.) and his work for the Arabs is designed to make them an English client state. Lawrence has been working all along for two goals, an independent Arabia and an Arabian client state.

But then, this just scratches the surface of what is going on with Lawrence's character. We see so much more: the shameless exhibitionism, the intelligence, the possible sexual orientation – one wonders if his reaction to being raped in Deraa is similar to his explanation for the match trick – his belief in his own indestructibility, his conflicted loyalties and his love for Arabia, whatever the questionable source for that love might be. The movie needs a great performance in the central role, and boy do we get that. Peter O'Toole was a little-known Irish actor, primarily on stage, before this role. He is, if a strictly hetero man may say it, magnetically gorgeous and as perhaps our mostly naturally flamboyant actor he is a natural for the part of "A poet, a scholar, and a mighty warrior (and) also the most shameless exhibitionist since Barnum and Bailey." He gets the conflicts inside Lawrence and wisely never resolves them. O'Toole's performance here is perhaps the single most unfairly overlooked lead performance in AMPAS history. This man being competitive Oscarless is a crime.

The movie also has perhaps the best color cinematography ever – Freddie Young gets the credit for that – and a magnificent score, from Maurice Jarre. Along side O'Toole's great performance are superb performances by Sheriff as Ali – smoldering sexuality in the love interest – the always welcome Jack Hawkins and Claude Raines as Lawrence's British handlers, Anthony Quinn as an Arab leader of questionable loyalties and clear motivation, and Jose Ferrer in a brilliant brief turn as a Turkish Bey. The only performance that too me seems off key is Alec Guinness as Feisal. Not that Guinness is not a great actor, but perhaps because for me Guinness is the most British of British actors, even when made up as an Arab or a Tantooean hermit he seems like, well, a Brit made up like an Arab or a Tantooean hermit.

It is not a perfect movie. Lean's direction is overall fantastic – no one handled epics like Lean. The battle sequences are beautiful, there are images (O'Toole in flowing white robes atop a train, for instance) that are perfect and iconic. But like all epics, including Lean's, there are stretches where the pace seems to lag unnecessarily and the movie drags. The ride across the Nefud should not feel like it is in real time, no matter how gorgeously filmed. But that's a quibble. This is a great film.

My first impression of the new Coen Bros movie, A Serious Man....

The plot is simple. It is the story of a man who finds himself utterly unprepared for his midterm exam. He has studied his teacher's stories, but not the reality behind them: he was unaware that there was going to be math involved, even though the whole point of the stories is to illustrate the math - it's the math that really matters. He was also under the impression that it was going to be open book.

In his desperation, he tries to crib from the exams of his fellow students, only to discover they don't have any of the answers either. Or if they do, their blue book contains nothing but indecipherable gibberish. He's afraid that failing the exam will cause his scholarship to be revoked. Finally, with it all falling apart on him, he turns to brazen cheating, and gets caught. And discovers that, while consequences may not necessarily have actions, actions most definitely have consequences.

Or perhaps not; perhaps that's too easy of a metaphor. What A Serious Man is, besides being one of the handful of best movies of the decade, is an examination of a world where, if God is present, he sure the Hell isn't showing himself to us; he left on sabbatical before the exam and the proctors he left behind can do no more than point to the parking lot.

I seem to have returned to my perhaps inappropriate metaphor. But then, I'm still turning the movie over in my mind. Perhaps it is better just to point out a few of the many, many joys the movie contains: typically sparkling dialog - it is the Coens - tremendous performances, especially by Michael Stuhlbarg, perfectly drawn and cast minor characters, a great shaggy dog (their best since Lebowski which was shaggy dog from first to last) that wanders into the middle of the movie and stays on the edge of the consciousness like it might, finally, actually mean something... maybe. An ending that is perfect for all those people who thought the resolution to No Country for Old Men was too pat, predictable and neatly wrapped up. And, oddly enough, a beginning that is its equal. The movie's plotting is typically ingenious, and provides a hidden circularity to the whole picture - the movie begins with a man who may be a Dybbuk and ends with a man who may be Schroedinger's Cat. It is also uproariously funny, right through to the ending credits.

And perhaps maybe, just maybe, it gives us the answer to the whole damn thing - an answer given to us by, of all people, Mike Yanagita.

There has probably never been a movie from a major director quite like Ace in the Hole. It is a movie of almost unrelenting bleakness and cynicism, lightened only slightly at its outermost margins. It also not only stands up well more than 50 years later, it has a freshness and relevance that comes from an almost uncannily eerie spot on prediction about the future of the role of media in our culture. Wilder notably responded to the initial negative reaction to the film by noting that he did not think he made in cynical enough. In a time of wall-to-wall media coverage of the parentage of Anna Nicole Smith's baby, breathless television commentary on the suit Kobe Bryant wore to a hearing on his rape case or a prosecutor's hairstyle, crowds of gawkers outside of a mine disaster, Ace in the Hole plays with a more harshly realistic light now than it probably did on its initial release.

Kirk Douglas gives a tremendous, fearless performance as Chuck Tatum, a newspaper reporter who has fallen off the face of the journalistic globe and who smells the chance to regain his fortune when he stumbles on the story of Leo Minosa, trapped in an old Indian cliff dwelling. Tatum immediately recognizes that he can remake his name on Leo's story, if he can stretch the coverage out long enough. With the connivance of the fame-hungry local sheriff (despicably well played by Ray Teal), Tatum deliberately delays the rescue in order to maximize the story.

I have never seen Douglas give a performance quite like this, or in a role like this. In fact, there may not be another role like this in that era. Tatum is almost uncompromisingly nasty and self-serving to everyone; his boss, his coworker, Leo's slatternly wife, and Leo himself. Douglas the movie star disappears completely in this film. It is a masterful performance; any clue that we are watching Kirk Douglas acting would tear the film down.

Also wonderful is Jan Sterling as Leo's femme fatale (literally) wife, whose reaction, at first, is that Leo's predicament gives her a head start on leaving him. Later, Tatum convinces her that she can make scads of money of her husband, which she does with tremendous malice - the price to visit the cliff dwelling goes from free to one dollar quite rapidly. Sterling brings a great balance of sexiness and ruthlessness to her role.

But the goat of this movie is not just two or three heartless people, it is all of us. As in Frank Cady (Sam Drucker in Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction) who, with his wife, is proudly and fiercely the first of the throng that encamps at the cliff dwelling, and who is not above using his status for his own personal gain; he turns an interview into an advertisement for his insurance business. Leo's predicament draws a huge crowd, including a literal carnival, and other people who are looking to cash in on Leo, most notably a country band hawking the sheet music to their song, "We're Coming Leo." Wilder handles all of this material with his usual straightforward aplomb. Wilder is not one for shots that call attention to themselves, and the unpretentious nature of his direction serves the starkness of the story well. Likewise the script is full of the bitter wit and great lines that grace any Wilder film.

But the film has one major failure, and that is the end. Tatum, it turns out, at least belatedly has a heart and isn't the most cynical person in the film, and we get an unnecessary and unlikely attempted murder, a stabbing, comeuppance for the bad guy - all of which seems tacked on and diminishes the film. To me the real end of the movie comes a few minutes earlier, when Tatum announces that Leo had died, and the carnival closes down, the crowds leave and even as the dust begins to settle, we see a long shot of the solitary figure of Leo's lame father, slowly hobbling back to the mountain that still holds the body of his son. That is an unforgettable shot. That ending, with Tatum essentially unredeemed and alive, would serve the movie much better.

Still, this bitter, cynical and well-made movie is a great gem, and a fine addition to Wilder's brilliant oeuvre

When it comes to twist endings, I think there are three things that are necessary to justify them.

First, the ending has to evolve logically from the story. That is, when you go back and look at the movie the second time, you can see where the careful director and screenwriter have laid the groundwork for the twist. Think of the Sixth Sense. We may not have seen the ending coming, but the evidence for it was there, in retrospect.

Second, the ending has to be internally consistent with the logic of the movie.

Third, and most importantly, the ending has to resonate backwards into the story, offering some insight into the characters and the story that makes you understand the story better with repeat watchings. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a trick ending to do.

David Gale violates all of these precepts. ALL of them. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Most egregiously, the trick ending - the final tape Winslet gets is absolutely inconsistent with the entire movie. Kevin Spacey's character goes to the trouble of killing someone, framing himself, getting executed, creating a tape that exonerates him for someone to find right after he dies, AND THEN SENDS A TAPE UNDERCUTTING ALL THIS TO A REPORTER? Horse hockey. The sole reason for that tape to be sent to Winslet is so the movie makers can make us sit on a cinematic whoopee cushion. END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER Not only is it a cheap trick, it is a stupid one. Any screenwriter worth spitting on if they were on fire should be able to come up with a way for us to realize that the whole thing was a set up without resorting to such an obvious trick that is an insult to our intelligence.

The ending also is not prepared for us previously in the movie, anywhere. It does not arise naturally from any of the characters, there are no real clues scattered for us to have missed. It is just tacked on at the end.

And, of course, it adds nothing to the movie. Until the end, the movie was a decent, if overly strident, movie about an issue: the death penalty. I am not one for message movies, and am ambivalent on the issue, but the movie was not - until the end. What does that ending say about the message that the movie was sending in the first hour and forty five minutes? Nothing, except that the movie makers don't care about the issue they tried to get you to care about.

The stridency of the movie prior to the twist is the result of a mediocre script and by the numbers direction. Even before the end, this was at best a 6. But with that ending....

A contemptible movie. I'd give this a 1, except for the Kate Winslet rule. She's an actress I love watching, and is one of those rare performers where their mere presence in a movie keeps it from being totally worthless for me. Also, Spacey is very good as usual; the ending is not his fault.

So, I'll give this a 4 for the acting. But it is awful.

It's hard to know how to describe or review Borat. I mean, how do you describe a movie that gets huge laughs from the Running of the Jew, or two hairy men wrestling naked? The movie has some of the hugest laughs I've ever experienced in the movie. At one point, I was literally bent over in my seat, pounding the chair in front of me with my fist (thankfully, a moderately attended morning showing and the seat was empty).

The movie relies on pretty much every funny trick in the bag; physical humor, verbal humor (Borat's fractured language), sight gags (check out Azamat's fridge!), in-your-face rudeness, ethnic stereotypes used in a way to defeat the stereotypes (Even Borat is a spoof on how Americans view foreigners), a little politics (the rodeo), and even the jokes that you have to think about (watching the pentacostalists suddenly start speaking in tongues, and realizing that this is pretty much what Borat's been doing the entire movie). Almost all of it is fresh, audacious, and hilarious.

Easy to decide if you want to see the movie, by the way. If it sounds like something you'd like, it delivers everything you'd expect. If it sounds like something you'd hate, it delivers everything you fear.

There is a place for a well made, entertaining film like this; as far as I am concerned just not, generally, on the Oscar podium, but still.

Gladiator has some impressively filmed scenes; the extended battle scene at the beginning is first rate, as is the recreation of the battle of Carthage in the Colessium (Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we win? - great line). All of the fighting scenes were imaginatively staged.

The acting was decent. Russell Crowe - not one of my favorite actors - proves he can be effective when he's not given too much to say, and Juaquin Pheonix is superbly creepy throughout.

But I found myself annoyed at stretches of the film, particularly at the end, where Crowe envisions meeting his wife and child on a tree line alley through a field of wheat, or something. It's what I expect from a Mitch Albom book, not a serious movie. Not that it detracts too much from the film, really. The story of Crowe's family is the peg to hang the action on; it adds neither intellectual or emotional depth to what is in reality a well-made, well-shot, entertaining popcorn muncher.

It makes me very sad that I did not like this movie; I am a huge fan of all five books in the incredibly misnamed Hitchhiker trilogy.

Where did the movie go wrong? Well, casting Sam Rockwell, for one. I wanted to bash his heads in with a rock throughout the film. Yes, Zaphod is supposed to be annoying, but not that off-putting.

Second, the plot seemed to be missing a few pieces, somewhere. As in, the end features Trillian and Arthur together - big change from the book, but I'm fine with that - and... Zaphod with the Vice Preisdent? Did I miss something? Yeah, she clearly was jonesing for him during the movie but... what? SOMETHING had to happen. Maybe in the director's cut.

But frankly, the problem was that the whole thing never felt silly enough for me; it's like the actors felt they were in the middle of some high art feature. They should have been having FUN, and that fun should have been evident on the screen. Instead, it was flat, featureless and... God but I hate to say this, dull.

There is a quote from Nietzsche's Zarathustra, something along the lines of, when you say yes to one joy, you say yes to all woe. There is a moment, half way through the erasure process for Joel, when he cries out to the doctor erasing his memory, "Please let me keep this memory, just this one." With that, Joel is essentially accepting the entire course and swoop of his love for Clemmentine; not just her confession that she feared being ugly, or her tangerine sweater, or even her crotch, but her changeability, her alcohol consumption; even the painful end of the affair, all for one memory. And at the end, despite his having forgotten everything about her, and despite knowing from her that the relationship is going to fail, Joel says yes one more time.

This is a wonderful movie. I had resisted seeing it because of Jim Carrey; for the same reason I avoid Robin Williams in serious roles, when I see them acting drama, they always look like the improv is busting to get out. Here, though, Carrey never gives a hint that he is about to go all Ace Ventura on us. Instead, he gives a restrained, effective performance as Joel. Winslet as Clemmentine is likewise fine.

But the real stars are the direction and the screenplay. The movie creates an unnerving feel throughout, especially in the memory sequences, with quick cutting and effectively unsteady camera work. The screenplay is intelligent and witty, and makes effective use of the non-linear story - we may be jumping around but we are never really lost.

Well, except maybe once; the circular nature of the story - it begins more or less at the end - came as a nice surprise to me. But it is honest, the clues are there - the differences in the "meet" story Joel tells, Elijah Woods's unexplained presence at Clemmentine's building, Joel's not knowing My Darling Clemmentine.... A nice job by the screenplay.

By the way, on a couple occasions, characters sing My Darling Clemmentine. Note that both times, they stop just before the line, "You are lost and gone forever/Dreadful sorry Clemmentine." Not as long as we have memory she's not.

One of the best films I have seen in years. It will live in my memory... I think.

Well, I watched L.A. Confidential last night for the first time. An excellent example of modern film noir. A well written, brilliantly acted film. However, a couple of minor quibbles prevent me from giving this a 10, or calling it one of the great films of its time.

First, I join in praising the acting; uniformly excellent. Usually, I don't care much for Russell Crowe, but here, why, it's almost like he was born to play an unintelligent mook prone to uncontrolled fits of violence. Second, I think it's Spacey's best work that I've seen, much better than his Oscar work in the vastly overrated Usual Suspects, for instance. And James Cromwell was superb. I'm only aware of seeing him in a handful of roles; he's been good in all of them, but his turn here was a revelation. The scene where he offs Spacey jarred me. Pearce, Straitharn, and even Basinger are also memorable.

But I had a couple problems with the film, that at first blush at least keeps me from praising it too highly. First, I hated hated hated the times the director superimposed an earlier shot of a character over the screen, as if we were not smart enough to figure out that the dead girl was the prostitute with the nose job, for instance. A smart film like this one should trust the audience to get it.

Second, you know, when a character asks another one, "Would you shoot a suspect who is surrendering in the back to prevent some lawyer from getting him off?" and the character answers "No", well, you pretty much know how the movie is going to end, don't you. There's a difference between foreshadowing and telegraphing.

The movie does it a second time, too, when Spacey and Pearce are talking about how they got into police work and Pearce mentions the imaginary name he's given to the guy who killed his father, followed by a scene where Spacey whispers that name to Cromwell, followed by a scene where Cromwell asks Pearce - and only Pearce, mind you! - if he knew the guy. There is no reason for Cromwell to ask only Pearce about the guy, except to move the plot along to Pearce's recognizing that Cromwell is the villain. There were other, better, subtler ways to reach that conclusion, and the movie should have seized them.

The "rape" scene didn't work for me at all. Not for a minute. Again, it seems an obvious plot contrivance. I think it would have worked better (given that the point of the scene was to allow photos to be taken) if Basinger had been the aggressor.

Oh, and I am somewhat torn between praising the excellent cinematography and arguing the movie should have been in Black & White. Color photography diminishes noir, and neo-noir.

And last, how did Bud White survive that final shoot-out? Didn't Cromwell shoot him in the face, point blank? What, is this some sort of mystical Jules and Vince moment? Movie ends better with him dead, I think.

But still, great acting and dialog. The screenplay is intelligent and suspenseful; wonderfully shot, great music. That I still rate the film as highly as I do, with these problems, is a testament to how superb the rest of the film is.

Spoilers To me the interesting thing about the movie is the introduction, about half way through the movie, of the Gunderson family. Until that point, the movie was a very well done thriller, reminding me strongly of the Coen Brothers' first film, Blood Simple, in the way it followed the long, obvious unraveling of a crime, every little mistake being far more obvious to the viewers than the characters. And then suddenly, the movie has a moral center to contrast the darkness of the plot.

At first Margie seems to be almost a cartoon rather than a person, but what you realize over the course of the movie is that what she is is human: good at her job, loving to her husband, kind to her coworkers and subordinates, just... nice. And she wraps up the crime at the end with a great little speech emphasizing the human view, without us even realizing that it is that... For a little bit of money. And here you are. And it's a beautiful day. And, well, I just don't understand it. Now that you put it that way, neither do I.

This is a movie that is almost uniformly excellent; the cast, headed by Macy, MacDormand and Buscemi, is perfect - I cannot think of any other actors who would be better for the lead roles. The script is spot on in the way it sees and develops its characters, and the way people actually talk. The Coen Brothers' taste for the quirky qua quirky is much more muted here, but it still adds just the right touch of the other to keep the movie riveting. And the cinematography catches the vast empty whiteness of the northern winter perfectly.

Everything that brings me to movies is in here: great acting, great dialogs, surprises, amusement, shock, beauty, harshness, humanity.

This is one loud, obnoxious, vulgar movie. And oh yes, funny. Very, cynically, deeply misanthropically funny.

So how do you critique a movie like this one? I guess you start by noting that the acting starts out over the top, and goes from there. And the script thinks that human weakness, greed, and lust are uproariously funny. Which, in the right hands, they are. And Mel Brooks's hands are the right ones.

The movie makes great fun of pretty much everything - Broadway, Nazis, Old ladies, sex, gays, theater critics, Swedish models, Franz Kafka (not quite bad enough!), you name it, with gleeful abandon.

Every so often, you can see a mediocre film, and get a hint of what the film could have been with just a few changes. This is one of them; it features several excellent actors - Ed Harris, Tim Roth, Pete Postlethwaite, Joss Ackland (sorry for misspellings!) - but one unforgivably bad casting decision: casting the absolutely charisma-deprived Christopher Lambert as the Priest. To believe in the film at all, the priest has to be seen as dangerously attractive to the people, a charismatic leader. Lambert cannot portray that. He is one of the worst actors around, and he kills this picture dead.

Two other major gripes about the film: there is a scene where the priest is lectured by his bishop and then sent to Rome - or not, since he never actually goes. What was that there for? To show that the Polish Church was in cahoots - or at least practiced accommodation - with the government? Fine. But at least, SEND HIM TO ROME. Otherwise you have a useless scene that detracts from the movie.

The other gripe: I suppose there is some screenwriter union rule that dictates that if you have a movie involving a priest, an attractive woman has to fall hopelessly in love with him. What a stupid, useless, cliché, especially in a movie like this.

As I grow older, I find myself drawn more and more to Billy Wilder movies. I suppose it's the cynical, Central European sense of irony. Stalag 17 is not his best; it's not Some Like it Hot, or The Apartment, or Double Indemnity, or Sunset Boulevard; perhaps because he had no hand in writing it.

Still, the Wilder world view is there, thanks to William Holden in the Central Role. He has a way of bringing the cynical attitude alive with just the way he stands or the way he smirks. He and Wilder were made for each other. And the movie is both funny (Those Nazis just ain't kosher? What kind of line is that?) and suspenseful.

It is a good thing so much of the scenery in Lion in Winter is stone, considering how much it gets chewed here.

No one goes over the top like Peter O'Toole in his prime, and this movie essentially begs for that type of performance. O'Toole's Henry is not merely larger than life, he's Macy Balloon sized larger than life. "Oh God, but I do love being king!" O'Toole bellows at one point, and it is clear O'Toole loves playing one as well. It takes an actress of the caliber of Katherine Hepburn to not disappear alongside a performance like that.

Henry, in love with his mistress Alais who is promised by treaty for the marriage of his oldest surviving son Richard, anxiuos for the succession to the throne for the sake of the empire he has built, calls to a palace in his French possessions his three sons, Richard, a fierce and determined warrior who is his mother's favorite - and a favorite of the King of France, as it turns out - the deep-revolving, ignored and unloved middle son Geoffery, and the dull witted youngest son Johnny, his father's pet and choice for succession. He also temporarliy frees "the Great Bitch" from her prison, his wife, Eleanor of Acquitaine, who he has kept walled up in a castle for ten years, and calls Phillip, the youthful King of France and the son of Eleanor's first husband, in for negotiations. As soon as all five arrive at the castle, they begin to plot with and against and for each other, with Alais, the crown, and Acquitaine as the pawns. No one in tha family likes anyone else, no one is loyal to any one else, and all are willing to betray anyone to win.

Are they so different from any unhappy family, whose uneasy alliances and betrayals occur over subjects less momentous to outsiders than a crown? Well, as Eleanor put it, "what family doesn't have its ups and downs?" All of the major actors - O'Toole and Hepburn, John Castle, a very early Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Daulton, stoop-shouldered, drooling, self pitying Nigel Terry - attack their roles with evident relish. The screenplay sometimes descends to faux profundities and leaden pronouncements, but never for too long. The dialogue sparkles with wit and verbal imagination.

But crowning it all off, of course, are Hepburn and O'Toole. They play off their deep abiding love and deep abiding hatred of each other verbally for the entire movie in scenes that can wander wildly from humor to deep pathos as they find with unerring skill exactly the right way to wound each other.

Sometimes, Coen Brothers movies can come off as overly mannered. Sometimes, that ruins the film; other times, you get O Brother Where Art Thou? This movie does not exist in any kind of reality; the characters talk, move and think in a way that has no connection with how humans talk, move and think. And yet, this movie works almost completely.

Perhaps it's the strange mixture of mythic and human; perhaps it's the dialouge, perhaps its the way the Coen Brothers focus on absurdities of behavior and make them the key to the characters. Or perhaps, the movie works because it is the funniest of the Coen Brothers movies. The whole movie is shot in a sepia wash that makes the movie feel old; perhaps the style of the acting in the movie represents a time when the whole cinematic world was bitoned. Or perhaps its that old-timey music.

Whatever. The plot of the movie loosely follows the Odyssey, with a few obvious nods to the Wizard of Oz thrown in - the KKK Klose Order Drill team was outrageous. Clooney, Turturro and Nelson play three convicts escaping from a prison chain gang - and apparently the devil as well. Along the way, they meet the cyclops, turn into toads, are seduced by sirens, become old-timey singing stars, are nearly hung, are nearly drowned, and eat roast gopher. ("Gopher, Everett?" has become one of my favorite lines in recent movies; the way Nelson says it repeatedly, and the look of that poor gopher on a stick....). In the end, they find a treasure, even if it is not the treasure they seek.

As I mentioned, the performances are incredibly unnatural and mannered, so it is hard to judge them by regular standards. Still, Clooney, Turturro and Nelson - especially Nelson - all pull off their characters admirably. And as always with the Coens, the direction is interesting. Not as good as Fargo and Blood Simple, but still quite fine.

I'll get this out of the way first: I was born in Flint and lived in the Flint area until I went away to school. The last time I spent significant time in Flint was the summer of 1984, which coincided with the opening of the Waterstreet Pavilion, and Autoworld (I still have the souvenier mug, and if Michael Moore ever come to visit me, he's drinking coffee from it). There may be some things in this movie that are not entirely true, and the movie is slanted, but the feel for Flint is absolutely dead on.

*SPOILERS*

The idea behind the movie is Moore trying to get Roger Smith to visit Flint; or rather, those areas of Flint that have suffered while GM has abandoned the town in favor of cheaper labor. Moore has an everyman demeanor, right down to the "Out for Trout" hat he wears throughout the movie. This allows him to get away with a few things that might otherwise tick us off: the guy at the Private Club and the Security Giards that force Moore to leave are just poor schlubbs doing their jobs, after all. On the other hand, I felt a moment of justice when Moore was almost gleefully unfair to a Flint PR flack whose move to Tel Aviv coincides with, but probably did not actually cause, the intafada, or when the GM applogist PR man was laid off. Moore's personna also allows him to play the innocent: his surprise that the elevator at GM's World Headquarters do not actually go to the 14th Floor is priceless, even if he probably knew in advance that they do not go there.

Coupled with the attempts to get Smith to visit are the attempts by the Flint City fathers and mothers to try to revive the town, and the residents whose lives we get to see a bit of. Particularly notable are Fred the Bailiff, who evicts people from their apartments every day, and the Bunny lady, who pets and talks to a cute little rabbit, just before braining it with a steel rod and skinning it for dinner.

All in all, the movie is funny and poignant and sad. Smith never visits Flint, of course, and Moore's one chance to speak at a shareholder's meeting is ended when his mike is cut. And all of the hopes and dreams of the people of Flint to resurrect the City come acropper. And we are left with the sense of sadness for the wasting of human potential and outrage at Smith for allowing it to happen. Which is of course a simplification, but the simplification Moore wants us to make. The movie succeeds in its purpose and entertains.

<SPOILERS>

It is my fervrent hope that God has a sense of humor: I would hate to think all of us who saw and roared at this film are bound for some inner circle of Dante's inferno.

Like the Marx Brothers, the plot and the acting in a Monty Python movie are beside the point; what matters is the zinging of jokes and the presentation of sight gags. When well done, as here, there is not a moment when you can think of something potentially funny that the movie does not do - with the exception of the animated alien sequence which sends a chunk of the film crashing to earth with the flying saucer.

But the movie's laughs more than make up for that little lapse: the lone voice of dissent when Brian tells the masses that they are all individuals; the crowd's wise conclusion that Brian's mother is a virgin, the crucifiction scene that manages to mock both Spartacus and every Christ story ever, the lisping Pilate, the People's Front of Judea - or is it the Judean People's Front....

Just as in Braveheart some wags in the audience treated us to "It's just a flesh wound" the first of the many times someone lost a limb, here I got The Life of Brain in Pilate's courtyard. No singing at the end, thankfully.

And as to my views of The Passion of the Christ, I liked it; not a great movie but a pretty good one. It kept reasonably close to John, with a few traditions from the Stations of the Cross added in. As for anti-semitism, I didn't see it - anti-Roman, yeah, yeah, that I saw, despite Pilate's John-based reluctance to order Jesus' crucifiction. The story necessarily (to be true to John and the prophesies that he drew on for his gospel) makes the high priests - with a few notable exceptions - complicit, and early crowds back the high priests, although the horror of the passion changes the crowd's tenor as the procession moves on. The movie's view of the crowd owes as much to The Ox Bow Incident, or perhaps Huck Finn, as it does John.

Gibson presents the plot of the story in pretty much the same way it is presented in the other movie versions of the Passion that I have seen - from Zefrelli's version to King if Kings to The Greatest Story Ever Told Jesus Christ Superstar. Instigating role of the High Priests, angry jeering crowds at Jesus' trial before Pilate, reluctant Pilate, foppish Herrod, everything. What separates Gibson's vision is that it occupies the entire movie - flashbacks aside - and, of course, the extreme violence of it.

While I think that the criticism regarding spurring anti-semitism is misplaced, those who have criticized its extreme violence have a very definite point. The movie worked for me, but for many viewers, I suspect, it would leave nothing behind except an impression of violence. Me, even the sight of pieces of Jesus' flesh being scourged off him by a flail I could take. But near the end, when Jesus is dying on the cross, a crow lands atop the cross of the unrepentant thief and... oh, man, there's one thing I have a phobia about it's eyes. Just the thought of a bird pecking them out makes me turn from the imaginary screen. That the puncturing of his eyes only implied rather than shown is a relief.

Fortunately, the same thief is seen in two later shots, with both his eyes. So either the bird missed or Gibson made a huge continuity error.

So, I was in college at the time, see, and a few of my rather mix and match friends were sitting around my dorm room and for the lack of anything better to do, we decided to catch one of the movies playing on campus. The movie we chose to see was Eraserhead. We made it through the movie all right, but as we left one friend exclaimed, "That was the worst movie I have ever seen!" "Me too!" said a second, and one by one, we all jumped in with the same verdict: Eraserhead was the worst, vilest, boringest piece of crap any of us had ever seen.

But the story does not end there. Some weeks later, one of that set of friends noted, "Hey, remember that Eraserhead movie? That scene with the girl in the radiator? Well maybe..." and off she went on an interpretive spree. And later, another friend found himself recalling the film, and a scene, and what he felt it might of meant, and another and another... Until we finally realized that the movie was not bad; we were a bad audience. We had not captured and seen the quality of the movie, the ideas being expressed, the depth of the allegory, and stuff. The next year, the movie came around on campus again. The same group, minus one who had graduated, armed with our prior viewing experience, ready to meet the director on his own terms, marched to the on campus theater to see it again. The result?

Eraserhead was the worst, vilest, boringest piece of crap any of us had ever seen.

There's a lesson in there.

Pick a word that describes mediocre: dull, hackneyed, cliched, stereotypical, boring.... Yep, this movie has it all. In the world of Oscar winners, this movie is the worst. It is hard to believe that people could have found this movie better than the nominated High Noon and The Quiet Man, let alone the unnominated Singin' in the Rain.

Yeah, John Belushi is a huge pulsating body of life in this movie. Every scene he is in he steals without effort. I think trying to get too much out of the guy in his other movies spoiled the comic effect, but in this movie he is absolutely superb. The scene where he is looking through the sorority window and turns to the camera and raises his eyebrows, letting us all in on it, was superb. As was "Seven years of college down the drain."

The rest of the movie has tremendous moments, and the whole movie is gleefully mean-spirited and hilarious. But the whole pitch of the scenes raises whenever Belushi is on the scene. "This situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part." And indeed it does.

This is one of the best examples of Chuck Jones's art. The mixing of animation and opera here is better than Rabbit of Seville, the Wagner is great....

So how many of us got our first earful of opera from this? And how many of us, the first time we saw the Robert Duvall-led helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now! began mentally singing - or even sang out loud - "Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit..."

Yeah. Me too.

Actually, the one line summary pretty much says it all. This short is the most consistently imaginitive, inventive, reality warping, short around. It constantly challenges perspective and reality, and our assumptions about the author's - well, animator's - role in an animated short. Vladimir Nabokov would have loved it.

Really, The Two Towers is the weakest of the three novels, and it is only natural that the middle volume would be a bit of a let down. Jackson does a nice job of trying to lift the story - the battle sequence is fantastic - but to my mind the 10 I might have given for this movie went over the cliff with Aragorn. I have nothing against Jackson deviating from the books - I was not troubled by the changes in the Faramir character, for instance, and adding the Warg riders themselves was a nice touch. But what was the purpose of sending Aragorn over the cliff? Creating false tension that probably fooled less than 1% of the audience? Screen time for Liv Tyler? All it did for me was make the movie feel false for about ten minutes. This crucial mistake is compunded now that we have the Extended Edition and see some of the scenes that were left out of the theatrical release. the movie would have been stronger without Aragorn's fall, and with, for instance, the scene between Boromir and Faramir, or the march of the trees to the Battle of Helms Deep.

Well, so be it. One or two major missteps in a ten hour movie is not unexpected. On its merits, apart from that, this movie, like the whole trilogy, is a magnificent achievement.

One question: every time I look, Legolas is shooting dozens of arrows. And every time I look, his quiver is full. Where are the arrows coming from? Elf magic?

Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are both such effortlessly likeable people on screen, it is no surprise they have such an easy chemistry on screen even where - here like in Sleepless in Seattle - they spend much of the movie apart. You've Got Mail is no classic, it's no breakthrough, it does not feature any star turn, stand out, performances - though I liked Maureen Stapleton's part - just very good actors acting very well (Dabney Coleman plays the Dabney Coleman part like it was written for him; Greg Kinnear plays the solipsistic writer with the right touch of egoism and obliviousness). It does not feature a particularly memorable story, and the dialogue is straight from Snappy Dialogues R Us, but you know, it is still a fun way to spend some time being entertained, laughing, and passing your wife a hankie if - like mine - she tends to cry when movies want you to cry.