What was the last movie you watched?

[Charles Castle]

On the Wikipedia page for Penny Serenade (1941, directed by George Stevens), there's a short section detailing a recent "AI colorization" of the film. Curious, I took a look. It looks about the same as colorization has looked for a couple of decades, now, which is to say it doesn't look very good at all except for in fleeting moments. It's in the wrong aspect ratio, too. This particular film is a prime victim for this sort of noodling because when the copyright came up for renewal 28 years after its release, Columbia Pictures neglected to renew it. Thus, it fell into the public domain. As a result, its presentation on home video usually has been awful, with countless editions available from fly by night video companies. Public domain is invaluable and necessary, but it is often a haven for philistines and grifters. Most PD versions of Penny Serenade are short five minutes of movie in addition to the usual defects. It's a shabby fate for a film that contains Cary Grant's first Oscar-nominated performance and a performance from co-star Irene Dunne that the actress herself felt was her very best. For what it's worth, the edition from Olive Films is excellent, sourced from primary materials and restoring the entire film.

The story one finds in Penny Serenade follows the marriage of Julie Gardiner (Dunne) and Roger Adams (Grant), from their first meeting through tragedy after tragedy in which Julie loses her unborn child in an earthquake in Tokyo and becomes unable to bear another child. They adopt an infant daughter after a close inspection by the state, only to have her die of a fever. Roger loses the newspaper he owns, and the law refuses to allow them to adopt another child due to Roger's insolvency. Pleading with the courts. The shock is too much to bear. We meet them at the very end, as they are prepared to go their separate ways. The flashbacks that tell their story are keyed to music - they first meet in a music store where Julie works - and the film's vignettes are accompanied by well-known songs of the day (hence the title of the film).

By 1941, Cary Grant had arrived. He had already made some of the best and most enduring films of his career with directors including Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, and a previous film with George Stevens. He followed Penny Serenade with his first film for Alfred Hitchcock. He was in the full flower of his stardom and he was codifying into an archetype what the phrase "movie star" means in the public's imagination. And yet, Grant was beginning to be taken for granted (if you'll pardon the pun). Grant never won an Academy Award, settling for an honorary statue more than a decade after he had retired from film. The two films for which he was nominated are not usually films most fans of old Hollywood immediately think of when Grant's name is mentioned, though both of them are excellent. Both of them are what would be called "Oscar bait" in today's parlance: serious dramas with barely a laugh to be found. Comedy has never been favored by the Oscars. Grant's talent for light comedy is an essential component of the Grant Persona (even in films for Hitchcock). Indeed, he might be the best light-comedian ever to step in front of a camera. You do the math.

Penny Serenade, in contrast to Grant's best-remembered films, is a tear-jerker, and as such it more closely matches the screen persona of Grant's co-star, Irene Dunne. Throughout the 1930s, Dunne made melodrama after melodrama, including Back Street, Magnificent Obsession, Love Affair, and The Age of Innocence. After Penny Serenade, she starred in more melodramas, most notably I Remember Mama (for which she was an Oscar nominee). Although she appeared in musicals, too, she didn't star in a comedy until 1936, seven years into her career. It is, perhaps, ironic that she's best remembered today for her comedies. Grant is part of that, having co-starred with her in his own star-making film, The Awful Truth, and again in My Favorite Wife, both archetypal examples of screwball comedy. Beyond that are the changing tastes of audiences. The 1930s-style melodrama, the weepie as they used to call them, is out of fashion with cynical contemporary viewers. Adding insult to injury, many of Dunne's films were remade in the 1950s in more famous versions (Magnificent Obsession by Douglas Sirk, for example, or Love Affair as An Affair to Remember by Leo McCarey, who also directed the original item). In any event, Penny Serenade is more of a piece with Dunne's career than it is with Grant's.

If you believe his biographers, director George Stevens came back from his service making documentaries during World War II a haunted man. Stevens was among the American soldiers who liberated both the Duben labor camp and Dachau. The film he shot there was used at the Nuremberg trials and is one of the key documents of the War. It is said that his films took a more serious turn afterwards, but I'm not sure if that's right. Stevens started his career making comedy shorts for Hal Roach, principally starring Laurel and Hardy. It was Stevens who figured out how to shoot Stan Laurel in a way that made his blue eyes show up on film, hence ensuring him a career as a film actor. Stevens left Roach to make feature films for RKO because he felt that he could make more serious films in a comedic frame. Even before the war, he was turning to darker and more serious subject matter. In between Gunga Din and The More the Merrier are two dour dramas, Vigil in the Night and Penny Serenade. Both of these films upend the screen personae of their stars. Both Carole Lombard and Cary Grant were primarily known for comedies at the time, but Stevens saw dramatic potential in comic actors. The war, it seems, only hastened Stevens the way he was already going. His work with actors on Penny Serenade prefigures his work on films like A Place in the Sun or Shane or Giant, in which he coaxes a raw emotionality from his movie star casts, turning them into actors in the process. And Grant had to be coaxed. He was openly hesitant to crack the polished veneer of the Movie Star facade he had constructed. In the fullness of his stardom, he wasn't sure if an audience weaned on Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday would find a more emotional, more human Grant worth watching. At Stevens' behest, he opened up.

Penny Serenade's structure follows a one-damned-thing-after-another parade of misery. This isn't a touchy-feely film, or, at least, it isn't often one - the fade to musical inserts to denote chapters seem hopelessly melodramatic (in the pejorative use of that word) - but it still intends to encourage a receptive audience to get out their handkerchiefs. The stars are what make this film watchable. Their performances rescue the film. Grant and Dunne (mostly) prevent it from turning mawkish, which may be why Stevens went for Grant in the first place. Stevens stages long scenes as comedy, which has the effect of making the tragic scenes into gut-punches while defusing their overt emotional manipulation a tad. The scenes that might seem outrageously manipulative - particularly the earthquake and courtroom scenes, are provided a lived-in naturalism by the actors. Watching Grant plead with the court is evidence that he could have excelled in even the starkest dramas had he chosen that path, in part by using the same techniques he often used to play comedies. He underplays. He doesn't over-emote. He puts just a touch of strain in his voice and it's very effective. Dunne follows this lead. There's no rending of garments in this movie. No wailing into the void. It's effective.

In spite of what I may imply by calling the film "potentially mawkish," the filmmaking on display in this movie is usually a cut above the standard "invisible" filmmaking of classic Hollywood. It takes some risks. I may grouse about the melodramatic use of musical interludes, but the first of these is accompanied by a skipping record that not only foretells the difficulty of the film's central relationship, it performs an astonishing segue between past and present. The whole film is decorated with similar flourishes. There's a romantic sequence where Julie follows Roger onto a train as he is bound for Tokyo, and the way it's cut suggests their relationship is a good deal less chaste than usual for the production code era, while nominally staying within the code's strictures. The notion that Grant wouldn't be having sex with any romantic partner in any of his movies is patently absurd and this is one of the few films in his portfolio that acknowledges this fact. Even beyond this, Roger and Julie are shown to share a domestic bed (as opposed to a sexual one) in contravention of the code. They likely got away with it because in those scenes, they were new parents dealing with insomnia and child rearing, so the fact that they share a bed likely didn't register for the blue-noses at the Breen office. Regardless, this is a film that treats its characters and the audience as adults. This, too, prevents the film from being overwhelmed by its own melodrama.

My first impressions of George Stevens were formed - perhaps unfairly - by his later white-elephant production of The Greatest Story Ever Told (and to a lesser degree by Giant), so it's occasionally surprising watching him work in miniature. This is all surely the result of the comedies he made for Laurel and Hardy, which were very detailed in the little things, but the same techniques work well with melodrama, too, where they serve to disguise the wheels of fate turning the machineries of plot. It's not naturalistic, but it fakes being naturalistic really well. I'm also surprised at the treatment of Japan in this film, given that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a mere seven months after this film's original release, though maybe not because of the proximity of the war so much as the attitude toward the Japanese in The More the Merrier, a mere two years later. That film buys into the racist propaganda that Hollywood produced as part of the war effort. This one does not, at least not beyond the casual racism built into all major studio productions of the day.

Because my focus in Penny Serenade is Grant, I have to ask myself how this film fits in with the rest of his career. It's not correct to say that it's a fluke, because it's not. Grant scaled back his work in screwball comedies with the onset of World War II, preferring to appear in more dramatic roles. Penny Serenade opened the way for Grant to appear in those more serious films. Certainly it's a key that opened the door to his first two films with Hitchcock. A year after Penny Serenade, Grant found himself in Once Upon a Honeymoon for his frequent collaborator, Leo McCarey. That film duplicates the formula of Penny Serenade, in so far as it starts as a light comedy then veers sharply into something very dark indeed. You can see the bones of Penny Serenade in Mr. Lucky, a romance from 1943, as well. Beyond that, it's inconceivable that Grant would have been considered for None But the Lonely Heart in 1944 if he didn't have Penny Serenade as a calling card. It put directors on notice that Grant was indeed an actor who could do almost anything, who could carry a serious drama. He got a second Oscar nomination for that film. Mind you, Cary Grant the dramatic actor was already there in films like The Eagle and the Hawk, something that is sometimes obscured by Grant the movie star. And yet, in our culture's collective memory of Grant and his place in classic Hollywood, Grant's dramatic films are off in a corner if they're remembered at all. They're outshone by the great entertainments, and by the Grant Persona itself.

[Charles Castle]

It's always dangerous to take the Coen Brothers at their word, so when they say in the DVD supplemental material that the fake Yiddish folktale at the beginning of A Serious Man (2009) has nothing to do with the film that follows - that it's essentially a cartoon short before the feature - that should be an alarm bell right there. It has everything to do with the movie that follows. Or maybe it doesn't. And that's the point. Nothing in this film is certain. How appropriate is it, then, that when we first see our protagonist, Larry Gopnik, he is explicating the story of Schrödinger's Cat.

The opening scenes of A Serious Man concern a man on his way back from market who is helped on the road by a man who his wife claims has been dead for three weeks. He is a dybbuk, a ghost, and to invite one into your home is to invite ruin. This man shows up as invited and the wife stabs him with an icepick. Consequently, he wanders back into the night. Now, the question here is this: is this man actually a dybbuk? The movie doesn't say so conclusively. Do the actions of the wife curse their house? The movie doesn't say. Are the movie's actual protagonists related to these people, and are they therefore cursed? The movie doesn't say. The filmmakers invite you to make your own connections, and that's at the heart of the movie, because they've set things up such that you can never know what's actually going on. Is Larry Gopnik's wife having an affair? It doesn't say conclusively. Is his brother some kind of idiot savant, a mathematical genius? It doesn't say conclusively. Is God actively destroying Gopnik's life? The movie doesn't say. Without opening the box and killing the cat, we can't know. The Coens like this sort of thing. It's the box at the end of Barton Fink stretched out to feature length.

All comedies are predicated a little bit on schadenfreude. Mel Brooks once described the difference between comedy and tragedy thusly: "I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy." The Coens know this, and push the envelope. This movie doesn't evoke gales of laughter. It's more interested in the nervous variety, the "thank God that's not me" variety. The movie darkens considerably as it goes, until there's nothing funny about the ending at all, except that it's not happening to the viewer. The film's casting is just about perfect for this, because everyone on screen is vaguely familiar, but not overly so. Michael Stuhlbarg as Gopnik in particular navigates a tricky performance that requires him to be sympathetic and pathetic at the same time, while raging against an indifferent cosmos. He's the lynchpin of the movie. But this is not a movie-star driven movie.

A Serious Man takes from Fargo the virtue of a seeming verisimilitude, drawn, as Fargo is, from the Coen's upbringing in Minnesota. This effect is amplified by the fact that it's a period piece, set just far enough in the past to cement the place and time in the mind's eye. I don't think this would work in a contemporary setting, but it works beautifully in the late sixties. The film's sense of verisimilitude is further cemented by the ethnic details, also presumably from the Coen's upbringing.

The ethnic details are more important than the time period though.

For all the Judaica on display in this movie, it might very well be an atheist's movie. You can't really tell. God, if he exists in the film's universe, is silent on the matter, and his representatives on Earth, in this film a series of ever "wiser" rabbis seem to be talking out of their asses. Gopnik, for his part, understands the math of the universe - he says so to a Korean student who may be bribing him or may be blackmailing him - but he doesn't understand the consequences. The student's father, who threatens to sue him for defamation, tells him to "accept the mystery." The end of the movie consists of two cross-cut sequences in which Gopnik caves to an act of "moral turpitude" then receives an ominous call from his doctor, while his son waits to get to shelter as a tornado touches down just beyond his school. Is this the hand of God showing itself? Or is it just a bunch of random disasters? More than one critic has likened the film to the Book of Job, because the film really goes out of its way to heap shit on our hero, but even at the end, it doesn't say for sure. And for a comedy, even a dark one, it sure does deliver a shuddering chill as it cuts abruptly to black.

[ihavemyreasons]

They Live (1988)
I think my last extended John Carpenter kick was in the VHS days and while this was one of my favorites of his, I'm not sure I'd ever seen it before start to finish other than via VHS. 4K viewing tonight. More flaws than I remembered, but still great. In lesser hands it could have been really bad and cheesy, but somehow it all works - well, except for the fight scene - still love the scene - but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous. Rowdy Roddy defintively a better actor then he was a wrestler. Shame he didn't get many other roles other than this.

[Charles Castle]

Such was Stephen King's popularity in 1983, that work on the film version of his novel, Christine, began while the book was still being edited. 1983 offered a bumper crop of films based on the writer's work, including Cujo, The Dead Zone, and Christine. The later two were directed by two of the masters of late 70s/early 80s horror movies, David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. Carpenter, for his part, was coming off the failure of The Thing, a financial disaster that saw him removed from the director's chair of another King project, Firestarter, and desperate for a hit. Christine was fast-tracked and appeared in December of 1983, a mere eight months after the novel's publication.

Universal would regret this decision. The film version of Firestarter followed Christine into theaters six months later and got withering reviews. It did less business on a higher budget, too. Worst of all, it incurred the scorn of King himself, who counts it among the worst films made from his work. He calls it the movie equivalent of "cafeteria mashed potatoes." Carpenter, it seems, got lucky.

The basic plot of the book and the movie is the same: bullied nerd Arnie Cunningham falls in love with a derelict 1958 Plymouth fury and fixes it up until it's in cherry condition. Christine, for so the car is named, reciprocates Arnie's love, and Arnie begins to change under Christine's influence. He becomes more self-assured. He asks out the pretty new girl at his high school and she accepts. His style begins to change to a 1958 sense of cool even though Arnie lives in the autumn of 1979. His best friend, Dennis, is alarmed by the changes he sees in Arnie but cannot do anything about it as he recovers from a devastating football injury, as is Leigh, the girl Arnie courts. Both of them, along with Arnie's parents, are concerned by his unhealthy obsession with the car. Arnie has enemies, too. The bullies who tormented Arnie blame him for getting them expelled, particularly the psychotic Buddy Repperton. They see Arnie's life changing and they see his cherry new car and vow to "get" him. One night, they sneak into the do-it-yourself garage where Arnie stores Christine and wreck her, going so far to defecate on her dashboard. Unfortunately for them, Christine was born bad, and there is a malevolent and jealous force animating her. As Arnie watches, she regenerates herself and begins to act as a manifestation of Arnie's id, executing ghastly revenge on Arnie's tormentors. But she doesn't stop there. She's jealous of Leigh, too, and attempts to kill her at a drive-in movie. Worse: Arnie has come under the scrutiny of Detective Junkins, who is investigating the deaths of Buddy and his gang, and then of Arnie's boss, the sleazy owner of the garage where Christine lives. Dennis and Leigh contrive a plan to destroy Christine, even though they understand that it brings them into the path of the car's unending fury.

Christine, the novel, is not one of King's better works. In addition to the burden of convincing the reader of the reality of his haunted car, the story recycles the revenge fantasy from Carrie. Arnie Cunningham is another oppressed nerd, a spiritual sibling to Carrie White. The book is overladen with other ideas about how Christine became what she is, and includes baroque, EC comics-style tableaux of monstrous comeuppance for Arnie's enemies. Christine gathers a collection of ghosts in her back seat who have a conversation with Arnie as he loses his mind. Plus, it sidelines its narrator, Dennis, for most of the book. This last part is less of a problem in a two hour movie than it is in a five hundred page novel. Christine could have been a complete disaster on film, along the lines of one of King's other tales of machinery come to life, Maximum Overdrive (directed by a well dosed King, himself). But Christine is lucky in its interpreters.

Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Phillips cut away all of the narrative digressions in the book in favor of a lean and vicious narrative that focuses only on the core of the story. As a new origin, the film posits that Christine was just born bad on the assembly line in a droll prelude in which she punishes slights done to her by the workers who made her. This sequence has no significant dialogue, but provides everything you need to know about the film's title character. The screenplay removes the complication of a romance between Dennis and Leigh too, and focuses instead on both of their relationships with Arnie. Moreover, the film manages something that the book struggled to convey: it makes Christine seem alive. This is partly through its deployment of special effects, but also in the way the film uses Christine's headlights as indicators of her mood. Where the book constructs an elaborate back-story, the film doesn't need it all because the reality of the car is right there for the audience to see and seeing is believing. The difference in media has a transformative effect on the books relentless use of song lyrics as a literary approximation of a needle-drop soundtrack. The film uses an actual needle-drop soundtrack and folds it into the flow of the narrative (rather than as epigrams at chapter breaks in the book). It's subtle with this, too. Most of the soundtrack is diegetic. It gives Christine herself a "voice" that comments on the scenes in which she appears, but only with songs that would have been on the radio in 1958. The one song that is associated with Christine that isn't diegetic is George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone," which never plays on her own radio.

The film is surprisingly bloodless for a horror movie from 1983. Carpenter was faced with exactly the opposite problem he faced when he made The Fog three years earlier. That film was initially bloodless, but the success of the slasher movies - particularly Friday the 13th - that followed Halloween convinced Carpenter and his producers that they needed to add more gore to that film. With Christine, he was faced with an analysis of The Thing that suggested that the extreme violence in that film was a contributing factor in its failure. Which isn't to say that the film is not violent. In some ways, going back to the way he suggested violence in Halloween makes the violence in Christine even crueler. This is most evident in the death of Moochie, filmed from above as Christine forces herself into a space that's too narrow for her, but the death of Buddy is even crueler. It's almost offhand as the flaming Christine runs over a burning victim that tumbles briefly in her wake. You can't actually see any of the gore in either scene, but the film is good at conjuring images in the audience's mind. When Jenkins tells Arnie that they had to scrape Moochie off the concrete with a shovel, you don't really need to see it to conjure up the picture in your mind's eye.

For a film with such a ridiculous premise, it's a particularly grim horror movie, but this too is part of its modus operandi. If it cracks a smile even once, if it ever winks at the audience, it will break the spell. So it never does. The absurdity of the idea of a malevolent, sentient car is ridiculous enough without calling attention to it by laughing at the idea. Even its most ridiculous set pieces work because the movie plays them completely straight. The scene where Christine regenerates herself is a committed special effects set piece that conveys a sense of wonder and horror (emphasized by Carpenter's choice to score the scene to the Viscounts's sinister version of "Harlem Nocturne"), while the duel between Christine and the bulldozer that ends the film benefits from the sense of tragedy hanging over the entire thing. Arnie may be enacting his own id through Christine, but he's her victim, too.

The film's biggest handicap is the trio of actors in the lead. Keith Gordon was a genre veteran by 1983, having worked for Brian DePalma on two films, but he's a lot more convincing as Arnie the dweeb than as Arnie the cool villain. This was Alexandra Paul's first major film role, long before she went on to become a Baywatch babe, and her inexperience shows; Carpenter wisely diminishes her role in the film compared to the character in the book. John Stockwell is similarly handicapped by a plot that sidelines him in the hospital for a huge whack of the film's running time.

Whatever the shortcomings of these three, Carpenter more than covers for them with his supporting cast. Roger Ebert once noted that no film starring M. Emmett Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton is completely worthless, and this gives Harry Dean Stanton the juicy role of Jenkins so it's more than worth watching. Stanton devours the part. Also chewing the scenery are Roberts Blossom as George LeBay, Christine's scabrous previous owner, and Robert Prosky as the cigar-chomping Darnell, a man who oozes working class resentment and shady capitalist opportunism. Even William Ostrander's bully, Buddy Repperton, works as a distillation of every high school bete noir ever filmed. The supporting cast is strong enough to hold the screen against Christine herself, who is one of the more indelible film automobiles of any vintage. I mean, the evil car in The Car (from 1977) has no real distinguishing characteristics other than "big and black," and the cars in The Cars that Ate Paris are all pretty interchangeable. But Christine? She has a personality. If this were not so, then her demise at the end of the film would not be so cathartic. It would be just so much screeching twisted metal, like a demolition derby or something. Nor would the film's last shot hold so much menace. Carpenter takes King's ending and distills it down to a shot so minimalist that one has to marvel at its elegance. And maybe laugh at it, too. It's pretty funny.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I just saw Avatar 2.  I'm not a film critic so I can't give really nuanced comments.  The movie was terrible.  The story was the same predictable crap as the first one "MAN BAD NATURE GOOD".  Again, the humans were done in by their own ineptitude.  The movie takes place 10 years later, but the humans STILL haven't figured out how to make long range weapons.  They want to colonize Pandora, but I guess missile technology was lost somewhere?  So they just kind of leave lightly defended bases all over the place?

It's like, the humans are the designated villains.  They aren't exactly good, but at least they're interesting.  The Navi are just the same old hippy dippy nature lovers.  They go out hunting, but it's not clear what they hunt, because they seem to think that all life is sacred.  So they hunt, but there is never any visible evidence of them actually killing anything.

Early on, the humans take a hostage, who is of course hostile to their cause, and they just kind of let the hostage hang around unwatched on the bridge of a ship.  As you would expect, it does not end well.

I can't really spoil anything because anyone with a functioning brain can figure out what's going to happen at the beginning of every scene.  Because it's just that boring and predictable.  I guess I have only myself to blame.  I knew this movie would be terrible like the first one, but I hoped that the visuals would at least provide a pleasant time.  And maybe they would have.... if the movie were half as long.

I can't sympathize with the Navi because the movie never makes them sympathetic.  The movie just draws this parallel to Native Americans and just kind of expects you to go with that.  So you never care about the characters, you know that the movie doesn't have the guts to do anything bad to the Navi, and you know that the humans are just mustache twirling caricatures, so there's no reason to get invested.  The movie is just eye candy.  It's all shine and no substance.

[stethacantus]

Revenge of the Shogun Women ( 1977)
An all around misleading title. For one thing, there is no such thing as Shogun Women. Shogun's were Japanese, not Chinese, and were typically male with exception to the rare occasion where the wife of a recently dead Shogun briefly taking over until a new Shogun was chosen. And you only had one single Shogun at a time, not a cluster of them. Originally meant for release in America in the 1970s, it was shelved and would not get a release until 1982 when 3D had a brief mid-80s revival with such films as Jaws 3D and Spacehunter.  They hadn't yet given the film an English title, which was originally called 13 Golden Nuns. Once again, another movie released after the popular television mini-series Shōgun that decided to capitalize on it. Had this been released in the 1970s, it would probably been called ...Shaolin Women  or ,,,Kung Fu Women, and if released a year or two later have been called ...Ninja Women. In the beginning of the film a title card explains that women who were raped by bandits were sent to a Buddhist monastery where they learned to be Shoguns.  The other misleading thing about the title is the "Revenge" part. The shogun women don't get much revenge as the bandits that raped them, and are the villains of the film, easily kick their asses when the woman finally attack them, and pretty much kill them all within five minutes. It is actually the town doctor, who knows how to make bombs out of sulfur deposits in caves, who kills the bandits by blowing them up. This was another of the Kino Lorber films released in 3D, part of their 3D Film Archive releases. This time around the Anaglyphic 3D was not as good as their Dynasty release, but still worked better than 3D television from the 80s and 90s. The movie itself is passably entertaining.  But it is unintentionally stupid. Basically an army of bandits go around wiping out entire towns, raping all their women, and killing any martial arts expert who tries to stop them. The women raped in the town they destroy in the pre credit segment go to a monastery where they learn to be martial arts experts. The entire film is the expectation that these women will finally go after the bandits. But their religion forbids them to do so. They even debate allowing refugee women into their temple as the bandits raid a neighboring town. After that town is wiped out, we finally get the showdown between the women and the unstoppable bandits,,,  and they are all pretty much killed with the bandits barely taking any damage. Until the town doctor shows up and starts chucking his home made dynamite at them, killing all but the bandit leader, who although badly wounded, faces off against the only monastery resident who had not fought them, the mother superior, who just barely defeats him. Probably should have called this film Revenge of the Bomb Doctor.

Miami Vice: The Prodigal Son ( 1985 )
I had thought that I would not get to see evening movies this week. Saturday was Christmas Eve with family over and a night time church service. I still had the afternoon to myself before the family members showed up. So got in my martial arts film followed by episodes of Miami Vice and Person of Interest, two complete series I bought on physical media which I am gradually working my way through one episode a weekend. And I completely forgot that the first episode of season 2 was a two hour television movie. Miami Vice had premiered the previous season and did not become a hit series until mid season, with it's biggest ratings being during the summer reruns, where it's popularity just kept growing and growing. There was a lot of anticipation for season two, and NBC decided to capitalize on it with a second Miami Vice television movie since it's pilot film. I mean, this was a big event at the time. hey even commissioned an original Glenn Frey song just for the episode called You Belong to the City which was released with a music video promoting the upcoming television movie  with clips from it intercut with Glenn. On September 27th, 1985 the first new Miami Vice episode since May 10th aired. And everyone agreed, it sucked. Something was wrong with the series. Something was different. Something that continued through the rest of the series. Miami Vice had lost something. Now rewatching the series nearly 40 years later I have a chance to see if the series really did go downhill, or if it was just a case of the novelty wearing off.

Some of the problems with the series I thought only started in the second season, like self parodying  formulaic episodes and episodes with to much padding also happened in the first season. I guess I didn't notice since those  were covered up with a pop song. You don't really realize that they padded and episode with an aerial shot  Crocket and Tubbs driving down a highway for four minutes if the song Girls with Guns is playing over it. Maybe those tricks didn't work for the second season and up. In 1984, having actual pop songs on a television episode was revolutionary. Not so much in 1985.

As for The Prodigal Son, not as bad as I remembered it. But I can see what I initially didn't like about the episode. It is a one hour plot dragged out for two hours. Not so much with padding, but by being overblown with scenes that were not necessary. NBC wanted this to be a big event movie. So for the first ten minute pre-credit opening, the movie takes place in  Bogota, Columbia. I am not sure if it was actually  filmed there. But they found some jungle location with mountains, and I am sure Florida has none of those. So for the first ten minutes Crocket and Tubbs are in a guerilla camp looking for information from a drug cartel member captured by the guerillas. A long segment that is completely out of tome with the rest of the series, and not necessary to the plot. After the credits, we get another overblown scene about a drug bust in the everglades culminating with the cartel members shooting back being blown up when a bullet hits the gas tank on their boat.  The cartel retaliates by attacking a party the DEA agents are throwing, one that fellow cop Gina was invited to, putting  her in critical condition. The leader of the cartel becomes a wanted fugitive, and believed to be hiding in New York City. So Crocket and Tubbs go there under cover as drug dealers to flush the cartel leader out. A lot of this episode could have been cut for not being relevant to the main plot.  It just feels like a lot of stuff was added when NBC decided to expand the one hour season opener to a two hour film. I could see where this odd pacing would have thrown me off on the initial viewing. If they wanted a movie, they should not have used this plot, but had written a plot that warranted two hours. They had a couple the first season. Two plots that needed to be split into two part episodes over two weeks. The Prodical Son is still watchable, and is actually pretty good. But you can see why the regular Miami Vice viewers were put off by it. BTW, the title refers to the fact that Tubbs is returning to his home town, as he was originally a transplanted New York City cop in the first season. However, this element is completely lost in the final script for this episode. Not only do you not meet any of the police Tubbs had worked with, but unless you remembered the first episode of season one, you would never know that Tubbs had returned to his home town.

[Charles Castle]

My relationship with An American Werewolf in London(1981, directed by John Landis) is long and complicated. It came out when I was six. By the time i was nine, my brother and I were deep into horror movies. We did not have cable and my mom would not let me rent it on VHS. My brother was finally able to show it to me on HBO while we were staying with my grandmother in the summer of 1986 when i was ten. There was a HUGE "want to see it" factor for this movie among the kids I played with that summer, and I recall arguments broke out about the relative merits between American Werewolf in London and The Howling. This had the perverse effect of pointing out which local families had HBO and which had Showtime. The two channels had begun to war with each other and part of that war was exclusive deals for some movies. My grandma had HBO. We had to rent The Howling on VHS later on behind my mother's back to render judgment. Meanwhile, I stayed up way late on the nights that summer when American Werewolf in London was on HBO, sometimes so late that the sun began to rise as the credits rolled. My cinemania started young, and American Werewolf in London wasn't the first horror film to hook me late at night by any means.

And yet, I'm curiously indifferent to An American Werewolf in London. It's not a film I ever thought was great or even particularly good. There were parts of it that I loved when I first saw it, sure. I loved every minute of the undead Griffin Dunne scenes and I had a huge crush on Jenny Agutter left over from Logan's Run (which I got to see at a drive-in in its "R"-rated version before it was cut to a PG for cable). I never thought the combination of humor and horror worked very well and I hated the werewolf.

The story follows hikers David and Jack, who are backpacking across the north of England. As the film begins, they've arrived at the dreariest part of the country, it seems, and they stop in for some warmth at a local pub, the ominously-named Slaughtered Lamb. The locals are hostile to them, and, feeling unwelcome, they head back out into the rain, but not before hearing dire warnings about the moors. They're told to stick to the road. They wind up ignoring this advice to their sorrow. They're attacked by some kind of large animal. It kills Jack and David wakes up in the hospital three weeks later. Upon waking, he discovers that the details of the attack have been fudged. The locals up north maintain that the attacker was an escaped lunatic. David disagrees, but his sanity is beginning to unravel as he experiences a series of vivid dreams. Jack's ghost begins to visit him to tell him that he's now a werewolf and that he needs to kill himself in order to prevent further deaths. Meanwhile, David embarks on a romance with his nurse, Alex, who takes him in after he's discharged from the hospital. Unfortunately for David, the full moon returns.

The genesis for An American Werewolf in London dates as far back as 1970, when John Landis witnessed a Roma burial designed to prevent the the deceased from walking the earth as the undead. This was near the set of Kelly's Heroes, on which Landis was working as a gopher. The idea was further incubated by Landis's first collaboration with make-up artist Rick Baker. During the making of Schlock, Landis and Baker hashed out the kind of werewolf transformation they'd like to see in a movie. This led to the "rules" Landis ultimately imposed on the effects in American Werewolf in London, which insisted that the scene be well-lit, that the actor and character be nude, and that it all be performed in-camera without any lap dissolves or other optical cheats. In spite of hashing this out between them, Landis and Baker ultimately had very different ideas about the werewolf design, and Baker eventually became so frustrated by the lack of movement on the film in the eight intervening years that he signed on to do the effects for The Howling. Baker's ideas of what a movie werewolf should be are in that movie: bipedal, partially human. Landis wanted a quadruped, with very little humanity left. A hound from hell, as it were. When the money became available for American Werewolf, Baker was already into the production of The Howling, which he handed off to his protege, Rob Bottin. The fact that Baker chose not to wait is apparently a source of friction between Landis and Baker to this very day. It can't have helped things that The Howling beat American Werewolf in London to the theater and in many ways upstaged Landis's film. Still, American Werewolf in London was a bigger hit and it took home the first ever competitive Oscar for special make-up effects.

The schism between Baker's ideas and Landis's ideas creates an awkward tension in the film itself. The werewolf - mostly Landis's conception - looks a bit like a big stuffed dog. In only one shot is it really convincing as a monster. Baker was given his head for the design of the undead Jack, whose appearance gets progressively worse as the film unreels until he's the epitome of an E. C. Comics revenant, and for the dream sequence involving the massacre of David's family. These are the best special effects scenes in the movie. The transformation scene, while convincing, is artless, full of clinical details rather than mystery and terror (the two are not mutually exclusive, by the way, as anyone who has seen one of David Cronenberg's early films can attest).

The film's (im)balance between horror and comedy makes for an awkward narrative. The comedy is often too low-key to really carry its scenes. The interview between Dr. Hirsch and the police, for instance, is as flat as they come, with the audience siding with the bumbling Sergeant McManus demonstrating that he's a better cop than his superior even as he sublimates this fact to the Inspector's authority. In theory, this scene pays off later in the film when the werewolf decapitates Inspector Villiers, but in truth, this scene doesn't establish a connection between the audience and any of the three characters in it. The comedy is on better ground when it lampoons both American notions of fun and their British counterparts. When David channel-surfs the TV, he finds a test pattern, a laughably tasteless ad for The News of the World, and a dart championship. I don't know if the BBC has ever lived this down. "See You Next Wednesday," Landis's "signature" movie within a movie is incarnated in this film as an awful skin flick at the theater in Piccadilly Circus, and underlines less seemly elements of British culture of the 1970s. It has some fun with some punk rockers on a subway, too, much to its detriment. Punk won that culture war; it's David Naughton's seventies-era dudebro that seems the freak in this scene. The funniest part of the movie is Griffin Dunne's undead Jack, who is ceaselessly cheerful as he tries to convince David to kill himself. This is undercut somewhat by the gore associated with these scenes. Indeed, the film is more violent than you would expect of a comedy, and it's not the slapstick gore that would enliven the horror/comedies that come after it.

The romance between David and Alex is the kind of thing that vanishes from movies after about 1983 or so. It's a lingering sexual fantasy from the 1970s. It's fun to watch because Jenny Agutter sells it, but David Naughton isn't an actor who's up to his half of the bargain. Agutter is the heart and soul of the film in much the same way that Geena Davis is the center of The Fly, but the film around her does her no favors.

The soundtrack of An American Werewolf in London is famous for its assemblage of "moon" songs. One of Landis's hard rules was that all of the songs in the film had to feature "moon" in the title, hence various versions of "Blue Moon," Van Morrison's "Moondance," Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising." And yet, this hard rule precluded using Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London," a song that might have been written specifically for the movie. I admire Landis's discipline even if I question his judgement.

The end of the film has always bothered me. This is a film that suggests a mythology of werewolves, but fails to play by that mythology (in contrast to Landis's formal intransigence). Do werewolves have to die by the hand of love? It's suggested, but not put into practice. Silver bullets? Dismissed with a hand wave. The big action sequence at the end of the film seems like a darker version of the car chase that ends The Blues Brothers, with car crashes aplenty in Piccadilly Circus and logic be damned. Roger Ebert once described the end of American Werewolf in London as "unfinished," and I don't think he's entirely wrong. It's a frustrating film.

In spite of all this, the film manages at least one sequence that's worthy of Val Lewton, as a business commuter is stalked by the werewolf through the corridors of a tube station. The finale of this scene, shot from above with the victim on an escalator and the werewolf stalking forward, is genuinely nightmarish and reflects a different kind of film that's not so in love with its special effects, or, at the very least, one which employs its effects more artfully. There are enough moments like this one - David's dream of approaching himself on a bed in the woods is another one - that the film elbows its way into the conversation when discussing the horror films of the late seventies/early eighties. It's not a classic because it's just not a good enough movie to carry that designation, but I understand its cult among the young gorehounds of the day. I was one of them, after all.

[Charles Castle]

I wasn't expecting Raw (2016, directed by Julie Ducournau) to be funny. I mean, French extreme horror movies like Inside or Martyrs are often grim to a point where they cease being entertainments and become endurance tests. Raw is definitely in the tradition of those films, but not in that way. Don't get me wrong: Raw is a profoundly disturbing and visceral movie, one that isn't shy about employing a gross-out scene here and there. Nor is its splatter of a slapstick variety, a la The Evil Dead. It's a deadly serious movie. And yet there are laughs to be had; some laughs come from actual jokes, some come from the cinematic audacity of the filmmakers. And some of them come from the way the filmmakers take the horror genre's structure and combine it with a contemporary naturalism. The way this is filmed doesn't feel like it's necessarily a horror movie, but the structure of the film, from its alarming first scene to its final whip of the tale, is derived almost entirely from the genre. After the final scene unfolded I said to my wife that I wouldn't have been surprised to find the Crypt Keeper sending the audience to the exit with some ghastly bon mot. Writer/director Julie Ducournau, making her first feature, is keenly aware of her traditions. The resulting film is self-aware and funny without being a parody.

Raw follows Justine, a young woman from a strictly vegetarian household, as she embarks on her first year at veterinary school. Her parents are alums of the same school, and her free-spirited sister, Alex, also attends, a year ahead. The vet school has some pretty harsh hazing rituals for its freshmen, and in one such hazing, Justine is obligated to eat a rabbit's kidney. This makes her sick at first. She vomits it up and then develops an alarming rash. But something inside Justine has shifted, and she's suddenly interested in eating meat. Meanwhile, her first semester is going poorly. She's accused of cheating when her roommate, Adrien, copies from her test page, which prompts her professor to unleash a bitter scorn on her for being a bright student for whom things come easy. Her sister is complicit in continuing hazing requirements, many of which keep Justine sleep deprived. And she has the hots for Adrien, even though he's gay (she walks in on him as he's going down on his boyfriend of the moment). All of this on top of challenging school work that has her treating or dissecting a variety of large animals. When a ghastly accident severs one of Alex's fingers, Justine discovers a taste for human flesh, too. She blames the dog for eating the finger, but Alex knows and resents her for it. Alex turns out to be keeping a family secret, and soon she's coaching Justine in the finer points of cannibalism in contemporary France.

Raw is a film that's aware of genre signifiers. It quotes liberally from other horror films, most notably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, and Suspiria (both the title credits and end credits are pure Argento).  To my own sensibilities, this film plays like the mutant love child of May and Trouble Every Day. For all that, its most alarming sequences seem sui generis. Its opening scene, in which a figure throws itself in front of an oncoming car in order to get it to crash into a tree, generates a deep sense of unease. When the filmmakers revisit this scene in close-up and with context, it remains deeply disturbing. The scene where Justine eats her sister's finger is equally alarming in spite of the ghastly comedy that plays out when Alex wakes up and watches her sister do it. Raw is specific in its use of harm to animals, too. It is set in a veterinarian school, and its use of scenes of autopsy, dissection, and animal husbandry is infinitely crueler than notorious animal harm films like Cannibal Holocaust. The fate of Alex's dog for being an innocent bystander to Justine's cannibal awakening, for instance, is targeted at the sensitivities of pet lovers in a way that turns the screws harder than the random shock killings in any given mondo film or Italian cannibal film. The filmmakers know the value of both identifying with the animal(s) first and the politics of its images. This has Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts in its DNA. And yet, there is still a level of dry comedy in these scenes that makes them endurable. Alex's dog makes an attempt on her finger, so he's not totally innocent. One scene finds Alex talking to Justine while her arm is shoulder-deep up the anus of a horse (presumably to palpate a fetus), which is a scene that's both funny, surprising, and incredibly gross. It's the film's method in microcosm, leavening repulsive scenes with humor.

Raw is a wicked send up of the culture shift when young people first leave home for college or whatnot. This film's college experience is more brutal than most given that Justine's vet school seems actively hostile towards her. One of her teachers even expresses his disdain for gifted students for whom everything comes easy. Certainly, the culture of college life provides a framework for the disasters that befall her. The hazing awakens her appetite, the party life at school provides her with opportunities to fall from great height, her male roommate provides her with an opportunity to explore her new desires. As a setting for this film's coming of age story, it's all of a piece.

It probably goes without saying, but Raw is a movie about flesh in the way a horror audience would expect. Oh, sure, you get the gore of a horror movie, which has contributed to the film's reputation for instilling revulsion (theater audiences reported incidents of nausea and vomiting), but that strikes me as marketing, as a challenge to audiences to endure the film. This sort of thing has a long and honorable tradition dating back to William Castle and beyond. Aside from that, this is a film that is at least partly about having a body made of flesh, particularly a female body made of flesh. A female body that bleeds, even. The film's explicit references to Carrie underlie both the film's acquaintance with blood and women's acquaintance with blood. Cannibalism stands in for sexual awakening, of course, because movies about female flesh are always about sexual awakening in some shape or form. Justine starts the film in a state of virginal repression, represented by her veganism. Once she's tasted meat, she develops a taste for rougher and rougher sex. This is reflected in the performance of Garance Marillier as Justine, who uses the shapes of her posture to communicate her states of innocence and experience. It's a terrific and technically complex job of acting. But the film finds horror in some of the more mundane elements of being female, too. One of the film's ghastliest (and funniest) sequences revolves around a bikini wax. One of the film's social horrors (as opposed to its visceral horrors) involves a party dress.

This is very much a film about rape, a subject that isn't coded into the subtext, but rather part of the text. The scene where Justine ropes her (very gay) roommate into copulating with her has a hint of rape to it, as does the way Alex forces Justine to eat the rabbit kidney. Rape culture is one of the film's more troubling leitmotifs. The sequence that precipitates the film's end game is a kind of horror that's very much au courant with the place of women on social media and in rape culture in general: Justine is drunk out of her mind and enacting her hunger for flesh all while being filmed and put on the internet. All of these scenes give shape to specific fears of women and girls. I cannot imagine a male filmmaker writing or directing a film like this.

I can, however, imagine a male audience becoming deeply uncomfortable during this film. The Monstrous Feminine is always good for getting under the skin of male moviegoers. Most men are uncomfortable enough with the facts of female biology in everyday life, so it doesn't take much to weaponize mundane feminine experiences for them. Justine's sexual appetite is almost a parody of male insecurities toward sexually aggressive women. When the film's gore-soaked finale arrives, those fears seem entirely justified. This is compounded in the film's wicked denouement, in which the film's ostensibly stable male authority figure is shown to be completely at the mercy of his own female monster.

It should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention to the genre that we are currently in one of horror's periodic golden ages. The modern model of horror has a hint of social justice activism underneath it, and, indeed, an interest in the human condition beyond the spilling of viscera. Raw spills plenty of viscera, sure. It's a vivid and angry film. But it also pokes at a raw and bleeding collective id in a way that's new to the genre, a way that makes the film linger in the mind once the images of grue fade in the memory.

[ihavemyreasons]

Escape From New York (1981)
Remember being disappointed in this when I saw it on VHS. Not sure why. Guessing it might have looked like ass in 4:3. HD remaster looks great in widescreen. Forgot all the known actors in it besides Kurt Russell. Mostly good performances, but Ernest Borgnine at his overacting worst. Soundtrack maybe the most John Carpenter soundtrack ever. Plane special effects cheesy as is movie overall and a lot of the scenes look too much like they were shot on the soundstages they were with artist rendered unrealistic graffiti. Been numerous movies with similar plots. Enjoyed it more than any of those on this viewing. Corny, but well made and fun. And to think that the distant future of 1997 was 25 years ago.

The Thing (1998)
Watched after They Live and before Escape From New York. This is the John Carpenter movie I've seen more times than any other but hadn't seen in at least 20 years. Special effects hold up surprisingly well and I still think it deserved to do far better than it did on release, but the plot could have been cleaned up to make it a better movie and add some suspense. Still enjoyed but not quite as great as I remembered. A bleak ending when bleak endings were rare.

[ihavemyreasons]

No Holds Barred (1989)
Sometimes you have a memory of something terrible, but then you see it again and it's far worse/more wonderful than you ever remembered. So amazingly stupid, sexist and poorly written, acted, and shot...80s made for TV level movie shot with 80s soap opera production values that thinks it can convince you that wrestling is real by playing up every negative stereotype about pro wrestling and redneck pro wrestling fans is the best way I can describe it.. most TV wrestling fueds that lead to grudge matches tend to be better thought out and written than anything in this movie...we're supposed to care about Hulk's little brother because he was introduced as Hulk's little brother...that's it - no characterization - no heart warming bonding montages - just hey, Hulk is introduced as having a little brother in Act 1 and then he disappears and gets beat up in Act 4..and in between we get Hulk Hogan in a speedo...you jock ass!

[Charles Castle]

The newer Clash of the Titans (2010, directed by Louis Leterrier) is surprising in at least one respect: it satisfies the Bechdel Test. There are more than two women in the film with speaking parts. Two or more women speak to each other about something other than a man (in this case, Cassiopeia to her daughter, Andromeda, on the subject of defying the gods). Rah, rah, feminism. Otherwise, this sucks all kinds of ass.

This film is stitched together from bits and pieces of the original film without borrowing its overall design. Some elements seem thrown in just for the sake of echoing the old movie. Calibos, for example, seems like a throw in excuse to make giant scorpions. The contempt for the original film exhibited in this one is manifested in a throwaway bit, in which Perseus finds Bubo the owl in a bunch of scrap and tosses him aside. Mind you, the original is no great shakes and the owl was ridiculous, but why antagonize the people who grew up with it by trashing it? Feh.

Allegedly, the whole reason this exists is to update the special effects from Harryhausen's charmingly homemade stop-motion puppets to state of the art, photoreal CGI. But what, I ask with all too much regularity these days, is the point of state of the art special effects if the film is edited so fast that you can't see anything? I challenge anyone to tell me what this film's harpies actually look like (apart from having wings). There were two points during this film where I said aloud "Hold the camera STILL!" If I say anything during a movie, I'm usually having a bad time, so this is telling of my experience. The way the film plays fast and loose with mythology is irritating, too, but not nearly as irritating as the way it wastes relatively good actors in the background in favor of Sam Worthington and Gemma Arterton, neither of whom exactly holds the screen. Polly Walker gets four minutes of screen time? Elizabeth McGovern is even in this? Really? I almost gave this points for having some background extras at the palace in Argos dressed in the Minoan snake goddess outfit (sadly and absurdly there is no visible nudity), but screw it, it's anachronistic. Ralph Fiennes must have done this without preparation during some down time on the set of Harry Potter, because his performance is basically Voldermort in mythological drag. Lazy.

In a nutshell: Loud, pummeling, illogical, incomprehensible, pointless. Tremendous resources misapplied wholesale. A great steaming pile.

[The Lurker]

The newer Clash of the Titans (2010, directed by Louis Leterrier) is surprising in at least one respect: it satisfies the Bechdel Test. There are more than two women in the film with speaking parts. Two or more women speak to each other about something other than a man (in this case, Cassiopeia to her daughter, Andromeda, on the subject of defying the gods). Rah, rah, feminism. Otherwise, this sucks all kinds of ass.

This film is stitched together from bits and pieces of the original film without borrowing its overall design. Some elements seem thrown in just for the sake of echoing the old movie. Calibos, for example, seems like a throw in excuse to make giant scorpions. The contempt for the original film exhibited in this one is manifested in a throwaway bit, in which Perseus finds Bubo the owl in a bunch of scrap and tosses him aside. Mind you, the original is no great shakes and the owl was ridiculous, but why antagonize the people who grew up with it by trashing it? Feh.

Allegedly, the whole reason this exists is to update the special effects from Harryhausen's charmingly homemade stop-motion puppets to state of the art, photoreal CGI. But what, I ask with all too much regularity these days, is the point of state of the art special effects if the film is edited so fast that you can't see anything? I challenge anyone to tell me what this film's harpies actually look like (apart from having wings). There were two points during this film where I said aloud "Hold the camera STILL!" If I say anything during a movie, I'm usually having a bad time, so this is telling of my experience. The way the film plays fast and loose with mythology is irritating, too, but not nearly as irritating as the way it wastes relatively good actors in the background in favor of Sam Worthington and Gemma Arterton, neither of whom exactly holds the screen. Polly Walker gets four minutes of screen time? Elizabeth McGovern is even in this? Really? I almost gave this points for having some background extras at the palace in Argos dressed in the Minoan snake goddess outfit (sadly and absurdly there is no visible nudity), but screw it, it's anachronistic. Ralph Fiennes must have done this without preparation during some down time on the set of Harry Potter, because his performance is basically Voldermort in mythological drag. Lazy.

In a nutshell: Loud, pummeling, illogical, incomprehensible, pointless. Tremendous resources misapplied wholesale. A great steaming pile.

The thing I remember the most is the film's unnecessary lens flares and that the game based on the movie was a blatant knockoff of the original God of War.

[Charles Castle]

Mercy, there is soooo much lens flare.

[Charles Castle]

Rewatched Jackie Brown this evening. Probably still my favorite Tarantino. I could not recall if I posted about it here before, so this is my write up from 2010:

It took a long time for filmmakers to recognize the droll comedy in Elmore Leonard's novels. They were always in love with his plots, but lacking the comedy, most movies based on Leonard are but pale shadows. For Leonard himself, the plots are an excuse to study his characters. Once asked about his top five crime novels, Leonard listed George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle five times. That book is ALL character study. In any event, sometime in the mid-1990s, someone discovered the comedy, but it wasn't until Quentin Tarantino's 1997 adaptation of Rum Punch, retitled Jackie Brown, that anyone discovered the character study. Perversely, this breakthrough came from Tarantino's decompression of the book's plot, which he films from multiple angles (both chronologically and from points of view). The plot is still there, but the plot is secondary to watching the characters interact and it grows from these interactions. This is the kind of movie that takes time out to watch its characters have dinner or shop for clothes (this last in the midst of its most difficult plot points). A lot of movies tell us what its characters do for a living. This one tells us how much they make and even how much money they have saved in their 401k plan. It's rich with details, a fact that surely contributes to complaints about its length, though not from me. I wouldn't want this to be any shorter. Hell, I could spend another hour with these characters without noticing the time.

Of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, I wrote: "... Shoshanna, as played by Melanie Laurent, is basically Marlene Dietrich to Tarantino's Von Sternberg." In retrospect, that honor properly belongs to Pam Grier as the title character in Jackie Brown. Tarantino is in love with all of his actresses, to be sure, but I think he held a special fondness for Grier, the action star and baddest mother fucker of his fondest imaginings. When he read Elmore Leonard's book, in which the character is a blonde white woman, he imagined it for Grier. She responded in kind with the best performance of her career. She's Foxy Brown and Coffey fading into middle age, still holding her looks, but having to rely increasingly on her brains. Fortunately, she's also smarter than anyone around her. She's smarter than Ordell Robie, played with amiable menace by Samuel L. Jackson, for whom she smuggles money from Mexico. She's smarter than Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton), the ATF agent on Robie's trail who views Jackie as an instrument to trap him. She's probably smarter than Max Cherry (Robert Forster), her bail bondsman, but she never has to match wits with him given that he's smitten with her from the moment she walks out of jail and into his life. This is something pretty rare, actually. It's a movie about a 44 year old black woman and a 56 year white old man who have a relationship and plan a caper. I mean, has there ever been another character like Jackie Brown holding the center of a movie? Honestly, I can't think of one. Tarantino's willingness to stop long enough to really look at his actors enhances their performances. It doesn't hurt that all of them have interesting faces, none more so than Robert Forster, who, like Grier, also does career-best work here.

As cinema, this is Tarantino's most assured movie. He's not trying too much. He no longer needs to make a splash - he did that with his prior two films - so he doesn't have to overreach himself. In his subsequent films, he loads his palette almost to the point of bursting. In Jackie Brown, he's content to observe. A director noted for scenes of graphic violence, he keeps all of the violence in this film out of the frame or at such a distance as to cushion the blow. More than that, though, he's willing to let his lead characters fall in love. This is the only one of Tarantino's films in which the characters realistically relate to each other in the ways that adult men and women relate to each other, and he does it independently of the plot. The plot uses this, sure, but it doesn't depend on it. It also slows down to let its characters think things out. Action, in this movie, is no substitute for thought. The actions that occur without thinking - the scene where Robert DeNiro's character shoots motormouthed Bridget Fonda after she nags him a couple of words too far, for instance - precipitate disaster.

This is also the least "meta" of Tarantino's movies. The meta level is still there - it makes me smile every time I see Sid Haig play a judge sending Pam Grier to jail, for instance - but the director elides most of it, as if it doesn't matter to the movie. Most of it is in soundtrack cues. Oh, and my, heavens, does this have a killer soundtrack, from the opening shot scored with Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street" to the diegetic appearance of The Delphonics to a catalogue of heavy soul from soul's golden era. Some of the soundtrack cues come from Pam Grier's other movies. None of this really advertises itself the way that, say, the red light and soundtrack cue from Ironside mark the Kill Bills.

In any event, it's disappointing to me that Tarantino hasn't gone back to this mode of filmmaking. He's gone back to being a provocateur, which is fine, I guess, but on the evidence of Jackie Brown, that impulse squanders an immense reservoir of talent. For Jackie Brown's part, it remains the director's best film, even if it's the one that fans of his more outre films tend to ignore.

[Charles Castle]

Some films change a little, but sometimes that small shift can knock a movie out of the bright circle of fond memory. For me, a case in point is The Sting (1973, directed by George Roy Hill), a film I used to love. It's been at least a decade since I last saw it. It's a film I originally saw with my father, and it was a film he loved. It was something we could share, actually, and he usually had good taste, so it's a memory I treasure. When I sat down with my wife to watch it last week, I expected it to be a good experience. I was kind of disappointed. The whole thing fell flat this time out and I'm at a loss as to explain what ineffable quality was missing. It didn't help that my wife didn't like it (this was the first time she had seen it). That was kind of a blow, too. I understand her reaction, because the film didn't work for me this time, either.

The Sting is one of those movies that's trying to put one over on the audience, which is interesting as far as it goes because its structure is like one of those Penn and Teller routines where the magicians dismantle the trick to show you how it works. The audience is privy to the con. The story follows small time con man Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford). Hooker and his partner, Luther (Robert Earl Jones), have run a small grift on a guy who turns out to have been a money courier for big time mobster Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). Lonnegan brooks no interference with his operation, big or small and he soon dispatches his thugs to knock off Johnny and Luther, though they miss Johnny. Luther, before he dies, puts in a good word for Johnny with long con mastermind Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), and Johnny convinces Henry to run the long con on Lonnegan as a means of getting his revenge. They set him up with a card game, in which Johnny appears to betray Henry to Lonnegan, then tell him the tale of how he wants to take over Henry's bookmaking establishment with a sure scam that will take it for all its worth. The other two elements of the movie are corrupt cop Snyder (Charles Durning), out for his cut of Johnny's takings, and the FBI, after Henry on a federal warrant. Not everything is as it seems.

The way the movie works is that it tells the audience everything save for one or two small details. Now, if the audience is onto those details, the gig is up and the movie becomes an exercise in makework. It's a house of cards. And this, I propose, is what spoils my fondness for the movie, because once you've seen the whole thing, it holds no surprises. Not cinematic ones anyway. I think the filmmakers know this, because they've built the thing around the charm of Robert Redford (who was probably too old for the role) and Paul Newman, then hedged their bets with a raft of interesting character actors and a sentimental ragtime score. And there are touches that are suggestive of a better film than what one actually gets. I love the idea that Eileen Brennan's character not only runs a house of ill-repute behind a merry-go-round, but that when things get slow for the girls, she fires it up and lets them ride it. That's cool, but it's a fleeting moment. Otherwise, the street scenes all have some weird feeling of being "on set," and visually the whole thing screams "movie." And not in a good way. George Roy Hill is indifferent to any of the possibilities of abstraction offered by the period set and his direction of the film is utilitarian at best.

I suppose this experience could have been worse. I mean, I like The Sting. I still like it, to an extent. But if it was never a favorite before, it will definitely never be a favorite in the future, even if I do choose to watch it again. That's looking pretty dim at this point.