rik_tod

More Shoes
Director: Lee Kazimir
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

I've been asked to recommend a film either at the top or bottom of this post, which isn't actually a review, though many people still insist on referring to these pieces I construct as reviews. All the same, I have also been asked to place the word "review" into the title. It was rough going, trying to find the exact spot to place that (used erroneously here) noun, but I hope I have at least been able to follow through properly by some small measure on that count.

As for that recommendation... well... let me ask you one small question: Do I know you? Apart from one other person here on Spout, The Working Dead, I don’t personally know any of you. Yes, a handful of people on here have left some very nice comments regarding my writing, and I am sure some of them would make great friends, but I still can’t know someone from just a quick comment or two. It makes it hard to recommend anything if one does not personally know those to whom one is speaking. That the reader can ascertain elements of my personality from my writing is readily apparent, since my style is of a more personal nature, talking about how films affect me more often than actually reviewing them. In the broad sense, though, this is not necessarily true of most “reviewers” or “critics,” who often shoot for a bland sameness in their acceptable styles. Regardless of style or intent, the reader still has it all up on the writer, including myself. They can scan through any number of my posts and get a fairly accurate picture of my emotional range, my psychological bearing, and my critical eye (which, more often than not, one will find those eyes closed). They can read my writing for a short while and get a decent summary of my being. They can determine whether they want to listen to my railings any further, and whether to accept my judgment, good or ill, of the film in discussion.

That’s all fine and well, but while it seems that such a relationship is one on one for the reader – reader meets writer – in fact, it is the complete opposite for the writer. The writer, presumably reaching out to a vast audience, most often has to tailor his words for that entire audience. In doing so, whether he is recommending the object of his review to his readers or not, he is in fact, doing them a disservice unless he is careful to couch his recommendation (or lack of one) in qualifiers: “this is the sort of film this sort of person, or such and such a type of people, would enjoy,” etc. But most critics do not take this extra step. They assume that whole goose-and-gander maxim thing holds true for the critic and their prospective audience: heed my words, you will love/hate this movie, no matter who you are!

Since I only write for myself, and mainly as a therapeutic means, I don’t worry about “recommendations.” Flat out, I don’t do them. I especially don’t since the Eraserhead and Motorama incidents of many years past, in which I didn’t actually recommend those films to anybody, I just suggested to my more or less captive and bored audiences that we watch them, and I have received endless harangues from the less adventurous amongst my friends ever since. The misunderstanding comes from their blanket need to be entertained -- and just entertained -- by movies. This runs counter to my need (though there is still an entertainment factor at play in my heart) to see films that are at least interesting, if not outright mind-expanding. I will not go into details about those films – this is not the time and place – but rest assured that they definitely made me start being far more careful about what films I show or even recommend to individuals. When people in the office ask me to recommend a movie, I generally ask, “What do you like?” If they answer “Oh, I love Pretty Woman!” or some such other pap (which has happened more than once, I am afraid), I am likely to respond, “Hmm, sorry. Can’t help you.” (I hold back on what I would like to add to that statement: “It’s too late for you…you can’t be helped.”) It’s not that I can’t back up my words or my opinions; I just don’t want to have to hear those people whine once they climb down the other side of the Rik Recommendation Mountain. The world is now made up of people who believe that their time is Oh So Very Precious – the “I can’t believe I wasted 90 minutes of my life on that film” contingent, when they all, to a person, are just as likely to turn right around in an instant for ten straight hours of Nintendo or a night of being soused with their brain-dead buddies. That’s fine – to each his own – but don’t hit me with your personal prejudices concerning films, and your own insecurities with personal time management, when you have asked my opinion in the first place.

Because this has happened time and again, unless I know someone extremely well, I do not recommend any films to anybody. My mother, my father, stepparents, brothers, the Working Dead, Raw Meat, Egg of the Dead – these are people, and their individual artistic tastes and boundaries, that I understand and know fairly well, and I can launch into recommending a film to them with a certain assurance that they will at least give me a measured opinion of their own on its excellence or lack thereof. I am not afraid to recommend titles to them, because I know them. In some cases, too well.

You, generic reader, I don’t know. So, outside of the film which I am purportedly supposed to be discussing here – More Shoes, a first-person documentary about the travels of a would-be filmmaker who definitely takes an offhand recommendation a tad too far, and when I say “too far”, I mean roughly 4000 miles in that direction of limits past the stretching point – outside of the film at hand, I cannot offer up a recommendation to you. What if I were to go all loopy and go, “Wow, the guy in this movie travels across part of the world in search of his artistic sensibilities as a director, so, since he travels, I recommend RV with Robin Williams!” For all I know, you aren’t the type who enjoys overproduced but under-thought hack comedy by people who should all clearly know better, and since you trusted my notion to recommend this film to you, you are going to be pissed off at me. You will be less likely to pay attention to one of my posts the next time around, and all because I told you that “you’d be sure to enjoy this if you enjoyed that.” Making recommendations is a dangerous game if played improperly, and everyone – even the self-aware – does play it improperly. And if both sides are crazy to begin with, no one can ever win. And, of course, there is the chance that I would recommend a really crappy film to everyone on purpose, because that is the sort of guy I am sometimes.

So, in the interest of this “review” still containing some form of recommendation in it, why not do an end-around and concentrate on the film at hand. Would I recommend More Shoes to you? I certainly liked large portions of it, even if it is not completely engrossing and a little too laid back in its approach. I will, perhaps, even watch the film again at some undefined point in the future, regardless of whether I would then have to put up with the director/star’s choice of hideous footwear. In fact, before I watched it again, I would re-title my copy of the film Better Shoes instead of More Shoes, because surely he would have benefited from some well-designed walking shoes rather than the usual slacker’s choice of ugly Birkenstock-style gear.

More Shoes is a film by Lee Kazimir, a young man with a certain small amount of filmmaking experience before this film takes place, who takes the recommendation of a legendarily crazy but brilliant film director, and decides to walk across Europe in search of his filmmaking soul. Werner Herzog once recommended that aspiring filmmakers forego the classroom experience of film school and “make a journey alone, on foot, for a distance of 5,000 kilometers, let's say from Madrid to Kiev.” Herzog, in his usual manner, proffers this advice to any within earshot, and most people will smile, shake their heads and go, “Oh, that Werner! There he goes again,” and then move on. Not Kazimir. He literalizes Herzog’s offhand statement, and hits the road on foot, and not just by making an epic journey on foot, but by actually duplicating the starting and stopping point of Herzog’s tossed off, imaginary excursion. It's the sort of idea for a film that gets publicity from the sheer audacity of it, and a more cynical person than I would probably point out with a sharper finger that maybe the true impulse behind it was publicity, to get the director noticed and nothing more. There might be a little of that here, but I think its more the approach of a man who is a little frustrated and lost in his would-be talent, and desperate to find if he belongs anywhere, doing anything.

To me, it’s a foolhardy though impressive ambition that drives Kazimir, but my chief problem with such an attempt is that, in my estimation, even if one decided to brave the rigors of such a trip, Herzog was not talking about actually filming such a journey. He was basically suggesting one surefire means in which a novice artist could gain life experience on a massive level before embarking on their filmic career. A travel of considerable size, of perhaps thousands of miles through historic towns and decaying society, would certainly afford the aspiring filmmaker ample opportunity to gain such experience. His life would be threatened on occasion, he would perhaps fall in love or at least lust a number of times, he would see the best and worst of humankind, and he would be given a true sense of man’s place within the construct of nature on this trip. All of the ingredients needed to allow the artistic self to merge with the more physical aspects are readily available for the hapless soul embarking on such a journey. Herzog does suggest his “Madrid to Kiev” trip specifically for an aspiring filmmaker, but he never suggests that such a filmmaker should bring a movie camera along with him down the road. And, really, such a task -- almost a spirit quest, in a way -- would serve the same purpose for a writer, painter or architect as well. Since Kazimir goes into his trip with film experience, it’s no surprise that his survey does take the form of a video, rather than a book, statue or mural. But I still think that such a journey of discovery would be best taken by using the memory directly, not capturing it on a series of tapes.

But, I don't fault Kazimir from wishing to use his particular focus on capturing his journey. While he may doubt whether he wants to continue working in film, and uses this experience more as a litmus test regarding his artistic ambitions, he really has no choice but to film it. After all, if he doesn’t, there is no record of it. While he would perhaps be better suited to simply backpack across Europe like many thousands of other kids of his relative age, if one is a filmmaker, why not film it?

My mother was recently in town, and she brought along her new digital camera, with which she proceeded to take hundreds of pictures while she stayed in Anaheim. She is on an epic journey herself -- by fifth-wheeler, not by foot -- on the first real vacation she has taken in twenty years or so. Naturally, she wants to capture everything she can on film . But there is no actual artistic impulse involved, at least none that is apparent to her own child. It is merely another person doing what we all do through life: collecting keepsakes, mementos, souvenirs... whether through a purchase from a gift counter or through the lens of a camera, we all tend to do this when we travel. In this sense, what Kazimir has collected on his travels on his camera matters no more than the photos taken by a 62-year old mother on a seriously long road trip that zigzags back and forth across the U.S.

In fact, if anything, in the same way that no one wants to be trapped on a couch while a relative makes them look at photo album after photo album of blasts from that relative's past, where every third person in each photo has to be explained at great length for the (usually stiffly posed) photos to make any sense at all, so too can More Shoes seem a bit like a chore at times. We are basically shown scene after scene, with little in the way of explanation, and with what little explanation we are given sometimes ruining what little suspense does build up along the way. At times, I wish there were no narration at all, and would prefer to almost just bump along silently through the film, enjoying each turn around the corner on my own judgment. But, at other times, I wanted to know more about the people I met in Kazimir's video journal, and the narration would fail me in that regard.

And still, I never lost full interest in his journey across a multitude of countries. There is enough here to sustain one between Madrid and Kiev, even if Kazimir himself starts to lose faith in his abilities along the way. This viewer really did start to feel for him, even if Kazimir brought it all on himself. I'm one of those "I need a vacation from vacation" folks, so I couldn't even begin to imagine what Kazimir was feeling in the waning moments of his walk. Or maybe I could, since he decided to film all of it, instead of just keeping it to himself. Like a collection of snapshots that really require a livelier narrator than someone's 82 year-old aunt to be more than just mildly interesting.

So, would I recommend More Shoes? Damn it. I’ve already told you – I don’t know you… but here's a recommendation I can give to everyone: Don't Follow Recommendations. Make your journey through the history of the cinema a more organic one. Start out trying twenty films from every single genre, no matter how much you think they are going to suck. Watch a film because one actor is in it, and then choose another actor in that film, and watch your next film with that actor in it, and so on. Open a film guide, drop your finger in, and then watch the collected works of whatever director the tip of your widdle nubbin lands upon. Do what I have done twice in my life and watch a thousand films in one calendar year (that's averaging just under two and three-quarters films a day, and its actually easier to do than one might think). Pick a book on a specific genre of film and then attempt to watch every film in alphabetical order. Or do what I do currently, and just check out any film that catches your fancy. Don't over-think it... just watch, try to enjoy yourself, and well after the film is done, ponder on how watching that film affected you, good or bad. Never... ever... worry about how much money a movie made at the box office. Unless you are a movie producer, box office means nada... And most of all, I recommend that you don't listen to strangers. Listen to people that you know, respect or trust. Value their opinions, even if you don't agree with them, and try to understand their point of view even if it skews 180 degrees away from yours. If they liked a film and you didn't, discuss it with them and find out what it is in their life that makes them be so incorrect -- er, I mean, different.

So, there you go. A recommendation section in this non-review that has "Review" in the title I am sorry that it isn't actually a film recommendation, but if one is required, I recommend everyone watch Nightdreams, directed by F.X. Pope. It's hard to find, but it has Wall of Voodoo performing a genuinely spooky version of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire while lipstick lesbian cowgirls act badly on purpose, and yet still manage to act badly for real. It's the greatest scene ever filmed, and I am only half joking.

What's that? You don't enjoy hardcore flicks, even if Nightdreams is a relatively big-budget attempt at genre crossover, with some very interestingly staged, surreal sequences, including one involving a housewife becoming intimately involved with a giant Cream of Wheat box while a piece of toast plays Old Man River on a saxophone?

Well, that's the way it is with recommendations: you never know what you are going to get, especially if you don't know the person doing the recommending. You don't know me and I don't know you...

...and now I probably never will. Goodbye, Spout...

Climactic Death of Dark Ninja
Director: Peter Craig
US, 13 minutes, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

A Ninja Pays Half My Rent
Director: Steven Tsuchida
US, 5 minutes, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

At the outset of reviewing two ninja films, please forgive me, if you will, for being a samurai guy.

Yeah, they’re pushy and elitist and, in the manner of most of the rest of mankind, they are often simply drunken, woman-slapping, craven beasts. But every once in while, one of them steps out, does something unbelievably heroic or cool (more often than not against the general grouping of pushy, elitist, drunken, woman-slapping samurai that aren’t heroic or cool). And when they finally do their heroic, cool bit, it’s usually out in the great wide open, where everyone can see and learn from their awesomeness and die by their godlike skill with the blade.

Not like ninja.

Sneaky, creeping, shadowy bastards, the lot of them. I guess it hurts them as a species that ninja have never really had an auteur in their corner like the samurai class had Kurosawa. Well, except for those Eastman and Laird guys, but they had to make their ninja heroes not just mutants and not just teenagers, but turtles as well in order to bring international attention and fame to them. And, looking back, the lack of a Kurosawa figure leading ninja into battle through the movies didn’t really hurt them at all, since everyone around me today seems to think that ninja are the bee’s knees. No kid wants to be a samurai anymore, but they all want to be ninja. Again, ninja did this through stealth, getting through to the public through what are largely considered children’s media (though we know that’s not really true), instead of through the front door and boldly out in the open like the samurai.

It’s not surprising, though, that ninja really started to pick up steam in the ‘80s – that most superficial of times (if you don’t count today), where backstabbing and shadowy behavior truly solidified their status as the bread and butter of the big business world (those two characteristics have always had an iron grip on politics). Sho Kosugi was there to lead the path on video, Frank Miller and those Turtle guys in the comics, and every third toy seemed to be a ninja engaged in some form of sinister sneakiness. And let's not discount the massive influence of Snake-Eyes from the G.I. Joe TV show, comic series and toyline. Ninja sort of seemed to the mid-to-late ‘80s what spies were to the ‘60s, albeit on a more minor scale. Unlike spies in the ‘60s though, the TV never got filled with successful ninja-led series – except those omnipresent testudinians-- nor did ninjas ever gain a truly Bond-like hero either. Why? Because it’s hard to become a lovable assassin, and its especially hard when you are shadowy and weaselly and obscure most of your features except your eyes. It can be done, but please don’t prop up Elektra as such a character; she’s sort of cool --  with Miller working her strings -- but she is mainly a pain in the ass.)

Me? I never took to the ninja set, and I suppose it’s quite obvious from what I have written thus far. But most of my friends seem to be quite enamored of them, and so it came as little surprise to me when I stopped to reflect upon a couple of those old pals while I was watching one of the two ninja-related films on Shorts! Volume 3 titled A Ninja Pays Half My Rent. Chiefly, it is because the style of this film is directly reminiscent of the antics preferred by those two old pals, and I even had to check out the credits of the film halfway through to make sure that this wasn’t a ninja-style film attack from one of them in particular, since both have spent time in and out of Hollywood working on short films and the occasional feature. Alas, while the mood was certainly right for them to have been involved, it appears they were not.

But it is definitely the sort of story they would have worked out, having some average doofus being forced into finding a new roommate (his old roomie dies from a grapefruit squirting accident, rarely fatal we are told, but still…), and finally settling on taking in a shadowy, lurking assassin to meet the bills. The humor doesn't try to go too far, though really, given the truncated running time, how could it? Just a quick set-up leading to the introduction of the ninja, a series of swift blackout gags portraying both the difficulties and the sometimes awe-inspiring charms of having a ninja as a roommate, and then... well, that's a surprise, and while nothing earth-shattering is going to occur in such light fare, Rent is a fine example of a film where the makers clearly understand exactly the point where they don't overstay their welcome. It's almost enough to start to warm my anti-ninja heart...

Also playing havoc with my stance on this subject is the other ninja-related piece of the DVD called Climatic Death of Dark Ninja. Unlike the more absurd first offering, Climactic could really take place in our world, and I must point out that there are no "actual" ninjas to speak of here. This film, a bit more ambitious (and presumably personal) than Rent, though still very definitely of a comic variety, is actually about the making of a film called Climactic Death of Dark Ninja and the various problems that don't just merely arise in this story, but rather, have plagued the production since its erstwhile teenage director corralled his ragtag group of friends and neighborhood kids into shooting the film long before we meet up with this group.

Please see beyond a couple of the stiffer performances by the young amateur actors and try to view their stiffness as more of a natural quirkiness, and you will find greater enjoyment in the piece. There is a definite weird charm at play here -- fans of insider joking about amateur filmmaking geeks will especially get a jolt out of this (i.e. those types of geeks themselves, including that pair of old pals of mine and, to a lesser degree, myself) -- and it would be a shame if you wrote it off early. Climactic pays off well by following up on a couple of key jokes laid out in the beginning, so sticking around for the full thirteen minutes rewards the viewer. If it seems, after following the shorter first film, that this one drags a bit, that wouldn't surprise me, but do stick around all the same. The length is actually perfect, and while after the first viewing I was fairly neutral regarding the whole enterprise, subsequent takes found me warming up to it, taking its loony charms to heart. Those darn ninja have sneaked up on me again.

And so, what do I do? Admit I have a problem? Surely not an addictive one -- it's only two short films -- not a series of features. If it were more prolonged a bout, I might be worried about my non-ninja stance. Maybe I simply had a minor Grinch-like torrent of emotion, and allowed for some tolerance in my formerly implacable stand against ninja of all stripes. And maybe it is a wish to still be hanging around with those two old pals of mine, launching into all sorts of trouble playing spy games and occasionally engaging in some guerrilla filmmaking. Maybe, at the great and considered urging of one pal in particular, we would even try to make a mini-ninja epic of our own.

I, of course, being a control freak, would probably then insist on gumming up the works by introducing a samurai into our film. They wouldn't like it, and would probably talk me out of it, but what else am I going to do? Gotta class up the joint somehow...

[I should point out that in my references to ninja throughout this piece, I am speaking in a broad sense about current popular notion of the ninja, not of their actual history or presence in the real world. My apologies to true ninja everywhere. You sneaky bastards…]

Director: George Siougas
Greece, 24 minutes, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

I have spent a shocking number of minutes the last few days recounting the trials of living with a handful of my roommates from past days. These roommates are, for the most part and as far as I can surmise, still friends, and thus, I shall not detail in such a public place the names and antics of said possible "still-friends." I will save those tales for a time when said stories directly tie in with whatever subject about which I am writing, or if I am just really good and pissed off at them.

By "recounting," I mean that I was engaged in a series of conversations with random current friends of mine, wherein certain items were brought up by them, which then reminded me of an anecdote involving this old story or that past occurrence, and all of them, for some odd reason, involved things that happened when mired (ooh, perhaps too strong a word considering I have been so careful up to this point) in cohabitation with those mostly "still-friends." This was not purposeful, though it could possibly point to some form of repressed... something... bubbling ever so slightly below the surface of which I was not aware until I watched The Fridge tonight.

The next film in my epic meandering through the Shorts! Volume 3 DVD set, The Fridge is a Greek film short whereupon one's enjoyment of it entirely depends on how you like your horror-comedies served to you. If you like them sick, gory and cruel, then please depart the premises. The Fridge might lead you down the path towards thinking it will turn sharply at any moment in that direction. But, buyer of this appliance of simmering evil, much like in the movie, beware! This film is top-loaded with an almost mid-period Spielbergian or early, early Burtonian whimsy, like it wandered out of a Greek version of Amazing Stories or Eerie, Indiana. (Mind you, this is not necessarily a recommendation in and of itself.) In fact, the film's 24-minute running length would actually suit its use on such a show, and if I found out it had been used thusly, it wouldn't surprise me one bit.

At its center, not counting the demonic refrigerator with the clawed-arm handle and the eerie orange-glowing light in the taloned grip sitting atop it, is one of those Puck-style (and by this I refer to The Real World, not Shakespeare) spiky-blond roommates that gets on everyone's nerves just by breathing too loud in the adjacent room. Upon reflection, to those former roommates of mine who may or may not be "still-friends," I might have portrayed this style of roommate. The problem in being on either end of these miseries of coexistence is that one never really considers that when you blow up at something they did, on their side of things, one of their pet peeves concerning you might be that you blow up at everything they do. And vice-versa versa-vice ad nauseum stick a cork in it **** you i'm gonna kick your ass try it asshole crash boom smash whew hey let's go get a beer what the hell was that all about i don't know. Then everything is fine until the next time someone's leftovers go missing.

Such behavior lies at the heart of this quite unsubtle and very silly exercise in over-the-top fantasy filmmaking. For unknown reasons, a shabbily dressed man frantically wheels a magnet-covered refrigerator to a spot at the end of a very open alleyway. The man then runs away in fear, desperately looking over his shoulder. The horns blare on the soundtrack in the manner to which he have become accustomed when something in the realm of great danger looms ahead for us in the film. We then meet that spiky-blond slacker, George, who eats out of the tiny fridge in his shared flat like a coyote who has discovered a carcass on a freeway, with one eye constantly over his shoulder, ready to bolt at the slightest sign of any of his three roommates. With the fridge being so small, despite George's attempts to remove any and all edibles from it posthaste, the roommates are fed up with it, and they decide that George is the one to take their pooled cash (he doesn't want to throw in) and get a bigger, better model.

Of course, given the opening, George will be the one to discover the fridge in the alley, which may or may not be possessed or actually be some form of demonic creature, keep the cash for himself, and pass the thing off as a new purchase. I am unsure of the prevalence of refrigerators in either Greece or in Europe in general for having handles in the shape of the devil's forearm, or of having that orange-glowing ball thing in a demon's grip looming like the Eye of Sauron atop it, but the roommates don't seem to notice anything odd. All is peachy as far as they concerned... until things start to happen.

And all of them happen to George. Food goes missing, and he gets the blame; he can't open the door, but then the roommates can easily, and then when he tries again, he can't; he hears a noise behind the machine, tries to fix it, the machine shuts down, everything melts, and he gets the blame and towel with which to clean it up. If you smell the words "battle of the wills" floating around the corner like a five-day old, room temperature club sandwich, then you would win the last Red Bull in the fridge. (Frankly, you can have the goddamn stuff...)

The Fridge is not all that original an entertainment -- as much in the way of genre fare goes, there are basic tropes which cry out to be followed, even by those who would subvert genre -- but entertain it squarely does. Somehow, it even manages to make a thieving schlub like George seem completely sympathetic. It helps that you will hate his roommates as much they seem to have grown weary of him. Some of my old roommates are my dearest, closest friends to this day -- though not all of them are -- but if there was one theme that ran throughout these failed attempts at space-sharing, it was the food issue. The refrigerator unit almost always seemed to be at the center of most of these arguments, and so it is very shrewd of the filmmakers to fixate on this common anger point and run it crashingly through the apartment.

And yes, a couple of those food-involved moments were brought up when I sought to make small talk by dishing deeply on the antics of roommates past. They aren't really sore spots at all, but just very funny in the telling, which is why I was sharing loopy tales of my "still-friends" with my current friends. But it does make me wonder if there was some other force at work in those apartment and condo kitchens of yore that caused all the distress. Not just a monstrous fridge which disappears food and has sloppy manners, but perhaps also a derelict dishwasher which destroyed a series of my favorite mugs and painted all of my white plastic bowls the nauseating color of Spaghetti-O sauce, or a phantom garbage disposal which spewed noxious filth all over the counter that remained there for several days while I was off on vacation. Surely these fiends must truly be to blame for my woes.

See how I am? Anything to make amends. Even after all these years, you gotta stick by your roomies...

A New York Trio: Confection, Colorforms & Date
Director: Eva Saks
U.S., 4, 8 & 5 minutes respectively, all color
Cinema 4 Rating: 5s across the board

Only fives for three straight Eva Saks' films? How can I be mean to someone whose chief desire seems to be to entertain or educate children?

Smack-dab in the middle of the Shorts! Volume 3 DVD collection lies a mysterious region known as the New Yorker's Triangle... er, I mean A New York Trio, consisting of two films of absolute, nearly cloying innocence and a third, slightly more adult short featuring a character whose death I was almost screaming for until the snotty little gold-digger's ways are changed for about thirty seconds when surrounded by the emotional residue of September 11, 2001. (That she will rebound from this the next day, and in about six months time or so, convince her unfortunate boyfriend that she needs a gigantic, unnecessary, ridiculous "wedding of the century" is not mentioned within the film. But, if you know anyone even remotely like her, and we each probably know about two or three thousand of them, then you know it's coming...)

Reading up on director Eva Saks on her website and elsewhere, it came as no surprise to find out that her films have been showing up on Sesame Street over the last few years. This is no knock on their quality, mind you... even to this day, long after such behavior is considered fashionable or at least socially acceptable for a non-child raising adult, I still spend some time at 123 Sesame Street, often early in the morning and only when I am flipping channels and notice that some random cable station is showing it. As a puppeteer myself, and a massive Muppet nut, I still find it the purest way to enjoy Henson's creations. As long as I avoid Elmo (whom I consider an abomination to decent Muppets everywhere -- there is no real character within his puppetry work, and he is almost purely driven, annoyingly, by his voice. He almost makes Telly Monster bearable...) Skipping past the little red fiend, I can sift through the show, watch familiar old Ernie and Bert bits (though they seem to show up less and less all the time), and every once in a while, my vigilance is rewarded by a series of spies opening their coats counting to ten, the song about the Lower Case N not being lonely anymore or the one about the Capital I (in the middle of the desert, in the center of the sky), or one of the older short films that used to be shuffled throughout the show, like I'm An Aardvark.

This appears to be the province where Eva Saks wishes to thrive, and judging from the first two films in her New York Trio, seeming connected only by location, Confection and Colorforms, while I have no knowledge as to whether these particular pieces have ever appeared on the show, I can understand how she managed to get on the show. It is no knock on either the capabilities of those who have created short films for Sesame Street, nor on Ms. Saks, to say that there is a comfort level within her work that fits in well with what has preceded her on the show. This could imply that the skill level doesn't necessarily have to be that high or artful to make it on the show; it just has to fall somewhere within the properly accepted ranges of subject matter and also come off, at least, as seeming moderately well-crafted.

I am certain that those far less jaded than I will find her work perfectly delightful, perhaps even heartwarming. The last time I looked, I still had a heart, and while it is one to shy away from the most gooey of sentiments, on most occasions, it does react well to sincerity, no matter how squishy the atmosphere surrounding the sentiment might be. And yet, confronted by a massive dose of what I can only assume is a most sincere effort on Ms. Saks' part to both entertain and to mildly illuminate her audience on varied subjects such as the plight of the homeless, racial and communal understanding and the personal sacrifice of the superficial, I am left cold, and find myself oddly stunned by this conclusion.

I was hostile to Confection from the start, not liking the choice of small girls in the lead at all (though I guess she grew on me slightly in my repeat viewings), and seeing the film as more of a Lifestyles of the Affluent and Bratty (as I did the other films), with her obsession for expensive desserts and her secret desire to become a ballerina. Sure, her encounter with a homeless man seems like it changes her, because this is the viewpoint the film forces on us, but really, the girl only rewards him with her frosted strawberry goodie because he applauds her daydream performance on the ballet stage. In truth, she is only facing the first point in her conditioning into adulthood. The homeless man knows what he wants -- the delicious dessert, and he recognizes how to get it, by producing what the girl, who is laden with a snooty busybody of a mother who simply must be the most horrible person, truly craves: some small measure of approval. He applauds -- the bell is rung -- she delivers the prize -- the puppy drools.

Colorforms ups the ante for me by having a perfectly wonderful tiny "actress" in the lead role as the unbelievably Messy Little Girl, but despite this, I was still left unmoved by the story. In a nutshell, and that's not hard considering how short these films are, a little girl is so crazily messy that her parents decide to call in the big guns to help her get some manners, i.e. "the grandfather." He confronts her at the breakfast table, she stands her ground, the parents rush off to some daily business where they won't be returning until much, much later, the grandfather and the girl sit with arms locked in a standoff, and once the parents leave, the grandfather whisks the girl off to an Indo-Caribbean Pagwa celebration, where the residents of the neighborhood throw garishly colored powders at one another and yell "Happy Pagwa." None of this is really explained to the audience -- I for one have only encountered mention of this bizarre ritual once before, but really, I couldn't care less about it -- and I was left wondering to what extent it was really explained to the girl. For all we know, the tot merely understands that she has gotten to attend a swell parade and gotten to be really, really, really messy, and all with an adult's loving approval.

But when they return to the house, they sit back in the standoff pose they had when the parents left, pretending to not have moved at all. The girl tells her mother, who asks if she has learned anything, "Cleanliness is next to godliness," which I am fairly certain is only a series of rote words to such a tiny girl. And here I get confused, because in essence, the girl is not just keeping secrets from her parents at the insistence of another adult, which is a dangerous precedent, but she is also lying to her mother and herself, because if she actually learned anything during her adventure, it was that filthiness is actually next to godliness, given the celebration in which she partook. The film itself has some fun moments, and great reaction shots from the girl, but the stiffness of the adult acting doesn't help the film win me over. In the end, like Confection, Colorforms comes off as middling and also seems to backtrack over its intentions.

And then there is Date, which loses me from second one. I don't like women like the one portrayed by the admittedly gorgeous actress in the lead role, her attitude, her bossiness, her superficial insistence. Certainly, the film is going to play off this, and it does, turning her completely around when she is confronted with a wall of posters at a candlelight vigil for the still missing victims of 9/11 (coincidentally, my birthday, and I insist that it plays no part in my feelings towards this film; if the film were excellent, I would tell you so). This is the best shot of the three films, but also, and thankfully, the shortest content-wise (its credits pad it out to the second longest). It's not that I don't think the story is fine -- in fact, as a concept, I don't have a problem with the film at all. I just don't like her character, and as I stated before, people who behave like that do not change overnight, and she will be back to pushing her boyfriend around financially within a fortnight, if not sooner. I am fairly certain, even though she will tell the story of how much this moment changed her for years and years -- something I hear people say constantly, even as they prove their hypocrisy almost instantaneously -- I would bet that she will have largely forgotten that moment action-wise within 24 hours.

Much like I will hope to forget her Date...

Director: Stig Svendsen
Norwegian, 9 minutes, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

A scene that I did not mention the other day in my piece on My Name is Yu Ming was one in which the titular character, a Chinese man who has learned Gaelic in order to seek a new and hopefully more fulfilling existence in Ireland (a course which he has suggested to himself entirely at random), engages in an impersonation of an iconic movie scene. Yu Ming, his face covered by cream as he shaves in front of his bathroom mirror, begins to perform De Niro's "You talkin' to me?" scene from Taxi Driver, repeating the famous lines in his newly learned second language, though after he does four or five bits, he drops the tough guy act and snickers nerdishly at the mirror, handily amused with his lonely antics.

I started to wonder then as to whether a character in Yu Ming's circumstances and location would have not only actually had the chance to see Taxi Driver, but whether that sequence has quite the same impact dubbed into another language, where it is no longer De Niro verbally acting the part. My musing then broke down into whether, if Yu Ming had indeed seen Taxi Driver, it was as a bootleg via the black market, or then, if not, if the film were even available legally in his country. In Ireland, where My Name is Yu Ming was made, certainly it is available, and the English version would naturally carry over and play well the same there. It was the inclusion of China into the equation that had me musing.

I didn't think much about this film scene that comments on yet another film scene until I watched the sixth film on the Shorts! Volume 3 DVD collection, Loose Ends, a couple of days later. Where Yu Ming only fleetingly (and without real consequence) nodded at American pop culture, this nine-minute comic Norwegian short practically wallows in it. Having recently watched Simon Pegg's Spaced for the first (and second and third) time, I couldn't held but reflect upon it when confronted with Loose Ends' pair of Star Wars-obsessed supergeeks, who start an epic battle (though always of modest proportions) over whether E.T.s belong in the Star Wars universe.

Their geekitude is proven by their abilities to delve into such battle not over the better films in the Star Wars series, but over the worst one instead. But I myself shall not continue the debate, nor will I give away much more in the short, as pretty much the entire piece depends on how they play off the various permutations of this running feud. This includes the punchline, which I find personally a little underwhelming, though when I first watched it, the bit did warrant a chuckle on my part, as it did my girlfriend, who is herself a tad obsessive over the series, when I showed it to her later. At that point, though, I was past the chuckling stage over the ending, and had moved on to wondering where the rest of the Clerks-style Norwegian comedy classic, out of which this short seems to have wandered, could be. Two loser geeks rambling smartly but to little positive effect about minor details in Star Wars movies? Sounds like Nordic Kevin Smith to me, especially with a lot of Ås waddling about the place.

I am still unsure about whether the title Loose Ends really works for this film, as I really don't see anything in the commonly accepted though ambiguous area of loose ends in it, nor is anything really left unresolved, nor is it Norwegian porn -- gay, straight or transgendered -- so it certainly couldn't stand for anything in the area. The title most definitely didn't prepare me for the fact that I would smacked straight off in the face with jokes about Jar Jar Binks and the slow, careful loading of an E.T. Pez dispenser. But, like the Yu Ming scene, Loose Ends set me immediately into wondering about the prevalence of American pop culture throughout the globe. Not so much about the effects of such prevalence, because I really don't care, and am, in fact, more concerned about the effects on our own country, and only regarding those things for which I hold distaste if not outright disdain.

I do not doubt that someone will take me to task for considering the Star Wars films wholly American as they were filmed to a great extent in England, Tunisia and points elsewhere, and with an international cast to boot. But, production-wise and creator-wise, they are just as American as Lucas' Graffiti, though if it helps matters for the nitpickers (with whom I would often fall into rank), we could just speak of this as English-speaking culture and be done with it.

In the end, we have a series of science fiction/fantasy films (let's not start that argument here) that are wildly popular throughout the world, are referenced constantly in American culture in all forms of media, and now, apparently, have inspired a Norwegian filmmaker to create his own slacker comedy short built around the incidental appearances of characters from other American films or from films in the same series which take place years in the future apart from the films under discussion (The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith).

That this became the subject of the film's dialogue charmed me from the start of Loose Ends, chiefly because I was not expecting it, especially from two guys (one of whom, unsurprisingly, is named Lars) driving through some undefined backstretch of the Norwegian road system in the middle of the night. I doubt if the subject were anything else of actual Scandinavian origin that I would have been drawn so quickly into the film. (Well, any subject except for lutefisk... that is so frightening and noxious a concept, that any film attempting to explain its supposed appeal has got to be fascinating straight through.) Suddenly, I am watching two fellows from a foreign land having a conversation that I could just as easily have with any of my own friends here in the States. And probably have had at some point.

But the film, perhaps befitting the shabbiness of its choice of Star Wars flicks, is only an amusing trifle and the initial charm starts to wear off before the conclusion. Even in a home where I am surrounded by Harryhausen posters, Universal Monster models and Bruce Campbell knick-knacks, geek culture grows increasingly thin with me the longer I am exposed to it through the voices or actions of others outside myself. It's the main reason I have yet to actually venture to Comic-Con, even though I live not that far away. It's the main reason I have only been in a comic shop twice in the last three years. And it's also the reason I have yet to attend a film festival down here. Perhaps it stems from a self-loathing, and I don't wish to be reminded of that which I have become, a person who has been sucked into a vortex of comics, music, toys and videos from which I know no reasonable escape. Not to say that I do not enjoy my trappings nor continue to add to my various collections. But I also recognize that perhaps with a little bit of self-restraint, I might have a real home now, instead of a massive pile of what largely boils down to nothing but paper and plastic representing junk culture crammed into an increasingly crowded apartment. Who knows what I might have done with the money I would have saved over the past 25 years? I might have done something bigger than just blowing wads of cash attempting to complete my Fantastic Four collection (which I never actually did) or tracking down those elusive Cowboy Bebop soundtrack import CDs (which were subsequently swiped from me). At least Yu Ming knew enough to cut his geek foray off after a couple of Gaelic-translated Travis Bickle lines.

And now you know why I am reluctant to be concerned about how our culture is affecting the rest of the world. Sometimes, I think they can just have it. And the Norwegians can certainly keep The Phantom Menace if they wish...

Director: Daniel O'Hara
Irish, 0:13, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

I have no facility for foreign languages. Some would say that even English gets the better of me most of the time. Even in a situation where it would behoove me to learn Spanish -- such as at work, where we often publish stories, sometimes my own, in what seems to be the predominant tongue of this region -- I find myself unable to negotiate my way through the Spanish language, except for a handful of words I absorbed through umpteen years vegging out in front of Sesame Street (peligro; abierto; cerrado...) I know that it would be wise to learn it, and it would greatly enhance my situation at work were I to get it down at least part of the way. Most of all, even achieving some small form of fluency would make it easier to converse with people on the street, and especially in my own neighborhood. But until I get a little pro-active and take a real course or at least hook up with that Rosetta Stone thing, I am a man displaced.

My chief fear in learning another language is in never getting the pronunciation of words correct enough to be even partially intelligible. A secondary fear is in getting the accent right, but not so much to avoid being mocked back by the targets of my international discourse, but more so that I don't appear that I am mocking them. You might think that I exaggerate these fears -- and it also might seem strange since I usually seem to revel in nothing but the mocking of others -- but I really have had nightmares about this recently. Even at work, after being introduced late last year to our new employee Jorge (but hearing him introduced as "George" to we gringos), I asked him which one he would rather I called him, Jorge or George. He said, "George. The way you say my real name is wack." Thus, in my ongoing tradition of dealing with things in my way, and not being comfortable calling him "George," his nickname of Proty was engineered (for reasons I have gone into elsewhere). I would rather invent new names than screw up the real ones.

And so, momentarily, I am keeping away from Spanish. My fears of being misunderstood or, far worse, insulting the ears of those with whom I wish to converse is running far too high at the moment. But my fears involving my transplanted acceptance are peanuts compared to those experienced by the lead character of the short film My Name is Yu Ming, the fourth entry on the Shorts! Volume 3 DVD collection. I moved from one state to another, where the official language remains the same no matter what is perceived politically to be the majority of residents speak here. Yu Ming leaves his native land of China to start his staid, boring existence over in an entirely new and foreign country, Ireland. A spin of a globe, the placement of a finger, a peek at the map, and Yu Ming is suddenly studying Gaelic (which he determines to do due to the atlas stating that Gaelic is the official language, where, in fact, according to the UNESCO site and charter, it shares that duty with English, with Gaelic as the first official language properly, and English as the second).

Yu Ming leaves the drudgery of his supermarket stocker's job and packs up for Ireland, momentarily suffused with renewed spirits from the knowledge that he has supposedly commandeered the helm of its native language, and is ready to pull into port and begin his life anew. (Actually, he takes a plane.) The signs of the airport and on the streets are all equally laden with slogans in both English and Gaelic, and so he is able to find his way easily wherever he wishes. But once he gets to his initial destination -- a small hostel, seeking shelter -- he is in for a rough time. No Gaelic spoken at all, just a very rough approximation of the Queen's English by a Billy Idol-type running the front counter, and the impression to all who surround Yu Ming is that he is not speaking Gaelic at all, but is actually speaking the language of that which his facial features corner him as representing. The Irish only hear the native language of their land pouring from Yu Ming's mouth as that of his own homeland. We find out later, through the timely interruption of a wizened pub-frequenter, that Yu Ming has, indeed, mastered Gaelic to such a degree that he is now amongst its most accurate deliverers.

It is an amusing prospect, and there are a handful of light laughs to be found in My Name is Yu Ming. Much of this is due to Daniel Wu's naturalistic portrayal of the lead character, who has a wide-eyed appeal that works well for Yu Ming's naive delving into a new land. Thanks to the juxtaposition of clashing cultures and tongues, and even the prospect of one language being mistaken for the other though being separated by many thousands of miles and continental and racial origin, the germ of the idea here is one which would be fun to explore deeper. But, in line with what does work here, My Name is Yu Ming is all surface, especially when taken through repeated viewings.

After my initial amusement at the predicament of this stranger in a strange land made even stranger by the fact that he arrives as one of its most fluent Gaelic speakers , there grows the realization that one is actually watching a 13 minute version of a Guinness commercial. Cut each of the scenes down to their primary elements and necessary exchanges, and down to five to ten seconds each at that -- something akin to editing this short into a trailer for it instead -- and a Guinness commercial is what you would have. Or, if shown during the just finished Beijing Olympics, it could have served as a Visa ad. Tack on the overly assured and slightly smarmy ending -- ignoring the fact that the scene takes place in a pub -- and you could easily mistake this for a Latter Day Saints happy-happy-life spot.

One could take this film to task for perhaps understating just how prevalent the use of the Irish tongue remains. One is led to believe here that only those who live in the farther reaches of the island continue to speak it at all. One is also led to believe that no one can understand a single word he is saying. I understand the conceit is that they believe he is speaking Chinese, but even later, when the elderly Paddy character is introduced, he lays down what are supposed to be the facts concerning the use of Gaelic -- that no one really speaks it anymore, that the signs using it are doing so out of tradition, etc. And even the bartenders, who are clearly familiar with the old man and should know full well that he speaks the old language of their land, think he is speaking Chinese just because he talks at length easily with Yu Ming. I also find it ridiculously hard to believe that at a youth hostel in a major Irish city, which revolves around serving tourists from a great many different places, backpackers of all types and curious travelers, that there wouldn't be someone on staff that spoke a smattering of Gaelic, if only to greet tourists in a polite and educational fashion.

Furthermore, I don't care what sort of superbly obsessed nebbish Yu Ming is, I just can't believe he can master the Irish language in only six months, and especially to such an extent that he is more fluent at it than the Irish themselves. If the film is, say, an Ace Ventura-type film, and Jim Carrey spits out a language mastery for Tlingit that he got down in a fortnight, you tend to believe it given the crazed proportions of the comedy already at hand. It's unbelievable, but so is everything surrounding it, and you therefore accept it. But this film is not the broadest of comedies, and its structure is far more natural and understated. In their efforts to bring their film to a cute, surface-satisfactory conclusion, the filmmakers undermine their structure and the whole thing crashes down with the slightest second glance.

Still, if anything, the film made me start thinking about my own second language attempts again. I am certain that if I just applied myself, and given the fact that I am already surrounded by co-workers and neighbors who gnash through it every day, that I can get Spanish down in three, four months. It will come out sounding like Chinese to their ears, but I will believe that I am speaking their language. And since it will sound like Chinese, they will look at my white-boy face and lightly reddish-blond hair, and they will think I am actually speaking Gaelic. And then, in my desperation to be understood, I will move to Ireland, where no one will understand me.

Except Yu Ming...

Director: Ryan Fleck
0:19, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

Half Nelson? What is that? A documentary about only one of Ricky Nelson’s offspring in a particularly ridiculous hair band from the ‘80s showing up for a gig?

Ah, I know what Half Nelson is… I just haven’t seen it yet. Even Oscar-nominated for Ryan Gosling’s performance and all that, I haven’t seen it. Even with a crack-smokin’ teacher and all that, I haven’t seen it. Honestly, it just didn’t sound like subject matter in which I would be particularly interested.

Then, without ever knowing the connection, I watched Gowanus, Brooklyn, the second of sixteen short films on the Shorts! Volume 3 DVD collection. Apparently, the film basically served as a demo reel for director Ryan Fleck to get a fleshed-out feature version with these characters made, the film we now know as Half Nelson. But I did not know this fact as I watched Gowanus, Brooklyn. I do not like to read the backs of DVDs before I view them; I would much rather be surprised, either happily or otherwise, by the result. All I knew was the title of the film, the name of the director (which I did not recognize, but will from now on) and that Gowanus ran a paunchy 19 minutes compared to most of the films on Shorts! Volume 3.

The result is that Half Nelson is now in the top spot of my Netflix queue. I cannot put off seeing it any longer. It isn’t that Gowanus is anything revolutionary as a film, but it is extremely intriguing. Gripping the viewer while understating the methods which caused such magic to be achieved, the film also slips away almost unnoticed. You reach a certain, small but necessary involvement with the two chief characters – a 12-year old practically latchkey girl and a genius schoolteacher caught up in a crippling crack addiction --  and then they are gone. Nineteen minutes has been reached without any awareness of the clock, like one was settling in for a feature... the short ignoring the normal laws of the short. Nothing is wrapped up; questions are raised but never answered. Some would see this as unfulfilling. I see it more in the way that a good short story can expand the reader’s imagination with a handful of perfectly detailed sentences, and does a service to the reader by allowing them to interpret the ending on their own, even letting them invent their own mythos for the characters, rather than forcefeeding them a trite, neatly packaged conclusion. Gowanus, Brooklyn operates as a blessedly unfinished and uniquely delicate miniature. We have a meet and greet with the main characters, we understand their pain and the salvation they possibly hold for each other, and then we are left to muse on what might happen to them. I don’t need to be told there is a happy ending. Likewise, if I wish to see the struggle that lies ahead for them, then so be it. Left on its own, I find Gowanus a most interesting place. I don't really need a feature to flesh it out for me.

And yet, I clearly did not get enough of Shareeka Epps’ performance as 12-year old Drey. Her part is mostly composed of discerning glares and stares, the machinery in her mind surmising each situation as it confronts her. But even with a minimum of dialogue, or perhaps due to this, she is mesmerizing. Matt Kerr, whose part would become the more famous and possibly more charismatic Mr. Gosling’s in the very near future, is perhaps not as winning, but Kerr brings a nice, deer-in-the-headlights uncertainty to his involvement with the young Epps, who catches him attempting to get high in the girls’ locker room after he coaches one of their games and they have departed for the evening. With a secret now held over him that could potentially end his teaching career, but sensing his pain and confusion, Drey intuitively allows him a secret of her own (no matter if it is a small, trivial thing compared to his life-threatening one), which allows them to share common ground. And a tentative friendship is born, albeit on extremely wobbly legs. And then the film ends -- questions posed, answers in limbo.

So, now the next Netflix film I shall receive this weekend will be Half Nelson. I am intrigued to see how Epps carries on her role in a longer production, and I want to see how Gosling expands and, from accounts as varied as nearly every film critic and festival board around the world, improves upon Kerr’s turn in the Mr. Dunne role. Apparently, Kerr himself even shows up in the feature version as another character, and this, too, has me interested. Mostly, I want to see where director Ryan Fleck intends to take the two characters, and how they will play out with the other characters established in Gowanus – the troublesome brother, the too-busy paramedic mother, the other girls in Drey’s class -- and how they will react to Drey's unlikely bond with a teacher.

It’s a form of interest I did not expect to get from just sliding into watching a mere short film on this DVD – how could I expect it, unless I read about it? For a person who loves chance discovery, this is like candy, no matter if I end up liking Half Nelson or not. As I said before, I would much rather be surprised. This surprise -- chancing upon this demo of a feature -- indeed, did turn out happily, if only for me. Most would feel such a bare bones work would leave them unfulfilled, but, were you to ask me, I would say that most can’t operate without being openly lead to solid resolution anyway. My world doesn’t work that way. There is little in the way of true resolution here, this flighty, generally ambiguous and unforgiving world. There are only more questions upon questions, all of which tend to result in answers that remain stubbornly recalcitrant. It doesn't bother me, though -- I don't need answers. I just need to understand how films like Gowanus, Brooklyn affect me. And in my short version of the world, isn’t my opinion the one that counts?

Hold on… please don’t answer that. Wait for the feature version instead...

I knew that I could only try it once. The whole point of my initial Netfluxxed Quiz on weird Netflix recommendations was that there was no way in hell anyone could predict that a movie like Flamenco could come out of a Buster Keaton silent comedy, a rough Ridley Scott sword duelling epic and a British TV series featuring Fry and Laurie as a posh ninny and his brilliant butler in the 1920's. (To see all the hubbub, click here and here.)

So, there is no point in continuing such a quiz. But I do wish to continue putting up these silly things, mainly because it gives me a quick post for those extra busy days (or those days when I am feeling "not so fresh"), but also because it is so damn silly. And for this round, it will also serve to celebrate the fact that, near the end of my fourth summer here in Southern California, I recently spent my first Sunday (albeit a mere couple of hours) on one of the many beaches here. Unlike most of Alaska, this beach had sand. And bikinis. And lots and lots of canines -- it was the Huntington Beach Dog Beach, right there in Surf City itself. And only some of the bikinis were on dogs.

And the place had a handful of surfers, which is why I am choosing the following two recommendations. First, the titles which inspired Netflix to recommend the first film, and all of them are probably somewhere in my 50 favorite films of all-time, if not an even more exclusive list with a number much smaller than 50:

Annie Hall - Woody Allen's Oscar-winning classic comedy with a spider as big as a Buick.
Blue Velvet - David Lynch's amazing whodunit, my romantic litmus test, and which also serves as the film with my all-time favorite movie walkout scenario.
A Clockwork Orange - The Kubrick film I always retreat to when I wish to smash an eggy-wegg (but not my pal Eggy).

Granted, according to the description of the documentary Surfwise: The Amazing True Story of the Paskowitz Family, about an aging surfing guru with nine kids who lives in a camper by the beach and dispenses odd life lessons, there is likely comedy in it which is both intentional and unintentional. And I haven't seen it, obviously, so I cannot fully judge if it really does fit in with these films. But it still seems like a big leap to connect three Oscar-nominated and/or winning narrative films to a doc about a hippie weirdo.

Now, for the other surfing recommendation. I will let Netflix do the talking for the documentary Blue Horizon:

This innovative surf video follows two-time surfing world champion Andy Irons and "soul-surfer" Dave "Rasta" Rastovich, comparing and contrasting their personal and professional styles. Director Jack McCoy spent a year shooting footage at exotic locations around the world to capture the excitement and passion of two very different athletes. In the process, he reveals how far the sport has come -- and how much further it could go.

And the film (not even a real film, actually, but a television special) which inspired this sports documentary recommendation?

The Best of Victor Borge.

I will also let Netflix do the talking for comparison:

Combining physical comedy and classical music to brilliant effect, Victor Borge was a pioneer in his field, and this performance features many of his greatest routines, including "Introducing Mozart," "My Favorite Barber" and "The Timid Page Turner." Borge also welcomes a pair of special guests -- soprano Marylyn Mulvey and pianist Sahan Arzruni -- who join him on stage for some hilarious moments.

Wow. Apparently it's a short swim from the beach to the stage at the Philharmonic.

Netflix, you're a wonder...

Director: Paul Morrison
Pathé/Momentum, 1:46, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

Last week, I wrote a piece about a film involving a young Brazilian lad with whom I was able to identify due to a shared love we both had for sport. In each case, it was a different, particular sport: mine, baseball; his, soccer. The connecting factor between us was that we both created worlds in which the trivia and paraphernalia surrounding each sport, rather than the sport itself, were the primary basis and focus of our individual obsessions. And each obsession was a way in which we could protect ourselves, sometimes to our detriment, from the familial strife surrounding us, though the boy from Brazil's problems perhaps a bit more political heft to them.

In Wondrous Oblivion, we meet another such lad, perhaps the third member of our party, though I am fairly certain that our true number, this group of game-obsessed, youthful dreamers, is in the tens of millions. Given the proliferation of fantasy sports leagues nowadays, perhaps this group has largely either moved fully beyond childhood for such matters, or childhood has now been stretched to Winsor McCay proportions. Regardless, David is a child of those displaced by the war, his parents being Jewish European immigrants. He and his family live in a home in a somewhat shabby area of London, though his father's successful grocery keeps the family getting on pretty well -- well enough to look for a bigger home in a better area -- and David in a boy's school, though he is generally not well accepted by the rest of his class.

Mostly, this is due to David being rather quiet and shy, and if they gave awards for portraying wide-eyed innocents for much of a film's running length as something near to a git, then the filmmakers would be rolling in the post-show bling. More than anybody else on earth possibly could, David loves cricket. The problem is that David sucks at it. Really, really sucks at it. Can't field, can't hit... the kid can barely throw the ball five feet, and never in a straight line. The one thing that kid has going for him is earnestness, though through my eyes, this just makes him seem a tad simple, and it seems to be that way for his schoolmates as well.

Enter the Samuels, the new next door neighbors from Jamaica. Mr. Dennis Samuels immediately erects an elaborate cricket net in their backyard, so they can practice bowling (what we would call pitching in baseball) and then hit the ball safely without smashing out every window in the neighborhood. Dennis has an adorable daughter named Judy with whom David will become enamored, mostly because she, too, is obsessed by cricket. Except her obsession stems from the fact that she is actually good at playing it, not just at mooning over the sport all misty-eyed.

This seems like the perfect scenario in which a withdrawn, cricket-mad lad can finally find the guidance he needs in the sport which he loves so much, sometimes to his detriment. Only, most of the neighborhood is unhappy with a black family moving in, and David's family is already under pressure due to their own racial background. When David becomes too close to the Samuels' family, David's parents will bear the brunt of the pressure from local racists and tsk-tsking neighbors, while David remains mostly encased in the comfort of his world where everything is cricket. Or what one of his teachers will describe as David's "wondrous oblivion."

This film, like the Samuels family for David, seemed like the perfect opportunity for myself as well. Unlike much of speed and power-obsessed America, where even baseball has become a "boring" sport, I actually enjoy a pastime even slower and more pastoral in nature. Even more so, I like being given chances to see the British love of cricket through more than just a random scene here or there. My pal Eggy leaped upon this knowledge and sent me a copy of the Bollywood film Lagaan a couple of years ago, and she was so right and wonderful to do such a thing. Right in my wheelhouse. I even watch the half-hour Cricket World wrap-up on one of the Asian cable networks every Sunday or so, and check the listings for that once-in-a-while test match that pops up on Fox Soccer Channel without any regularity whatsoever. So, to be handed a film that obsesses as much as its young protagonist over the sport seems too good to be true. Add to this the early '60s London atmosphere, the slow build of an integrated society, and a soundtrack filled with songs from the first wave of ska (a personal favorite genre of music), and it would seem that Wondrous Oblivion couldn't miss with me.

And yet, after 105 minutes of merely average drama, I was left wanting so much more. Not that I wanted anything terrible to happen to any of the main characters (except maybe David, who I wanted to punch in the temples every once in a while), but the mounting threat of the violence comes off almost cartoonish, like it wandered in from Absolute Beginners (where at least it seemed far more dangerous, even while being enveloped by lip-synced musical numbers). Everything in this film is all threat -- the possible romance between David's cute, marriage-stunned mother and Mr. Samuels (played by Delroy Lindo, an actor I have never really enjoyed much, in what may be his most perfect role) is all bluff, and ultimately plays false -- and even the cricket scenes are this way. Where I am pleased with the detail to the minutiae of the game, once David learns to play and even become one of the best in his school at the game, the film tails off and doesn't allow us to truly revel in his success. They try to compensate at the end with a scene involving some top-flight stars of the game, but there aren't any fireworks to it. It becomes as workaday as the rest of the film.

Even this "wondrous oblivion" David lives in really doesn't come off. The fantasy elements are too underplayed -- almost thankfully, since they are dreadfully done as it is -- for them too work in the piece at large. David's player cards, which he collects throughout the film, come to life in his eyes as he plays his tabletop games, and the effect strikes a note of discord with the rest of the film. It just doesn't match. And so, too, goes the phrase "wondrous oblivion." At the beginning of the film, his teacher says the phrase in reference to David, and somehow the kid picks it up as a personal catchphrase. He uses it whenever something strikes his fancy, but honestly, even though we are told he is a good student, David seems just a tad too daft to pick up on anything, especially a softly whispered minor insult. As a screenwriting device, and as a title, "wondrous oblivion" comes off as too forced.

As a film, though, it is anything but forced. It's a walk in the park where you meet a couple of scary muggers, but they are on their day off. It's wistful nostalgia without any sort of grounding on which one can plant their feet for a rest. I don't want to actually dissuade people from seeing it, as it is, on first glance, a well-made film. Their are decent performances from Emily Woof as the mother, and the aforementioned excellent Lindo. The ska music is fine, the party scene is teasing, and the cricket is grand. But don't read "well-made" as "well-crafted," though.

Wondrous Oblivion is too caught up in its own fantasy that it is already doing everything right to really care to do it right. And that, on any field, is an "all out."

Those with Netflix will know instantly to what I am referring here. Ever log on to Netflix and check out your Recommendations page? I normally don't. I try to use a more intuitive and organic approach to discovering films, and enjoy making it more of a "found item" journey than one in which one corporation tries to force-feed me the goods of another corporation. But every once in a while, I like to check the Recommendations page out, mainly because its a quick and simple way to add more ratings to Netflix (which I am, now that I think of it, unsure of why I even do that since, ultimately, the only real reason to do that is to get things recommended to you -- which I don't like...)

Most of the time Netflix makes some sort of sense with their recommendations. Take, for instance, the fact they are recommending Madea's Family Reunion to me because I highly rated both Malcolm X and The Color Purple. Recommending Futurama Season 3 to me because I loved The Simpsons Movie, Futurama Season 1 and The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror is a no-brainer. I get that, even though they should probably figure that if I am that far into the Groening oeuvre, then I am probably hip to Season 3 of Futurama already.

But then, Netflix produces some amazing whoppers. I am reminded of the Patton Oswalt bit about his first experience with TiVo, where he watches The Man from Laramie, a classic Anthony Mann western, and the next morning, TiVo has completely filled up with "horsie shows," a phrase Oswalt speaks in TiVo's voice, which most of us would recognize to be that of a stereotypical mentally disabled person. TiVo throws a fit trying to defend its decision, and Oswalt moans "Thank god, you don't have retard strength, TiVo..."

Hopefully, Netflix doesn't either, because I am launching a new series here, in which I will give any of my readers out there the title of the films that Netflix uses as the basis of its recommendation, and then a couple of days from now, I will let you know the actual title of the movie it actually thought would be a decent match to the previous set of films. I will even give you some capsule hints to each "enjoyed" film so that you can see just how far-ranging Netflix has gone to suggest something to me. If you can actually match my answer, I will try to come up with some sort of prize. I will be completely honest, but I can almost guarantee you, there is not a single chance in all of the Chinese hells (the Chinese have a lot of hells, you know) that you will guess it. If you do guess it, then you are probably a drone recommendation program for Netflix...

NETFLUXXED QUIZ #1
Because you enjoyed:
1. Seven Chances (1925, directed by Buster Keaton, silent, black and white comedy, Buster runs down a mountain chased by a zillion women who want to marry him to get to his fortune)

2. The Duellists (1977, Ridley Scott's directorial debut, based on a Joseph Conrad story, Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel are soldier rivals who duel with swords throughout the Napoleonic age)

3. Jeeves and Wooster: Season Three (1992, classic British TV comedy, P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie doing what they do best... make Jen and I laugh uproariously)

Based on these choices, can you guess what Netflix recommended? The answer on Friday...

[Originally published on The Cinema 4 Pylon, August 1, 2008]

Director: Christopher Smith
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

Dozens of bear traps. The torture dungeons. The booby-trapped woods. And a busload of whiny, horny, corporate-type arms dealers. Oh, yes… and a pair of Hungarian hooker hotties.

Seems like heaven for a B-film drooler, doesn’t it?

Severance, a British horror flick that comes packaged with a healthy dose of actual humor (and much needed, too, considering how easily this one could have slipped into mere torture porn territory) seems like that drooler's version of heaven (and often, I am that very drooler), and in fact, much of it is kind of nifty and lightly smart as well. Sure, the bulk of the characters are annoying, but they need to be annoying so you have someone to cheer getting bumped off. I enjoyed it more than I did either of the Hostel movies, and far more than any of the increasingly ridiculous and bloated Saw series. It also helps that the lead actress is just the sort of kittenish pixie I fall for over and over again in the movies.

So, why do I come so close to giving Severance a pass? And despite the fun I had, why won’t it make its way into my collection? Why doesn’t it quite measure up for me to some of the classic horror-comedies or even some of the better genre films from the past two decades? What is it about Severance that disappointed me if it was obviously not much of a chore to get through the first time?

The last question raises yet another one, but it is a question which answers the previous three: it is one regarding re-watchability… “Do I want to go through all of this again?” For me, so often the key to my enjoyment, especially in a genre picture, is the knowledge that somewhere in the future I will return to see that particular film again. It’s a mood that overtakes often about halfway through, where I sense the certain delight in store by renewed face time with this story. In the case of Severance, I asked “Do I wish to tread down this dark-as-pitch path again, ready to once more encounter these characters and their really not-too-unique situation?” (I say this since we have been inundated recently with roughly similar scenarios, just without the twist that these are all co-working sheep basically being led to the slaughter.)

The answer would have been “Yes” with just a little bit more cohesion to the backstory – perhaps making it more openly a cleansing system for a crooked operation -- and with that certain something that I find so lacking in many of the genre efforts today: a steadier, more consistent tone. My frustration with Eli Roth’s efforts so far (which my buddies and I were discussing just the other day at lunch) has been due to inconsistent tone and an almost flailing attitude towards dialogue and structure. Roth’s talent is so obvious, and eventually, there could be a truly terrific film coming out of him. And so it goes for the makers of Severance. There is an attempt here to make more than just a standard psychos-in-the-woods film. It’s a shame that one never really gets caught up in the insane situation in which the chief characters are trapped. For a while, there is a drift from one tart-tongued zinger to the next, and then the film will drop the snappy patter for some generic horror action, instead of fully incorporating any of the disparate elements into one cohesive, fulfilling scene.

The prime disappointment though, is in not fully realizing either the location or the prop devices which are at the ready for the filmmakers. We see a field full of traps but only a couple are ever employed; the same goes with the landmines. There are pits, nooses, loops and spikes galore at large in the section of the Hungarian wilderness where Severance takes place. But the manner in which they are triggered from scene to scene is far more rote than one would wish from a film that is so inventive for short bursts of time. I know you take what you can get with some directors, but I really wish a film with this kind of set up were being attempted by someone with even half the vision or energy of a Raimi or a young Pete Jackson. I kept imagining the film would build ever bigger on the wacky stunts early in the film, but such grander things never occur. Yet again, as I stated the other day, my maxim of “This much, and no more” seems to have taken the filmmakers by hand, leading them from scene to scene via the easiest route possible. All it would have taken was one solitary scene which lived up to my expectations, and I would have been much more satisfied with the entire effort. I would have praised the makers of this film far past the point they probably deserved, and I would have looked forward to their next production with a deeper reserve of optimism.

I am still looking forward to director Christopher Smith's next joint -- a Bermuda Triangle thriller weirdly titled (hold for breath here) Triangle -- but I must admit I’m only mildly hopeful of the outcome. If you take a forest full of gimmickry and weaponry and only render it slightly above generic, and about two or three notches below its potential, there’s probably not much more you are going to accomplish in your career that is worthwhile. Hopefully, Mr. Smith will notice that ships are top-loaded with all manner of potentially interesting items and objects, and the ocean likewise filled with sharks and various creatures, which can be employed to create outrageous situations through which the characters must battle and eventually extricate themselves. Not just, "here's the scenario... ooh, isn't this dangerous?... how will they ever get out?... oh, they got out..."

Severance, for all its fun, whimpers out near the end, the threats stop being actually threatening, and somewhat becomes the simple-minded paintball game it mocks earlier in its script. The villains, so looming in the early parts of the story, become stooges, but not the style of stooges that the premise sets you up for: to be dispatched in increasingly elaborate ways, not just to be knocked down like so many harmless clay pigeons.

How can I be this mean to a film I actually liked? It's what makes the difference between a film like The Evil Dead and a film that merely emulates and strives to be The Evil Dead. It's what separates the men or women from the boys or girls. The films that truly contain a manic, unfettered imagination and those that play at it. The films that make me want to watch movies, not the passionless ones that merely fill up time and space (but certainly not my shelf space).

For the time being, though, Mr. Smith will have to bunker down at Camp Squandered Opportunities, the summer home of wayward film crews. Hopefully, he won’t neglect the two hot Hungarian hookers in the same fashion.

Cinema 4 Rating: 7

Just like the once seemingly lost battle I fought for far too many years in the past regarding watching films in widescreen ratios (and because its the generally the same group of people griping about both), subtitles seem to vex a lot of Americans. They don't want to have to read when they go to the theatre, and it appears that most of them would really like to do it even less at home on a much smaller screen. (Hell, I think a lot of them just don't want to read, period.) Nix the subtitles then, my friends, and watch it dubbed. But please don't complain or mock the film when the dubbing doesn't sync properly or makes the film look cheap. You got us into this mess with your phobia of being forced to read off a screen. Or maybe you prefer the dubbing, Americans, so you don't have to hear someone speak a language other than English. Anything, you say, just don't remind us that there are other cultures outside (or even inside) our borders, or that there is anything going on outside of our increasingly sheltered country.

My own knowledge of world cinema is, I hope, better than the average person, and I never shy away from subtitles. In fact, I adore them. But despite this, I must make an admission. The bulk of my foreign film watching is derived from seven places (I am not counting primarily English-speaking lands in this), in order: Japan, China, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden and India. Of late, Korea has been pulling up to the pack. But Brazil? One of the biggest countries in the world? What have I seen from there? I have four fingers on my right hand, and each finger accounts for a single Brazilian film that I have seen up until the point that Manda Bala landed in my mailbox late last week. The four fingers add up to City of God, which I think everyone with even the slightest interest in cinematic excellence should see, and three of Marins' Coffin Joe horror flicks, of which I feel the opposite (though, speaking for sick little me, I dig them). And that is it for Brazilian films for me. Comparatively, I've seen nothing at all.

Of course, I have seen films which have taken place in Brazil (The Emerald Forest, for example), or involved the country in them for a handful of scenes or referenced in dialogue, often for people fleeing to the country for some nefarious reason. (I suppose that I could add Brazilian erotica into the mix, but then that wouldn't leave the fingers on my other hand free...) And I have seen the occasional television program dealing with the rain forest. But these images are fleeting, and except for City of God, no real sense of the people or the political workings of the country can truly be derived from them. (And for the last time, Gilliam's Brazil has nothing to do with anything in Brazil. It's just an old song...)

Until Manda Bala showed up in the mailbox and became the thumb on my right hand. Though it is not actually a Brazilian film by creation -- it is a documentary directed and largely produced by Americans -- it has done just as much to allow me to see the true nature of Brazil in a way that only City of God has done for me. Not only did it open my eyes to concepts that I had heard fleetingly about but had never really considered deeply -- kidnapping as a business -- or concepts I had never considered at all -- the cottage industries, like bulletproof cars and plastic surgeons who specialize in building new ears for kidnap victims from their own rib cartilage, that spring up as a result of kidnapping becoming a business -- but it introduced to my crowded head the concept of frog farms.  As in, farms that specialize in breeding frogs for eventual devouring by humans.

Seriously, I knew people ate frogs (or at least, frog legs), but not on my watch. It's just something that has never happened around me. Not that I am against one of my friends eating a frog around me, and even last weekend at the OC Fair, there was an open opportunity for it to occur. It just hasn't happened, and frankly, it's not something which I am going to do myself. I'm at peace with amphibians of all stripes. I like holding them or petting them once in a while, but that's it. As a result, I had never really considered that anyone would make even a halfway decent living raising or shipping them, outside of the pet industry.

Manda Bala not only starts us off at a pretty well-sized frog-farming outfit, and shows us details of the farming along with interviews with the slightly befuddled proprietor of the establishment, but it also uses the frog farm concept as an overall metaphor for the state of the poor in Brazil as a whole. It's a metaphor that you are going to have to sit through the credits to fully ingest, but it's a strong one for sure. I was slightly reminded during the frog butchering scene at a restaurant -- and please beware of it, my weaker-stomached friends, if the idea of seeing living frog throats cut, bodies stripped of skin, and the eventual weirdly composed shot of a trio of decapitated, almost smiling frog heads on a counter makes you feel wiggy --  of the rabbit-skinning scene in another more famous and equally provocative documentary, Michael Moore's Roger and Me.

Though completely different in style, I was reminded of it in more ways than one, because like Moore's film, Manda Bala is also a tale of corruption and the deep and abiding rift between the classes. Here the similarities end, because this film is a far more violent tale in the end, and perhaps more complex. A tale of squandered opportunities and laundered monies. A tale where the rich take advantage of the poor economically, but the poor in turn take their own physically direct (and eventually, mental) advantage of the rich via the violence of kidnapping or outright murder, and where those in between often become the nouveau riche by taking advantage of the entire situation.

To be fair, the film is stacked against one politician in particular, Jáder Barbalho, a lifelong mover and shaker from the state of Pará, who resigned from his role as President of the Senate to avoid impeachment after facing numerous corruption and embezzlement charges from his critics. Nothing major though... just the disappearance of, oh, I don't know, over a billion dollars from a federal developmental agency, SUDAM, with which Barbalho had major pull. One of the accusations against him is that he helped influence numerous phony SUDAM projects through which much of the missing money was laundered. And one of these projects -- surprise, surprise -- is a frog farm. (See? I never would have even thought to launder money that way.)

I will go no further, for there is much to discover for those interested in delving into a deeply fascinating, though rather confusing, film. It sometimes does seem like director Jason Kohn has bitten off a little too much, but somehow it all pulls together. There are interviews with victims of the kidnappers, one of the kidnappers himself, and the people who profit from the violence. We see how bulletproof cars are built, the different steps in farming those omnipresent froggies, and get some amazing footage from the ear-replacement surgery. We see some of the harrowing footage sent by the kidnappers to their victims' families (themselves victims in all of this, now that I think of it), including one of the men getting a section of his earlobe lopped off. It might seem quaint with its gentle opening at a frog farm, but this is not a film for the weak of heart. It's is a film suffused with -- if not actually showing it in most cases -- the violence at the core of a culture which has found it necessary to turn deeper towards it for survival. Such is the history of man, I suppose. And Brazil’s history, more than ever, is everyone's history.

And all the more reason for those that shun subtitles to quit complaining, brother, and shut up and read. Or learn to read. Or learn to speak Portuguese. Whatever you have to do to be able to see one of the most fascinating if not bizarrely constructed documentaries I have ever seen. (I won't bother to tell you it's in widescreen, too, because I wouldn't want to stack the deck against you seeing it.)

Yihe Yuan [Summer Palace]
Director: Lou Ye
Chinese, 2:20, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

I am nothing in this world, and I am too much for this world. How shallow everyone must be to never realize how unfathomable I am. How can they not know that I am unknowable? Is that unreasonable of me? Don’t dare to ask…

I am given a DVD of Summer Palace, but I have already seen The Unbearable Lightness of Being a dozen years ago, and so I don’t see the point. I watch it anyway, and find that I am alternately this and that. Don’t ask me what “this and that” are; they could be one or the other, but each are as much a mystery to me as myself, and therefore, not only would I never understand, but you would never understand either. And now, out of both of our confused states, we will sleep with each other, and then I will cry for some unknown reason in the darkness. And you will still never understand.

Out of an oath of fealty to the art of nudity, I continue watching Summer Palace. This is an easy oath to fulfill, as there seems to be some form of sex scene every 14.2 seconds in Summer Palace. The female lead is most fetching, and that too makes the oath easy to fulfill, and also easy on the eyes. But I can never understand her need to fill her unknowable sadness with increasing amounts of confused, empty sex. And yet, she can never, outside of having empty sex every now and then, be with the man whom she claims is “standing on the same side of the world” with her.” Why? Why ask. You would never understand, she will never understand, and… Damn it! What do you want from her anyway? Can’t you see she’s sad? And naked… again…

All of this starts out before the Tiananmen Square riots, and then once they happen, we are supposed to possibly understand how irrevocably the events of that incredible summer changed the lives of these people, especially the sad, naked girl. Or not. Honestly, I didn’t get the impression that any of them really dwelled upon Tiananmen Square later at all or even at the time. They probably pretty much ran around with sparklers and made out while it was happening (hard to tell with the whirling cinematography), and since no ever talks about it in the film outside of a couple of almost parenthetical references, there is almost a genuine feeling (and mind you, I am certain this is completely off-base but I am merely stating that it is simply a feeling) that the rest of the film was made first and then the director decided that his film just needed a touch more political material, so he shoots an additional Tiananmen scene. Then people can write about how touching it is that these characters have been so changed by this earth-shattering tragedy, and how their worlds are torn apart, and how everyone in her little collegiate group spins about terribly on their respective axises, and the sad, naked girl ends up getting even more sad and even more naked.

I discover between several pauses for bathroom breaks, leg stretching and dog-walking that the problem of Summer Palace is one of constants. All of these characters essentially remain the same. Especially the sad, naked girl, around whom everyone seems to spin. It's hard to tell why, since she is clearly a nutjob from scene... well, maybe two or three, and she hardly veers from that path at all in the course of almost 2 1/2 hours of not particularly deep soul-searching and smoldering looks of frustration. Maybe it has more to do with the nakedness and less with the sadness that people seem to flock to her. Sure, she actually does get nuttier and nuttier throughout the film, at one point curling up in a ball in an empty swimming pool while her voice intones how lost and sad and slutty she is, even while pining for a love she can never fully claim because, damn it, she is just so obsessed with her own inner sadness. But she starts out at such a high level of fucked-upness, and little explanation is given why, that litle sympathy can be engendered. She is clearly one of the most self-obsessed losers in film history.

And if you can point to me the moment in the film where anything that happens at Tiananmen Square actually affects her in any way -- because she is so consumed with her own craziness, that there is no way she was probably even aware it meant anything at all -- then you must be a similarly styled headcase. Better sleep with that guy over there right now, because he could turn out to be the love of your life, and you wouldn't want to deny him the opportunity to hear you spurn for self-absorbed reasons.

Years pass in Summer Palace, and the characters grow up and they go here and there and couple up for various reasons or break apart for various reasons or travel for various reasons, and Tiananmen Square doesn't seem to mean a goddamn thing to any of it. It would be like doing a movie about a group of Colonials who hang around during the Boston Tea Party, and then go build sandcastles for the rest of the film, never once mentioning everything else going on around them. Maybe the impression director Lou Ye (or Ye Lou or whatever...) is trying to impart is the Tiananmen Square actions are so hard to fully understand, and so warped in its political dimensions and all of the various groups involved (there is an interesting moment where the students have to go perform requisite military training that I assume is supposed to be ironic, but then again, I'm not sure anything in this film is meant to be ironic. Or maybe everything is...) Five good minutes of Internet research could probably yield to me just enough information regarding the events that I would then go "Oooohh, that's what he meant..."

But after slogging through Summer Palace, I just wanted a nap. And not even with a sad, naked girl. I've dealt with enough sad-crazy in my life already. I just wanted a nap, so I could power up for a long, epic-seeming film that actually pays off somehow in the end; a film that makes one actually feel like the journey was worth it. Instead, I got a film with numerous well-composed scenes which would get me all caught up for minutes at a time before being hit with yet another sex scene, and then the sad, naked girl's endless explanations as to why she is so sad and so frequently naked. And then, instead of being pleased that a serious drama was so kind to keep my interest by throwing liberal doses of naughty, naughty sex my way (there is considerable passion in many of these scenes), I just get more frustrated because I simply cannot care for her in any fashion whatsoever. And therefore, I don't give a crap what happens to her, or any of her friends.

If the point of Summer Palace is actually "here's a group of people, and here's why you won't give a crap about them"... well, I can find that in about 90 percent of the films I run across. Luckily, in those other films, some evil force or demonic slasher does away with those people, and I can get some small amount of pleasure at seeing the herd thinned. Here, though, the film tries to convince you from the start that it is so much more, and has a lot to say about something. Gosh, that's noble and all, but the film is ruined from the start by giving us a mostly uninteresting lead character who is so obsessed with her own sadness, madness and mortality. I can get the same story by buying a pack of smokes for any girl hanging out at a Hot Topic, buying her fake goth gear, brooding about the exact same thoughts.

And so I left Summer Palace feeling extremely underwhelmed. Or did I? If it so hard to tell anymore, getting all lost in thought like this. Maybe it did its job after all, and maybe I secretly liked the film despite how pissed off it seems to have made me outwardly. Maybe this film is the film I have been looking for all my life -- oh, hold on... someone just got shot down my street... oh, that's too bad... where was I?... oh, yes -- but I am just too caught up in myself to realize that I need this film around. No, I must shun Summer Palace -- I must turn it away! I must break up with it, because I can't live without it! It just couldn't possibly work out -- I am too, too doomed to be sad and lonely...

Oh, I don't know... I guess I just wasn't meant to understand...

Cinema 4 Rating: 7 

I didn’t really think about it at the time, but in retrospect, it almost seems like the arrival of the Africa Unite screener from Spout in late January was an intentional tie-in to the annual Black History month held the following month. After all, watching it and reviewing it would, if things went the normal course, cause my own review to be placed up on Spout in that month of African-American celebration. I, myself, am not, to the best of my knowledge, of that particular descent, except perhaps in the manner that we all are of this planet descended eventually by way of that continental plate. But this does not mean that I don’t have any great interest in this very important, and generally neglected, aspect of the history books. It’s just that I was thinking, at the time of its arrival, as Africa Unite being a mere “concert film.”

Unfortunately, circumstance precluded a viewing of the screener occurring in my household until just last night, the final night of Black History Month, and just after I had found myself caught up in its celebration throughout the previous couple of weeks – purely by accident. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled showed up in my mailbox from Netflix, although I had already seen the film a couple of times, and had quite forgotten it was still in my queue after I had already seen it on cable so many months before. I took a nap one night, and awoke to find Jen watching Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s exemplary PBS series African-American Lives, mainly because it was the only thing interesting she could find on television. A most intriguing twenty minutes of the tail end of that episode found me watching the whole of its next showing, and then recording its next two-hour installment, so captivating is its take on both African-American culture – and American culture in general. Finally, our first trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach found ourselves also taking in the African Heritage Festival being held in its open areas, where I was able to peruse firsthand much of the segregationist signage and openly racist commercial products of the twentieth century (as well as catch up on my George Washington Carver knowledge).

And still, I didn’t think to include Africa Unite in this mix, believing it to be pretty much a straightforward concert built around the 60th birthday celebration of the late reggae superstar Bob Marley. A listing of the names in the credits was enough to make me believe this, featuring a plethora of Bob’s many similarly surnamed offspring and widow Rita, as well as listing the Fugees’ gorgeous Lauryn Hill in the mix, as well as a few other world music stars, like Angelique Kidjo (who is marvelous in her brief footage). The other reason for my misconception is my need to not be influenced by packaging and outside critical opinions. Thus, I did not read the three paragraphs on the back of the DVD, which would have illuminated me as to the actual contents of the film.

Not that I would have necessarily sought this movie out apart from getting a copy of it from Spout, but if I had run into it eventually, I would have been surprised (as I was last night upon watching it) that it isn’t that standard “concert film” of which I assumed it to be. Because, what I found myself really faced with was both a sobering lesson in the damages that colonialism wrought upon the people of the continent, and also the stirrings of a surge of hope that perhaps the youth of Africa, by uniting (hence the title) -- beyond any of the borders laid down upon them when their continent was sliced into digestible sections by European rule and plunder – as one people, they can rise above the many problems that keep it a second-class citizen – poverty, disease (especially the ravaging menace of HIV), and the war that divides numerous African nations internally – even in the third world. Danny Glover, a producer here and celebrity promoter of the concert and cause, delivers a stirring speech a third of the way through that makes one wish he would quit the bad movies in which he has largely been mired for the last few years and use his fame to fight even more for his personal and political beliefs.

There are concert sequences to be had (and perhaps too few of them), but at least half of the film is dedicated to laying out the foundation of the “united Africa” vision, included old newsreel footage from the ‘30s through the ‘70s. Especially interesting to me, after some thirty years of hearing Marley and his ilk sing the praises of Haile Selassie, was to be given the opportunity to learn more about the man -- though they would say “living god,” an appellation with which I personally hold zero faith -- who inspired them. Hearing his name invoked in song, or singing along with Rastafarian phrasing is one thing; to be able to see large sections of film footage about the late Ethiopian emperor and groundbreaking African leader, and to allow him to become an actual once-living being in one’s mind, is a very powerful thing indeed. Combined with explanations and film footage about the Belgian Congo and other colonial clashes with the rightful citizenry of the various lands, it all helps the viewer put a political context to the music at last. Sure, one could do the footwork on their own and discover this information, but most people – even those who would most benefit from its discovery – won’t go that far. Better to use the allure of some grand music and famous musicians, including one of the most famous in the history of entertainment, to help open people’s minds to the possibilities in store for Africa.

My one major gripe with the film is that it could have easily been a half hour longer, by pumping up the live music portions for that extra time. Sure, the full DVD apparently comes with “Over 45 Minutes of Complete Concert” footage as a bonus feature, but knowing this without readily available access does me no good, and as I have now seen the film and only have a minor interest in reggae, I will likely never see this footage. (And did Lauryn Hill actually go all the way to Ethiopia for this conference and not perform?)

Sure, this Africa Unite thing could all be a pipe dream (or a spliff dream, given we are speaking here of reggae), since the plan hinges on people from tribes from many disparate regions actually getting along and working together. It’s one thing to say “Hey, we are all going to get along!” but it’s another thing to practice it. You might also cynically state, “This cooperation never really works here; why should it there?” But the game of the cynic (and I have often been lumped into their company throughout my life, and sometimes rightfully) is a tired one, especially in a situation such as this, where sometimes the hope of brighter days ahead is all that carries these people forward through the pain that sometimes can overtake reality. It’s one of the reasons I can never wholly discount the faith that others place on their religious beliefs, despite my own atheism, because if there is something that allows people some sort of hope for the future – whether it be political or personal freedom, or even a belief in what I consider to be a fantasy afterlife – and it makes them happier and better people to belief this, then so be it. Whether or not I agree with the tenets of Rastafari is beside the point. As long as this dream for a united Africa is achieved through non-violence and the democratically derived consent of the vast majority of its peoples, anyone of any faith (or lack of it) can speak up to bring it to fruition.

And Africa needs a whole lot of people believing in the same dream to help it reach that brighter future. Africa Unite is a good starting primer on this dream.

Director: Charles Binamé // Canadian, 2005
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

Of course we generally go to movies in which we either have an interest in a personality involved in the film, whether it be a star or director or even the author of the source material, or we love a particular genre and wish to see new examples of such, or we have heard or deduced that there is an element within the plot which forms that interest. In most cases, those that love dinosaurs are more apt to see a film if it involves dinosaurs than a film that doesn't, and more so than those that don't appreciate large, lumbering prehistoric beasts.

The wall into which I have slammed my nose time and again through the brief period I have been part of the Spout Mavens group is constructed firmly by layers of DVDs containing films and subjects which I have absolutely zero interest in confronting in real life. And I have mentioned this time and again as well, though I have managed thus far to spew out some sort of nonsense resembling what is commonly called a review, if only to fulfill my obligations to the group. Were I an actual reviewer for a paper or television, I would regularly face off against such films, and most likely the bulk of them would be the sort of Hollywood pap that I usually am lucky to avoid. The beauty of simply blogging about films is that I can pick and choose my victims, and if I end up seeing a film that I hate unreservedly, most assuredly it is within a genre or regarding a subject which I normally find attractive, if indeed it isn't merely a starlet or a favorite actor that hasn't waltzed across my scope. And I found myself hoping that someday a disc might arrive from Spout which fell more into my comfort zone.

One finally did. Or so it would seem. Five years ago, The Rocket, a most intriguing biographical profile of Montreal hockey god Maurice Richard, would have plopped into a recliner in that comfort zone and propped its skates up on the ottoman for a pleasant but tough evening's entertainment. But not now. Five years ago, that was when I still mostly cared about sports, and the last time I gave two shits for hockey. Now, I'm living in a city proudly boasting the current Stanley Cup champions, and I have yet to even consider getting a ticket to a game since I moved here. The closest I have come is shaking a fist at the Honda Center ("The Pond-a") because of all the traffic gumming up the surrounding streets following a Cup victory, while we were trying to get home from the movies. I have never seen a live NHL game, so you'd think this would be on my list of worthwhile pursuits. And yet, I am still quite well-versed on most of the major sports to this day. But here's the rub (and you might be surprised to find that it has nothing to do grumbling about striking millionaires): while I talk a good game at work, the truth is that I have grown increasingly tired of sports. I now find the devotion required to follow such events to be an ever emptier pursuit.

Yes, I follow the Packers as much as I have throughout my life, but only to keep a conversational touchstone with my father. Outside of this team, I do not watch the NFL at all. Once the Pack is out of the playoff picture, the picture on my TV switches to a movie. I barely have a favorite team in any other sport anymore, outside of baseball. And while I can still work up a lather of concern over a Mariners or Reds game even in late May, my stock in baseball overall has dipped to an all-time low on the index. I've never believed ever that baseball was the Great Game of Innocence that its most ardent defenders constantly assure us was the historical case -- pro baseball has always been graced by a certain level of playful corruption -- but it is going to be hard to go to Angel Stadium next spring and pretend that the efforts on the field aren't the work of nefarious outside chemistry. The harshest part for me when watching sports now, and especially the fans, is remembering Seinfeld's statement that, due to the yearly turnover of players on any given team, that all we are really doing is "rooting for laundry." Since I do not generally subscribe to landmass allegiances, why would I do this for a sports uniform? It's hard to continue the rah-rah-sis-boombah once that gets earwormed into your brain. (The funniest part? My bread is buttered by my 9-to-5 work for a sports organization. Ironic, no?)

One other fear I had to quell before diving into The Rocket was the problem that most sports movies have: that certain lack of inertia that comes when these films hew too closely to the tried-and-true formula. I'm not going to repeat the formula; we have all faced it time and again, nearly every time a sports movie comes out. Certainly more than just sports movies can give a viewer the feeling that they know exactly how a film is going to end; following the generic sports movie formula, a viewer can know exactly how every reel will end. Double this feeling when the film is also supposed to serve as biography. Certainly, there are many great sports movies, and the best of them (Raging Bull, Eight Men Out, The Pride of the Yankees) generally concentrate more on the tortured psyches or fractured bodies of the athletes who did or didn't win, rather than on what they won and who they beat to do it. Not all winners are necessarily heroes, (nor losers, villains, as it turns out), but the sports formula, with its comeback training montages, its inspirational speeches or the right person taking a seat in the stands just when it seems all is lost, generally doesn't recognize that fact. The formula films, when fused with biography, also confuse surface facts with viewer interest. Look, we all know who won the game and who lost -- we saw it on TV or read it in the paper; nothing would be more boring to me than watching a film about a team that wins the World Series by actually showing them winning the World Series. Give us a look at what it takes to even face off in such a competition, let alone the mettle it takes to actually persevere in it. Even Rocky, which sets out initially to be one of these types of formula flicks, was slightly more concerned about getting Rocky laid, and since people remember every element of his rise to the near top (especially the montages), they often forget that he loses the closing fight.

The Rocket couldn't be less concerned structurally with who won the games; it just wants to show us what drove Richard to play the way he did. Far beyond my expectations, The Rocket not only show us Maurice Richard's mettle, but how he built it punch by punch over several years through battles both on the ice and in the NHL league offices. The film opens in chaos in 1955, a dozen years and three Stanley Cups into his pro career, as we hear radio reports of thousands of Montreal fans hitting the streets in an infamous riot protesting NHL president Clarence Campbell's presence at a game after Richard was given a huge suspension (rest of the season and through the playoffs) for decking a linesman. How did it get to this point? And how did Richard inspire such devotion? The reasons were possibly far more politically and socially driven than it might seem at first, seeing how it stemmed from a mere hockey game.

The film then jumps backward to 1937 to bring us Richard's hardscrabble formative years in Junior Hockey and his struggles to land a spot on Quebec's Montreal Canadiens of the NHL, all the while supporting his young wife as a low-paid machinist. Through his battles on the ice, constant bickering with the league's front office, and constantly striving to prove himself both to his coach and himself, Richard surges stubbornly forward over every obstacle, taking revenge on his on-ice oppressors and firing back at his critics via the press. To a complete outsider to Québécois culture (and largely one to what it takes to succeed in hockey), such as myself, this appears to be mere bullheadedness, but then we begin to see a fuller portrait of a man who simply refuses to let anyone push him around or tell him how he should behave, be it a father-in-law, a coach, an entire league, or anyone believing him to be an idiot because of his Francophone heritage.

But one needs a remarkable actor to not only make us believe in this complex man, but also that he is embodying one of the greatest stars in the history of sports, especially in a time when helmets didn't cover up a player's head (and would thus make it harder to employ a stunt double in key action shots). That remarkable actor is Roy Dupuis, probably best known in American as Michael on the TV series version of La Femme Nikita, who previously played Richard in both a short film and a television movie. It is a brutal, bloody role, and Dupuis impresses greatly by showing both Richard's toughness and tortured soul, while still selling fully the notion of Richard as one of the fastest and most prolific scorers in the game of that era.

The film itself is solidly produced, and I derived my greatest pleasure from the film's generous glimpses into both a time period (war-time Canada) and occupation (pro hockey in the '40s & '50s) not often seen on American screens. While I had some quibbles over the need for some The rest of the cast performs admirably, and I especially enjoyed veteran Stephen McHattie, whom I don't often enjoy, as gruff (what else?) and demanding Montreal coach Dick Irvin. Julie LeBreton does a solid, quiet turn as Richard's loyal, long-suffering wife, Lucille, though my one major gripe is that she never seems to be quite as young as she is portraying, at least, in the early years. A smaller gripe is that many of the dramatic scenes involving side characters have a TV movie quality to them, and I could do without what are supposed to be "grounding" scenes with Richard's barber, who seems to be a font of folk wisdom that rings false to me.

Overall, five years away from giving two shits about hockey, this one was a surprise. I'm now buying some skates so I can kick them up on the ottoman and watch the thing again.

Eugenics is such an ugly philosophy, even for a person like me who is constantly exasperated with much of the human race. I don't have a problem with most people until I start to survey the idiotic choices they have made, but because I believe freedom of choice is an inherent right of all men and women, I am basically forced to swallow this feeling as I watch the world insert ever more feet into an already swirling toilet of stupidity. However, whenever I do start physically retching over the ploddings of mankind, I step back and examine my own choices -- some that have done me much harm, some that turned out fortunate by some degree, most of little serious impact -- and know that while I might get riled up over the nascent idiocy surrounding me, I really do not have a lot of room to speak. We all have choices to make, and not all of them work out, and some of them are not even choices at all.

Meet Mr. Mason. Mr. Mason chooses to drink himself into unconsciousness, and will even go so far as to steal from his own daughter to support this habit. Or has he chosen this lifestyle? In Tomorrow's Children, a low-budget roadshow potboiler from 1934, it is mentioned that Mr. Mason comes from several generations of idiots, drunkards and thiefs. And in keeping with this long-standing tradition, his middle-aged wife (who is also a drunkard) is pregnant and about to drop another baby on the floor, where it will take up residence with the rest of their brood, including one son who is already well on his way to being a reprobate, and another son who believes that the empty whiskey bottles strewn about their hovel are his only friends, and just drools away as he plays with them night and day. The only bright spot for this family is their daughter Alice, who is smart and hard-working, keeping the family afloat as much as she can with what little pay she receives, and who is looking forward to marrying her longtime beau in just a short while.

That is, until the baby dies coming out of the womb. Well-meaning Doctor Brooks sees the squalor in which the family lives, and tries to get them help from the state. Unfortunately, the state is one of the 27 that practiced forced sterilization through a large portion of the twentieth century, and once the social workers examine the case, they will only offer to help the family out of their situation if every single member goes under the knife. The way I see it, it's not castration, so in Mr. Mason's case, that could mean more action without the distraction. But for Alice, it means a fate worse than death, because she has dreams of her own in which she and her boyfriend have their own children. Even worse, while the state is strapping her down to the table, we find out Alice is adopted, and not even legally...

It's astonishing to learn that our country practiced such methods to a major degree, forcing sterilization upon many thousands of citizens -- deformed, crippled, "feeble-minded," criminal -- all in the name of a "science" which at that point had any real science behind it. Much of it was about allowing the "right kind" of people to  produce large families, and for those deemed as "outcasts" to no longer be allowed to spread their genes throughout our society. If it sounds remarkably similar to some of the Nazi practices, you are right. It is close, and even Nazis on trial at Nuremberg pointed to the U.S. as the very model for these programs in Germany. Whether they were just trying to save their necks by shifting blame, I will leave it to others to debate. The question is whether the state has a right to interfere in our personal lives to such a degree, whether conditions of hereditary degeneration are on display or not.

The filmmakers of Tomorrow's Children, including writer-director Crane Wilbur (who would direct a couple of films in the '50s starring Vincent Price, such as The Bat, and cameos as a priest here), are clearly against the state with this one, and paint all of the state's actions as severely "feeble-minded" in their own right, tied to an inconsiderate bureaucracy, or downright criminal, such as when one judge takes a bribe from one potential sterilization victim, letting him off simply because he is a rich senator's son. That the guy is a raving lunatic (complete with what appears to be Conrad Veidt's black-eyed makeup job from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), who is barely held in check by his handlers, becomes apparent when he takes his first spare moment to attack and rip the top off a nearby nurse. The scene itself though is a pleasant reminder of just what one could get away with when one's film was released as an "educational" film in the 1930s, and there is much talk of "seminal" this and "fallopian" that, and medical charts of reproductive regions. It is also no surprise that it was banned in much of the country for numerous years because of this portrayal.

Thanks to the opening scene of the destitute family of louts, this one has a little Freaks-residue at hand (even featuring one of that film's "pinhead" stars, Schlitze -- the inspiration for Zippy -- in a short scene), and becomes instantly fascinating from the start. It doesn't quite work overall, but, unlike the anti-drug films of its era  like Reefer Madness, which are mainly enjoyable as ironic and quite silly relics, this one actually builds up a little suspense as Alice inches ever nearer to getting her tubes tied. Will her boyfriend get to the priest who will get to the judge who will make the phone call in time to save tomorrow's children? Will Sterling Holloway survive the film's inept comic relief scenes in time to become the future Winnie-the-Pooh? Will irresponsible nitwits stop having broods of kids when they have no possible way of supporting them, even with the most lax welfare laws at hand?

Maybe, yes and no, but I learned long ago that the only way to balance this out in society is to not have any of my own, and I do it through my own self-imposed eugenics program. No knives, no fuss... so far, I figure there are trillions of babies I haven't had, so society is safe for the moment. (You do the math...)

As one of my major interests in film criticism is in the influence life experience plays on personal opinion and how knowledge of that experience by others further influences their opinion of your opinion, and as I have recently plunged headlong into the network of movie fanatics on Spout without so much as a "howdy-do," and as it is too frickin' hot to really write today, I have decided to do just that: introduce myself in a somewhat formal fashion. In the interests of my personal national security, it shall be first and middle name only, no rank, no serial number, and will consist of only the truths I feel comfortable divulging. Those of you who have read The Cinema 4 Pylon, or the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc or have known me for a quarter century may feel free to wander about and peruse the literature bins while I forge through this. Others, if we have not met, in much the same way that we should get to know people before forming friendships, I will inform you that I consider this to be an important point in my own process, and if you are interested in why this is, there are a number of posts on the Pylon wherein I elaborate on that "why." Perhaps someday I will post them on Spout, but for now, seek them out if you wish.

So, "Hello." The first name, obviously, is Rik; the middle, Tod. Lived in Anchorage, Alaska for the first four decades of my existence, and moved to So Cal three years ago. Have put on 25 pounds since I moved, but am now ensconced in an exercise regimen that should get me back down to my preferred fightin' weight of 180 in a couple of months (already partway there). Outside of being a marketing coordinator, I also write and edit for a soccer publication, despite having very little interest in soccer. (I am a baseball guy, after all -- Reds and Mariners -- for life) I have been with my girlfriend Jen for seven years, and while we both do things that drive each other a little crazy, we seem to have done away with the petty jealousies and flareups that destroy other relationships left and right, and which served to do in my own past marriage of eight years practically from Day Negative-One.

I refuse to define myself by a religious or political tag (as if those were the most important aspects of life), but those who insist on these matters generally consider me to be an atheist, and on the "yammering, yammering, getting nothing really done" front (which I suppose might apply to religion, too, now that I think of it), many people have called me a social liberal, though one pal recently hit me with the label of "libertarian socialist." I'm not so sure about it, but at the very least, it appeals to me metronomically for the nonce. Nobody really knows what they are in life until their plane is going down anyway.

But, we are here because of the movies, and that information I am more than willing to share. My two earliest memories both involve steps: the first is stepping on a bee in Duluth, Minnesota (the only time I am aware of being stung in my life) at the age of two; the other is standing on the garishly carpeted steps leading up to the balcony of the Fourth Avenue Theatre, a grand old lady of a moviehouse that has since been raped and pillaged by Anchorage's ruling class to be turned into nothing more than a tourism center and a place where the elite can occasionally clink glasses together when patting themselves on the backs for their "good" works. Never mind that I saw The Jungle Book there at that tender age; never mind that it is also where I would later see Stop Making Sense, Ghostbusters and Escape From New York, amongst many others. Not too much later, my parents took me to Pinocchio, and while it shall remain in my Top Ten Films list forever, I was certainly far too young to see it, and it scarred (and scared) me immeasurably. Many of my earliest nightmares were brought about by that film, not least of which was my rising fear of water, thanks to Monstro the Whale. After that, an afternoon TV matinee of The Beast of Hollow Mountain at the age of six kick-started my love of, simultaneously, dinosaurs, special-effects films, monsters, horror and science-fiction. A trip to the Polar Theatre when I was 12 also got me going on a life-long obsession: we saw a double feature of Animal Crackers and a Ma and Pa Kettle movie, and I and my brothers have been steadfast Marxists ever since.

Growing up without cable or video (didn't know what either was until I was 15) didn't slow me down. From that point on, I devoured any film in any genre that was shown on television. With only four channels to choose from, pickings were slim, but I frighteningly good at locating an amazing array of films to study, jumping on Christmas showings of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin shorts, Errol Flynn films on Saturday afternoons, and Jerry Lewis films whenever I could get them. And then, on a breakthrough night in 1976, after coercing my father to drive me 40 miles there and back just to get baseball cards in Wasilla, I saw in a row the Sasquatch "documentary" The Mysterious Monsters on NBC, and then Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? on the local ABC affiliate (probably the most adult-themed movie I had seen at the point in my life; it stunned me...) and then saw my first Harryhausen film, The Valley of Gwangi at midnight. If there was a moment that truly turned me into a movie fan, it was that night. The following Saturday night, I saw The Birds for the first time, my first Hitchcock. I start keeping copious notes on the films I was seeing, as movie resources were almost nil back then, and then I dove into several local matinee and late-night horror and sci-fi packages, getting introduced to the "classics" at just the right time.

Speaking of "the right time," was it fate, divine providence or sheer luck that found me at the age of 14-15 when the first VCRs came out and cable hit town? I didn't know it then, but those were the Wild West days of home video, and I thrilled with every rental, even striking up friendships with the clerks and finding myself getting handed "private stock" material -- odd films, such as Evil Roy Slade and the like, most of them unavailable legally, but I refuse to call it the "black market," as I never once had to pay dime one for the use of these films. They were merely tapes that were handed back and forth between the video clerks throughout town, and I felt privileged to be considered one of their number, at least as a movie fan.

For those who are on Spout and see the Ruthian numbers racked up on my page -- 15,120 movies listed, 6,478 movies seen, etc. -- rest assured, those numbers will go up much higher, and yes, I have seen all those 6,478 movies and then some. The lists do not reflect this yet, but when I left Alaska, I had almost 5,000 movies in my collection (I traded most of the generic videos for credit before my move), and I have yet to update this aspect on Spout to its full compliment. Most amazing, I have had two whole years of my life where I purposefully set out to see 1,000 films over 365 days (averaging just under 3 films a day) and succeeded each time -- one year while I was married, and one year out of it. I also spent a seven month period seeing every single film released in Alaskan theatres in 1996, and only stopped because my involvement in a play made it impossible to continue the effort. I spend (or try to spend) every New Year's Day completely at a movie theatre, seeing four or five movies in a row; and try about once a month to spend a Saturday in this pursuit as well (such as I am doing tomorrow). To say at this point that I am truly movie mad would be pointless...

And yet, something changed since I moved. While I have always written quite a lot, it is only since hitting California that I have purposefully concentrated on writing as more than a hobby, but also as mental exercise and vocational possibility. And part of this exercise and purpose naturally had to involve writing about the movies -- they always say to write what you know -- but for those of you who have slogged through some of my "reviews" and said, "When is he actually going to review the movie?," here's the kicker: I am really not concerned about "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Whether I liked the film or not is never the point; the question is why I did or didn't like the film, and what internal or external circumstances led me to each absolutely arguable conclusion. Yes, it's nice to get comments, and especially constructive criticism, but unless we are longtime BFFs, I am really not concerned with whether you agree with me. I write to discover and flesh out my own feelings about each film, and every post is a chronicle of my struggle to discern this feeling. I include very personal details sometimes for even the most superficial subjects; it would not be out of place for a Roger Corman badly-suited monster flick to reveal some deeply buried nugget regarding my ill-advised teenage struggle against my well-meaning father. It is personal journal disguised as film criticism, and some might find it outside of what they will accept as a film critique, and again, I really don't give a shite. I'm not in it to review movies; I'm in it to review myself.

So, Spouters and doubters, that’s a start on me. How about the rest of you?

This movie, most likely? Merely another example of the now-standard studio reflex to rewrite and/or remake everything (both, in this case), whether it is needed or not, and muck it up to an insane level in the process. Ewan McGregor's secret agent (code-named Eye, which helps towards explaining the title, which is more than most movies do; you don't see Alex Trebek making a cameo in Double Jeopardy) spies on a femme fatale/serial killer played in a variety of wigs by a most bewitching Ashley Judd, for once doing the slicing instead of the co-investigating (even if the cover looks like another one of her James Peterson-style cookie cutter flicks). McGregor, who premiered as Obi-Wan Kenobi this same year, has lost his wife and daughter in a divorce, becomes entranced by Judd to the point where he begins to protect her as he follows her devilish exploits through a variety of cities, collecting souvenir snowglobes of each stop along the way. To make things worse for the addled agent, his daughter's memory haunts him to the point where he holds entire conversations with him and interjects herself into his investigation, even though he is only somewhat certain that the mental image he has gotten of her from a school photograph is actually the right girl. Then, both Judd and McGregor refer to Judd's character as a "lost little girl", and if you think that isn't creepy when coupled with McGregor's obsession and voyeurism, then let me introduce you to Chris Hansen...

Ridiculous, shallow, empty... McGregor's agent (I mean, his character, though maybe his real-life agent applies here as well) and his methods make no sense in the real world; Judd, for supposedly being such a frightfully deranged killer that investigations are launched over her by multiple agencies, still ends up as a woman in peril who must be rescued; and everything in this movie seems to occur in a world totally shut off from the increasingly outrageous actions of the two or three main characters. It seems that Judd's character would be exceedingly easy to capture and bring to justice, at least as portrayed in this film. Not being a serial killer, I don't know how they perceive the world around them, but it would not be a far-reaching conclusion to think that they would have a little more prescience regarding the world around them when they go out -- Judd's Joanna seems to have more than a small amount of perception regarding the men upon whom she preys -- so why does she never take a look around when she goes out, and see (more than the one time she does) this often klutzy and not particularly well-obscured agent who chases her about for several years?

So, why is Eye of the Beholder so goddamned compelling? Why do I give this movie a break, when logic would seem to preclude the fact I would like this movie? Easy -- despite its cavalcade of ceaselessly faults, Beholder is immensely watchable. Part of this might be better acting than the film deserves, even if McGregor himself seems to sleepwalk through much of the movie. (Patrick Bergin and Geneviève Bujold do fine small turns here; k.d. lang, however, does not. Love the vocalist, hate the actress.) Judd's habit of flouncing about in her various residences in either lingerie or absolutely nothing doesn't hurt either, and certainly helps the film direct our own voyeurism as a parallel towards that of the nosy McGregor, who constantly sets up cameras and voice sensors everywhere he goes, collecting endless data on his subject. And director Elliott, who also made the outright enjoyable The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert a number of years ago, goes crazy with the artiness, making this film look and feel far more than the sum of its parts. This would be fine if there were more here -- most of the plotlines end up getting muddled, especially the one involving the "ghost" of his daughter, which makes little sense being included here (in the original book by thriller specialist Marc Behm and the first film by French director Claude Miller, Mortelle Randonnée, the protagonist is much older than the killer, to the point where he believes she may be his missing child). Instead, we get a grand hodgepodge of splashy scene changes and fabulous set design, and we also get an insanely pretentious closing line in place of decent resolution of any sort.

If Elliott weren't also the screenwriter, I would say that he just decided, "The hell with it! If this thing refuses to make any sense as written, then I am really going to burn down the town!" and just ran crazy with it. But, he did write the screenplay, so clearly he is as completely lost in the story (with its nonsensical changes) as the field agent is within it. And yet, I am still willing to make concessions to plausibility if the movie genuinely entertains me for its entire running time, and I will say that despite everything that was running counter to this possibility occurring, I was unable to stop watching it. Not in the Plan 9 sort of way. That is a fun film by a very bad director who nonetheless instilled it with his own personal passion, and it's gumption shows in every frame, like a beghouled updating of attitude from Babes in Arms. Beholder is simply a bad film perpetrated, for some odd reason, by a director who can be good and from source material which is proven and good itself, and that makes it almost as fascinating.

Perhaps it is like the clichéd trainwreck from which one cannot turn away. Perhaps voyeurism is transmittable, from director to film protagonist to viewer, until all three find themselves trapped via the seducement of guilt-laden mindlessness. Or perhaps more cinematic trainwrecks need Ashley Judd flouncing about in lingerie to make them watchable. Whatever it is, as often as this film pops up late night on Showtime, I'm fairly certain I will become even better acquainted with it over time. And probably to the point where I feel that I can save it. Just like Joanna...