Reviews

This years Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, "Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives" is the story of a man who is dying, and as result recalls his past lives and is visited by ghosts and spirits.

There are ape spirit creatures who lives in the forest attracted by his sickness, he remembers being an ox and a princess, we watch a nurse drain some device the ailing Boonme wears fixed to his abdomen.

This was the first film I watched at 2010's AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles, and it was a start that was not followed easily. The film is strange but the words which feel most appropriate to the film are "gentle" and "mysterious".

Boonme's final days are spent with his sister and a nurse and their various supernatural guests. They eat dinner, watch films, look at photo albums, life unfolds but with an awareness of a mysterious shift coming. As death approaches, past lives and those human, animal, or other appear ever-shifting and inter connected, foreign but also familiar, like relatives returned after a long absence."Uncle Boonme" is the final part of a multi-platform project featuring art installations and short films called "The Primitive Installation", about Nabua, Thailand a region heavily occupied by the Thai army from the 60's to the 80's. "Uncle Boonme" believes his karma is the result of the part he played in the violence of the past.Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul ("Joe" for short) has created a landscape of shadowy jungles, intimate bedroom lighting, a haunting, funny, dreamy, and wise, rhythmic lamentation about modern life, it's "primitive" counter points, death, change, spirit-monkeys and all that good stuff.

Uncle Boonme is a fantasy as epic as Souleymane Cisse's "Yeelen", one luminous to look at and visually wander through, with several of "Tropical Malady's"' most hallucinatory moments, appearing strong early in it's opening movements and closing out on notes as elliptical as those of "Syndromes And A Century", and then there's the final scene compressed into a wonderful kind of epilogue involving a monk, that's the most audacious, fascinating, and best of it's sort since Wes Anderson's "Hotel Chevalier"."

Transformations and contrasts between the ancient and the modern flow into one another from electronic bug zappers to sex with talking cat- fish, primordial caves to karaoke bars. Dual and multiple-roles and states within a single whole, are a recurring theme in the film, so multiple meanings and readings being generated is little surprise. But though these thoughts rise up haunting us after viewing, the images of movement through Nabua's phantom jungles and Boonme's warm goodbyes are what we are left feeling and reeling with.

All modern worlds are built on ancient ones, all new things have within them older forms. "Uncle Boonme" is more informed by Buddhist notions of reincarnation, the idiosyncratic personality of it's creator and the psycho-geography of it's location, more than normal concerns about dramatic and character arc. In simpler words...an old man who is dying can recall his past lives.

The film is a matter of perception as complex and post- modernist/globalized as any experimental narrative in avant-garde-dom or as mystical and "primitive" as any ancient Sutra, based on the cultural inclinations and presuppositions you bring to the film. In any event, is to Joe's continued success and cinemas continued fortune that he so playfully and beautifully can challenge and delight these hybrid perceptions of ours as he does.

Chameleon Street is a film about a black con man from Detroit who specializes in being a master of plain-sight disguise. Doug Street can enter a room and upon meeting someone understand what they want to see reflected back, and after cutting through the "emotional baggage" of his own personality, assume the role like an actor taking a part. Throughout the course of the film he becomes a surgeon (going so far as to perform several successful operations), a lawyer for a human rights organization, journalist, and a French exchange student. His greatest role and the one he seems to struggle with the most throughout the film are the roles of husband and father. These he only seems capable of, as long as he has another more exciting identity to supplement his "real life". The film is considered to be far ahead of its time in it's critique of the performative and trans formative nature of identity, race, and class, a sort of spiritual cousin to Samuel R. Delany's short story "Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones".

Street as a character is a clever anti-hero, similar to, but less psychotically unpredictable than Alec Baldwin is in "Miami Blues", but infinitely more entertaining than Leonardo Dicaprio in "Catch Me If You Can". Street survives by his wits and chance, and has an unconcerned Dandylike air about him. He quotes Oscar Wilde "the divine Wilde" and refers to "Vivaldi, Hendrix, Sly Stone, The Sex Pistols, and Ipso Facto" as "the classics" he listens to on his newly fashionable (at the time the film takes place, in the early 80's) Walkman. Essentially he follows in a long tradition of the charming rouge, only viewed through the mind of a clever black man in the early 90's (hence the po-mo, multi-culti stuff). Several people who knew the real Doug Street as one of his personas, including the Mayor of Detroit, appear in the film playing themselves, adding another layer of identity confusion that Hsiao-hsien Hou's "Puppetmaster" and Jason Rietman's "Up In The Air" would similarly use to greater acclaim. Harris has a voice reminiscent of Orson Wells, especially when he narrates, which is for most of the film, and has matching ambitions for a first time director. Harris wants to include everything he's ever thought or felt into a single film as if it would be his last. In fact this is his first and only film, so better too much, than not enough.

Beyond easy designation of social relevance (race, class, etc.), Street's chameleon like behavior is in microcosm the way everyone behaves at a certain basic level, learning to read the people and situations life brings us to, often playing them to our advantage (maybe more than we are even fully aware of), and only occasionally putting our foot down to announce what we are not, at those times when we either cant or refuse to cut through the "baggage of our personalities". You can't be everything to everyone, and the film asks even if it's possible to be yourself to yourself.

Doug Street's narration throughout the film is the story he recounts to amuse himself, creating a pleasant illusion to stave off his own boredom, impatience, and dissatisfaction with being, on top of intelligent enough to perform surgeries though luck, mimicry, and quick study) poor black, lacking a high school diploma, working in his father's burglary installation company and living in his parents house in Detroit. Why go to school, why get a job, when you can be senator tomorrow, or a police officer, or anyone you can imagine (quite literally) with the right combination of confidence and creativity. "All the world's a stage…And one man in his time plays many parts."…that old chestnut.

"Chameleon Street" is not a perfect film, not the funniest ever, or featuring the best cinematography, no one is going to clamor about the use of soft-focus, shadows, mood, blah, blah, blah, and it will not be praised for it's soundtrack (typical of it's time and unimpressive), but like Hal Hartley, Bill Gunn, David Blair, or Mark Rappaport, Wendell B. Harris Jr. is sui generis in his sense of style, focus, and concerns, and if nothing else deserves praise as a great neglected American auteur. There is more personality in this one movie than in some director's entire oeuvre's. Personally, this is my new favorite film the kind you watch twice back to back because you can't believe what you've seen, and pick up your jaw up off the floor hours later. The kind you rant and rave about to everyone you know, fully aware most wont like/get it/care about it. It's okay if you don't like this as much as me, I can't expect you to. If you don't, tomorrow is always available for you to take on a new personality, perhaps one with better taste.

The screenplay for "Invasion" was written by literary giant Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Boi Cesares (whose short story "Blow-Up", had been made into a film by Michelangelo Antonioni 3 years earlier). Invasion takes place in Buenos Aires, where a clandestine group of friends, businessmen, and enthusiastic youth have joined forces to fight off on invasion of their city by unknown forces; men in tan suits.

Like Jim Jarmusch's "The Limit's Of Control", the film gives us only what precious little information we need to move onto the next scene, like an agent on a mission who can't afford to know too much, so that if captured can't be forced to talk. "Go here", "take him", "good luck", "the rendezvous is at midnight on the docks", or "noon at the cafe", are about as declarative as many of the conversations get, usually issued by an old man at headquarters.

Unlike Jarmusch's cool, collected, calm fest, these guys get down to multiple scenes of shoot-outs, scuffles, and interrogation and torture. Why they are fighting, and who the enemy is, is left unanswered, as is why they don't seek help from the "authorities" or even the common man on the street. The city is being taken over slowly, "the trucks are coming in", is a phrase we keep hearing again and again. Imagine the Matrix, without the kung-fu/sci-fi stuff, where there is an eternal cat and mouse game between the Agents and those resisting the agents.

Erasing the specific nature of the enemy could have a very practical explanation like fear of censorship if they give Them or Us an official title. It could also be Borges and Cesares, after living their multiple disappointing rebellions, revolutions, and coup de tats, were weary of easy or convenient dichotomies. Or perhaps like GK Chesterton said of the Iliad, "Life is a battle", and the war will continue on regardless of which particular players strut the stage in fatigues.

Like the Trojan Army (Borges was a huge fan of the Iliad, and Adventure stories), our heroes are doomed to fail, which only gives their cause and epic and glamorous sheen; the final scene depicts a batch of new recruits standing in line to get guns and begin the cycle anew. It's like an abstract mob-film, where cool and charismatic men, light each other on fire, and insist they will die before they talk. There is a documentary like realness that add a tension and weight to the secret wars, which never seems to spill out into the light of day and attention of the general public.

Much screen time is spent just looking at blackness with only lit faces or ghostly eyes, showing the hero's as much in the dark as we the audience. But heroes they are, self sacrificing, dedicated comrades and friends, that we longer really see in modern action heroes, and their play-by their own rules, "did you have to break so much furniture McGarnical?", escapades. Like real covert ops, they are precise, they are also so casual, and at times defeated looking, you might imagine they do this every weekend; one man wants to know how long the mission will take, because has to be home early to meet his wife.

Though well lit and composed with crisp black and white austerity, there is one "magical realist/fantastique' flourish, when the team leader of the heroes, finds himself in an empty building were dozens and dozens and impossible dozens of men in tan suits, emerge seemingly from nowhere and surround him. He is tortured in a football stadium, where I am told, real dissidents and "traitors" were actually tortured and killed. It' doesn't quite live up the hype of the literary giants behind it, but that's a tall order to fill.

It's an interesting and reserved action film, with some great suspense and encouraging of the same kind of existential reflection that films like "Blow Up" and "Limits Of Control" demand. An obscure, but enjoyable French New Wave inspired, curious allegory from Argentina, about life's struggles which are always in secret, and always endless.

I couldn't imagine a more beatific opening 15 minutes for a live action adaption of "The Little Mermaid". All my hopes for a eastern European fantasia (this film was made as a collaboration between Bulgaria and USSR) came true, in bright multicolored fire-works, dreamy mermaids(whose costumes are a bit dated, but still oddly effective), lovely period costumes, and wondrous underwater photography(the merman with the violin will stay with my years).

Unfortunately things dry begin to dry up once our daughter of sea, reaches dry land to get her man. The story is simple enough; girl rescues drowned sailor and falls in love with him, to become human she sells her most prized possession first her flowing green hair, and eventually her voice to an old witch.The prince has mistaken another princess as his savior, but is unmistakably drawn to our heroin.

She has a sidekick in a village fool, whose simple stupid-heartedness is ultimately what saves her, sort of. In any event it ain't the prince, and it's nice to see the ugly buffoon, usually the minor comic relief, take a place of mythological importance. Still without animated talking fish pals backing her up, she can only take this so far.

The elegance of the waves gives way to the tediousness of courtly life, where contests and intrigues play themselves out, to their inevitable end. Which in keeping with the early accounts and legends, sees our girl facing a tragic end. My favorite version is where she turns into sea foam when she dies, and serves as an explanation for why the sea is so frothy. It sounds about right to me anyway.

It's over all a beautiful Soviet fairy tale, which should delight fans of fables, Han's Christian Anderson (one of my mother's favorite films was the 1952 Hans Christian Anderson, musical way, way, loosely inspired by his life), and fan's of Disney's "The Little Mermaid.

From the first image in this film doesn't it look like Leonardo Dicaprio is already regretting his decision to be in this movie, is Teddy regretting going to the island. The answer doesn't much matter, because none of the answers waiting at the end of "Shutter Island" matter. Answers to plot points are just the carrot leading our hero from one way too symbolic hallucination and dream sequence after another.

"Shutter Island" is "Jacob's Ladder" with some "Manchurian Candidate" thrown in there, under a general Hitchcock umbrella. "Session Nine" as a made for t.v. melodrama. It was okay, like "The Departed" which preceded it, this will be remembered as one of Scorcese's best, but it was entertaining.

"Don't Look Now" and the other two I mentioned are better a this type of mind-f7.k pulp, and "Bringing Out The Dead", and "The Last Temptation Of Christ", have better Scorcese hallucination sequences too. The performances were all done though. I especially liked Elias Koteas' brief one eyed arsonists, especially after last year's body-artist serial killer in "I Come With The Rain", he's making racket out of the soft spoken maniac, the way Anthony Hopkins used to (or still kinda does considering "The Woflman").

Predictable for the most part, but the extended dream sequences were better than most and narrowly (but just barely at times) avoided some "Number 23"-esque embarrassments. I wish the average mainstream film would be at least this caliber, but because the average is so low, something like "Shutter Island" ends up looking allot better than it really is by comparison.

It's all an illluuuuussssiiioon! I enjoyed it for what it was, but I doubt this will be anyone's favorite movie.

The only similarity this bears to Thomas De Quincy's "Confessions Of An English Opium Eater" is that both characters have the name Thomas De Quincy. The novel is an autobiography of the effects on opium on one man's life, while the film is a Vincent Price lead "Lady From Shanghai" like twisting film noir.

Price's De Quincy is a sailor, whose voice over is a Raymond Chandler meets De Quincy poetry, come to San Francisco after a long stay in "the orient", where he involves himself in the dubious world of human trafficking, particularly brides in China Town during the 1800's Tong Gang Wars. The film opens with a brutal scene involving screaming women thrown in a net like freshly caught tuna, and then a violent battle between two gangs on the beach as they try to deliver the kidnapped women to their fate.

Albert Zugsmith produced classics like "The Incredible Shrinking Man", "Written On The Wind", and "Touch Of Evil", along with directing many exploitation flicks, which this film veers into from time to time. The film is more in the Siejun Suzuki brand of wildly inventive, free wheeling pulpy expressionism, than Ed Wood kitschy ineptness. Despite the title the only scene involving opium is when Price takes some in order to get close to the women trafficking ring, and has a particularly impressive Lynchian circa Elephant-Man era hallucination scene (which is worth price of admission alone).

However the best scene comes when Price wakes up surrounded by guards and has to make a slow motion (cus he's high on opium) dash out of the den, and to the rooftops of china town. The scene is also completely silent, and truly marvelous in it's execution. I know slow motion action sequences where Greogiran chanting plays over sweat glistened A-listers shooting each other in mid air are common place now, but in Zugsmith's hands your reminded of excting an action sequence can be when it's done right. The plot is not particularly strong.

Why De Quincy is saving the girl, or what he is doing in China town at all, has many twists and turns, and leaves some gaps to be filled? But the direction, the suspense, and especially Price's performance make lines that would sound preposterous and almost Terrance Malick like in their stream of consciousness like "You wear as many masks as their are stars reflected in a gutter", sound as if he says them everyday. Such are the gifts of Price.

I was very pleased with this movie, that can be found easily on Youtube, though you might want to get a good copy to take in the fullness of Zugsmith's frames.There is a dreaminess and nightmarishness to all of the scenes, like opium was poured over a script to a lesser film, and this movie stumbled out of a smoke ridden room, rambling of dancing girls emerging from cages, crashes through windows, being swept to sea from sewer drains, and teetering on the edge of rooftops with vertigo at a snails pace, and feeling "the abbacus of fate has your number". Good times.

Zhang Ke Jai has(at least to me) grown substantially since "The World", able to leave some of the melodrama behind and let his characters and the landscapes speak for themselves. "24 City" is a beautiful film, both relevant and moving in the ways "Up In The Air" wishes it were.

A factory in Chengdu, China that has been in operation for generations is being closed down to make room for a upscale high rise apartment building called "24 City" ironically named after a poem about harmony. We follow a series of interviews with former factory workers about their lives in and around the factory.Some of the interviews could have been shortened or illustrated visually instead of having us just watching talking heads speaking over silence, but that is my personal preference.

It could be argued, by not re-creating their lives Jai gives his subjects a sense of dignity, and creates an intimacy between them and the viewer that would be otherwise lost. For the most part I would agree, though in honesty, I did get anxious more than a few times during some of these discussions. Jai's subjects at first seemed to be almost rambling inconsequentially, but as the film goes on, their statements become enmeshed in each other and the film as a whole, and intricately articulate how the factory for generations was their entire world, romantically, socially, philosophically, and culturally.

Some of the workers had their first fights there, their first loves, some moved their whole families on the promise of work, while others left their families behind, and suddenly this community which has sustained them all this time has disappeared, moved by forces beyond their control. Part of the film is documentary, but some of the interviews are "fictional" and feature actors.

I had trouble telling the difference between those who were actors and who were actual workers, but the mixture between the authentic and the dramatic only serves to highlight the contrast between the promise of worker's solidarity and justice and the realities of changing economic priorities. Jai's "The World" offered us the best metaphor for the globalized melancholic that I've yet to see, that of an amusement park masquerading as the greatest architectural achievements of humanity, while those who toil in it are increasingly alienated from any sense of "authentic" culture, themselves, and each other. That film itself, however was not as compelling as it's ideas.

In many ways "24 City" and so I am told Jai's similar, "Still Life" continue this series on the changing face of China, and the "real" people caught up in this global gentrification. What made me look at "24 City" as something other than just a clever polemic was a baffling scene of a girl skating to a soft, bubbly, trance like electronic song. The girl skates in circles, and the music plays and we just observe her, and the song continues, as the camera floats off looking across the city and the mammoth building rising up into the skyline. I don't know what if any purpose this scene had to the rest of the film, but it was lovely. Equally startling were the huge crowds of workers, by the hundreds in the film's first scenes, that are as overwhelming as the CG throngs of countless soldiers and orcs from "The Lord Of The Rings" epic battle-scapes. In those moments Zhang makes his cinematic eye, rival and better his(at least for me)binding interest in social realism.

Realism especially of the socially progressive variety is not my cup of tea (to put a borderline pathological aversion mildly), but "24 City" made, if not a believer, than a fascinated viewer out of me. If globalization has to be "hot button" of contemporary art, if there must be sad-sack post-modernist which stylistically bite the hands that feed them, if the classical Marxist themes of alienation, class, and gentrification must persist on into the next decade, we could all do worse than to see them filtered through Zhang's warm humanism (another term I would usually avoid).

It's not a thrill a minute, and there is no George Clooney smirking to enjoy, but "24 City" is rewarding, intimate, and oddly sensual, which few politicized movies, and even fewer documentaries, seem capable of doing these days. This is the first Jai I enjoyed, and makes me interested to visit the rest of the oeuvre.

From the director of "Lilo and Stitch" comes one of the most beautiful music documentaries? I Watched it completely on accident and was totally entranced. Each of the dozen or so performances are done in rural areas, caves, rundown barns, abandoned buildings, coffee shops, a protest at the building of a damn, and only at the end on an actual stage.Sigur Ros had just released their fourth album and finished a world tour when they decided to play a series of free shows across Iceland, largely unannounced until the day of the show.

In the performance at the damn the band decided to play acoustic (since using a generator would be kinda hypocritical while protesting an electric damn) and the wind picks up at the beginning hissing against the cameras without PA to drown out the white noise. But as the song progresses the wind stops and the sounds soar. Spontaneous moments like this or when a dog wanders up walking between the performers, give each song and venue an unpredictable truly "live" feeling. A performance in an abandoned building with only the lead singer on guitar and four of the band's string players seem to echo in the dilapidated building.

The name of the film translates to "At Home", and this is very much a poem to the bands native country and the beauty of it's landscapes both natural and urban. The settings are often of faded places being consumed by nature and time, in a minimalist nature porn that would Andy Goldsworthy proud. Although in the case of the damn, the area of the performance is latter submerged under water, as the urban "blight" consumes the landscape. This visual motif runs through the film, but the performances are far from somber, as the audiences attracted to the shows are a both young and old, music fan and curious onlooker, and whole families. The distance created by the obscure imagery is closed in the same moments by the warm focus placed on the regular people attending the shows. The band also performs with a Icelandic poet, and again with a man who creates a kind of marimba music out of different kind of stones using volcanic rocks, flaky stones form cliff slides, and river rocks to produce different tones.

An Icelandic choir chants beneath a green hill, and we can hear the connection between these chants and the bands general sound (similarities even the band didn't seem to be aware of until filming). Though they have a lead vocalist and voice is very important to their music...how do I say this without it sounding like a gimmick, oh well...the band have no lyrics as such, and sing in a made up glossia language, making melodic sounds that suit the music. As wiki explains it, "Vonlenska is a non-literal language, without fixed syntax, and differs from constructed languages that can be used for communication. It focuses entirely on the sounds of language; lacking grammar, meaning, and even distinct words. Instead, it consists of emotive syllables and phonemes; in effect, Vonlenska uses the melodic and rhythmic elements of singing without the conceptual content of language. In this way, it is similar to the use of scat singing in vocal jazz.

The band's website describes it as "a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music". Most of the syllable strings sung by Jnr Birgisson are repeated many times throughout each song, and in the case of ( ), throughout the whole album." You can pretend it's just a foreign language if that makes you feel better though. Because there are no words, their music has a blankness and openness to it that gives the listener the ability to project their own thoughts and emotions, without disconnecting from the most immediate instrument that so much instrumental "post rock" can miss; the human voice. Their music is melancholy, grand, triumphant, and intimate at different times, but I wont waste too many words trying to describe it. Words like ambient, glacial, falsetto are used allot in such descriptions, and would be appropriate.

The band is interviewed in between songs, and they are humble and unpretentious. Certain sounds are beautiful and just feel "right", no more, no less. They like playing for people who wouldn't normally see them, and are genuinely pleased that each town greets the shows so warmly. The phrase "this is nice" is used several times by several different members, but you know what? It is nice.

The combinations of sounds, places, and people create a rhythm that "just feels right". Home is where the...etc. I just watched this and while it was still fresh I wanted to recommend it to just about everyone. I'm not a big fan of documentaries about bands in general, so this was a very pleasant surprise. Like listening to the band's recorded music (which I am biased about since I am a fan of the band who are largely responsible for my love of "The Life Aquatic" and apologist view of "Vanilla Sky") this left me with warm fuzzy feelings.

The 90's modern attempts at Woodstock ended in orgies of over-priced water and sexual assaults, so it's nice to see a band somewhere in the world could create free music in intimate venues, that people could appreciate and get behind. Almost everyone appreciated it anyway.

One of the bands grandmothers attended a show, but said it was too loud, and when she found out it was on TV, decided to go home and watch it there.When the concert strobey light and video effects came on in the final climatic moments, she thought her TV was messed up and turned it off. You can't please everyone.

Nauseating it is but, genuinely striking film making at work, both disorientating and disturbing in equal measure. If nothing else Grandrieux like Von Treir's "Antichrist" raises the bar for horror films here, but doesn't rely on "gore" and shock the way VT did, instead generating fear from a soundtrack of guttural human cries, moans, noises, and silences, and bringing us unbearably close to characters and sensations we desperately and instinctively want to avoid.

I still think the combination of fairy tale logic into such a brutal close focus doesn't gel as much as Grandieux believes it does, but there is something to be said for the notion that complete sentimentality and utter depravity are closer than they appear. I felt like an insect watching this movie, pinned to a wall of sounds and images. Not a good feeling, but horror films are not supposed to create good feelings are they. What's most horrifying about this film is it's lack of any moral aim, for all there terrors horror films do usually show the triumph of a "final girl" or the humanity of a monster, but like "The Descent" Grandrieux's universe is an unstable chaos of actions, desires, and terrors, but more so because even the logical rules of cause and effect, are no good here (like Funny Games' remote control scene but stronger and stranger), in one scene Claire and Christine escape Jean, only to have him magically appear in front of their car. Next cut he has them in his hotel, seemingly hypnotized as he for lack of a better word...sniffs their fear.

What's so violating about a scene like this is not the violation that goes on within it, but the breaking of narrative rules that we depend on in a film like this, for respite, the chance to escape to breath. Sombre is suffocating, and makes even "love" itself, normally a redeeming force, a horror to behold.

My first impression of Claire's attraction to Jean was echoing the Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him?". I felt not the usual jealously one feels when the object of your affection is publicly affectionate to the worst possible kind of person (or a decent person who is transformed into a monstrous caricature through sheer force of jealously alone), but one of panic. She does not know what she is getting into but we (the audience) do, having witnessed albeit elliptically at times Jeans earlier crimes. Eventually she does know who and what Jean is after he attacks her sister, but her attraction seems to intensify as our repulsion grows, and at first I felt this as a failure of understanding character development (no rational human being would willingly go back to THAT). But this was a failure more on my part than the films.

I was expecting realism, when right from the beginning the film announces itself as not existing in a stable mental landscape of coherent naturalism. Our first images are a boy blindfolded in a field feeling his way in the air, then abruptly the sounds of children laughing like hyenas as they watch a Punch And Judy show.The hand-held camera at times jostles around with Jean's or a detached third party pov and at others holds itself sustaining agonizing close ups, all to create it's own kind of rationality(something after watching more Guy Maddin and Mark Rappaport I find a little easier to understand or at least accept).

Claire and Jean's relationship is non-existent guided by the films only symbolic logic(chance or reason/hope), a prop like the puppets in Punch And Judy, but where Mister Punch, would kill his wife, his family, his jailers, and in some versions even Death and The Devil himself, and do so with a smile, Jean wrestles with his demons which are indistinguishable from his desires, and suffers for them. The film's final shots of Jean in the woods recall Lon Chaney Jr's. performance as "The Wolfman"(1941), and all the tragedy, doom, and masculine anxiety there in. In the days of 'Dexter" where serial killers can be heroes too, were all aware that wolves can wear human skin, and men don't need to transform into monsters to make beasts of themselves.

In Fellini's "La Strada" where a lovely clownish child-woman is hopelessly and helplessly in love with a brutish strong man who rapes, torments, and abandons her, we are forced to see "love" as a beastly thing which traps our heroin from the rational action of escape. But it's this break with realism and into the metaphorical which freed Fellini from the other Italian filmmakers of the day and allowed him to progress into his trademark oneiric style, and it's also what gives "La Strada" it's emotional impact, which has to be weighed symbolically not literally. "Sombre" in many ways follows suit, but with more neo-Gothic, and new french extremist aesthetics.

"Sombre" is a difficult film, one which even the most willing to attempt to understand it, will not enjoy the first, second, or maybe any times watching it. I can't say I enjoyed it. I'm not gonna put this on during rainy day like "Slim Sussie" or "Monster Squad", but if I had a friend over who told me they were in the mood for a horror movie, something actually scary (a rarity) I would suggest this.

"...if my eyes don't deceive me, There's something going wrong around here..." -Joe Jackson

Never before have I seen a director's cut that's made so much of a difference to my perceptions of a movie. My first viewing of "Dust Devil" was the Wienstein cut, with about half an hour amputated for American audiences. My first impression was of a dismal boring serial killer thriller with supernatural overtones in a novel setting, featuring lots of half baked characters, and a serious shortage of suspense, horror, or general interest.

What was cut from the film basically seems to be anything that would have been remotely interesting. The narration is subtracted, there is less music, less repeated shots of the moon, sky, and desert landscape, less peripheral views of the political and social context of the time and town, less time spent with the characters, a few dream sequences gone entirely, and a great sequence towards the end that takes place in a makeshift movie theater and recalls Ingmar Bergman's "Persona"(where for a brief momentum the movie itself falls out of joint), all get left on the chopping block in the US release.My first impression was terrible, but my second viewing of the longer cut was like seeing the film with fresh eyes. Dust Devil is the story of an ancient demon who doesn't so much possess his host as it does become trapped inside of them. The demon only seeks to break out of the material world, an act he can only achieve through ritual murder. In his own words, "there is no good or evil, only spirit and matter. You are full of light, and I only have to make a small incision to let the light out.I should have done this days ago, but I get lonely, forgive me I wont keep you waiting any longer".

The demon can only kill the hopeless; those who truly have nothing and are either suicidal or have given up on life completely. He is attracted to a town called Bethany in the Namibian desert in south-west Africa, that is slowly collapsing on itself, to the point where even the sheriff has been paid to leave. The town is literally drying up, and the dust is as much an ecological terror as the demon that feeds on the he despair and hopelessness breeding in the town. The demon played by Robert John Burke (who was also the gruff Nordic mythological beast in the underrated "No Such Thing".) however is not the main feature of the movie. Dressed in his Sergio Leone cowboy trench coat and hat as a classic man with no name, "a violent wind which blows from nowhere"(though Stanley's final cut, even gives him a brief scene of pathos). The plot involves a South African white woman named Linda (Chelsea Field) who has just left her husband in Johannesburg.

We learn she was once a student radical but has lost her passion to a lifeless marriage, and is driving aimlessly towards "the sea" or towards suicide, whichever comes first. Linda picks up Burke, the nameless handsome hitchhiker, or imagines she does anyway (reality around Burke seems to collapse at times), who has just finished off two previous victims near Bethany. The murders call for investigation, and the sheriff contacts Ben (Zakes Mokae) an old African detective who lost his son (and had subsequently divorced from his wife), in some undisclosed "violence along the border". He drives through the desert listening to his ex wife's "whale song" recordings she forgot to take with her 15 years ago (there is a continuous juxtaposition of ideas and sounds of the sea with the barren desert).

The two murders (there are only four in the film, and 3 depicted on screen), are ritual in nature, and so Ben enlists the help of my favorite character for narcissistic reasons, Joe the one eyed town shaman and projectionist at the drive in who narrates the film, and was scheduled to show "Bird With A Crystal Plumage" and "Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires" as double feature, before the trouble begins. He tells Ben that in order to stop the killings he will need to "stop thinking like a white man, and start thinking like a man" in order to open himself up to the rituals needed to trick and capture the evil spirit. Meanwhile Linda's husband is trying to track her down, failing at every turn, and only getting in the way of everything he touches as a bumbling and arrogant white male South African (not unlike Wikus from District 9, but sans redemption). What makes Dust Devil worth watching is the Stanley's milking the landscape and the sky for all it's shamanic glory (so we may better understand the demon as a force of nature itself), and Burke's alternately charming, cold, sensitive, or demonic performances.

Ben and Linda are the main characters and much of the movie is devoted to bringing them together and showing their mutual alienation and despair and how Ben's dedication to the murder case and Linda's picking up Burke the hitcher seem to give them both new sensations of purpose and meaning. The ecological blight of the dust, the economic famine of the town, and the psychological desperation of the characters and even Burke's desire to escape the material plane, are layered over (and form a commentary on) each other. The few moments which recall most directly a horror movie come few and far between the scenes of poetic narration, police procedural, and eye fulls of the Namibian desert and the dust devils(mini tornadoes) which dot it's landscape. Do not watch this unless you can get the Final Cut, its the only one worth seeing.

Come And See is the best war film ever made. Throughout the film we watch a young boy enthusiastically dig out a gun buried in the earth and join up with his countrymen to fight off the Nazi invasion, only to have his boyhood fantasies of heroism, literally burnt alive.

The young actor Aleksei Kravchenko looks nearly unrecognizable by film's end; the bags under his eyes have bags under their eyes. We observe the war entirely from his position, where a girl majestically dancing in a rainstorm can transition without warning to bombs falling on a forest camp.The boy tries to leave his company at one point, and return to his village. When he left his mother gave him his rifle and said, "You might as well shoot us now. We'll die if you leave." Though we never find out one way or the other, his house is abandoned and he assumes the worst. The boy's ears are damaged from the bombs and going deaf and perhaps mad with grief, he wades out into a bog.He finds himself in another village where he hides amongst a group of farmers he was planning to rob. The Nazis show up and begin the round up for a massacre. We watch what happens first hand, like a Nazi officer's girlfriend shown eating lobster as a barn full of people is set on fire. The boy gets a chance at revenge, but it doesn't change anything. The film closes with the boy firing at a statue of Hitler, and here the film plays documentary footage of the war flowing backward, the bombs go back into the sky, the people come out of the cattle cars, the goose-stepping parades flow in reverse, until finally we reach an image of Hitler as a baby.

The next shot is of the boys withered face as if hes looking at the photograph too, realizing that even Hitler was young and innocent as he was once, and likewise Once Upon A Time went off to fight for country. No war film has ever left me so drained, and the only other film that goes into as much brutal detail of victimization is maybe Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (love it or hate it, in that film you go through an emotional experience). The Russian's suffered the greatest casualties in WW2, more than any of the allies or the Axis powers and depending on how you arrange them, more than some nations put together.Their tightening cultural grip came as the result of the tremendous scar of the War, much the way Germany became brutal after their losses in World War 1.

Elem Klimov captures war as a universal psychological scar, where demonization and glorification only amount to momentary denials of its terrible scale and depth. There was no place to root for the hero, only a skeletal hope that he would survive, though at times you think he might be better off if he didn't. Visually it's similar to a Andrei Tarkovsky or Bella Tar over the shoulder long walks and slow pans style. There are no real shoot outs; the war is a presence either felt as sudden bombs or swarms of Nazi's barking command. Come and See is a surreal, disturbing, and intense coming of age film, hypnotic and horrific in equal parts. Director Elem Klimov never made another film after it saying, "everything you could do with cinema I had already done." Though at the other end of the spectrum Quinten Tarantino's Inglorious Bustards shows you can teach an old dog some new tricks, Come and See is for realistic war films as good as I could possibly imagine a World War 2 or any War film could be.

Is it too late to add "A Single Man" to the list of best films of last year? I hope not.

"A Single Man" does take us through the stream of consciousness mind of a newly single 52 year old gay college English professor living in Los Angeles during the Cuban missile crisis. The film takes us through the day the eponymous single man Colin Firth has decided to kill himself, still grief stricken over the sudden death of his boyfriend of 16 years. He is alert and functional, but emotionally drowning. The color scheme of the film is largely flat, dull, tones, until American fashion designer and first time film director Tom Ford wants us to focus on something which catches Firth's attention like shirtless young men playing tennis, the red lipstick of a secretary, or the color of one of his students blue eyes, by painting them in luminous color. Much of the film is just Firth going through a typical day but soaking in the little details of the world for the last time. Naturally it begins to feel like the first time.

Though the story and dialog are nothing spectacular, the direction, performances, music and editing are immaculate. Some might say this is style over substance, but I can't really see what if anything would have been substantial about such a story. The Cuban Missile crisis as backdrop is arbitrary at the level of plot, but metaphorically as the national moment of uncertainty, doubt, and doom it suits Firth's quietly suicidal melancholy perfectly. This is one of those movies were ostensibly "nothing happens", and more often than not were forced to frustratingly observe Firth's constant sensual gaze and seemingly indestructible sexual tension, when we'd wish he'd just give himself permission to enjoy life, sex, and the invitations around him. Then again "his heart has been broken", and as he shouts at Julianne Moore he is not seeking a "substitution" for what he's lost. Somethings are irreplaceable.

In one scene Firth and a student with a crush on him, go skinny dipping in the ocean at night. One of those "let's break out of the monotony of our lives and do something crazy" moments, that had me wondering if the film weren't in fact, just as trite as I had imagined at my most skeptical moments. Instead of a playful, carefree scene of splashing, we see only choppy waves and distant figures, and before we can really see what's going on Firth is being dragged back on shore with a gash in his head. The ocean does not care that these people wish to be free and spontaneous. The ocean has no opinions whatsoever.

Little details like that, little moments have to be taken into greater account in a film like this, because there are no great plot turns that announce themselves as significant, and no definitive moment that changes all that has come before. We learn more and more about a character, as the film goes on, but nothing shocking or surprising. "I am exactly what I appear to be, if you look closely enough" says Firth at one point.

The flashbacks do not communicate to us all the odds and ends of Firth's past relationship, they flutter around important moments (at least to him), the first time they met, a vacation with a scenic view, the notification of the death, the last time they spoke of death not long before the accident, etc. All we learn from this is that these are the things which Firth thinks about, but through seeing them with him, we begin to feel as he does; to experience the world with waves of painful memories lapping over us of their own accord. Besides that their relationship isn't really important anymore, the boyfriend is dead after all, only Firth, his friends, and phantoms all that's left. If their relationship doesn't seemed fleshed out, it's because it's no longer made of flesh.The ending left something to be desired, there are clues throughout the film certainly (every one's comments on Firth's appearance, "my watch is broken", etc), but it is unsatisfying (even if that is the point).

"A Single Man" is neither hopeless or optimistic, it's a highly stylized bitter sweet trip through fleeting sensations of being alive in the present and the constant pangs of wishing you could re-experience the past. Some point out that if Firth were not gay and in the 60's he would be able to vent his grief in healthy ways, and though that certainly compiles Firth's distance from the world, like Andrie Tarkovsky's "Solaris" or Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine" or so many "I wish you were here" themed films, it's speaks to a more universal sense of loss; the loss of love to time, and life to regret.

My first experience with Taksehi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi) as director as well as lead actor, and I say file away under first class WTF right next to Funky Forest and Night Dreams (review forthcomming).My first experience with Kitano was the disquiet ting almost sympathetic teacher in "Battle Royale", but I knew right away he was an actor worth looking into, and I'm usually not very interested specific in actors. The beginning when Kitano and his matching dummy (who trade places throughout the film, whenever Kitano feels pressured or uncomfortable) think of new films to make Kitano a success.

They try gangster movies, because they are what Kitano is best at, but he has done too many of them and wants to get away from being typecast. Then they try a "traditionally Japanese Ozu like film- the kind Wim Wenders would like", but it too falls through "who wants to waste a half hour on drinking liquor and tea?" Stories about the "common folk" aren't common anymore, and the black and white is now just alienating. They go through a few romances first where a woman is devoted to a man who is usually an artist or in some way disabled and these are called romantic comedies. Then they decide this is sexist so they try films where a man is devoted to a woman, and they call these tragedies. Martial arts period films and horror films get their turns as well, since both do well in foreign markets and might even get remade, but horror gives way to comedy, and neither make nearly enough at the box office.

All of these failures are visually punctuated by the suicide/murders of the Kitano shaped doll.Then providence strikes and Kitano knows what to do, he will make a big budget CGI sci-fi spectacle about meteors racing to earth, only the meteors will have faces and are supposed to become major characters in the film. After that reason abandons ship altogether and the last 45 minutes to an hour are the worlds longest Monty Python sketch involving Kitano as the assistant to a mad scientist/industrialist, and a mother and daughter trying to make cash the easy way, by putting roaches in their food at restaurants, getting hit by cars, and finally marrying Kitano. Trips to France, pro-wrestlers, villagers hopping like bunnies, robots, and generally inexplicable events follow one after the other until the credits.

In Godard like fashion even the characters seem out of place in this slapdash world, asking about why certain earlier strange things happened, at which point Kitano transforms into the wooden doll version of himself (if only we could all do this to get out of tough questions.)I laughed a few times, mostly out of surprise, but sometimes out of exhaustion. There's an early scene where Kitano tries to make a drama about the 50's, but fails once he realizes Japan in the 50's was the wrong place at the right time.

The nostalgic and innocent decade of American pop, was there a time of "discrimination, poverty, and domestic abuse". It was also when Kitano grew up, moments which begin with promise of sentiment or catharsis segue into reminders of social horror at every turn.I don't think he necessarily intended this scene to be the "heart" of the film, and not just another spoof scenario, but it goes longer than most of the others, and after seeing it, and the conceptual loops, dead ends, and false starts. The film maker goes through for sake of "glory" it's easy to understand how it might be tempting to just turn into a block of wood, and let your Id make the decisions (the caricature is at least indestructible).

Easier but not necessarily always entertaining to watch. Kitano did in fairness get his start as a stand-up comedian in the Manzai style (think fast past Abbot and Costello back and forth banter, which in Japan goes back to the 700's.), and many sequences like the martial arts instructor and his master, or the exploits of the strange stuffed animal ladies do take on the format of a Manzai routine. With a little cultural perspective the madness does have a method.Though considering the great ode to artistic impotence "8 1/2" has now become a star studded Hollywood musical in "Nine", it's easy to understand Kitano's frustrations with the cinematic redundancy and the bastardized genre permutations that they spawn.

"You can take the handcuffs off your free now"-Melanie Griffith "Maybe I don't want to be free."-Jeff Daniels I may be mistaken, because I haven't seen all of his films, or even most of them, but it feels like Jonathan Demme put off trying to have this much fun in a movie again until the party sequences in "Rachel Getting Married". A light rom-com beginning where uptight yuppie Jeff Daniels meets punky "free-spirit" Melanie Griffitih, who does incredibly cliché things like throwing his pager out of the window, so he can stop living by the man's rules. The crazy wish-fulfilment scenario of the impish, erotic, impulsive woman only increases, with stealing, skipping out on checks, binge drinking, and lots of sex (left mostly off camera), all in the first few hours of meeting.

Halfway through Ray Liotta enters and the movie switched into a kind of brutal thriller, and still works almost flawlessly. Instead of just making a movie that happens to be set in the 80's Demme fully embraces the period, music, dress, and small sub cultures at the peripheral, punks, bikers, early hip hop, reggae, indie rock bands, etc, and films them with a sincere fascination and not just an interest in trendy exploitation. He crafts a great soundtrack here and puts it to perfect use especially in the Reunion sequence when "The Feelies" do a bunch of fantastic cover songs. Cameos from John Waters and Sussie Tissue of "Suburban Lawns" were disappointingly brief, but that's not really a complaint.

The unlikely scenario develops and changes, and we lean so much about the characters as the film goes on when it does become full of suspense it's easy to get dragged into their predicament even if you've seen it in a thousand other 80's movies. John Cale of "The Velvet Underground" is responsible for the score, and David Byrne (of the Talking Heads) does the opening song, both of which seem perfect matches for the material here. Demme's love of music is what makes all of his best films shine. I couldn't imagine "Silence Of The Lambs" without Buffalo Bill's dance in front of his mirror.

It's this understanding of how to appropriate pop music and perhaps pop culture in general into cinematic terms which "Something Wild's" more than it's romantic odd couple comedy, road movie, and relationship drama origins would suggest. Armond White used the phrase "multicultural heaven" to describe "Rachel Getting Married", and through "Beloved", "Philedalphia", and his various documentaries we see Demme deal with varying levels of success with cultural clashes and struggles, but in this early film like later in RGM he gives into his more Utopian impulses, and creates a diverse patchwork looking America. "Something Wild" appears on screen as America would sound from listening to it's catchiest songs (the one's you secretly howl in the shower or when no one is around).

For the most part it is reminiscent of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" in it's incredible unlikeliness, but more natural, sympathetic, and less juvenile, or like a more emotional less paranoid variation on Martin Scorcesse's "After Hours". All of the characters down to the most minor are sympathetic from Melanie Griffith's mild American prototype Mom who is not ignorant of her daughter's wildness but not judgemental either. Similarly Ray Liotta's sociopathtic husband is not a cardboard barbarian, but the kind of guy you could spend a few hours with, always a little uneasy as to whether they are gonna put an arm around your shoulder or a flick a cigarette into your face.

Before Liotta appears on screen the camera fades to black for a second, cuing the film's sea change in tone, which I didn't notice at first, but is a clever device. In many ways this is a standard American romantic comedy from it's time, but in the ways that are most important it's fun, unique and endearing. As the Ebert says, "The accomplishment of Demme and the writer, E. Max Frye, is to think their characters through before the very first scene. They know all about Charlie and Lulu, and so what happens after the meeting outside that restaurant is almost inevitable, given who they are and how they look at each other. This is one of those rare movies where the plot seems surprised at what the characters do." Lots of movies are entertaining, and a good few are intelligent and emotional griping, but this movie just made me happy, from start to finish, which is even rarer.

A friend of mine once told me I seemed like "The Violent Femmes type", since we were friends I accepted her slight insult and implication of twee dorkishness. While watching the Something Wild, especially during the Feelies performance, I was flashing to the Violent Femmes music video for "American Music", and remembering how charming and delightful it was. Some may find this "sensibility" annoying or a ploy, to distract from more serious issues or important themes. Such an inability to accept well developed style is not inarguable, I have been a curmudgeon for content over style many times myself. But so much of American popular music is slight, sexual, humorous, and waifash, that I feel it's a significant aspect of our culture worth enjoying on it's own terms. "It's better to be a live dog, than a dead lion"-Daniels. There is nothing wrong with enjoying popcorn-art from time to time. Every honest person enjoys some candy. It's just that one can't live on candy alone.

The Alex Trilogy which is made up of this "Boy Meets Girl" and "The Lovers On The Bridge" is a great cinematic treasure, everyone who likes movies should try to watch. I guarantee anyone who watches this will at least like one. This sci-fi/heist movie second part of the trilogy is set in a world of venereal disease where "The Love without Love" sex without love, can be fatal. Alex is the son of a great thief, whose old mates hire him in the hopes that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. Alex falls in love Juliette Binoche, one of his fellow criminals daughter/lover(I was a bit confused about that part). Nothing else needs to be said because nothing else is important. Leos Carax's films are poetry they whimsical and stylish and romantic and personal and frenzied. Cinema is a stage where Carax's Alex finds himself repeatedly at odds with the world and in search of connection, sometimes he finds it, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he, lives sometimes he dies. The only constants are David Bowie songs, dancing, and general awesomeness. Denis Lavant's rocket sprint to "Modern Love" is as close to sublime as movies get.

Everything before the appearance of Hit Girl was at least interesting, after that the head of the movie goes so far up its own ass, it can perform its own colonoscopy, which it then proceeds to do, as what I'm sure some would call satire. Mark Millar's hacky writing that's made him a 5th tier mainstream comic writer is present here as ever. If this is a good adaptation of the comic (which I gave up on after issue 2) then it's a faithful adaptation of a bad book. "Mystery Men" and "Blank Man" with a little girl who calls people a "c&^t" and plenty of references to YouTube-is that what's passing for edgy and original these days...agro Juno? The strain of creatively impoverished Millar writing can be traced from "Wanted", to "Kick Ass" and the Iron Man franchise. For instance, Samuel L. Jackson is in the new "Iron Man 2" because Millar had artists model their new Nick Fury after him in his "Ultimate's" comic's series. When Alan Moore says that modern comics are now just a spawning ground for bigger commercial properties and merchandise, Millar is looking more and more the eager grounds keeper. His books come with headshots in mind.

"With Kick-Ass, the books just out and now the movie's out six weeks later. And I think that's the way things are going to go now, because to go to Marvel's B and C-list characters and try to get movies out them – what's the point of that?"-Mark Millar. I know this is the way Kubrick went about "2001", but this ain't 2001. Concerning, B and C, characters I would gladly take a "Howard the Duck" sequel any day over Super-Bad kid doing the world's worst Batman quote at the end of a movie.

As for Mathew Vaughn as director, "Kick Ass" combines the worst of his last two films; the Guy Richie rip off of "Layer Cake" is now replaced by embarrassingly brazen Tarantino worship, and the stiffeled/self-congratulatory attempts at graphic-novel adaptation in "Stardust" is present and accounted for here. Vaughn financed the film himself, so calling this a soulless studio product isn't accurate or necessary. Bad indie movies get made too...agro Juno is actually more accurate than I suspected when I started writing this.

At the beginning Kick-Ass tells us how he isn't like your daddy's super-heroes no alien origins or dead parents to avenge, no powers or skills etc., but an hour later, were cheering on Hit-Girl's Matrix/28 Days Later/Silence Of The Lambs/Kill Bill reference laden revenge for her slaughtered father, and watching jet-packs streak across the sky. Roger Ebert went too far connecting "Kick-Ass" to Columbine and Virginia Tech. A movie can be bad without being the end of western civilization, and though Kick-Ass isn't very good. Children and Old people swearing will always have produce a knee jerk ironic laugh, like a fat man with high pitched voice, or a short person with a deep Barry White voice, and so Kick-Ass has it's moments of amusement(largely thanks to Nicolas Cage).

With great fan-boyishness comes great responsibility, and if super-heroes have any meaning at all, it should be about more than just kicking ass. If your reply to that "But then what else is there?", then just forget everything I've said, this is the movie for you.

"Precious" wishes it were "Mysterious Skin", but it's not. Gregg Araki spins a tale that could have been a weird Law and Order SVU episode or Lifetime movie, but instead comes off like a classic novel, the kind that sucks you into every page from first to last. There are point of view shots in this film, from perspectives that we often see, but are rarely forced into "experiencing" the way we are here. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was especially impressive here, considering I had basically written him off before this. Small town pedophilia is nothing new, and though the film does not shy away from the fact, it's the focus on the characters and the opposite ways they respond to the event that makes the film so tragic, fragile, complex, funny, and disturbing. To use SVU lingo, the film speaks for the "victims", though Araki's true masterstroke is his ability to portray characters who would never describe themselves as such.

A brilliant documentary ostensibly about a man tracing General Sherman's swath of destruction across the south that won the civil war for the North. What it ends up being is a video journal of Ross McElwee getting hooked up or trying to hook up with a variety of southern ladies, from an aspiring model to scientist living in a small island in a lake by herself. Watching "Sherman's March" is like discovering a great novel for the first time. Though it's relatively obscure, the American Library of Congress was right to include this among their important historical works. It's every bit as personal as "Crumb" and as politically complex as Micheal Moore minus the soap box. The lines between personal, political, fiction, documentary, history, and present are blurred from the beginning, and this only continues for two hours where McElwee's personal scars mirror the blasted landscape Sherman carved, and just as equally the South's selective memory when it comes to the war. McElwee says "Sherman really loved the South. It must have been a terrible choice to make to destroy it.", and so continues to echo a southern Gothic tradition of ambivalence and nostalgia through the personal documentary medium way ahead of its time. Sherman's March" is complex, awkward, sad, sweet, and very funny, a film so rich in character it's impossible to forget.

"...The film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word...emotion." -Samuel Fuller, "Pierrot Le Fou"

Before "Kung-Fu Panda" there was Sammo Hung, who is a burly martial arts action star, and in "Pedicab Driver" a five star director who knows how to throw his weight around without missing a beat. Like Jackie Chan (who he choreographed fight sequences for), Hung combines physical comedy with self propelled stunt work, showcasing both the fury and the funny.

In 1930's Macau, China two rival groups of pedicab drivers negotiate how to split up the cities work, half will take passengers, and the other half will take cargo, and civil war is nearly averted until a chef chases a cat into the room and all hell breaks loose. The subsequent battle seamlessly recalls both "Star Wars" and "The Three Stooges", without loosing any of it's frantic energy or becoming a parody.

Pedicab Driver is first and foremost a Hong Kong action film, but while watching it you don't get the sense that each scene is designed to introduce a new excuse to fight. Some sequences, like the battle in the gambling den, do seem non-sequitters, as we never return to that set or it's characters, but the execution of this scene is so flawless that you rarely ease back from the edge of your seat long enough to mind let alone gripe. Sammo and his friend "Malted Candy" are passenger drivers, who both fall in love in with different girls at the same time. Sammo has to compete with a lecherous baker to win the heart of his girl in classic slapstick fashion.

While Malted Candy's story, which is minimized early on but expanded later, takes the form of a romance, and then a tragedy once it's revealed that his love interest is not all she seems. This does not have the makings of a great tale, but it is very much a great movie, that handles these stories with a poise that genuinely enhances the action sequences, which are almost submerged under the story and characters (a rarity if not a freak, for an action film of this caliber).

Yes, the bad guy is ugly, the good guy is handsome which is all very obvious, but Sammo is big ol kung fu teddy bear, whose agility and lightening fast speed belie his Chris Farely physique, and it's his performance which elevates the movie into something amazing. The comedy is funny, the romance is sweet, and the action is one of a kind combining the best of martial arts cinema, with an easily accessible drama that makes us care about the characters and their pains, joys, and inevitable revenge.

Pedicab Driver is badass and brutal at times, but never sacrifices the charming lightness that makes the movie so enjoyable and gratifying in a way few of it's exciting peers (then and now) permit themselves to be. It's the type of film that gives the impression that everyone involved was enjoying themselves by effortlessly doing what I do best. This joy pours from the screen, and it's hard not to become immersed in it.

I recently watched another HK action film featuring Sammo called "Zu: Warriors Of The Magic Mountain" and though it had similar sizzling combat (though largely artificial; wire or animation driven), it lacked a humane element, like reading a dry translation of an ancient myth. Pedicab Driver has a face, and a heart, and a fist, and watching them collide is a true joy to behold. I challenge anyone to not be entertained by this movie. Go on, I dare you!

Over a decade after his dinner with Andre" Wallace Shawn finds himself at his psychiatrists snow covered house in the wilderness, where his wife is desperate to meet the psycho-therapist team that's been stealing away so much of her hubby and his time. Julie Hagerty and Tom Noonan (who also directs) are said therapists who were just preparing for bed, when in comes the troubled couple. Shawn wants to leave immediately, embarrassed by the imposition, while his wife stalks room to room like a caged tiger, veering between offensive and polite with every blurted out or carefully chosen word.

Hagerty too wants to go to sleep, but is too passive aggressive to kick the visitors to the curb. Noonan on the other hand thinks they should stay long enough to resolve whatever issues need addressing.

Shawn: I don't like where this is going. Noonan: It's going where it's going

He also enjoys his domination over Shawn and his wife (who he can silence with a whisper or slight gesture) and is titillated in more ways than one by Young's edgy barbs, which she has mostly for psychiatrists and the dopes who go in for such psycho-babble. "What the f*&k are you people talking about" is her echo throughout the film. Shawn is a mild mannered and pint up neo-liberal who married a dancer in a bar, one who dominates him just as much as the other characters in the film do, but who comes to represent his anxieties (which are many and varied)

If you can imagine Anti-Christ without the gore, sex, and supernatural elements you can peer into the power plays present between the two couples in "The Wife". The evening never veers into "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Wolf?" levels of chaos, as the characters rarely reveal any deeper motivations about themselves for than more a moment. With the exception of Shawn who babbles about himself throughout the entire film, much to the other characters devious pleasure or annoyance.

Noonan's direction is sparse and reserved minimalism. There is repeated image of the house with the front door open letting light pour onto the snow, of the characters faces distorted in the reflections of their wine glasses like funhouse mirrors, and an upside down reflection of the characters in a frozen lake at night lit only be torch(the place Noonan goes to "be himself"). Light comes and goes as a central theme with the characters submerging into shadows often as their emotions rise up in outbursts. Noonan doesn't stick to this visual pattern enough to become predictable, but uses it as one in a range of subtle tricks to highlight mood and emotion and keep the film from being a play.

Noonan is wise enough to let his fellow actors command the screen which is a good choice because between Shawn's groveling, Young's populist emoting, and Hagerty's Quaalude induced bouts of laughter and nervousness, there isn't much room left to do anything but sit at the end of the table smiling like Lucifer and delivering a single sentence of "tell me what your feeling" or "this is really happening isn't it?" Fortunately Noonan can deliver these lines and any others he has with a truly creepy finesse that really does say more with less. Outside of the house as he walks in the snow in his bathrobe, torch blazing in the dark he resembles a saint on a pilgrimage or a serial killer going to bury a body. You never can tell with Noonan.

Like a John Cassavettes movie "The Wife" is an actor's showcase and it also ends a bit unresolved, piling up question onto question up into the very last scene. In the final moments Noonan does give himself the spotlight, though he cleverly leaves his face largely in the dark. Another actor or director might complain about the way he is lit in this scene and the lose of potential emotional connection, but its because of this very distance created by the shadows covering his face which make it hard to tell if he's crying, and make the scene so absorbing. It is scenes like this which make "The Wife" attractive; the hazy dance of images between shadows and low lighting and the emotional undercurrents of resentment, love, fear, and loneliness that gush up into view only to disappear again a moment later.

What is the happiest moment of your life? If you had to pick one moment, one memory to keep with you and the rest were going to be erased what would it be? This is the central question of Afterlife a film about life, memory, happiness, movie making, and only in tangent, death. A group of dead people arrive at a dilapidated building where they are told to select a single memory that they will dwell in for all eternity. Heaven as it turns out is only a memory. The film is mostly these people talking directly into the camera documentary style reflecting on what was most important to them.

I recently told a friend about this movie, who told me it sounded "corny", and if the film had only been about these people I, might agree. I told my friend that I liked the film because while watching it I reflected on my entire life, and what happiness had meant to me during it. I was almost shocked and a little saddened by how quickly I came to realize what my moment was, like the movie as a whole it leaves a bittersweet taste. My friend told me they didn't think about their life that way, and that it would be too depressing to do so. I told her that someone in the movie says that too, and what made the movie as a whole so good and not just a clever concept was how honest it was about the complications between notions of a meaningful life, nostalgia, and personal happiness.

The dead have a half a week to choose which memory they want and the rest of the week is spent filming the memories in a sound studio. The screening at the end of the week is to be their moment of "ascension". Though silent at first the "counselors" shooting these memory-movies are not separate from the process, they too are dead. Takashi and his trainee Shiori we see handle most of the cases.

Afterlife despite its title is not a film about death, but about memory and self-reflection. Two characters become problematic early on, one an old man who says he cant remember his life clearly enough to choose a specific moment, the other a young man who refuses to chose a moment, insisting it would be "avoiding responsibility for his life" and a surrender to empty nostalgia. Takashi becomes interested in the old man's case(for personal reasons we discover later), and has the man's life sent to him on videotape so that he may observe and report, in a quieter variation on Albert Brook's "Defending Your Life" (a conceptual cousin to Afterlife).

Afterlife is about producing films that capture only a single moment and that only have meaning to single person; films that will only be screened once, but will be remembered literally forever. They are so personal as to be inconsequential to anyone but their intended viewer, but I couldn't think of a more meaningful type of film to make both for an audience and their creators. I think this is why many people watch films, at times to identify and at others to connect with what is unidentifiable.

Russian silent film director Aleksandr Medvedkin used to travel the USSR on a train stopping at random villages and asking the people what their problems, issues, and concerns were and then asked for their assistance in making a film about just that. Doing this Medvedkin wanted to give cinema to the masses. The world of Afterlife likewise gives cinema to the individual.

There are sprinklings of melodrama in the film towards the end, but they allow the characters to actually reach important conclusions that the film wouldn't have been able to connect together otherwise. Even if you can't remember your own moment, isn't it possible that you are an extra or a main character in someone else's, and nothing as dramatic as some old flame pining over you, but maybe a moment spent with a friend or a family member. Maybe your parent's happiest moment was when you were born. It's only from an imaginary position like an Afterlife that we have the distance to reflect on such grand feelings intimately and sincerely.

Since were not dead, this question can be written off as sophomoric or corny, our best days may in fact still be ahead. But I wonder if without some prior sense of what is truly beautiful, meaningful, and warm fuzziness incarnate whether we can know true bliss when we finally see it. This is assuming it's something you can even know when you see it, and not something that only occurs with memory. I was once told in a Sunday Sermon, happiness is predicated on happenings and events, but joy was something internal that had little relation to the outside world. Personally I think real happiness is created when memories generate joy that later events cannot soil or touch.

The only objections I could reasonably see are often spoken by the characters themselves, particularly the young man, who thinks the entire system is flawed; what do they do if a baby dies for instance? My own moment (and no I will not tell you nor anyone else) was actually quite "corny", in fact it was the first time in my life I realized why a certain kind of sentimentality existed. This movie is sentimental for sure, but it's definitely sincere. If we get lucky in this universe and there is an Afterlife, we would all be very fortunate to find ourselves in a movie theaters like these with kind hearted counselors to help us grieve for and accept our lives, and if there isn't well at least there's still movies like Afterlife; things worth seeing, things worth talking about, and things worth sharing with each other.

Drowning By Numbers is one of a very small group of perfect films I've seen. Not just 5, 10, 100 point films, but flawless to the point where numerical systems fail to be valuable. Peter Greenaway's third film is about three women a mother, daughter, and niece all named Cissie Colpitts, who one by one drown their husbands in a bath, in the sea, and in a pool. After the first drowning, the local coroner is asked to help cover up the crime, and he agrees believing this will give him car blanche to have his way with the new widow. He is rebuked in the first of several such attempts. His name is Madgett and he orchestrates for the town a series of seemingly random, perhaps ancient (in fact completely made up) games, consisting of strange rules and regulations, like "Hangman's Cricket" where half the game is spent learning the rules. Madgett's son is named Smut(our narrator), and Smut is interested in a young girl dressed in a fancy gown who always claims to be on her way to a party, and who jumps rope counting from 1 to 100 in the films opening sequence. Numbers appear in every scene whether spoken aloud or written on a small or large object in the background. One could make the film itself into a game called "spot the numbers", which count from the first scene to the last from 1 to 100. The film is full of small details some so obscure they are likely to please no one but Peter Greenaway or those willing to watch his behind the scenes blow-by blow "Fear Of Drowning", where for instance, we learn that many lines of dialog consist of the last words of England's kings, sometimes crazed non-sequitters muttered from their death beds. Why include such things, because it makes the game for fun, that's why. As always Greenaway composes every single sequence to achieve a sense of balance, and painterly poise. As usual most scenes, including idle landscape shots are recreations of paintings. Though the images are fantastic, the soundtrack by frequent collaborator Michael Nyman is stunning. I can't think of a director and composer whose works fuse together with such iconoclastic fluid grace since Sergio Leone and Ennio Mariconne. Nyyman's orchestral compositions are energetic, pulsating, lively, and captivating enough to be listened to and enjoyed apart from the film as its own music, and gives a sharp sense of irony and comic timing of its own to Greenaway's visual tableaux. Greenaway is not what you would call a "humanist" director, he rarely shoots close ups, instead remains in wide screen, and letting his characters take up positions as figures in an image, not actors on a stage, or in a film. This can be difficult to deal with if identification with characters is a pre-requisite for enjoyment, because the film aims for visual awe, wafts of aural pleasure, and snatches of witty literate dialog that only doesn't sound like dialog because of the casual delivery the lead actresses are able to give their macabre melodrama. Drowning By Numbers is a multi-layered film meant to be watched several times.

It is a monument to be marveled at, but one where all of the elements of the film medium contribute the structure and design of the piece as whole, where form and content perfectly integrated into each other. The women who drown their husbands, at first do it out of anger, then out of disappointment, and finally out of "solidarity", or in other words for no real reason at all. The pattern of threes needs to be complete, three murders, three autopsies, and three funerals. We know the husbands will die, they are as inexorably fated to their turns in the plot as all people are fated for death, as films are fated to end after a certain number of scenes. We are made hyper-aware of these numbers because they are flashed in a countdown on screen. Does anyone remember the death clock, http://www.deathclock.com/, how it works is after a few personal details are typed in a clock appears counting down to the exact moment you will die. You can watch your life flicker away by measurements. We are all drowning in numbers. Yet it's not all doom and gloom, because the coroner while being an eternal bachelor as fated to be rejected by the widows he assists as their husbands were to watery graves, he is also the master of games. Like his first film the Draughtsman's' Contract the battle of the sexes consumes the characters, where in Draughtsman, an artist who believes he is having his way with a mother and daughter discovers all to late, he is in fact being used and disposed of, so does Madgett find himself helpless in the face of "female solidarity", leaving him to his only recourse of playing more games. Sure death is just around the corner at all times, but there are so many marvelous, silly, frivolous distractions to amuse ourselves with in the meantime; life and all of its contents. "No Country For Old Men" and Blow-Up have both made this same point about death's inevitability and life as a game of chance, but where both those films suffered a self-serious somberness Drowning By Numbers remembers to be a tragic-comedy and not just a tragedy. Life is absurd, of course of course, but the absurd can be very funny, and humor after all is happiness' cheeky cousin, sometimes inappropriate, but nearly always welcome. Smut: "The full flavor of the game Hangman's Cricket is best appreciated after the game has been played for several hours, by then every player has an understanding of the many rules and knows which character they want to play permanently, finally an outright loser is found and is obliged to present himself to the Hangman who is always merciless".

The time is the 80's. Everyone is either A. on cocaine, B. a rapist, or C. a model. Those who are class B and C. are also class A. Everyone is dressed like extras from "Flash Gordon" with more fish-net, and all the music comes out of a Casio. Two androgynous bi-sexual models named Adrian and Margaret compete in the New York fashion underground for who is cattiest bitch and the most stylish a$$. Both characters are played surprisingly well by the same actress, to heighten both the androgyny of "the scene" at the time, and the repetition. Margaret is the main character, described by her male incarnation Adrian as "...an uptight WASP c*#t from Connecticut.", bookending the film, but being largely absent from its mushy middle. Amidst the usual backstabbing, s*^t talking, runway stomping, and sexual assaults (virtually the only kind of intercourse the film displays) visitors from beyond the stars have also taken an interest in the sordid little events.

These aliens live in a tiny, largely invisible UFO, positioned on top of our heroines apartment where they can observe the events inside through a heavily pixilated color blur that resembles Chris Marker's invented film style "The Zone" from "Sans Soliel" or the heat vision the Rasta-lizard of "Predator" views the world through. This psychedelic point of view is repeated throughout the film, as the aliens are the most constant though silent narrators. Their interest in the Manhattan fashionista junky set comes from the same reason that so many are/were attracted to such places; the sex and the drugs. Human orgasm produces more chemical reactions in the brain than at any other time in life. The brain becomes the body's dealer, and the body explodes, shivers, and shrivels back to down to size, patiently awaiting or screaming for it's next fix. For tiny aliens the only drug in the universe better than our cum-chemical's, are these fluids when they come from the opiate riddled brain of a junky."The ancient Egyptians weren't afraid of euphoria", says a drug addled screen-writer in one of the films many inter-connected sub-plots.

Thus aliens begin turning up at the fringes of "punk sub-culture" where the junk-cum getting is good and no one cares if people go missing. "New Wave" models are the next evolutionary step forward (for one they have more money drugs). So the junkies wait around to score, and the aliens wait for the junkies to score with each other. Unfortunately there is no way for the aliens to extract these chemicals without killing those they take from, which to Margaret who is often being raped by whoever is spilling their seed, it's as if God himself has suddenly taken an interest in her life. Not enough of an interest to stop her from being raped, but enough to make the bodies of the bad men (and women) disappear after they have done their business. It doesn't take long before she realizes that sex with her leads to death. "Margaret: I kill with my c^*t.". This new sexual power gives her both confidence (to get revenge on those who abused her), and a renewed sense of alienation (what little sexual release and connection she did have is now impossible).

"Campy" is something of an understatement for describing "Liquid Sky", a film drenched head to day-glo toe in nihilist attitude, decadent fashion, disturbing sex, and surreal black humor. But also this campiness and seeming lack of "content" and seriousness make enough room for the moments of sincere cultural insight and emotional pathos to stand out in ways that would seem truly alien in a John Waters or Dusan Makavejev flick (two filmmakers "Liquid Sky" is indebted to).

The ending of the film once Adrian and Margaret's feud has come to a literal and figurative "head" (couldn't resist the pun…I'm a bad person) is also surprisingly and even unnecessarily sad and vulnerable than would be required of something this "tasteless". Imagine if at the end of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" Brad and Janet had a serious talk about their changing sexuality, or their stifling childhoods or something. And now imagine that scene being successful.

What would it be like to come to New York in the 80's from the suburbs? What would it be like to suddenly be surrounded by a never ending race for sensual pleasure and aesthetic perfection, where the tongues are either in your mouth or barbed, forked, and spitting venom at anything resembling "sentimental", or "soft"? What would it be like to thrive in this environment? Would it feel like being food for alien creatures, or would it feel it like feeding them. In a world built around the sexual image, would sex feel liberating, or just like another way to be used. "Liquid Sky" is an absurd pageant, but one not based completely in irony, it's cynicism is hard one from experience. Margaret's inevitable "falling in love" with the UFO, feels like a tragic romance, not a schlocky b-movie. The movie contains both styles in the end, and finds a parasitic way of letting one feed the other to make both aspects stronger. Who is top and who is bottom in this scenario is up to debate.

"Liquid Sky" is more of an "attitude" than a film, and I know how cheesy that sounds, but divorced from this attitude the performances fall flat. Devoid of the music the scenes would fall flat. Devoid of the humor the dialog would fall flat, and devoid of the dialog the film would fall flat. If any one part of this film were to be altered the rest would fall into chaos like a game of Jenga.

As it is they all balance each other out in "cult classic" bliss, which may indeed be more style than substance. Of course Adriane might say something like "substance is for ugly people who lack style", and who am I to argue.