Reviews

What makes this film interesting are the very things that some who reviewed it disliked. As it says in the Fun Stuff section, "First movie made on Video master using High Definition Video System (HDVS) at 1225 lines and then printed on 35 mm film format." It may not be that novel today, but remember... this film was released in 1987! I remember watching it. I remember how eerie it was. I didn't know that it was shot in high def; I didn't even know what that was. What struck me about it was how real it seemed. It didn't just have the look of TV. It had the look of a play. Live. In person. I found it disturbing. Perhaps the theme of "sliding between two worlds" and the questions of sanity vs. insanity have also become banal today. It wasn't that these were new themes, even then. But they weren't as outworn as they are today. Hollywood wasn't really into making blockbusters about mental breakdowns. That's a recent phenomenon. At that time, insanity was left to art house directors. Lynch has traditionally done a pretty good job with sanity vs. insanity. What's real? What isn't? That kind of crap.

This film was novel, not because it was blockbuster with the insanity them (it was no blockbuster at all), but because for those who hadn't seen high def, films that questioned sanity... or both... this was something new and unnerving. The performances were great. You can't miss with Turner and Byrne... but Sting was great, too. Much as I hate to say it... he's really an excellent actor. It's always strange seeing him in a film. Isn't he a rock star? There's always that duality. Always that question... "Who am I seeing?" That echoes the "two worlds" insanity of Julia.

It's a grossly underrated film. I think that people don't know how to watch it, if that makes sense. It's held up reasonably well over time. If you haven't already, check it out for yourself and see what you think.

This is what I'd call a "very good" film. But to think that people consider this better than... just for a few examples... all the wonderful Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Leone and Welles films is shocking. The fact that "The Dark Knight" is higher on this list than "The Shawshank Redemption" is equally shocking. "The Shawshank Redemption" is ranked higher than "The Godfather," for Christ's sake!!! Of course, this is a list based on popular taste... not "high culture." I have plenty of problems with high culture, myself. But I have even more problems calling this one of the greatest films ever made. Frank Darabont isn't even a GOOD director. He's turned out three solid films... and then a bunch of crap. His "solid films" are pretty hamfisted and corny. But then people continue to like crap like "Gone with the Wind" to this very day.

It's amazing to think people like this film better than... say... "Taxi Driver." It tells you something. Anyway, I could go on and on like this. If you enjoyed "The Shawshank Redemption," it would be hypocritical for me to fault you that. After all, I liked it, too.

I don't mean this comment to be helpful to those considering watching the film. I mean it to be thought-provoking for those who appreciate the history of great cinema.

How to categorize "Venice/Venice"? If I had to invent a term, I'd call it "naturalistic romantic seriocomedy." If you like Eric Rohmer's films, you might also like THIS film. If you like Hollywood film... if your type of director is Capra or Hitchcock... "Venice/Venice" may seem trivial. The story doesn't go anywhere. The dialog seems to be about nothing. To top it off, it's heady stuff. Jaglom throws in an ample dose of physics and metaphysics. If you're looking to kick back with a flick and take in some good, ol' fashioned spoon-fed entertainment... you're looking in the wrong place with "Venice/Venice."

But...

It's also incredibly moving. The first half of the film is set in Venice and Lido, and Jaglom takes the opportunity to weave the beautiful scenery together in a way that both reflects and honors Visconti's film version of "Death in Venice." The film begins at the Hotel des Bains, where the Thomas Mann book begins. Dean (Henry Jaglom), an American director, is in Lido because one of his films is part of the Venice Biennale. He meets the beautiful young Jeanne (Nelly Allard), who demands an interview with him. The chemistry is immediate and obvious: Whatever is discussed is secondary to the facial expressions, the stares, the sounds of words. Jaglom does this MASTERFULLY.

Dean and Jeanne get to know each other... and they spend romantic moments around Venice. They have a falling out when Jeanne begins to feel that Dean is not the man she fell in love with in his films. They go their separate ways... Dean back to Venice, CA and Jeanne back to France. Dean settles back in with his girlfriend, Peggy (Melissa Leo) and is readying himself to start his next production. Then, Jeanne shows up. Unlike most films, where this would lead to some kind of conflict between the female leads... here, this leads only to a conflict within Dean, who is forced to make some important decisions.

What's wonderful about Venice/Venice is that it's confusing. It's not "one thing." It's drama, comedy, romance. It's set in Venice, Italy and Venice, CA... worlds apart in many ways and yet both well known to art-film directors. Dean is caught between a woman he has loved (Peggy) and a woman he wants to love (Jeanne)... between... you might say... the past and the future. Dean is played by Henry Jaglom. Jaglom is the director. He's both in front of and behind the camera. At one point, in the midst of a discussion of film, he encourages the group he's with to look in a particular direction, as if they were looking right into the camera... which, in fact, they are. You're not supposed to break through the so-called "fourth wall" and come out into the audience.

But that's exactly what Jaglom does.

Jaglom's mentor was Orson Welles. Welles was a rebel in the extreme. He broke studio rules. He both created and broke the rules of film-making. Like Jaglom, Welles was fascinated with finding the liminal space between reality and fiction... questioning the nature of truth itself. Welles' film "F for Fake" is one of these affairs, for example. And that's what "Venice/Venice" is in Jaglom's work. Without question, it's self-indulgent. Jaglom is psychoanalyzing and deconstructing himself right before our eyes. If you like the proverbial "film about film-making" (e.g., "Day for Night," "8 1/2", etc.)... you'll probably really dig this one.

There are a few things that I particularly love about "Venice/Venice":

1. Naturalistic/improvised dialog. People thought that Cassavetes was nuts when he did this back in the 50s in "Shadows." You'll notice that over the following decades... the whole sound and feel of dialog changed. Pre-Cassavetes... it was that snappy back-and-forth banter of Howard Hawks films that was the norm. Cassevetes and his naturalistic dialog never became mainstream... but it DID bring the mainstream to a place where we now hear people on the screen that sound somewhat like us. Jaglom is in that Cassavetes tradition. It's refreshing to watch a film like this once in a while. Crystal clean and no caffeine.

2. Wonderful actresses. Jaglom even says it in the film (as Dean.) Women are able to get more emotionally honest than men, and that's what makes women much more interesting subjects for art films. If you want nuanced personalities, cast great actresses. Jaglom not only features Melissa Leo and Nelly Allard... but Suzanne Bertish, one of the great actresses of TV, film and theater of our time. It's obvious that Jaglom wasn't interested in finding women to play parts. He cast these women to create their parts knowing that would also create chemistry.

3. The meaning creeps up on you. I love an "Oh, yeah... huh... interesting!" experience of film. I'm not into a spoon-feeding. If you tell me what to think... I rebel. Let me think for myself. So... while, to me, this is a film about choices, worlds in collision, dualities... about what it is to make film... about how women and men see each other (and there's some wonderful documentary-like footage about women's ideas on relationships in this film)... it can be about WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE. In my mind... great art stimulates. "Craft" entertainment manipulates.

4. Jaglom. If you like his personality, you'll like the film. If you don't, you won't. Another reviewer called Jaglom a "wanna-be Woody Allen" or something like that. Jaglom is NOT AT ALL like Woody Allen. He's heady, yes. Sarcastic. But he's obviously a true romantic at heart. I don't get that in ANY of Allen's movies... even "Annie Hall" or "Manhattan." Jaglom loves women, and I don't mean as hood ornaments. He's willing to bare his soul on the screen. Make me laugh, make me cry... move me. Jaglom has an incredible ability to make me feel everything on the sheer force of his personality and spirit.

The other review I just read, tracing the roots of this film, is just utter nonsense. This was obviously written by someone who has no idea of aesthetics, art/film history or social theory. I won't comment on the film, myself, because, frankly, it's late at night and I'm not up to the task. Read Susan Sontag's take on it. She was always brilliant at tying together the above-listed disciplines. I would also recommend a review of the Vienna Aktionists' work, and particularly that of Kurt Kren. This is a strange, enigmatic and elliptical film, but one of the greatest of its kind... and critical review shouldn't be about applying some rigid set of universal standards but about answering some simple questions: A. "Did the film achieve its objectives? Was it fully realized or half-baked?"; B. "Could it have been better, and, if so, how?"; C. "How and what did it mean?" (from a semiotics and social theory standpoint); D. "How does it relate to other films similar to it, and did it have something unique to say?" "Did I like it?" is a valid question. It's irrelevant, however, to me as a reader of criticism unless I'm quite sure that I share similar taste with the critic.

"The Clockmaker" is a minor classic... so great, in fact, that nobody seems to know what to do with it. Why? Perhaps it doesn't fit neatly enough into the crime genre. The first shots are provocative: A child looks out from a train at a burning car. As the opening titles hit the screen, the music crescendoes. We know something bad has just happened; we brace ourselves for the violence to come. The cinematography here has the hard-hitting feel of exposé cinema (e.g., Costa-Gavras' `Z'.) As if leaving its promise unfulfilled, however, this is the film's most dramatic moment. The only violence, as it were, has occurred before the action director Bertrand Tavernier shows us. Much like its principal characters, we are left to contemplate what happened and WHY it took place.

The story is simple enough. Monsieur Decombes, a clockmaker, is interrupted at work by the local police. They inform him that his abandoned car was found by the side of the road, left there by Bernard, his son. Would he accompany them to go see it? Under this pretext, they bring him to the station, where he meets a mysteriously evasive Inspector Guilboud. They return to the vehicle together. Only then does the inspector confront him with the awful truth: Bernard and his girlfriend have killed a man. Decombes is shocked. How could his boy have done it? Throughout the rest of the film, he struggles to understand this hideous crime and his relationship with Bernard, ultimately left with more questions than answers.

Mainstream moviegoers find "The Clockmaker" boring and anticlimactic. They're used to seeing crime flicks with action and plot twists. Here, they know the identity of the murderer from the start, they never see a dead body or an exciting arrest, and 90% of the focus is on the criminal's father. What they're left with is an hour and a half of wayward wanderings... of "character development." What could be more pedestrian? One almost gets the sense that this was the very reason that Tavernier chose to bring Georges Simenon's book to the screen: It's structure is a full inversion of what audiences are used to. This is a point that deserves to be revisited later, as it has a great deal to do with the deeper meanings of this work.

While it won the Prix Louis Delluc, `The Clockmaker' has never been taken seriously by arthouse snobs either. They call its direction `heavy-handed.' They note the over-the-top performances of Philippe Noiret and Jacques Denis (not to mention Yves Afonso. runner-up to Alain Delon in the "too-cool-for-words" competition.) Oddly, they call it `commercial'... a conventional social melodrama. And while it isn't Hollywood melodrama of the Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray varieties, there is some validity in this assertion. The definition of `melodrama' describes the film well: `A composition. intended to exhibit a picture of human life, or to depict a series of grave or humorous actions of more than ordinary interest, tending toward some striking result.' And the point of the film is all-too-obvious: Love isn't clockwork.

I've heard `The Clockmaker' compared to many films, including those of the French New Wave that preceded it. Is there any similarity, though, between Tavernier's work and such melodramas as. say. Godard's `Vivre sa vie' or Truffaut's `The Soft Skin'? There isn't. Some have suggested that the film was the model for `The Sweet Hereafter', in that both deal with isolation and the loss of children. Yet, where Egoyan's film is politically neutral to the point of nihilism, `The Clockmaker' outlines a specific set of social conditions that made murder an inevitability. The factory watchman is the avatar for all social-climbing capitalists. abusing his authority toward lecherous ends. Liliane, Bernard's girlfriend, is the powerless victim. Whether or not Bernard pulled the trigger is immaterial. In effect, society has handed him the gun, cocked and loaded.

Personally, I find the film more similar to the work of the New German Cinema. particularly Fassbinder's `Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven.' Both films begin just after murders have been committed. Both films spotlight those who are left behind to deal with loved ones' unspeakable acts. Both films give us radicals and reactionaries, each determined to use the protagonists' woes to political advantage. Ultimately, `The Clockmaker' is the more profound work of the two. It is a true `slice of life' and not the stagy drama that `Mütter Küsters' is. Starting from a conservative stance in its opening scene, in which Decombes and his friends discuss the merits of capital punishment, it turns out to be a liberal piece. Its point, as I see it, is not merely that 'violence begets violence.' True love, in Tavernier's paradigm, comes not from hearing but from listening. not from validation but from understanding. not from making things run like clockwork but from accepting the bumps in the road as part of the journey.

I'd just watched Haneke's "The Seventh Continent" and was excited at the thought that I'd found another great director whose work I could trust. [You see... I have this big thing about not wasting time on lousy films; when I walk out of a stinker, I never feel like I want my money back... I want the two hours of my life back.] I'm still in shock over "Funny Games." How could Haneke have made these two films? One of them must be a fluke. Either he was momentarily touched with genius in making "The Seventh Continent" and is, in reality, an incompetent idiot or "Funny Games" was the nadir of a great auteur's career. Was he forced to shoot this turd by a demanding studio? Was it a lame attempt to sell out? And, no, it does not work on any level... not as satire, not as thriller/horror flick, not as kitsch, not as "the joke's on you"... niente. The games are neither funny, nor elaborate, nor believable, nor gripping, nor horrifying, nor interesting. Aside from the opening credits, when the classical music is suddenly replaced by death metal (a truly brilliant moment), this film has nothing going for it. The industry has been churning out this kind of junk since "Lady in a Cage" (which does it far better, as a note.) I have a feeling that Haneke would (dubiously attempt to) claim that this movie was, indeed, farcical and not genuinely "in genre." As Brecht pointed out, knowingly-conceived kitsch is not art; to that, I would add this: "When you 'spoof', you must not only outdo the original but must display a high level of creativity, as you have a template off of which to work." In that sense, even "Scary Movie" does a better job at spoofing the horror/suspense genre, and that's saying a lot about the low quality of "Funny Games."

A big, fat 0/10. Hang your head in shame, Michael Haneke. Not Bergman, nor Kurosawa, nor Truffaut... not even the overly prolific Godard ever put out a turd like this. You've ruined your legacy. You coulda been a contenda...

I'm a huge Rohmer fan. I've seen all of the Moral Tales, the Comedies & Proverbs and the Tales of the Four Seasons. I dislike this particular film tremendously. Along with "Rendez-Vous in Paris," it represents Rohmer at his worst... moralistic, pedantic and amateurish. I've seen better summer camp skits than the bit at the cafe, the scene at the train station and the business at the art gallery. Frankly, with the exception of "The Blue Hour", the project is a wash. Joelle Miquel and Philippe Laudenbach deliver terrible, over-the-top performances, and even the great Fabrice Luchini seems foolish and out of place. Jessica Forde is passable as the jaded town rat. The only stand out (at least in a positive sense) is Marie Riviere who, as always, is entirely believable.

I'm not sure why this project got such a high IMDb rating. I can only think that people like the two-name films ("Celine and Julie", "Fanny and Alexander", etc.) because they sound whimsically playful. Rohmer has an excellent sense of humor (e.g., Conte d'ete, Boyfrends and Girlfriends, etc.), but this is not a delightful little caprice. With the exception of the first 20 minutes or so, it's a student project. Note also the horrendous original electronic music. Rohmer often refrains entirely from the use of music, and this is one case where he should have shown his usual restraint.

It's interesting to me how great directors are often revered for their worst work. Mulholland Dr. is David Lynch up to his usual tricks. In fact, it is beyond formulaic... It is Lynch imitating Lynch. If you've seen "Eraserhead", "Blue Velvet", "Wild at Heart" and the "Twin Peaks" series, you can skip this one. It's really more of the same: Eerie, noirish surrealism over a narrative that doesn't tie up neatly. If the cinematography was such that the images carried the film, I'd recommend it, but it's one of the weakest in this regard among the director's oeuvre. In my head, I can recall dozens of stills from "Eraserhead", and it's been many years since I've seen it. I can't think of but one or two interesting moments in this movie.

I'd like to put forth another thought. With the exception of his mainstream works (i.e., "The Elephant Man", "The Straight Story", etc.), Lynch favors the use of underdeveloped characters that are interesting in their inexplicable idiosyncrasies. His women are often the flimsiest of his characters, and they're particularly two-dimensional here. Female characters aren't just chess pieces; they're completely interchangeable. If you think back over most of the director's work, you'll find very few well-developed women. That's nothing new to great cinema... take, for example, Jean-Pierre Melville's women as typical of "art house" male directors... but it is interesting to note.

I'd like to believe that Lynch is having a good laugh at his audience's expense. If he is, it's a brilliant cinematic installation of sorts... a film deliberately designed to confuse viewers into thinking that there's something more to the story, into trying to make sense out of surreal senselessness... where the audience is part of the piece. The "lesbian sex," then, might be the director's "funning" us into enjoying a stupid piece of manipulation. He might as well have thrown Shannon Tweed in the middle to the wolf-whistling delight of the groundlings. Somehow, I don't take Lynch as the Frank Zappa of the silver screen. From hearing him interviewed and seeing his other films, he seems to sincere for such a daring stunt.

I'll take Mulholland Dr. at face value and give it a 6/10... most of the 6 owing to the fact that I WANT to like Lynch's output at all costs.

It is extreme cynicism-- even solipsism-- to imagine that the world exists in one's own mind. Yet, in some sense, each of us lives in a universe bounded by his own five senses and ruled over by "the Mind." In a post-nuclear-holocaust world, Alexander faces a reality that he cannot bear. In essence, he sacrifices himself by visiting the witch Maria, and one may almost regard that meeting as more symbolic than literal. Somehow, Alexander decides that by giving up everything (i.e., his home, his family, his sanity), he can save the world. He can undo the "war" simply by making it a part of his madness. In other words... if, ultimately, he is deemed crazy, the destruction will be passed off as the mere "ravings of a madman". Where normally society determines, in retrospect, what is "sane" and "insane," Alexander is given the chance to rewrite history by choosing his insanity. The question then becomes: Is he losing his grip from the start (and indeed off the deep end by the film's end) or is his "madness" consciously chosen? In that sense alone, Alexander is a sort of Hamlet; he's "crazy like a fox." We're never quite sure whether he is in control of himself or not, but the net result-- if we accept the ending literally-- is that the world goes on without him.

I have a feeling that this film was Tarkovsky's way of dealing with his declining health. The watering of the dead tree is symbolic, at least to me, of the way in which one continues to do the simple, quotidian things even in the face of death (in the hope that, either within one's lifetime or not, it will yield something beautiful for others.) His birthday also marks the death of civilization and, in choosing madness (the death of the rational mind), Alexander gives life back to the world. I'm quite sure that Tarkovsky felt that, in accepting his death in this project, he was making a statement about what it meant to be alive and, obversely, how precious and fragile human life ultimately is. I also get the "Just a Gigolo" theme here: "Life goes on without me." He's comforting himself in the thought that, in sacrificing his life to his art, even in death his life will have had meaning... in the hearts and minds of the people he has touched. Alexander's visiting the witch, in some way, represents that moment in a person's life when he chooses conversion... when he decides to accept the supernatural, in fitting with Pascal's wager (i.e., risking all on the only bet that can possibly lead to salvation... be it a bet on God, or a "higher power", or Destiny, or "other"...)

I'm not sure that Tarkovsky would agree with much of this. He had a tendency to depersonalize... perhaps in the tradition of a Vertov or an Eisenstein (at least in the sense of letting the "camera eye" capture reality)... in an effort to create a universal art. But perhaps "Offret", to its credit, achieves universality... describing the kind of spiritual legacy that artists, as nearly all people, endeavor to leave behind. While it may not be quite as clearly defined as Whitman's "Leaves of Grass", in which the poet literally contemplates the way in which his mind and body give back to the Earth, it's in that same general vein. What makes "Offret" unsatisfying to me is it's adagio pace, the histrionics of actors who thought that they were performing on stage and the great Sven Nykvist's wooden cinematography (which worked well for Bergman by fails utterly here.) It's a two-and-a-half hour film, of which one-and-a-half hours are a yawn (and of that "yawn"... at least a half hour in the middle is pure snooze.) It's still Tarkovsky, so I recommend it to other cinephiles, but its far from the kind of final masterpiece one might expect having seen "Andrei Rublyov", "Solaris", "Zerkalo", "Stalker" and "Nostalghia".

I'm surprised by some of the negative comments on this film. In my opinion, it represents the best kind of literary adaptation that the cinema offers: One in which the screenwriter and director clearly remained faithful to the spirit of the book without attempting to reproduce it. How can you go wrong with a Margaret Atwood book, a Harold Pinter screenplay and Volker Schlöndorff's direction? Some have suggested that the film suffered from "wooden" acting. Personally, I thought it was a fantastic cast: Robert Duvall and Victoria Tennant at their evil best; Faye Dunnaway as the "defeated" wife; Elizabeth McGovern as saucy as ever; Aidan Quinn and Natascha Richardson in the necessarily bland roles that drive the narrative. What holes here?

Commercial film doesn't get any better. "The Handmaid's Tale" is a dark portrait of a world unlike ours and yet so much like ours... in which a right-wing, bureaucratic patriarchy dominates the land. Women have three main functions (for which their clothing is color coded): Red for the handmaids, who are walking wombs; white for the innnocent children; blue for the sterile trophy wives. Brown is worn by the "aunts", a futuristic equivalent of the Sonderkomando (i.e., Jews who worked on behalf of the Nazi's in the death camps), evil schoolmistress types who both train/brainwash young women for assignment and occasionally destroy them. A fifth function, for which the garb is particularly interesting, is "working" in Gilead's underground social club (essentially a den of iniquity, rife with prostitution and drugs.) Point is... by splitting up these functions, hasn't Atwood described the basic roles that women play within our own male-dominated society, in various different permutations and combinations? To the patriarchy, women are mothers, models, sluts, angels and, when professionals, they are not to aspire to more teaching posts. In Gilead, the lines are clearer; in our own society, aren't most women "supposed to" play some combination of all of these roles?

I get the feeling that most moviegoers are looking for something else in "sci-fi." Here's a new plot twist: The rebels feed Kate some kind of medication that allows her to read the commander's mind while destroying his brain. Wait... that's "Scanners." Oops. Seriously, two of the reviews on this site made spedific mention of Schlöndorff's "horrible", "atrocious" directorial skills. Ahem. Perhaps before they weigh in on the auteur, they ought to see "Young Törless", "Coup de grâce", "The Tin Drum" and all of his other wonderful efforts. As a matter of fact, to insinuate that someone who could bring Grass' Tin Drum to the screen in such a stunning fashion is a lousy director is PREPOSTEROUS. Schlöndorff is a giant of the New German Cinema, and it underscores the ignorance of the Hollywooders when they cast such baseless aspersions.

A more thoughtful review of this movie is to come. For the time being, suffice it to say that "Cremaster 3" is one of the most visually stunning films ever made. Its narrative is unusual in the extreme, and the auteur's attitude toward the material is never clear. Chock full of provocative symbolism, it is, thus, both wonderful material for the thoughtful viewer and the paranoid schizophrenic. In fact, Matthew Barney has utterly blurred the line between the brilliant and the insane and this is part of his genius. It's too bad that he is best known for impregnating Bjork; he's a far greater artist than his baby momma will ever be.

Have you ever seen cinema that made you tell a friend, "I can't really describe it to you, or even what I liked about it, but you have to see it.... It's an experience you will NEVER forget"? For now, that's the best that I can tell you, except to say that the Cremaster series may be an example of a kind of art that heretofore has not been seen in the art. Until now, it has been limited the staid confines of white-walled galleries in the form of "video installations." Unlike Schnabel's films, there is no attempt here by the artist to "work within the confines of the medium" and give you something familiar with a twist. This is mindblowing stuff, and if you don't have the opportunity to see it in a theater, you have really missed out.

As a final note, you really ought to see the full series in its proper order: 4, 1, 5, 2, 3. If that looks like a Mensa test, question... well, it just might be. And do a bit of research on the term "cremaster" before you see it. It might help you to understand some of the ups and downs you experience in seeing it, as well as the unusual fecundity of its creator.

This is perhaps the most overrated film in cinematic history. While Max Ophuls' contributions to camera movement are undeniable, "Lola Montes" is proof positive that mechanical innovations do not a great auteur make. One has to feel for Peter Ustinov and Oskar Werner, whose talents, while evident here, are utterly wasted. [Less evident are the abilities of George Auric and Christian Matras-- soundtrack composer and cinematographer, respectively-- who, having worked on many of the finest French films of the period, clearly did not put their best efforts into this project.]

The flaws here are too numerous to list. Foremost among them are: the utter ineptitude of Martine Carol as Lola Montes; a disastrously two-dimensional screenplay with an anticlimactic ending; the series of intrusive flashbacks; a corny, stereotypically romantic French score; the use of a painfully vibrant Technicolor palette; Ophuls' ever-present, annoying use of the moving camera. Only the inclusion Maurice Chevalier or Cantinflas could have made this film worse. It is amazing to think that this was the first film on which Marcel Ophuls, director of "The Sorrow and the Pity," cut his teeth, as a 28 year-old assistant director.

The virtues of "Lola Montes", on the other hand, are too few to list. Even the credits are horrible. It is a debacle of the highest order and one ought not to waste two hours of one's life on it. The very fact that certain critics include it on top ten lists does not speak to Ophuls gifts, but rather the lack of taste among supposed film cognoscenti. To grant this "work of art" even one star would be to give it undue credit.

In short, one of the landmark films in the development of avant garde cinema, ostensibly in the same Surrealist vein as Clair's "Entr'Acte," Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" and Bunuel's "Un Chien Andalou" though with touches uniquely Eisenstein's. "Romance Sentimentale" set the stage for further experimentalist efforts, including the formal use of nature and contrapuntal sound. Interestingly, it was Eisenstein's only privately commissioned work, produced for the husband of the woman it features.

So much has been said about Intolerance down the years that, weighing in today, one can do little more than give one's opinion. My opinion is this: Intolerance is one of the greatest flawed films ever made. It is easy to lament its shortcomings. The four stories of which it consists are never sufficiently interwoven; ultimately, one wonders, "Why they were specifically included?" The answer is clear. Intolerance is not a film about prejudice, itself. It's a film about prejudice against Christianity, as well as the oppression of Protestants by Catholics. The oppression of the little guy by the big guy, the poor by the rich, etc. Just as in Birth of a Nation, Griffith succeeds in making a film for his kind of Americans. In other words, we're not talking Weltanschauung here, at least any that we, today, would recognize.

The film is terribly out of proportion. The modern story, of The Boy and The Dear One, and the Babylonian tale dominate the film. The narrative related to the Hugenots and the crucifixion of Christ are mere throw-ins. There's the obvious riffing on the Whitman verse, "out of the cradle, endlessly rocking," that, aside from being repetitive, is totally enigmatic and inscrutable. The characters are two-dimensional, the plot transparent, the performances maudlin and the ending ridiculous. [If you want the religious ending, you'd do better to watch Dreyer's Ordet or von Trier's Breaking the Waves; frankly, even It's a Wonderful Life handles its supernatural touches better, and that says a lot about Griffith's ineptitude in this respect.] At first glance, Intolerance's greatest strengths seem to be its costumes, its awe-inspiring sets and its crowd scenes, telltale signs of the empty epic.

Film makers know better. Griffith was the father of American montage, most clearly evinced in the "chase" sequences late in the movie. He was the first director to use montage to show, in parallel, events that the audience was to accept as occurring simultaneously and to dizzying effect. As the pace of the cuts increases, we find our hearts beating faster along with the action. In that sense, Griffith singlehandedly invented the cinematic language of suspense. [There is a whole semiotic study that one can pursue here that could go on for hundreds of pages; I'll cut to the chase, as Griffith himself would have.] Montage aside, many of Griffith's shots, in themselves, are devastatingly powerful. Critic Siegfried Krakauer wisely highlighted the courtroom scene in which, rather than showing the Dear One's facial expression, the camera focuses on the gripping of her hands. Throughout the film, Griffith uses the camera to suggest, in a kind of visual poetry, ideas that his contemporaries had to show us very directly.

Griffith was a detestable person. Personally, my feelings for him are somewhat similar to those expressed by Toscanini upon learning that composer Richard Strauss had accepted the presidency of the Nazi-run Reichsmusikkammer: "To Strauss the composer, I take off my hat. To Strauss the man, I put it back on again." [A hood, of course, would have been the more approapriate gesture from Griffith's perspective, but I digress.] Is Intolerance a great film? Certainly, it's an important film. I'm not sure that it's the kind of work I'd like to review over and over throughout the course of my life, but I'm glad that I've seen it. At the very least, anyone who has viewed it has gained insight into early movie making, as well as, perhaps, some of the social institutions of the time. At best, one will learn a tremendous amount about the development of film language, about the dialogue between film maker and audience.

Over time, Rossellini's legacy has been overshadowed by that of his contemporaries Fellini and de Sica. There are reasons for this. Fellini had a unique cinematographic eye and a gift for abstract symbolism. De Sica was able to capture the incidental and indeterminate in a way that practically elevated it to the level of the holy. His use of non-actors was far more effective than Rossellini's, as was Fellini's use of actors. Rossellini's scripts were often two-dimensional, his cinematography spotty and his editing odd. So why is it that he occupies a leading position among Italian auteurs?

In fact, Rossellini was not a neo-realist, but a realist. Compared with products of the neo-realists, his films are thin and wooden. If, on the other hand, one views them as works of tragedy, they are excellent. From the very start of Open City, it is clear that the seeds of disaster are sewn. A pregnant mother is to be married to a member of the resistance. Members of the clergy and children are also involved in fighting the Nazis. Italians are united against a common enemy: Fascism. Yet we know that, while victory is inevitable, so is death. Perhaps it is the darkness of the tight, seedy interiors that tips us off. Perhaps it is because we do not feel that sense of endlessness beyond the screen, but that we are being led through these building and streets along with the characters. Perhaps is is the German marching songs. Whatever it is, we feel the march of destiny leading us to some terrible conclusion. Fate can never play a role in neo-realist work; by Bazin's definition, it is constructed organically and arrives at its destination as if by chance. Tragedy can only be the purview of the realist.

Open City is not without its liabilities. For one, Arata's cinematography, while startling at times, is unsatisfactory at others. The script, written by Fellini and Amidei, is confusing and allows for minimal character development. [N.B.: The English subtitles add to this confusion, excising whole chunks of crucial dialogue.] Several of the performances are undynamic, such as those of Maria Michi and Carla Rovere; the villains, portrayed by Giovanna Gallett and Harry Feist, are very much "in type"; Aldo Fabrizi, who, as Don Pietro, is so central to the plot, is guilty of overacting. Above all, one doesn't get the sense that Rossellini's camera "falls in love" with its subjects the way that one might wish it did. Yet it is in this very impassiveness, this plastic script and detached camera, that the key to Open City lies. This is not a film about a painter and his son, nor does it lovingly portray an old pensioner and his dog. This film is about the horrors of war, not a subject for which Rossellini expects to find an empathetic audience. In the absence of footlights and the invisible "third wall", he uses the greatest tool at his disposal to create tragic theater: our own lack of nobility.

Open City is a portrait of human courage in the face of overwhelming odds. It confronts us with horrors which, God willing, we may never know. Don't watch it expecting to fall in love with the grittiness of World War II era Italy. Expect to be deeply moved.

What do Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Sergei Eisenstein, Mary Ellen Bute, Slavko Vorkapich and Joseph Cornell have in common? If you're familiar with all of them, you probably are or were in film studies. They're all early experimental film makers. If you think that you enjoy "art house" flicks because you've caught a Truffaut or Fellini film once or twice, wait until you get a load of the work of these artists. At its most extreme, we're talking... no narrative... no characters... no semblance of rhyme or reason whatsoever. We're talking MOOD. We're talking VISUAL POETRY. And, yeah... we're talking PRETENTIOUS. But who gives a damn? If there's a place for "Santa with Muscles," there's a place for pretentious, too. [Actually... scratch that. If there's a place for John Murlowski/Hulk Hogan movies, it's the trash.]

If you're not familiar with any of the aforementioned directors, I'd probably say that the closest thing you've seen to the dazzling cinematography of "L'Ange" would be the dream sequences of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" or Tarsem Singh's "The Cell." If you haven't seen either of those movies... I honestly don't know what to tell you. Many directors, in fact, employ Bokanowski's techniques as devices in their films. The main differences are... first... they didn't start using them in 1982. In fact, it's taken them the better part of twenty years to catch up with him. Second, they don't make whole films that way. Whole films of eerie avant-garde images don't sell at the box office. Hollywood hasn't financed experimental cinema in over sixty years; if you really think that Lynch and Scorsese's films are daring... well... that's you.

"L'Ange" is a wonderful film. Simply put. See it yourself. There's no reason to describe what's in it, because everyone must have a different experience of this film, even if that includes sleeping, walking out, screaming or falling into a hypnotically-induced torpor. Patrick Borkanowski is not an important director... he's an important artist. In "The Critic as Artist," Wilde said, "Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways." I'm not sure exactly in which way "L'Ange" spoke to me, but I can tell you this: This is a creepy little peace of heaven.

As a tremendous Lynch fan-- one who has seen the full body of his work several times over-- I found Mulholland Drive tired and anticlimactic. It had its moments (e.g., the Castigliane brothers coffee tasting, the first cowboy scene, etc.), but, overall, I found its gimmickry rather old hat. I walked out feeling like Lynch had let me down... like he'd run out of ideas and released this film as an excuse to increase his output. Basically, in my view, he spent the first part of the film creating his usual series of quirky, disconnected characters. So far, so good. Then, when the proverbial Pandora's box was opened, he slid them all around like puzzle pieces. As usual, the female characters proved to be insipid and interchangeable, where the males were more distinct.

Woohoo! A lesson in the "multiverse." This is an old and academic theme. Borges wrote about this stuff over a half century ago (e.g., "The Garden of Forking Paths".) Those who find the device exhilarating might also refer to my essay entitled "What I Did for Summer Vacation," at the end of which... I wake up.

Maybe Lynch ought to stop watching his daughter's two-dimensional flicks. I honestly think he's past the peak of his creativity.

"My Mother's Murder" is a video documentary made by Charles Stuart, whose 74 year-old mother, Emily "Cissy" Stuart, was murdered in 1989. It remains the only homicide case unsolved by the Princeton, NJ police department. The film, shot in a "what-I-did-for-my-summer-vacation" style, is as honest and balanced a portrait of human anguish as ever made. Somehow, miraculously, Stuart is able to walk the tightrope between the subjective and the objective... revealing his own feelings and questions amid a series of events that he captures, flawlessly, through the crystal eye of his camera. The film is further proof (along with "Living Dolls," "A Long Night's Journey into Day," "Southern Comfort," "Small Town Ecstasy," "Blue Vinyl," "Lalee's Kin," etc.) that HBO is at the forefront of documentary production. I can't recommend it enough. As a diehard Errol Morris and Joe Berlinger fan, I was pleased to see that it's still possible for an "average" person with an important story to see it aired on national TV.