mikeg994

This is a documentary not only about Hillary Clinton but also about the whole nearly 200 year history of the Democratic Party, during which time a lot of Democrats did and said things that from a modern perspective put them on the wrong side of history. Woven into this story is that of Dinesh D'Souza's federal conviction for exceeding the limit for campaign contributions to a political candidate. D'Souza asserts that his punishment was not only excessive but that it was orchestrated from the White House, which it may well have been. He then makes the point that his acquaintance with gang members gave him a unique perspective on the parallel between urban gangsters and the crew now working out of the white house.

Then there is a long digression into the more sordid aspects of the history of the Democratic Party beginning with the cruelty of Andrew Jackson and his party in his treatment of indigenous peoples forced from their homes and of his own slaves. We move from this to the civil war, to the assassination of Lincoln, reconstruction, and the inherent racism of Woodrow Wilson and that of Lyndon Johnson. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is revealed as promoting a form of eugenics and forced sterilization that the Nazis may have emulated. Franklin Roosevelt admired Mussolini early on in his ability in his own country to get things done without the messy business of dealing with a political opposition.

Then he explores the back story of the Clintons, which is well worth remembering. Bill Clinton had a history of sexual misbehavior ranging from infidelity to sexual harassment with multiple women. That Hillary has countenanced this over the years seems not a little grotesque. Each time Clinton just denies everything and questions the meaning of "is". As troubling as this might be, he makes us entertain the various questionable financial transactions which suggest influence peddling and payoff on a grand scale. Her friendship with sleazy characters such as Saul Alinsky in the creepy political scene in Chicago is itself a bit jaw-dropping.

In short it is a nauseating look into why Americans really should not put this pair back in the white house. I would only fault the film because it seems a bit unfocused. There are enough reasons not to vote for Clinton without resorting to the history of the Democratic Party.

Imagine Minnie and Mickey at Disney World suddenly pulling out Uzi's and mowing down the guests. Imagine if that animatronic Abraham Lincoln climbs off his platform and goes after you with a harpoon. That is kind of the feeling one gets with Westworld. For all I know there is an underground control room where they monitor all things in Disney World. Fortunately nothing has gone this wrong.

Yul Brynner's robot has malfunctioned. Although playing the part of a gunslinger, somehow it has gone rogue. It is not just the gunslinger, although you might think so.

What happens after that is fairly predictable. Other things don't really make a lot of sense. It has the inevitable 1973 conception of large computers, complete with reel to reel tapes as storage devices. It was fun seeing all the damaged robots being repaired, robotic animals, robotic dogs, even robotic snakes.

The film makes me want to read the book. Maybe it is just me but the film seems over-edited. The fantasy sci-fi aspects of the film did not seem to me to be adequately fleshed out and a more plausible explanation for what went wrong. In short I think it was an entertaining but far from perfect fantasy.

This film is not for everyone. Not sure it was for me. It reminds me of jobs I've had, which means basically that just because someone offers you a job doesn't mean it's good or they know what they are doing. It may be better than unemployment, but just barely. It demonstrates the fleeting nature of fame, and the fact that there are more than a few people running around loose who are not all there and some of them are staying at fleabag hotels and others are heads of movie studios. Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a socially conscious New York playwright whose specialty is writing about the people living at the fringes of society. Because he has just written a celebrated play in New York, he gets an offer to become a contract writer for a big film company. It is 1941 just before the war (so far as Americans were concerned) started.

When he gets to Los Angeles, it is as though he has arrived in career hell. The studio head is a fast talking fellow behind a big desk in a luxurious office who assigns him the job of writing a wrestling picture. The studio head will not take no for an answer or even let his listeners get a word in edgewise. Meanwhile he meets a famous southern novelist W.P. Mayhew, who must be patterned after William Faulkner who wrote for Hollywood for a while. He tries to gather advice from this eminent writer but he is seemingly constantly in a raging drunk. They are having this talented writer write "wrestling pictures" too.

So he goes back to his hotel, which is an unmitigated dump. Wallpaper peels off the walls, the plumbing sings, and the walls are paper thin. While complaining to a neighbor about the noise, Charlie Meadows, (John Goodman), he makes his acquaintance with him and he becomes his only friend/confidant. Meadows says he is an insurance salesman who does his best to buck him up and help him out of trouble.

Unfortunately Meadows is crazy as a loon as well. Unpleasant things happen such that you are hoping he just wakes up from a nightmare.

When I think of the hair that Barton Fink has in this film, I am strongly reminded of another surreal film, David Lynch's "Eraserhead." Just like that film, things happen that are never explained. The characters exist in unremittingly bleak surroundings and, above the oscillating fan at the writer's desk where Barton Fink suffers from severe writer's block, you see a girl sitting on the beach. He brought a box tied with string that Meadows had given him before leaving for New York, and, strangely, while walking on a similar beach meets the girl on the beach in the picture back at his hotel. I could guess what was in the box, but you never see it.

The Machinist stars Christian Bale in one of the weirdest and creepiest movies I think I have ever seen. Cue the theremin. It makes Hitchcock's Psycho look tame by comparison. Bale plays Trevor Reznik, who works in a gloomy machine shop from hell, one that apparently never heard of OSHA. The whole thing is filmed in a kind of high contrast off color monochrome. His whole life seems to revolve around visiting his prostitute/girlfriend and the girl whom he has come to know serving him at the Airport coffee shop. The guy is haunted and paranoid. He keeps getting post it notes in the form of a game of hangman on his refrigerator which creep him out. He also pursues a strange bullet-headed fellow with some fingers missing, who drives a red convertible and seems always there with a cheerful demeanor whenever something horrible happens, such as when a machine malfunctions and his co-worker loses an arm. Only Trevor seems to see him and is clearly going from bad to worse. Trevor claims to not have been able to sleep in a year. His weight is plummeting and he looks like a concentration camp survivor. The mystery to be solved is why all this is happening.

All in all, I thought it was an effective psychological thriller in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock at his creepiest.

I loved this animated feature. Often to get a feel for divergent viewpoints I read the reviews from people who "hated it". One reviewer said that it was "anti-American" and the only indication I found that America may have been involved was the brief appearance of an obese statue of Liberty holding a green hamburger skyward. Americans Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire seemed to have gotten the better of by tuxedo-ed monkeys and carnivorous shoes respectively, to be sure, but clearly jazz is something that the French seem to be more enamored of than we Americans. I didn't find that insulting at all, just delightfully goofy much like the old black and white Betty Boop cartoons.

Bruno the dog was worth the price of admission. What a wonderfully goofy dog and a very dog-like dog at that, doing dog-like things such as scrambling upstairs to bark at passing trains. And the dog's dream sequences? Just amazing. You didn't need the dogs to talk nor the humans either, to get the gist of things.

The grandmother was really the star of the show, very resourceful and determined. She morphs into his trainer as he grows up and propels him relentlessly following behind him on her tricycle and blowing her whistle. She does her own thing and in her own way and does not take kindly to being helped across the street by any presumptuous boy scouts. She also has unexpected musical abilities as it turns out.

There were some things that were a bit strange, but then one of the strengths of animated films is its ability to lapse into surrealism, after all things don't HAVE to make sense all the time do they?

Needless to say the strangest characters of all were the triplets. Three old ladies living together in a disreputable part of Belleville next to the elevated trains (at which Bruno finds endless fascination barking). The old ladies are unquestionably strange but the take home lesson is that even though you may be eccentric and like to use hand grenades to catch frogs in the lagoon, you still can have a good heart.

In short what some people consider weird, is to me just an offbeat sense of humor. In a word delightful. People who hated this feature really need to grow a sense of humor.

I loved it. This is definitely a guy flick but not completely so. The explosions, the stop action sequences, the special effects, the gadgetry and the alternative reality sequences owe something to the CSI Las Vegas and to that wonderful old TV program "Wild Wild West" where the Robert Conrad and his sidekick Artemis Gordon traveled in Victorian elegance in a private train car and dealt with evil genius strangely similar to Dr. Moriarty, if only in an old West context.

While it is not in keeping with the Holmes and Watson created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the wonder of the characters is that they are larger than any one writer's conception. Doyle himself grew tired of Sherlock Holmes and did his best ultimately to kill him off, but such characters have steadfastly refused to die. It is fitting therefore that generations of writers have seen fit to provide their take of the classic Holmes and Watson.

The movie is a joy to watch, the period costumes, the lush photography, the locations, the historical context and the extremely complex tapestry of narrative in all of its confusion of pieces which in the end do well fitting together in the final scenes. The manic genius of the Downey Holmes meshes well with the somewhat more normal Watson, and the touches of humor are just right.

I saw this film as part of an anthology put out by Mill Creek Entertainment (which for the most part consists of older, somewhat forgotten movies that have passed into the public domain) however this one is a blast from the 1980s. Its technical values and special effects are excellent even if there are more than a few cliché'd and conventional plot elements to the film. It has the feel of a "made for TV" movie, movies that aren't quite good enough to make it as cinema fare, made by actors who spent most of their careers working in television.

Two brothers (Wing Hauser and Lee Montgomery) from the city decide to go on a road trip somewhere in the South. They immediately run into trouble as their vehicle is run off the road by a bunch of mean rednecks who just seem to enjoy terrorizing outlanders who wander into their domain. Who or why do they do such a thing? Who knows, being a Southern Redneck, who needs a reason? The car is pretty much forgotten as the brothers attempt to hitch a ride into town. Here they get a brief ride by another curious local who then dumps them shortly thereafter and then, after grossly underestimating the distance to the next town, gets on the CB radio to tell someone about them. It takes the boys well until after dark to hoof it into town, where they promptly get into a bar fight with the same guy who ran them off the road. And of course the other locals in the bar are equally unfriendly. They are also blissfully unaware apparently that strange things are happening in their town. A drunk wanders off and is killed in the shadows, but when the sheriff is brought to the place where the body is supposed to be, it is gone.

The sheriff, who has a drinking problem, is unfazed by this turn of events and finds the boys lodging at an eccentric local lady's house. Here Wing Hauser and his brother are put up in separate rooms, and while Wing's night was uneventful his brother is literally gotten by something under the bed. The next morning Hauser sets out in search of his brother and befriends a local schoolteacher who is young, attractive, and seemingly available. She provides Hauser with transportation for the rest of the film, as his car is still back some miles away lying in a ravine of course. Meanwhile he finds a dead child in the basement of the school where the teacher works, and of course here the same dude who attacked him in the bar, and ran him off the road, finds him there and attacks him again. He gets away but not before the crazy Redneck character accuses him of murdering the child, and the local doctor, a woman battling sexism in a small town takes to sleuthing and against standard procedure is allowed to investigate the death in here clinic instead of notifying the county coroner. Being an alkie, the sheriff's judgment is not the best and seems to think this is okay although later on his boss, who like all big time law enforcement types is very slow on the uptake, fires him for doing this.

From here things go rapidly from bad to worse, as an army of zombies with caustic blood descend. It is never quite determined for certain how the zombies are created or why the crazy Redneck character is so mean, but he is and they are, and it is frightening.

While the plot has more holes in it than Swiss cheese, the special effects are pretty good. Hauser even has time to investigate the cause of these zombifications and it turns out that some bad dudes are doing something with toxic waste. Why is never adequately explained. They are simply bad dudes who like to play with toxic waste and don't much care if the locals are being turned into zombies because of it. Hauser sneaks into their facility and catches them at it, but then they catch him and are about to turn him into toxic waste too when his teacher friend (of course) smashes through the barn door with her Ford sedan, surprising them and allowing Hauser to escape with her.

At this point Hauser finally remembers his brother and goes looking for him. The batty old lady objects to him invading her house of course, and he finds more and more zombies in the basement along with his dead brother. (Well solved that mystery, now shouldn't he and the schoolteacher be getting out of there? No. They stick around and look for people they have befriended.) They are trapped in a gas station and the zombies are closing in, when of course the crazy redneck intervenes again but fortunately the zombies get him. And then, just when it seems that the zombies are going to get them both, the county sheriff arrives with a size-able force and saves their bacon. And at this point Hauser and his girlfriend probably go off and get married, naming their first born after his dear departed brother.

I guess the beauty of science fiction is that things don't have to make sense, necessarily, as long as the action keeps moving along. However, I would like to know why that crazy redneck had it in for Hauser. Did he torment all city slickers this way? Didn't any of the locals sense something was going really wrong in their little community? And what exactly was the process by which normal people are converted into bloodthirsty zombies with caustic blood? Who knows? I know, I probably just think way too much.

Back in the day, horror just didn't get the respect that it would today, kind of relegated to the back of the bus with all the other social reprobates. However this one is a gem, if not in the story line then certainly in the acting. Bela Lugosi is excellent as Mr. Kessler, the urbane and courtly widower somewhat befuddled by the recent loss of his wife in a tragic accident. Clarence Muse is excellent too as the butler, who in the role of black servant is not played mainly for comic effect, although he does have one funny line. At one point says "Do I look pale? I feel pale", when he sees Paul Dickson, who is the image of his dead brother Ralph.

As with most horror mysteries, there is a lot of darkness and strange occurrences. Never mind that much of it isn't adequately explained, it keeps the viewer going. The police are clueless and seem always to be the dumbest ones in the room. The rest are either insane or hapless witnesses and victims. Considering the frequency of murder taking place in this house, the occupants seem strangely unconcerned and Mr. Kessler has no problem hiring new domestic servants to replace those who have been murdered.

What is unexplained (and here be the spoiler) is why his gardener, Jules is providing shelter and allowing Mr. Kessler's wife {supposedly dead), who is also not quite right apparently, to hide somewhere nearby. Also why does she prowl the night and look in windows, in all weather, and what DSM-IV classification could possible exist to explain why this triggers in Mr. Kessler his slow trance-like stalking of victims in his house late at night? Mr. Kessler and his wife seem to be made for each other, since both are crazy as loons. All I can say is, it is probably a good thing that would-be son in law Ralph never gets a chance to reproduce with Kessler's daughter. The genetic consequences would not have been pretty.

This movie reminded me of several better known films from the same time period. The Architect as hero, "The Fountainhead", the interplay of delusion and reality as in more than one of Hitchcock's films, such as "Vertigo" where the hero suffers a trauma of some sort, and the burning of a home, as in the Daphne du Maurier story "Rebecca".

The thing that is brought off successfully in my opinion was the question of whether Robert Young's character was in his right mind or not. He is characterized as a paranoiac and some things he did seemed to suggest this. His attempted suicide was another one. The various strange things that happened. However it did seem from time to time that others might be involved in his various mysterious misfortunes. Nothing fit, and nothing really made sense until the end, when, as in a bad dream you wake up, and the pieces fit together, sort of. The fact that in the end the denouement offers a rather tortured clarification of the mystery, is not that much of a defect, in view of the entertaining nature of the ride and the stunning pictures of the pounding surf.

"New friend turned psycho" films have been made before, multiple times, but this was a good one. It is hard to remember sometimes which came first. Was it "Play Misty for Me" or that one with Glenn Close? The stereotypical gay friend upstairs, and the fiancé who can't seem to keep himself zipped up. Yet even the less than perfect men in the movie aren't all bad. Sure the client boss enjoys a little sexual harassment, and the fiancé isn't perfectly faithful, but then in reality who is morally perfect in life? And while both are jerks in different ways, poetic justice sets in when they both get dispatched permanently, while the gay friend only suffers a concussion from which he timely revives and saves Bridget Fonda from being killed by psycho woman. The movie is true in that most people are neither all good or all bad, and that once in a long while you run into someone whose sociopathic and frankly diabolical tendencies are breathtaking. That is true too, something I know from personal experience.

This film is a bit too self-consciously comic for its own good. Perhaps it can be chalked up to magical realism? There are more than a few loose ends by the end of the film and one never really knows where the story is going. Brad Pitt plays a character who is a kind of walking illustration of Murphy's law. The two hit men Leroy and the one played by Gandolfini were confusing enough. We are made to care about the Gandolfini character and then then he turns back into a villain long enough to be killed. Deus ex machina was was working overtime with this one. In reality both Julia and Brad would have been dead meat long before and no crime boss is going to forgive you for having been in the presence of his "son" when he somehow dies from a stray bullet, even if it wasn't strictly your fault.

In short, this is an ideal date flick with enough violence to satisfy the guys and enough sweetness to satisfy most chicks, and insubstantial enough to be forgotten 5 minutes after it ended.

After you have seen enough movies, there is very little that doesn't remind you of other movies. Nevertheless this was a watchable if somewhat disturbing film. I had to shut it off from time to time and come back to it later. Like "Silence of the Lambs" it features the search for a serial killer who has abducted someone and has confined her to his chamber of horrors, Like "Flatliners" the main character explores a dream world through an experimental procedure. The surrealism of the dream sequences is what makes this film, as one finds the characters in a situation and landscape in which literally anything can happen. And beyond this continuity and "making sense" are not necessary, which makes it a film-maker's dream too.

The only thing that seems a bit off is the fact that in the end one hopes for the redemption of the serial killer or the exorcism of his demons. You actually feel sympathy for the little boy inside the man, but clearly the innocence of the boy cannot be separated from horrible deeds of the man. The focus swings as it must from saving the man to saving his victim.

This movie is great on so many levels. In terms of an urban dystopia it reminds me a lot of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (Or should I say it foreshadowed "Brazil" since it was made three years earlier). It is one of the rare films that does not paint all in black and white, and in the end you feel mixed emotions, sorry for the replicants and realize perhaps the villain of the piece was actually Dr. Tyrrel playing God with increasingly human-like androids which, like beautiful but flawed automobiles, are cursed with "planned obsolescence." And who hasn't been in an interview situation like that with which the film opens where some slick, supercilious HR type is trying to pigeonhole you with a few questions? I couldn't help but cheer for Leon as he blows him away. The Tyrrel corporation is evil, as the way they are playing God with the replicants makes clear.

The other, less prosperous techno-nerds of the piece come off somewhat better. The Chinese eye designer in the cold room, and J.F. Sebastian, the ultimate nerd, who lives alone with his "toys" in a crumbling run down apartment building called "The Bradbury" in a tip of the hat to another great science Fiction writer. (I guess you couldn't have called the apartment building "The Dick" after Phillip K. Dick, the writer from whose novel this film was drawn.) Sebastian (William Sanderson) is a prematurely old genetic engineer who has created his own phantasmagorical world in his large flat. Like his creations the replicants, he has a limited life span, only in his case it is a medical condition and not as withthe Nexus 6 model replicants caused by a pre-determined limitation on their life span.

In the middle of this is the title character, the Blade Runner, otherwise known as Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Gaff (Edward James Olmos) who keeps Deckard from wandering off in disgust, and who has a strange habit of leaving samples of origami wherever he goes. The Blade Runner falls in love with a beautiful replicant (Sean Young) who doesn't even know she is a replicant, at first. Deckard dutifully goes about his business, tracking down and "retiring" the outlaw replicants, but clearly seems in the end caught in the middle of a moral dilemma.

In the end the story is a parable of the sadness and shortness of life, which for those of us in middle life becomes ever more poignant. It seems clear we are all programmed to die by our maker.

Watching this movie was like eating a whole $3.79 bag of Doritos in one sitting. It starts out okay but by the end you feel mildly sick like that was too much, really. The bathroom humor was overdone, and they should have left Fat Bastard in the deep freeze. This was a conglomeration of Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Silence of the Lambs, among others. Low points? The mole joke, Goldmember eating his own skin or fat bastard with too much skin, and father jokes. It is good Myers reincarnated Fat Bastard as Shrek because one sequel in this series was quite enough. In short the movie contained too many shitake mushrooms for any sensible person to take.

To die on your way to Brooklyn: it happens I guess. This film reminds me a lot of the supernatural thrillers "The Sixth Sense", "Donnie Darko" and of "Memento", all three of which are somewhat better films. Ryan Gosling (Henry) is a troubled young man who does things like torching his car for no apparent reason on the the Brooklyn Bridge and then sitting calmly on the pavement while traffic backs up behind him. This is obviously surreal because you know that if this happened people would be blowing their horns all over the place. The young man is seeing a shrink, won't take any meds, and happens to knows when all hail will break loose. The young shrink (Ewan McGregor) hears from him that he is planning to kill himself at midnight on Saturday night. McGregor has a hot girlfriend artist played by Naomi Watts, but she has had problems too, and can't create good art if she is on antidepressants, so isn't taking them. This in spite of the fact that a while back she cut her wrists while in the bath. Henry meanwhile also does obnoxious things like smoking on the subway and then when asked to stop he puts the cigarette out on his forearm. He's obviously not the most tightly wrapped of guys.

Well, weird things start happening. Like Bruce Willis, the child psychiatrist in "The Sixth Sense" he has trouble separating his professional from his personal life. Even if this isn't his patient, he insists on investigating matters like a detective. He goes to visit the patient's mother whose breath is visible on this warm night (she's Henry's mom and she's dead, but she just doesn't know it somehow) (a convention used in "The Sixth Sense") The house is weirdly empty and the woman goes to the fridge to get him a drink and it is empty. There is also a bull mastiff there, however, who doesn't much take to McGregor, and while the woman starts to bleed about the head, the mastiff gets him by the arm. In another scene McGregor is playing chess with a blind man (Bob Hoskins) who seems at first to be someone else but then is Henry's father.

To make a long story short, nothing seems to add up, and McGregor seems to be caught in a time warp. He sees the same kid lose the same balloon twice as workmen are raising a grand piano to an apartment high above. You just know the piano is going to cut loose and fall on someone, but nothing happens. At the end of the film, the young man does shoot himself with a gun in the mouth but then suddenly he is lying and dying on the pavement for a different reason (on the same Brooklyn Bridge) where his girlfriend, and his father and mother have just been killed in most ghoulish fashion. McGregor and Watts are trying to talk him into hanging on to life, but it is not to be. His pupils dilate and we know that he is dead. Strangely too, McGregor and Watts are meeting, apparently for the first time, and you know they are going to hit it off, somehow.

At the end of the film it STILL doesn't add up. Was time moving backwards? Was this an alternative reality, or a branching of contingencies as in "Donnie Darko"? Did McGregor see dead people? And what about Henry's ability to predict the weather and heal the blind? At the end we still don't know, nor do we know exactly why he felt responsible for the death of his parents and girlfriend. That is the only flaw in the film, that we are taking for an exciting ride, but end up, like some strange dream, not really knowing for sure what it was all about.

Malcolm McDowell makes his screen debut as a perennial bad boy in this send-up of British boarding schools. Like "A Clockwork Orange" that would make him famous, this involves his character's misadventures with his partners in crime in which the coldness, cruelty, and perversion of this peculiarly British institution is resisted.

I enjoyed the film although it feels a bit like a guilty pleasure. I am not sure whose side I am on with this one. Perhaps that is the greatness inherent in this film, that one sympathizes and at the same time is horrified by the antics of these young men. Being a teacher in an American high school, I suspect that the collective education of young people requires a lot of control and supervision. On the other hand it seems inevitable that this control takes on the nature of prisons and lunatic asylums. And as with prisons and lunatic asylums, not all the lunatics and criminals are on the inside looking out.

As with "A Clockwork Orange" it is a black comedy that says as much about the individual as with the society in which he lives. As the film progresses the world of the students passes farther and farther into surrealism. The final interview with the dean is weirdly accurate in its portrayal of school administrators, and the Alice in Wonderland quality of that interview is brilliantly demonstrated by the Chaplain who emerges from a drawer to shake hands and accept an apology. The mild "punishment" imposed by the Dean in the next to last misadventure, as well as the brutality of the cold showers and corporal punishments of the previous episodes were both wrong.

The Columbine High School-like episode at the end of the film was both prescient and seemed like a bit of fictional desperation. Indeed how does such a story end? A more expected "punishment" would have been to send them all to jail for their next to last escapade if not for retail theft in the one before that. However in many ways the whole process of growing up is a matter of coming to terms with one's inner anarchy or (in the case of the characters led by McDowell's characters) not coming to terms with it.

If you haven't seen the film then by no means read this review, since knowing the ending beforehand largely spoils the effect. However for those of you who have seen it or know the story, here goes:

This was an excellent film and part of its excellence was its upending of so many movie clichés. One huge cliché is that the hero of the piece, (Edward Woodward) could take on an army and win against outrageous odds. The hero is quite literally toast and that comes as a complete surprise to those who have no inkling of how it ends. The viewer is teased into thinking he is going to be smashed on the rocks below but an even more horrifying ending is in store as the title character, not seen until the last minute or two of the film finally appears. One might, based on so many other films one has seen, expect that the SWAT team would arrive by parachute and put the fire out and arrest all concerned. That this does not happen is about as gripping an ending as one could devise. The amiable and gentle folk of the island have all gone collectively bonkers and it isn't just from an excess of drinking. And how many old inbred aristocrats such as played by Christopher Lee have we read, seen, or heard about? Well-bred, high born, and flat out insane?

Islands of course are famous in literature for being dens of wickedness hidden from the view of the larger world. From Papillion to Lord of the Flies to Jurassic Park, they are special, rather magical places and this one is no different.

At the same time it makes paganism look like fun. There is a delightful playfulness in the spirit of the islanders. It seems almost a satire on the clash between paganism and the early missionaries of the Church. The music is wonderful. One wonders if there was ever a sound track album that came out of this film. It seemed at certain points on the verge of becoming a musical, a musical horror film the likes of which had never been seen before Sweeny Todd.

The cultish eroticism in the film did not distract from the story and did not seem in the end, gratuitous although it might have easily been so. There was a kind of sixties flavor to the weirdness, when people went native and dropped out, adopting very strange ideas indeed. One thinks of Charles Manson, Jonestown, Scientology, and Heaven's gate. How anyone could have hoped to remake this classic adequately is beyond me.

I found this film thoroughly entertaining, and richly textured enough to see twice. It stimulated me to look into some of the "facts" of Siegel's life and I guess I should not be too terribly upset about the artistic license taken with this film biography. It seems axiomatic that art imitates life and my postscript to that axiom would be "...except that the characters are better looking and the story simplified." If viewers of the film come away with a somewhat inaccurate picture of the man, then so be it.

Warren Beatty's portrayal of Siegel as a violent bipolar sociopath is probably not far from the truth. Virginia Hill's portrayal by Annette Bening as a woman who is both repulsed and attracted to this violent, unpredictable man, seems to be psychologically astute, although exactly what happened between Hill and Siegel is no doubt speculative, as it would have to be. One wonders however if Siegel actually did plan to assassinate Mussolini. One wonders too how Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) would have had so much confidence in Siegel if he had had such poor judgment as he did. Elliott Gould plays the gangster Greenberg as a complete schlemiel who has an almost childlike faith in his childhood friend, Siegel. It seems to strain credulity that any gangster would be quite as much of a moron as Gould portrays Greenberg. It seems unlikely but the truth probably would have taken too much time, as it is often the case in film. On the other hand, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Probably the biggest historical deviation taken by the film seems to be the idea that it was Siegel who originated the idea of Las Vegas as a show biz/ gambling mecca, and that he was some kind of tragically flawed visionary, as in the film "Tucker." This leaves out a few other persons (Wilkerson, for example) who may have had something to do with it. Perhaps Levinson has not taken the liberties with the facts that someone like Oliver Stone has in the past (for example in "JFK") but it makes one wonder. Nevertheless it was a great story told quite seamlessly and effectively.

Frankly I loved this movie, which is kind of an update of the classic eccentric genius, Sherlock Holmes. Bill Pullman plays a nerdy bachelor (Darrel Zero) who is "The greatest private eye in the world" and Ben Stiller is his somewhat put upon assistant. Like Holmes, Zero has uncanny investigative skills, and is given to pithy maxims and asides regarding how he does his work. Ryan O'Neal plays an unlikeable tycoon (Stark) with a secret or two, and who hires Zero to help him out with his problem, which revolves around the loss of a safe deposit box key and blackmail. The rest of the story is an entertaining series of plot twists and turns. The gentle and less than heavy handed humor mixes well with the inevitable skullduggery that ensues. The ending is such that you rather hope for a sequel, which unfortunately never materialized. An under-appreciated gem.

Texas is a desolate but beautiful and enchanted land and that certainly shows in this film. One is reminded to some extent of other films set in Texas, such as "Blood Simple" or "The Last Picture Show." Characters are silent and almost stoical, like the cowboys of the old days. It is almost as if the heat just cooks the words out of the mind as one squints in the hot sun.

The film opens with the bluesy guitar work of Ry Cooder, which is just right for the desolate scene: the lead character of the movie (Harry Dean Stanton) wanders on foot in the noonday sun through a landscape that is a bit like the biblical wilderness of Jesus, the Big Bend region near the Rio Grande. The man seems to have lost his mind, or his way, or both. He collapses on the floor of a local bar and he is finally taken into protective custody. His brother, (Dean Stockwell) who works in outdoor advertising in Los Angeles, is summoned to fetch him. The brother talks, and Stanton only talks after a long while. It turns out he has a seven year old son, Hunter, who has been adopted by his Uncle and his aunt.

The rest of the story recounts how he comes to terms with the traumatic breakup of his marriage and how he reconnects with his young son. This could easily have become a sticky sweet mess, but it is a tribute to the storytelling skill of director Wim Wenders and screenwriters L. M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepherd that this does not happen. Throughout the film, and in the performance of Nastassia Kinski as the estranged mother and wife, it has the ring of truth and a hopeful if not entirely happy ending.

This was a reasonably well executed thriller which points up the consummate and versatile acting talents of John Turturro and Johnny Depp. For Turturro you merely have to consider the varied performances of "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" to "Barton Fink" and can play both a redneck southerner or a Jewish playwright from New York. Depp of course can play everything from a young man with scissors for hands, to Captain Jack Sparrow.

This is a well traveled terrain for Stephen King as well. He has made a career out of portraying the hell that one can create in the skull alone. Living alone in the boonies is in some ways very peaceful and idyllic but in other ways it can be a very hair-raising and creepy experience. The same solitude can be a house of horrors as one dissolves in paranoia. We have seen the enemy and the enemy is ourselves, seems to be the theme. As with the story "The Shining", "Gerald's Game" being alone in the woods can be unkind to the imagination, especially if one lives by one's imagination. Add in alcohol and/or drug use and you have an explosive combination. Are you really alone? or is someone out there? Or is the someone you are afraid of inside your head alone?

The plot of this film has more holes than Swiss Cheese and seems more than a little dated, even if the baton of the quintessential foreign bad guy has passed now from the Nazis to the Soviets to the Islamic terrorists or (perennial favorite) our own US government.

What if the most ordinary white-bread American parents (yours) turn out to be Soviet spies? That is the premise of this film. What if some renegade Soviet spy is blackmailing the KGB operatives in the US by killing its agents one by one for MONEY! How capitalist! How demented can you be? This is the kind of guy who would take your girlfriend water skiing just so he can see her get smooshed by an oil tanker or something. And what are the poor hapless KGB agents supposed to do? Send your Mom and Dad off to pay this guy off? Why? Almost all of the agents are dead. The only ones left are Mom and Dad. Considering that Mom and Dad are near useless as agents, hey, be our guest, comrade.

And Mom and Dad are sleepers biding their time running a flower shop while waiting for their orders, which finally come in a dead fish. But by this time their covers have worked so well they are now God-fearing Americans. It is as though Ozzie and Harriet were Russian spies. But of course there is blackmail.

Meanwhile who is the FBI agent assigned to this case? Good old Sidney Poitier. Not only is he just the fatherly kind of guy to investigate and then help poor little Nikita (River Phoenix) along, but he moves in next door and is strangely open about his being an FBI agent. Just your friendly neighborhood FBI agent, who washes his car on the weekend and sleeps with the schoolmarm, but who is ready with his weaponry in any case. Gradually he convinces the boy (River Phoenix) of the facts of the matter. I mean wouldn't anybody be convinced that their parents are Soviet spies? This convincing takes about five minutes. I guess teens will believe anything if the news is delivered by Sidney Poitier. Meanwhile River places his trust in this total stranger rather than his own parents who are so good at being faux Americans that they have forgotten their Russian roots.

The fateful moment comes when the KGB boss invites the parents to the Kirov Ballet for instructions. The invitation arrives in a fish in a coded message in a metal canister. Mom cuts herself rather badly on a knife she is so upset by this call to action in the service of Mother Russia, but at least they get to go to a nice ballet about Sleeping Beauty out of it. Anyway Mom looks like she is going to exsanguinate there in the kitchen and all the boy does is go off to his room where he leaves his bedside record player going as he drops off to sleep fully clothed.

Well the parents botch the hand off and wound the bad KGB agent killer and some Mexicans being deported make off with the money and cross the border with it, no questions asked. The killer is wounded but is still alive however and Poitier and the parents chase after the KGB boss, who by this time is taking poor Phoenix at gunpoint to Tijuana aboard public transit. Why? Can't they afford to own automobiles? (Perhaps The budget for transport had to be cut severely after they paid this agent killer off.) And why are they taking the boy? To adopt him and raise him as a Russian? Makes no sense. Are Americans that stupid? Are Russians? I don't think so.

After a ridiculous interview at gunpoint between the parents, the boy, the KGB agent killer, and the KGB Boss, they arrive at the border. Nobody on the train seems to notice that folks have guns pointed at each other back there, but then maybe on the San Diego transit system such things are commonplace.

Things resolve themselves finally when they shoot the KGB killer and some of the KGB boss's henchmen haul the corpse across the border about as easily as one might leave an amusement park. They even haul the agent killer's (Scuba they call him) dead body across too, no questions asked. The border agent looks on innocently as though he were Gomer Pyle, as if to say "Thanks for visiting, come back soon, y'hear?" Admittedly this film was made in the mid-1980s before 9/11 and the breakup of the Soviet Union. The borders with Mexico and Canada were scandalously porous in those days. The Soviets were still the designated bad guys, but hey, they're just doing their jobs, right? Things were softening between the Soviets and the Americans then, but I still don't think you would have gone off to have a beer with Konstantin and Vladimir after a hard day at the FBI office.

It would be difficult to assess the literary merits of Hunter S. Thompson's book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" from this film. As I have not read the book I will leave that issue aside. It seems to be some kind of broad satirical look at Las Vegas the premise being that the only way to appreciate the weirdness and loathsomeness of this gaming mecca is to get weird on various kinds of hallucinogenic and mind-altering drugs. Instead we are treated to a kind of journey through the bowels of the protagonists complete with infantile orgies of destructiveness which are supposed to be some kind of expression of the well-deserved contempt one feels for crew-cut mentality of the early 70s political milieu. In the end like whatever it is one ate last night, it courses through the dark passages of one's interior only to find an exit in a toilet bowl. Considering the material presented in this film, making for an exit without delay is the only sane course of action even if some of it has to reverse normal peristalsis and leave via the entrance.

There are some themes, like the end of the world, that works of the imagination keep returning to over and over again. Rod Taylor in the 1959 classic film "The Time Machine" sees the human race destroying itself in a nuclear war only to reemerge with subterranean carnivorous morlocks farming a race of dumb blondes as a source of food while they greenly lurk underground. Charlton Heston in "The Omega Man" hides out in a heavily fortified compound, cruising the empty streets of the heavily fortified city while crazed, light-averse survivors of a plague wait until dark to pounce and destroy. Stephen King's film adaptation of his book "The Stand" shows us a world decimated by a killer influenza which has the survivors ending up in Las Vegas. And Michael Crichton has the demon agent coming from outer space in "The Andromeda Strain" and doing bad things to rubber and turning human blood to red dust. And now once again in the UK this time, "28 Days After" those generally untrustworthy scientists in secret labs are playing deadly games with germ warfare agents only to be unwittingly set free by animal rights guerillas. Having seen so many of these films before, I think "28 Days Later" does an excellent job of conveying the weird and horrible world of survivors of a holocaust.

As a microbiologist I am in a somewhat better than average position to judge the scientific merits of such events. Certainly viruses and plagues have decimated populations in the past, from the Black Plagues of the middle ages, to the 1918 influenza pandemic, and the AIDS pandemic of today. The Ebola outbreaks of central Africa are perhaps the most mysterious and horrifying in recent memory, and in this era of worldwide air travel or of natural migrations of infected birds, it isn't far from reality. It is a good thing that public health officials maintain a certain vigilance.

What sets "28 Days Later" apart is its "realism" (while of course being quite a work of imagination) however the virus is not the only heavy of the piece. While I could have told them not to take the tunnel, and would have probably put the car in reverse at the sight of all the wrecked cars underneath, and tried a bridge, and while I wonder at the tendency of contagion to turn normal people into murdering zombies who like rabid dogs attack and infect others, the curious turns of the plot where the characters make their way through a post-apocalyptic world where not all the villains are "the infecteds" made it a truly effective film in the horror genre. It was an excellent film.

This is not the worst film of all time, but as an actioner it was pretty average. Lots of blood and gore and a mysterious something from an ancient civilization that jumps out to bite you. The little orphanage looks like something out of "Signs." This film also owes something to the Indiana Jones series and "Men in Black", and the Matrix trilogy, all of which are somewhat better movies and had already been there and done that. The worst thing that can be said is that nothing in this movie has not been done or seen before.

The reading material scrolling by in the beginning was a bad sign, I thought. Any film that requires such an extensive explanation at the beginning in such an artless way (notwithstanding the fact that the first Star Wars movie did so) is already in trouble. The narration at the beginning in addition by the lead character (Christian Slater) is also a bad sign. And of course if you think too much about what transpires, it does not make a lot of sense in many ways. For example, what was the purpose of the experiment implanting the larval creatures which convert normal people into crazed kung fu superdemons? Why was the old archaeologist on the side of evil? Why didn't the boy who escaped not die himself if he was electrocuted. What happened to him after that? Why was the nun consenting to this experiment in the first place? What was in it for her? Sure dude, here are my kids, go ahead Dr. Mengele, do anything you like with them and hail Mary. No matter since when the zombie switch is thrown they all leave their premises and walk to the museum where they are all dispatched by the SWAT army staffed by the Paranormal agency.

And here was the leader of this super-top secret agency from which for reasons unexplained Slater was expelled. Apparently the security is pretty lax. Slater assaults the leader of the SWAT unit and gets his security pass. He just strolls into the place, talks with the older guy who is a kind of CSI pathologist who examines corpses. Strangely enough the SWAT team leader, Commander Burke, was surprisingly okay with Carnby's behavior, considering this was a super secret agency with military capability, and Carnby just gets off with a mild "Well, don't let it happen again, okay?" Later Dr. Hudgens takes a blood sample from a caged creature he just happens to have there in the laboratory and injects the old pathologist with something that converts him to one of THEM, whoever "them" happen to be. This was basically so the pathologist could trash the generator and put out

the floodlights that were keeping the nasty critters at bay at the entrance to the gold mine.

The nasty light-averse creatures with beady eyes and sharp teeth seem not to mind Dr. Hudgens, in fact he seems to be leading them somehow. His big moment comes when our heroes (Carnby, Cedrac, and Commander Burke) are finally at the portal to the dark world and all they need is the key. Dr. Hudgens provides the missing link to the key and holds them at bay at the door until someone nails him with a knife. (All that circus training finally came in handy). There is some question as to whether they should open it but open it they do. On the other side there seem to be more of these nasty creatures, but never mind they seem to have gotten loose already anyway. Only Carnby and Aline Cedrac, the blonde and sexy archaeologist escape in time as the mine goes up in a fireball of handy ordnance that Commander Burke luckily (for Carnby and Cedrac) went back to get and set off. Meanwhile the nun proprietor of the orphanage has offed herself (as nuns do, of course) and the whole city has been evacuated because it was too late, the darn critters got out anyway, perhaps in hopes that someone might finance a sequel? Things are left hanging.

The only thing that made sense in the movie was the rock video of Carnby and Cedrac having a horizontal good time. This makes sense because she was about the hottest babe to be seen in the whole film, the rest of them having already had their heads creased severely by the critters. Everyone needs a break now and then, perhaps.