Reviews

I do not know if "I'm Not There" is as fun for other people as it is for Dylan fans, but if you're really into Dylan it's addictive. I rented the film from Blockbuster and watched it 4 and a half times before my eyes gave out. The movie is all the more amazing considering it had Dylan's full cooperation despite its rather unflattering thesis: that Bob Dylan's constantly changing personas are the mark of a pretentious poseur who never really believed in anything. A more charitable view is that Dylan's many masks are a defense mechanism adopted to protect him from the incredible pressures he has faced throughout his career. So many rock stars have been destroyed precisely because they were unable to distinguish their real selves from their stage persona--Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Bryan Jones, to name only a few--just as Dylan himself came close to not making it with his 1966 motorcycle accident. If there is a real Bob Dylan in the film it might well be Richard Gere's Billy the Kid--the one trait Dylan has never wavered in is his obsession with the Old West and Americana--this is probably as close a glimpse as we will ever get to Dylan's psyche. Although attention has understandably focused on Cate Blanchett's Jude Quinn, all six Dylan dopplegangers are brilliant, especially young Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody Guthrie and Arthur Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud. Heath Ledger's Robbie Clark is a reminder why we will miss this brilliant actor, and "Dark Knight" co-star's Father John (the born again Dylan) bears an uncanny resemblance to the Reverend Jim Jones. Of the supporting cast Bruce Greenwood and Charlotte Gainsborough are outstanding, while Michelle Williams steals the show with her devastatingly sensual portrayal of an Edie Sedgewick-based character. An amazing film you have to see to believe. But please see it.

This may well be the definitive teen angst film of all time. I was in love with Alice (Charlotte Alexandra, who bears a striking resemblance to Alicia Silverstone in "The Crush") the moment she began her voice-over narration: "My name is Alice. I hate people. They oppress me." This future existentialist, who in a few years will either be studying phenomonology at the Sorbonne or joining a radical Maoist splinter cell, has every reason to feel oppressed. She is returning home from a truly ghastly summer vacation with her philandering dad and her nagging mom and is well on her way to becoming the next Sylvia Plath. A child trapped in a woman's body, she's obsessed with her vagina and with bodily fluids but understandably shy among men and terrified of real sex. Some of her fantasies and daydreams are quite odd, but hey, this is France, and we're talking about a fourteen-year old, okay? She scandalizes the neighborhood by riding around in her bicycle without any panties and begins a torrid fling with the stud who works at her dad's sawmill (Hyram Keller), which ends in tragedy when he's killed by her father's wild boar trap. The final shot of Alice is chilling. This film goes on to show once again that adolescence is hell, that sex is not all it's cracked out to be, that the French countryside is full of mean, narrow-minded people, and parents don't understand. Those looking for a good porno flick will be understandably disappointed, but those looking for an insightful analysis of modern man (or woman)'s existential ennui will be richly rewarded. This is the film "American Beauty" aspired to be.

If Ken Russell, Mario Bava, and Luis Bunuel had collaborated on a film the results wouldn't have been much different from "Flesh for Frankenstein." This movie should be required viewing for all pre-med students: if they can take this, they should be ready to dissect corpses. Not since "Sin City" have I seen limbs and organs strewed around the screen so cheerfully. Unlike "Sin City," which had a kabuki, stylized quality that blunted much of the horror, "Flesh for Frankenstein" has an unabashed nastiness that doesn't pull any punches. At the same time it's beautifully photographed; like much Italian giallo (Bava, Argento) even the most horrific images are rendered eerily beautiful by the lush color and widescreen. Udo Kier plays Baron Frankenstein as a proto-Nazi obsessed with creating a master race; Monique Van Vooren is deliciously campy as his oversexed wife and Joe Dallesandro, with his flat Brooklyn accent, resembles a young Marlon Brando as Nicholas the stable boy, the only decent human being in the film. Many have commented that he was out of place in the movie, but that was the point: he was the all-American good guy lost in a world of sleek but slimy eurotrash. Particularly disturbing were the two almost-mute children, who resemble nothing so much as Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. Like Bunuel's "Viridiana" there is an unmistakable hint of incest: the Baron and Katharine are clearly brother and sister, and they seem to be grooming their children to take their place. This movie joins "Salo" and "El Topo" in the pantheon of disturbing 70s cult films.

The late Pope John Paul II said this film "deeply wounds the religious sentiments of believers." It may well be that the Roman Catholic hierarchy's cover-up of pedophile priests has done more to wound the religious sentiments of believers than any mere movie could. The controversy over "Hail, Mary," like the controversies surrounding "The Last Temptation of Christ," "The Passion of the Christ," and "The Da Vinci Code" shows that any time a filmmaker deals with religious issues in his work he risks offending a sizable constituency. That's understandable: faith is an important part of most people's lives, and in a world rife with religious divisions you can't please everyone. Who knows? Maybe you shouldn't try. "Hail Mary," though obscure and enigmatic in Godard's finest manner, is nowhere as blasphemous as most of Luis Bunuel's stuff. In updating the story of the Nativity to contemporary France he nowhere denies the historical truth of the Virgin Birth or the divinity of Christ. "Hail, Mary" marks a turning-point in Godard's career when he abandoned the materialism of his Maoist period for a more spiritual, philosophical approach. Beautiful Myriem Roussel gives a striking portrayal of the Virgin Mary as a high school basketball player who works at her father's gas station; when her thuggish boyfriend Joseph (Thierry Rode) learns she's pregnant he's understandably suspicious. The film is touching as it deals with two ordinary people trying to make sense of something extraordinary entering and disrupting their lives; one can well believe that the historical Mary and Joseph went through just such struggles as the couple in the film. We get only a brief glimpse of the boy Jesus, but his death on the Cross is clearly foreshadowed. Interestingly, Godard uses some of the same music that Pasolini used in "The Gospel According to Saint Matthew." "Hail Mary" deals with complicated themes of the meaning of life, the wonder of birth, creation v. evolution, in an intelligent and thoughtful way far superior to the strident agitprop produced by American evangelicals. A beautiful if perplexing film.

This truly obscure neo-noir from 1988 is memorable as Uma Thurman's first starring role and also has a bit part from Steve Buscemi. Quentin Tarantino must have seen it since he cast both of them in "Pulp Fiction." The DVD retails at WalMart for $1.00, which is about what it's worth. "Kiss Daddy Goodbye" has an intriguing storyline but is so low-budget as to be literally unwatchable: the lighting is poor, the photography amateurish, and night scenes are literally invisible. On the plus side the eighteen-year old Uma oozes sex appeal and a sleazy sort of glamour which must have attracted Tarantino to her, and there are some gritty, realistic performances, particularly from Buscemi. The movie was produced with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the West German Kunstministerium, another example of taxpayers' money going to waste.

"Rosemary's Baby" is the first generation gap horror movie. 60s "It" girl Mia Farrow plays a sweet young thing who moves into an exclusive Manhattan apartment building with her struggling actor husband John Cassavetes, who brings his usual edgy neurosis to the part. All their neighbors are elderly, and it turns out that they are also a coven of witches whose mission is to find the perfect mother for the devil's child. Rosemary, whose name is oddly reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, is the perfect choice, and her actor hubby is quite happy to sell his soul to Satan in return for help with his career. Like "The Manchurian Candidate" and "The Killers," "Rosemary's Baby" is one of those movies that captures a vivid snapshot of the paranoia and unrest of the 60s, a decade that began so promisingly but that ended in assassination, riot, and social unrest. Holocaust survivor Roman Polanski, who was soon to lose his pregnant wife Sharon Tate to the murderous Manson "family," directed, closely following Ira Levin's brilliant novel and in the process creating "Catholic horror." Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer are excellent as the nosy neighbors who turn out to be the devil's henchmen, as is Ralph Bellamy as the sinister doctor who's part of the conspiracy. Shakespearean veteran Sir Maurice Evans (Maurice on "Bewitched") plays the one sympathetic old person in the movie. "Rosemary's Baby" set a standard for Hollywood horror that has seldom been equalled and never excelled. Only "The Exorcist," "Jaws," and "The Shining" come close. Of films made during the last decade only "The Blair Witch Project" approaches the same standard.

Face it: slasher films are not art. They're cheap, nasty, ugly, vulgar, despicable, misogynistic exploitation pics that appeal to the basest, most primitive instinct of our collective id. That's not to say I don't enjoy them, but I have no illusions about their ultimate worth. When you do see a slasher movie that has any artistic merit whatsoever, it's easy to exaggerate its quality and see it as something more than what it is (i.e., "House of Wax.") Seen in this perspective "Valentine" is actually one of the better examples of the genre I've seen, one of the few American slasher movies to approach the level of visual and stylistic sophistication found in the best Italian giallo. Director Jamie Banks is not yet on a par with Argento or Bava, but here he has crafted an atmospheric, entertaining thriller full of beautiful women, fiendish murders, and a truly inspired final "gotcha." The script is full of tongue-in-cheek humor that kept me laughing out loud, but never sunk into the kind of self-referential, trendy hipster attitude that mars so many horror films made for Generation Y (i.e., "Scream" and its sequels). In the eighties most victims in horror flicks were anonymous starlets who never appeared in anything else, but since Drew Barrymore was butchered in "Scream" it has been increasingly common to cast familiar faces in the victim role. This film delivered spectacularly in that respect, with three truly beautiful women--Katherine Heigl, Jessica Caulfield, and Denise Richards (who received star billing!) meeting increasingly gruesome and inventive deaths. Ms. Richards' hot tub scene alone is worth the price of admission. It's become a cliché for the masked killer of beautiful women to turn out to be a chick herself, but Jessica Capshaw was believable as Dorothy. Marley Shelton, with her fetching girl next door wholesomeness (I loved her in "sugar and spice") makes for an appealing "last girl," and David Boreanaz was amusingly repellent as her alcoholic boy friend, at times resembling nothing so much as a junior varsity caricature of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining." I give "Valentine" seven chainsaws--not as good as "Blood and Black Lace" but better than "House of Wax."

It's hard to get excited about Greek tragedy. People in stylized masks and costumes wearing over-sized boots, declaiming verse in front of curtains and pillars . . . Bad Greek tragedy can be worse than bad Shakespeare. But Michael Cacoyannis ("Zorba the Greek") took Euripides out of the library and put him back in the real world in this raw, savage adaptation of perhaps the greatest anti-war play ever written. Euripides was the most popular poet of the ancient world, although his leftist ideology has made him a whipping boy for elitist critics from Aristotle to Nietzsche, who prefer the more patrician Aeschylus and Sophocles. "The Trojan Women" is a stirring indictment of imperialist aggression at a time when democratic Athens was involved in a protracted war with totalitarian Sparta (the inspiration for Plato's Republic). The good-guy Athenians were the aggressors, invading islands that didn't tow the line, exterminating the men, enslaving the women--and in the process alienating the Greek-speaking world and losing the war as the brutal Spartans came off as the good guys by comparison. The parallels with today's world situation need hardly be mentioned, but suffice it to say that when they're threatened democracies can be as brutal as dictatorships. Cacoyannis has fashioned a stark, uncompromising rendition of Euripides' play with a dream cast--Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Genevieve Bujold (Clint Eastwood's love interest in "Tightrope") and Irene Papas. Brian Blessed ("I, Claudius," "The Black Adder") has the only significant male role. A movie well worth seeking out.

Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. Who would have thought three college kids being chased by an unseen ghost would have become one of the highest-grossing films of all time? The idea was so simple, almost quaint, I wish I'd thought of it. I'd be sitting in a hot tub in Aruba with Paris Hilton now . . . but that's a different story. This film struck a chord with the American public that's hard to identify. What did the Blair Witch represent? Was she nature, raped and despoiled by male-dominated American bourgeois society? Was she the Goddess of the Witches, Hecate, striking back for having been persecuted by Christianity? Or was the film itself an affirmation of Christian values, as so many horror films ironically are? Certainly the three student filmmakers come to grief after scoffing at the Bible-toting old woman's chilling tale of her own encounter with the Blair Witch. The film has obvious parallels with Stephen King's "It" and much of H.P. Lovecraft. Whatever. Anyone can make a movie, but not everyone can make a GOOD movie. "The Blair Witch Project" succeeded in part due to clever Internet hype, but largely due to the raw, cinema-verite film-making that imparted grisly authenticity to what otherwise might have been a cheesy exploitation film, and to the superb improvisational skills of three talented young character actors--Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Mike Williams. We could identify with them thanks to their very ordinariness. They were everyone's son, daughter, boyfriend, brother, sister. Their plight reminded one of soldiers caught behind enemy lines in wartime . . . Ironically, the real Burkitville MD (yes, Virginia, there is a Burkitville) is close to the sight of some major Civil War battles. The bottom line is, it's a darn good film.

Why has this dreary little piece of suburban angst become such a favorite with so many people? The whole premise is abominable: after losing his job, hen-pecked Kevin Spacey (an actor whose appeal is beyond me) starts buying pot from a high school kid and drooling over his lovely teenage daughter's Lolita-ish friend. What's so hip or revolutionary about working out, listening to classic rock, or smoking pot? Spacey acts like he's in prison (although with his shrewish wife, played by a grating Annette Bening, maybe he is). Then there's the self-hating repressed homosexual Marine Corps colonel, a stereotypical figure played without a shred of subtilty by Chris Cooper. Where's R. Lee Ermey when you need him? Then there's the eponymous "American Beauty." Mena Suvari is no doubt a cute girl, but she's not really beautiful. Thora Birch, the daughter in the film, is far better looking. But there's something creepy about building a whole film around ephebophilia. This is one of the few films I ever bought on DVD that I was unable to watch more than once. I gave it to my cousin for Christmas. Now I have to spend the next twelve months dreading what her payback will be come Yuletide.

This movie has everything: Jennifer Love Hewitt for the Gen-Xers, Sigourney Weaver for Baby Boomers, and the late Ann Bancroft for the Swing Generation. It's always fun seeing an actress with a good-girl reputation play a whore (i.e., Natalie Portman in the vastly overrated "Closer") and Hewitt is smoulderingly sexy as Paige, the younger half of a mother-daughter con woman team preying on gullible millionaires. Hewitt lighting up will undoubtedly appeal to smoking fetishists, but the film ironically manages to turn in an anti-tobacco message with Gene Hackman looking like death warmed over as a truly repellant cigarette manufacturer. Sigourney Weaver takes a break from the "Alien" movies to display her more feminine side; her rendition of "Back in the USSR" is a comic gem. Hackman is brilliant as always, even when playing a nauseating character. Ray Liotta does a funny parody of his "Goodfellas" persona as the wise guy with a heart of gold, and Jason Lee plays Hewitt's mark who becomes her true love. Look for super-hot Sarah Silverman as one of Lee's pals and folk singer Shawn Colvin as a minister. The perfect movie for long winter nights, I love this film!

Are sea side resorts the sad, dreary places they're always depicted as in movies and novels? Certainly this movie, along with the near-contemporary "Don't Look Now" depicts Venice as a particularly squalid and decadent tourist trap (for a more light-hearted approach, see "Just Married" with Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy). Having never been to Venice I can't say for sure, but it does make a perfect setting for this somber but sumptuous spectacle from Luchino Visconti, one of the great stylists of world cinema. Having seen the movie I now wish I had gotten around to reading the Thomas Mann novella it's based on (which also inspired an opera by Sir Benjamin Britten). Since I don't know the back story and the movie has little in the way of plot or exposition, I'm left wondering about Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde)'s obsession with young Tadzio. Is he a homosexual? A pedophile? Or is his longing for the beautiful youth something more innocent? Perhaps Tadzio reminds him of what he could have been and now knows he never will be. Those who complain of the slow pace of this movie should stick to car crashes and kung-fu: at 2 hours and 15 minutes it's not particularly long, and it moves at a leisurely but hardly sluggish pace. The film benefits from the ravishing music of Gustave Mahler, on whom Aschenbach's character is clearly based. Dirk Bogarde gives a moving performance, and the movie is graced by the presence of Silvana Mangano, one of Italy's great beauties, as Tadzio's mother.

This film bears an unmistakable resemblance to Orson Welles' "Le Proces," which was made just three years earlier: elegant black and white photography, the use of real Paris locations, a plot that combines absurdist humor with social commentary, and a performance by Orson's old pal Akim Tamiroff. Eddie Constantine plays Lemme Caution as a cross between Mike Hammer and James Bond, with a dash of Sergeant Joe Friday; with his pockmarked face, gravelly voice, trench coat and fedora, Constantine evokes the mystique of Humphrey Bogart, one of Godard's idols, while the exquisite Anna Karina, with her velvet voice, shares with Dominique Sanda the ability to convey complex emotions with minimal facial expression. Like much sci-fi, "Alphaville" parodoxically conveys an anti-technology message, which in the long run is self-defeating but makes for great entertainment, especially for those of us less than enamored of the Information Revolution. The plot bears marked similarities to "1984" and "Brave New World" as well as stories by Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov. "Alphaville" has a strongly anti-communist, almost libertarian message, which is ironic in view of Godard's later commitment to Maoism. The film's logical gaps are perhaps fitting in view of its protest against the tyranny of mathematical logic, which hearkens back to Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground." Godard shot the entire film in real Paris locations, mostly at night, giving them a spooky, futuristic look. Alpha-60, the supercomputer who rules Alphaville, is a clear forerunner of HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey." This is a movie that both entertains and makes us think, defending the primacy of human emotions and values in a world increasingly dominated by machines.

In its own quiet way this Vittorio de Sica gem is as gripping and powerful as such more graphic Holocaust films as "Schindler's List" and "Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom." It deals with a wealthy Italian Jewish family living in a secluded estate in the city of Ferrara. The Finzi-Continis are almost completely assimilated and have little in common with their fellow Jews, but once Mussolini's racial laws begin to take effect they open their gardens to young Jews from the neighborhood. The movie depicts the fatal passivity of people who think they're safe, that monstrous social upheavals won't touch them. Slowly but surely the Jews of Italy have their freedom taken away from them; before they know what's happening they're headed for Auschwitz. The movie leaves the fate of the Finzi-Continis unresolved, but we know from the novel by Giorgio Bassani that none of them survived. This film is beautifully photographed with the visual opulence one has come to expect from Italian cinema, with a haunting score and memorable performances, especially by the ravishing Dominique Sanda, quite possibly the most beautiful woman to ever appear on film. This is a movie everyone should see, since it drives home only too clearly the lesson that freedom can never be taken for granted, that what happened in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy could happen here too. No one is safe.

This cheesy but entertaining sword-and-sandal movie has more in common with the muscleman spectacles being made in Italy at the time than it has with the superior Biblical epics made by Hollywood in the same era, such as "Ben Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." The dialogue is stilted, the acting stiff, and the departures from the Biblical narrative make it unsuitable as a Sunday school lesson (i.e., Jerusalem did not become part of Israel until David conquered it after Saul's death; in one scene the prophet Samuel quotes verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which hadn't been written yet). On the credit side, the movie has lots of pretty girls (what's a Biblical epic without scantily clad dancing girls?) and an exciting battle scene. Hilton Edwards (billed as Edward Hilton) hams it up amusingly as Samuel, and an alarmingly obese Orson Welles gives a commanding performance as Saul, showing that life can be tough for a working actor even if you're a genius. Aside from Welles, only the sexy Eleonora Rossi-Drago, as Saul's scheming daughter Merab, manages to create a three-dimensional character. Overall, the acting is so poor that circus strong man Kronos, as Goliath, actually gives one of the better performances even though all he does is grunt.

Has anybody besides me realized that the apparent source for the character of Edmund Blackadder was Edmund, the scheming bastard son of Gloucester in "King Lear"? That out of the way, I must admit that I love all four "Blackadder" series (including the much-maligned first), but this is my favorite. "Blackadder" may be full of anachronisms and frequently gets names and dates wrong, but as Brechtian social commentary it couldn't be more true. As in all four series, "Blackadder II" cuts through the hypocritical platitudes of official history and presents the harsh realities of life in Elizabethan England, with its religious intolerance, official oppression, and vast gap between the haves and have-nots. This is no Renaissance Faire view of "Merry England": here is a world of dirt and grime, where old men urge their daughters to become prostitutes, where sadistic bishops cheerfully practice usury (organized religion, in all Blackadder series, is generally a tool of oppression), people are convicted and beheaded on insufficient evidence, and aristocratic fools play games with people's lives. My favorite episode is the one where Edmund is appointed Lord High Executioner and addresses his staff: "I am the newly appointed minister in charge of religious genocide." Despite the fast-and-loose approach to history, all four Blackadder series look authentic: costume and set design is always right on target; indeed, I've seen few Shakespearean productions that looked as good as "Blackadder II." Rowan Atkinson's Edmund bears more than a passing resemblance to Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow--an intelligent man trapped in a world less evolved than he--and Tony Robertson is brilliant as always as Baldrick, the Common Man reborn throughout history. Miranda Richardson's Queen Elizabeth I may not be the best screen portrayal of the Virgin Queen, but she's certainly the funniest, and Stephen Fry's Lord Melchitt is perfect as the irritating voice of authority. A word of advice to college students: don't bother to take British history; just rent all four "Blackadder" series and watch them over the weekend before finals. You may get the facts wrong, but your professor will have a good chuckle over your essay exams.

I'd give this movie an 11 if I could. I never thought it would be possible to improve on Robert Siodmak's 1946 classic "The Killers," but this 1964 classic from Don Siegel is that rare case of a remake that was better than the original. If it lacks the 1940s noir glamour of the original, it makes up for it with 1960s cool, rivalling other cult classics from the period--"Blood and Black Lace," "Casino Royale"-in capturing the swinging 60s ambiance. The original "Killers," made in 1946, was a brilliant distillation of the film noir ethos and the disillusionment of post-war America; the remake, in contrast, embodies the pervasive violence of American society that was one of the hallmarks of the 60s experience, along with the growing climate of conspiracy theories and paranoia. It's incredible that in 1963, the year of the Kennedy assassination, they would be filming a movie starring Ronald Reagan in which a man is shot by a high-powered rifle from a high-rise office building. Ironically, this film was released only two years before Ronald Reagan became the first of two actors to be elected governor of California as a Republican, and unlike a certain Teutonic knucklehead who shall remain nameless, the man could really act. He brings a natural air of authority and unspoken menace to every scene he has. Angie Dickinson is just as sexy as Ava Gardner and a better actress; John Cassavetes brings his usual neurotic edge to the role of the victim; and Lee Marvin, as always, is the intense, driven professional whose brain is always ten minutes ahead of his opponents. Clu Galager, as Marvin's geeky colleague, bears an unnerving resemblance to Detective Robert Goran (Vincent D'Onofrio) of "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." Together with such old pros as Claude Akins and Norman Fell the cast gives a master class in screen acting. If this movie had never been made, Martin Scorscese would have become a priest and Quentin Tarantino would still be a video store clerk. It's impossible to imagine what contemporary cinema would be like without its influence.

I've always had a soft spot for this movie. Sure, it goes on for too long and most of the gags run out of steam, but for the most part it's laugh-out loud funny. It was shamelessly ripped off by "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," which is a shorter and more coherent film. The images from "Casino Royale" that stick in my mind are Orson Welles doing magic tricks and Woody Allen in a kinky bondage scene with the lovely Israeli actress Dahlia Lavi. This film sports a virtual who's who of gorgeous sixties starlets: Lavi, Barbara Bouchet, Joanna Pettet, Ursula Andress, Jacqueline Bissett. The all-star cast is a fascinating blend of Hollywood veterans, newcomers, and hopefuls, many of whom peaked with this film. David Niven's James Bond is the perfect unflappable Englishman, and Peter Sellars is baccarat expert Evelyn Trimble. Of the ladies Joanna Pettet gives the finest performance as Bond and Mata Hari's love child. The ultra-cool Burt Bacharach score and Dusty Springfield singing "The Look of Love" alone are worth the price of admission, and it's great to hear Niven tell a pompous Soviet bureaucrat "I knew your man Lenin. A first-rate organizer with a second-rate mind." As a bonus feature the DVD includes the 1955 TV play "Casino Royale," the first time any 007 story had been dramatized. It's pretty dreary stuff, but worth watching for the always interesting Peter Lorre as the villain Le Chiffre (a role Orson Welles was to reinvent for the film).

This is a fascinating curio of the so-called "Golden Age of Television": a black-and-white, one hour and sixteen-minute long condensation of "King Lear" starring Orson Welles, preserving one of his greatest stage performances for posterity. Peter Brook, who would go on to direct a vastly different "King Lear" with Paul Scofield years later, directed Orson on Broadway in 1953, and it is his production that was preserved on kinescope, although Andrew McCullough directed the actual TV production. This is a stripped down, no frills Shakespeare, with minimalist sets, authentic period costumes, and an outstanding score by Virgil Thomson. The text is drastically pruned, and the subplot of Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund is omitted. Nevertheless, this is a "Lear" of raw power and visionary grandeur, more faithful to the spirit of the play than many more elaborate productions. Lear is a role that Welles was born to play: with his imposing physical presence and deep, craggy bass, Welles is every inch a king; if there's any flaw to his interpretation, it's that he's a little too robust to be an eighty-year old; Juri Jarvets, in the Kozintsev "Korol Lir," was a more fragile, vulnerable Lear. Of the excellent supporting cast particularly noteworthy are Micheal MacLiammoir as Poor Tom, Alan Badel as the Fool, and Arnold Moss (whom "Star Trek" fans will remember as Anton Karidian in "The Conscience of the King") as Albany. Despite its omissions, this is a faithful performance of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, free of directorial gimmicks or pointless modernizing (both of which Brook has indulged in elsewhere). "King Lear" is available on DVD as part of Passport Video's "Orson Welles Collection," along with "The Stranger," "David and Goliath," and "The Trial" (also reviewed by this author).

This movie falls somewhere in between "The Greatest Story Ever Told" and "The Gospel According to Saint Matthew" as far as movies about the life of Christ go. It's not as slow and solemn as the first movie, but it doesn't follow the Gospel narrative as closely as Pasolini's film does. Nevertheless it's a very good film. Jeffrey Hunter and Robert Ryan may not bring the iconic dimensions that Max von Sydow and Charlton Heston bring to the roles of Jesus and John the Baptist respectively, but they look good and are never less than believable. Hunter is an outstanding Jesus, emphasizing the human rather than the divine nature of the Saviour; his Jesus is more the gentle redeemer and less the stern judge (unlike Enrique Irazoqui). Siobhan McKenna is perhaps the definitive screen Virgin Mary, and Ron Randall as the Roman officer Lucius provides the average man's perspective on events. Frank Thring as Herod Antipas, Hurd Hatfield as Pontius Pilate, and Rip Torn as Judas all make their characters believable; Brigid Bazlan, as the jailbait Salome, is such a hottie it's a shame she was never in any other movies. The beautiful Spanish landscape makes an appropriate stand-in for first-century Israel; the widescreen photography and Miklos Rosza score are breathtaking. Orson Welles' narration alone is worth the price of admission. This movie was unfairly tagged as "I Was a Teenage Jesus," perhaps because its director, Nicholas Ray, had also directed "Rebel Without a Cause," but it's an excellent movie that has stood the test of time.

It is difficult to watch this movie today without thinking about the current situation in Iraq. Europeans--and now Americans--have been intervening in the Middle East, with disastrous results, since the Trojan War; "Lawrence of Arabia" tells the story of a man who played a key role in a critical period that led to much of the current turmoil in the region. In order to defeat the Turks, who were allied to the Germans, Great Britain unleashed the genie of Arab nationalism, and no one has been able to bottle it since. By promising what was then Palestine to both Jews and Arabs Britain unwittingly planted the seeds of the interminable Arab-Israeli conflict--but that's outside the scope of this review. Peter O'Toole plays T.E. Lawrence as a bipolar, sexually ambiguous nerd with a messiah complex (interestingly there are no women in the movie). In leading the Arabs to victory over the Turks Lawrence sees himself as their liberator when in fact he's the tool of western imperialism. The latter part of the movie, which depicts Lawrence's bumbling attempts to introduce western-style democracy to the Arabs, bears striking resemblance to George W. Bush's equally naive meddling in Iraq. As spectacle, the movie has never been surpassed and scarcely equalled; among big-budget epics of similar scope only "Ben Hur," "The Ten Commandments," and possibly "Apocalypse Now" come close; the only movie with similar grandeur is "2001: A Space Odyssey," and of course that's a different kind of epic. Sir David Lean won a well-deserved Best Director Oscar for this film. The movie made stars out of O'Toole and Omar Sharif, but there are Oscar-worthy performances from Sir Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Arthur Kennedy and Claude Rains; Jose Ferrer is uncommonly creepy as a sadistic Turkish officer, in a scene with uncomfortable homoerotic overtones. Maurice Jarre's score is outstanding; this is the kind of film wide-screen was made for.

Grigori Kozintsev must have been a man of unbridled self-confidence. Few directors have successfully met the challenge of filming "Hamlet," perhaps the most important single work in western literature; fewer still have sought to tackle the one Shakespeare play arguably superior to "Hamlet," "King Lear." Kozintsev was up to the challenge: there has probably never been a more visceral and disturbing adaptation of a Shakespeare play in any language. In contrast to the psychological approach appropriate to "Hamlet," here Kozintsev has chosen an epic portrayal of unsurpassed sweep and grandeur. Gone are any vestiges of the Elizabethan theater: here is perhaps the most compelling depiction of the Middle Ages in film history, a world of mud and filth inhabited by brutal, corrupt nobles and starving peasants. Kozintsev has in mind obvious modern parallels (the Holocaust, Vietnam) but he wisely keeps the story in a historic setting, allowing the audience to make the connection themselves. There has never been an odder-looking actor to play Lear than Juri Jarvets, who resembles nothing so much as Yoda from "Return of the Jedi," but few actors have ever portrayed the pain and loneliness of old age with such force. Oleg Dal's Fool is an eerie creation, an Auschwitz survivor adrift in fourteenth-century England; the two evil daughters are not portrayed as sexy vixens but as dirty old harridans hardened by a life spent holding and maintaining feudal power. Dmitri Shostakovich's score surpasses his score for "Hamlet." It's incredible this film could have been made in Brezhnev-era Russia, since it contains a surprising number of Christian religious images. Ironically, most of the actors in the film were Latvian or Estonian and their voices had to be dubbed by Russians, but it doesn't detract from the total experience. Of all the western films I have seen the closest match is Pasolini's "Gospel According to Saint Matthew," but while Pasolini's visual style is static and contemplative Kozintsev's is full of violent and discordant images, representing nature at the height of its fury.

In Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" James Coburn has the famous line, "The times are changing, Bill." While times may have been changing for the rest of the world in the 1970s, they weren't changing for John Wayne. He continued to grind out entertaining but old-fashioned westerns; not until his last film, Don Siegel's "The Shootist," would he venture into the kind of revisionist view of the west found in the films of Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood. "Chisum" is one of the Duke's better vehicles, a corny but immensely enjoyable reworking of the Lincoln County War that is about as accurate as Shakespeare's history plays. Wayne plays cattle baron John Chisum as a more sympathetic figure than he probably was; the always excellent Ben Johnson is his sidekick Pepper and if you don't find any homoerotic subtext to their relationship you're a better man than I. Geoffrey Deuel gives a surprisingly authoritative performance as a young Billy the Kid, standing up well against the numerous better-known actors who have played the part. Forrest Tucker is a splendidly crafty villain, and Andrew McLaglan directs in his best John Ford fashion. Add a brilliant title sequence, a stirring Domenic Frontierre score, and a rather mushy song by Merle Haggard, and you have a true western classic that should appeal to old and young alike.

This movie is one of my personal favorites. Where do I begin? There's the beautiful Bob Dylan score (especially "Knocking on Heaven's Door"), great performances by Kris Kristofferson and James Coburn, a supporting cast of western veterans, a literate script, and the direction of Sam Peckinpah in his last great film. Though not the masterpiece "The Wild Bunch" is, it's still a beautiful film; aside from "El Topo," it's the best of the revisionist westerns of the 1970s, a time when old myths and values were being questioned. Peckinpah, at heart a romantic conservative, somehow caught the Zeitgeist of the era. "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" gives us a grainier, more realistic view of the Old West than we're used to seeing; it predated Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven" by twenty years in its unflinching portrait of frontier violence. There are no good guys or bad guys, rather two morally ambiguous men, friends in an earlier life, who find themselves on the opposite side of what's basically a political argument. James Coburn is appropriately gruff as Sheriff Pat Garrett, a man who just wants to settle down and who knows the time for guns is over; Kristofferson makes a charismatic Billy, the embodiment of lawless individualism. The excellent supporting cast includes such old pros as Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Richard Jaekel and (in some prints) Elisha Cook Jr.; but the best performance comes from the late Jason Robards Jr. as the tragically muddle-headed Governor Lew Wallace (best known for writing "Ben Hur.") For those wanting a different perspective on some of the same characters I recommend the 1970 John Wayne vehicle "Chisum," with Glenn Corbett as Pat Garrett and Geoffrey Deuel (Peter Deuel's younger brother) as a young William Bonney.

I'm not a big fan of teen sex comedies; indeed, I'm probably the only person in the world who's never watched "Fast Times at Ridgemount High." I never got any when I was in high school, so I'm in no mood to see other people have all the fun I missed out on. However, I saw parts of "Coming Soon" on late night cable a few years ago and have been waiting to see the entire movie. It was worth the wait. All three of the young heroines are achingly beautiful; Bonnie Root in particular shines as good-hearted Stream, the Vermont girl trying to fit in with her tragically hip Manhattan party girl friends. Tricia Vessey brings an appealing vulnerability to the role of Nel, the depressive model who blossoms when she discovers her lesbianism. Gaby Hoffmann, who made such a big impression years ago in "Sleepless in Seattle," is appropriately bitchy as the bossy know-it-all Jenny; with her bangs and dark eyelashes Ms. Hoffmann would have been great as a silent film star. The script is funny and perceptive, and the three leads are supported by a talented cast of veteran performers, especially the hilarious Mia Farrow as Stream's hippie mom. The movie scores satirical points about peer pressure and the overemphasis on getting into a "good school," which makes young people feel like failures if they can't get into an overpriced Ivy League establishment. This film has joined the ranks of "Legally Blonde" and "Heartbreakers" as one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasure chick flicks.