In Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report (based on a short story by dystopian future-obsessed paranoid Philip K. Dick), oracle-like clairvoyants envision crimes that haven’t yet happened. They broadcast these visions to police officers in the Department of Precrime who arrest the would-be criminals, wipe their memories, and imprison them.

On Monday, Erica Goode of the Times reported that the Santa Cruz Police Department has been testing an analogous “precrime” technique named predictive policing. A computer program analyzes years of data on past crimes to predict that certain specific crimes, such as car burglaries, are especially likely to occur on a specific day in a specific location. So far, the program, which was developed by researchers who based it on models that predict earthquake aftershocks, “has helped officers pre-empt several crimes and has led to five arrests,” according to the Times.

Equally fascinating and unnerving!

(link via Tantek Çelik, who made a Minority Report connection; crop of a Minority Report teaser poster via teeVault)

I thoroughly enjoy classic James Bond films, so please permit me this commercial. If you, too, are a fan, and you have a Netflix account with Watch Instantly capability, note that a classic chunk—every Bond film released between 1965 and 1989—is now available for streaming.

According to scuttlebutting in the forums, these movies were added within the last day or so, and as connoisseurs of Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature know, these movies tend to appear and disappear with equal instantaneousness. So go now and watch. Word is Bond.

Here are the details, with Netflix links:

Available to Watch Instantly, in chronological order, are Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill.

Not available to Watch Instantly, in chronological order, are Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.

At Uniqlo today, I noticed they’re selling T-shirts in designs from Jim Jarmusch’s first three films. Those movies were tiny, private, impressionistic revelations to me at certain young ages. (I first rented Down By Law on VHS from my local library in the early ’90s.) So I don’t know how to take seeing them repackaged and slung like fast-fashion hipster hamburgers by what’s essentially Japan’s (or New York City’s) version of The Gap. I imagine it’s a feeling similar to that of a previous generation’s upon hearing Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” soundtracking a Minute Maid commercial.

Remember the premise of the animated film Up, in which an old man ties helium balloons to his house and pilots it like a dirigible? A team of scientists, engineers and hot-air balloon pilots did that in real life yesterday.

They tied 300 colored weather balloons to a 16-by-16-foot model house and piloted it for about an hour to a top altiude of 10,000 feet.

(link via @brainpicker; photo by the National Geographic Channel)

The movie is still lingering so fans of the Bluth Family will have to make do with these Arrested Development paper dolls by illustrator Kyle Hilton. Make your house their model home!

(link via Peter Vidani)

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about Adam Sandler.

Spotted this afternoon on the downtown 1 train platform at Christopher Street.

You know what people forget or don’t talk about when they talk about the movie Psycho? They don’t talk about, as Roger Ebert put it, that “inexplicable scene during which a long-winded psychiatrist lectures the assembled survivors on the causes of Norman’s psychopathic behavior.”

Shutter Island also has a twist and a long explanation of said twist at the end. Most of the rest of the film is engrossing, thrilling and frightening, despite the presence of overcoated G-man Leonardo DiCaprio, his memory and composure as scrunched as his ratboy face.

And, hey, it’s Scorsese so there’s men, anger, guilt and handsomely framed images (and dream sequences realized majestically, whether beautiful or horrifying), plus farty blasts of mega-brass on a soundtrack of atonal modernist composers.

It’s just that endings of the sort that I can’t specify, lest you haven’t seen the film yet and may wish to, bring me down.

(photo via IMDb)

Nasser Peyghambarian, an optical scientist at the University of Arizona, has been developing holographic projections that move in real time—projections a person could circle and view at a variety of angles, just as he or she could circle a real object and view it at a variety of angles.

He and his colleagues have reached the point where they can record and display these 3D images on a 17" inch screen that refreshes every two seconds. As such, the images are small and crude, but so is Peyghambarian’s direct inspiration: the “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” hologram from Star Wars.

He says:

From day one, I thought about the hologram of Princess Leia and whether it can be brought out of science fiction.

We have shown that creating a dynamic hologram of the size and resolution of Princess Leia is a reality.

(Nature link via Mashable via Coudal Partners)

As my requisite Halloween Eve horror film, I watched Alien. During the heartwarming chestburster scene, I remembered this thorax cake, which, you will agree, is both totally gross and totally awesome. (See also this zombie cake.)

(thanks to Jolene for the links!)

Q&A between New York magazine and Nicolas Cage from the world premiere of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, July 6th at The New Amsterdam Theatre:

Q. You used to do quirky movies like Raising Arizona and Leaving Las Vegas. Why the shift to the mainstream?

A. Part of the reason why I’m even here tonight is that I believe world peace begins at home. And if I can in my own little way contribute to that, if I can keep families smiling, that’s one less angry child that goes out in the world and makes a mistake like drugs or violence.

Man, what happened to this guy?

I’m pretty sure this idea came to me in a dream: create a decade-specific photomontage of Al Pacino’s movie-character sideburns, assigning distinctive names to each pair of said sideburns. I’m hoping this isn’t a series. (Probably you, too.)

Top row, from left: The Comma (The Panic in Needle Park, 1971), The Respectable Businessman (The Godfather, 1972), The Chicken Leg (Scarecrow, 1973), The Full Pacino ¹ (Serpico, 1973).

Bottom row, from left: The Respectable Businessman, Part II (The Godfather: Part II, 1974), The Modified Muss (Dog Day Afternoon, 1975), The Euro (Bobby Deerfield, 1977), The Hothead (...And Justice for All., 1979).

¹ I’m aware that Pacino sports several hairstyles in this film but the big beard is the archetypal one. [back]

I like this shot because I don’t think there’s ever a clean or accurate-color view of this costume in Blade Runner: either the lighting’s too dark/gritty or Harrison’s running around chasing replicants.

Nice tie.

(photo via You Might Find Yourself)

Los Angeles, 1939: Director Alfred Hitchcock, his wife Alma and daughter Patricia take a morning stroll with their dogs, Edward IX and Mr. Jenkins near their apartment at the Wilshire Palms.

(photo by Peter Stackpole, via junk bond trader)

The Internet Archive houses a film noir collection. The titles have fallen into the public domain so they’re free and legal to download—and they’re available in crisp mp4 format, among others. A glance reveals some classics of the genre, including Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (which I’ve mentioned here before) and Orson Welles’ The Stranger (that’s Welles and Loretta Young shown above, in a still from the film).

(photo via anonymous_emily's Flickr photostream)

Bill Withers, a pop star? Unlikely. A stuttering, asthmatic child in a West Virginia coal-mining town ranks low on prospects. As an adult, he nearly became a lifer in the Navy. For a while, he worked on an assembly line, making toilets for 747s.

Suddenly, in his 30s, he wrote (or co-wrote) and sang a string of hits: “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” He collected a Grammy for each. When you’ve become famous, he jokes, you start hearing yourself described in words you haven’t heard before, like “handsome.”

And then, just as meteorically, he returned to the ordinary. Today, in that L.A. way of retired entertainers, he lounges dressed in a tracksuit and spotless puffy sneakers, in a large but simple home, collecting checks from the songs he’s written. In the documentary Still Bill, we see him visit his hometown, walk the railroad tracks with its de facto mayor and look for family graves in a blacks-only cemetery overgrown with trees and weeds. They recall color lines but laugh that everyone’s black in a mining town. Bill travels, accepting honorariums and attending concerts during which other people sing his songs. He’s gracious, whip-smart and funny; I laughed a lot at his jokes, only a few of which were grandpa-like.

Although he hasn’t performed live since 1988, he putters around his home recording studio, where he claims to not even know how to operate the boards (his daughter, Kori, helps out; she sings, too, and her dad is her toughest critic). He builds songs on snatches of doggerel or poetry he writes down and springboards from (“Your love is like a chunk of gold/Hard to gain and hard to hold”). He doesn’t take himself seriously; he contributed two tracks to a Jimmy Buffet album and the documentary shows him in his studio flirting with reggaeton-style music, lyrics in Spanish, no less. Will those home recordings see release? The answer seems to be “not now,” perhaps not ever.

The documentary doesn’t pinpoint a moment that explains why the public hasn’t heard from Bill after all this time. Seeing him joke and chat with everyone from Cornell West to his old Navy buddies suggests he’s a capital-lettered Nice Guy, modest, self-deprecating, smart and real enough to have left the music business before it could inflate his ego or corrode his soul. (The movie avoids any direct coverage of the legal tussles Withers became involved with at each of the two labels he recorded for.)

He’s 71 now and retained that voice, like warm butterscotch. He stutters still, but only occasionally. The film’s most touching moment has him delivering a speech to a support group of kids who stutter. The “you can make it if you try” message, cliché by default, flows from him genuinely; the camera catches him crying.

He’s asked what he wants as his legacy. He’s silent for a long time and the movie leaves the question unanswered. I thought, he’s just that guy, you know? He wrote and sang a few songs most people have heard but his name isn’t household. And Bill would be cool with that.

Who knows where the time goes but my life sounds even more impressive¹ when weeks worth of greatest hits are edited and compressed into an entry. Have I learned my lesson? Will I resume updating daily? Let’s hope so. Hold on as I whisk you back to that magical month of November 2008.

On Halloween, I bade farewell to Inwood and moved into a new one-bedroom apartment in a mostly Caribbean neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I’m on Eastern Parkway a few blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park and various peeps. I can see the Empire State Building from my bed and I’m still trying to get Raul the Lazy Super to fucking install my required apartment-to-front-door intercom/buzzer. Otherwise I’d invite you over in a heartbeat.

On Monday, November 3rd, I happened upon a great New York City stand-up storytelling competition staged by a nonprofit group I’d never heard of before, The Moth. Admission is only $6 and I’ll be attending more of these, for sure. A topic is agreed upon beforehand; at the show I attended, in the crowded basement of Union Hall, it was appropriately “sweat&rdquo). Participants independently develop a five-minute routine mentioning the topic or incorporating it as a subject. The night of the show 10 of them are picked at random from the audience to take the stage and perform; some stories are straight-up personal recollections and most are styled like comedy bits. Judges vote on each participant. Great fun.

The next day, some guy was elected President. I had pizza and beer.

On Thursday, November 6th I waited in an around-the-block line to catch a free Comedy Central “Comedy Hour” taping of a Jo Koy standup routine. His ethnic jokes bored me but I enjoyed immensely the pussy and dick jokes that dominated the second half of his set; they made me laugh those cathartic laughs that purge crankiness and worry from my system.

That weekend, I ate the best jelly donut ever, and you can only get one starting at 8:00 a.m. on weekends at the Trois Pommes patisserie on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, one of Ed Levine’s possibly top-three bakeries in New York City. They go quickly but while they’re available in a small basket on the counter, they’re still warm and filled with a homemade-tasting raspberry jam. They cost $3 each and they’re worth it. I bit into mine with vigor and blasted powdered sugar all over my hooded sweatshirt.

Later the same morning, Saturday, November 8th, I traveled to Edgewater, New Jersey for the annual bluefin tuna carving ceremony at Mitsuwa Marketplace. The crowd there pressed forward around a team of men armed with extremely sharp knives to buy the fattiest cuts of the 400-pound specimen as soon as they were cut. The fish’s head was planted in an ice-filled red plastic bucket to the side where people posed for photos with it. Later I learned that although bluefin is among the world’s finest and exclusive fish for sushi (I ate some at Mitsuwa from a bluefin carved earlier and it was amazing), it’s an imperiled species and that I shouldn’t have enjoyed myself as much as I did. I made amends on our drive back to New York by stopping at the amazing Philippine Bread House in Jersey City and eating an ensaymada, a traditional Filipino slow-death method via five ounces of donut-like pastry that’s fried, sugared and topped with cheese. So bad, yet so good!

On November 10th, I tracked down the small, great and inexpensive Mexican restaurant I knew was somewhere in my neighborhood, Chavella’s.

I now know this about Tony- and Academy Award-winning playwright/screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, who I heard November 11th in an interview onstage with New Yorker editor David Remnick: if I took a whiskey shot for every time Stoppard said “as it were,” I would be drunk. But: despite being wickedly smart and well-read, he’s funny and self-deprecating, uncomfortable talking about himself, a topic that arose often about his new translation of Chekov’s play, The Cherry Orchard. I plan to see it after it opens at the BAM Harvey Theater on January 2nd. Stoppard said he’s striving to make it conversational and incorporate contributions from the actors to improve its familiarity. But amid talk of great Russian authors and the challenges translating them, I was most excited by Stoppard’s lowbrow revelation that he not only contributed uncredited dialogue for Sean Connery’s and Harrison Ford’s characters in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but that the idea for the “leap of faith” invisible-bridge challenge was his.

On Monday, November 17th, my boss and eight other people in my office got laid off so the company could save money. But I don’t want to detail that here because you never know who reads what on the internet. Which reminds me: my company is swell and I certainly don’t plan on stealing a bunch of office supplies when we move down to 120 Broadway in mid-December.

That night, I saw Iron & Wine in a sold-out show at Terminal 5. I enjoyed Mr. Beam (and his sister, who sang harmony). He’s a funny guy who’s still in some awe that he can draw such a crowd. He playfully chided the crowd for bursting out into applause as soon as he hit a chord, pausing to say something like, “That’s just one chord! You guys don’t know what song it is!” I was happy he played two of my current favorites, “Resurrection Fern” and “Boy With a Coin,” and he encored on the acoustic with “Trapeze Singer.” I enjoyed his acoustic stuff more than I did the full-band jamboree. Also, I was curious to get to the bottom of the point in his web bio that “[i]n conversations with Sam while mixing The Shepherd’s Dog, he confessed to finding spiritual inspiration in Tom Waits’ pièce de résistance, Swordfishtrombones.” That’s one of my favorite Waits albums but I didn’t notice many connections other than the songs-as-stories and a pleasing amount of marimba.

I organized a Brooklyn bowling outing on Saturday, November 22nd at Melody Lanes in Sunset Park². I like this place and not just because the decor can be summed up by the digit 1989: the music is loud and mostly bad. And there was a young boy at the lane next to ours inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones. Also, I am happy to report that Al, New York City’s Angriest Bartender, remains just that. At least to me. Here’s what happened when I ordered a pitcher of Bud. Al poured it and set four plastic cups on the bar.

Jason:

Thanks. But I’m with a group, so I’ll need eight cups.

Al:

[testily] I can’t give you eight cups. You’ll have to order another pitcher and I can give you four more.

Jason:

[pause] O.K., I’ll take two pitchers.

Al:

Or I can give you these eight smaller cups instead of the four large ones.

Jason:

O.K., let’s do that.

Al:

So, two pitchers of Bud.

Jason:

Well, if I get eight cups, I’ll just take the one pitcher for now.

Al:

[exasperated] One pitcher, two pitchers! Make up your mind!

Everyone else in the group who made a drink run reported Al was nothing but pleasant. Short and squat, resplendent in his giant ’80s eyeglasses, red suspenders and slicked-back silver hair. But pleasant, so I guess being surly with me was enough. Later, when I returned to him for another flagon of Bud, he claimed he was out of pitchers and that I’d have to bring him back an empty one.

The next night, I caught the seldom-screened and exceptionally low-budget UK punk documentary from 1982, Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed, which I enjoyed, especially the concert-riot sequences, as well as all of the angst and acne in the talking-head segments featuring Q&A with and concert footage from groups including the U.K. Subs, the Cockney Rejects and the Stiff Little Fingers, and the likes of influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.

On Monday, November 24th, I bought decor and other apartment stuff at the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with a pleasant pit stop at LeNell’s, the best liquor store in the city. LeNell Smothers is a charming Southern woman who poured me several wine samples while a Hank Williams song played. I purchased from her a bottle of Four Roses Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey for purposes of making my own bacon-infused bourbon, plus a pricey jar of genuine marasca cherries from Luxardo for assorted cocktail-development purposes.

I had a deliciously extensive Thanksgiving dinner at Jimi and Will’s newish apartment in Washington Heights. I learned I am not so great at playing Mario Kart Wii. I also made a cranberry relish recipe I clipped from the November 12th issue of The New York Times and it was delicious but next time: less onion.

And the next evening, Friday, November 28th, I finally made it into wunderkind chef David Chang’s reservations-difficult, 14-seat East Village restaurant, Momofuku Ko. Upon review, I see my notes on this disintegrate because I can’t read my handwriting on account of the wine-pairing option, which amounted to often a full glass of expertly complemented wine, champagne or sake served with each course. All 13 of them.

And I don’t believe I understood a word the sommelier said. For example, describing a red amid a string of incomprehensible adjectives and Spanish and maybe Spanish adjectives, I picked up on the keyword Mendoza and said brightly, “That’s in Spain, right?”³ when what I was actually wondering was “Wasn’t that the name of one of the bad guys in Dirty Harry?”⁴

Chang’s fixed-price menu, which isn’t printed publicly, changes often, so every day the courses are conceivably unique. I started with some sort of fancy pork rind; a neat cube of moist, peppered biscuit; and a non-jumbo shrimp with tomato chutney. I’m missing some matter in the descriptions there, and some ingredients, but let’s get to the big stuff. The pinnacle was the daikon soup with chunks of lamb belly, fried lily palm and fried purple mustard greens, paired with a Pinot Noir. The most beautiful dish, a smoked hen egg, its yolk broken and burst onto the plate, came garnished with a generous constellation of caviar, fingerling potato chips and sous vide onions and scallions.

Next: hand-torn pasta, cubes of snail sausage and pecorino cheese. Then: monkfish with uni and mitsuba. And: something with pine nuts and lychees topped with finely shaved foie gras which was of velvet-textured tastiness despite me not remembering what it even was.

With the plating of the most pedestrian course—roasted chicken with Brussels sprouts and mushrooms;—I was very, very full (also: drunk; in retrospect, the stop at Decibel for sake and shochu beforehand was unnecessary). But I had one more entrée to go. It would have top-ranked had I not perceived our corpulence to be approaching that of Henry VIII’s: large shavings of beef cheeks that had been braised for 36 hours, mitake mushrooms and charred jalapeños.

Done? Not yet: two dessert courses arrived with glasses of Muscat champagne and sherry, respectively: mandarin orange sorbet with juniper and segments of bitter orange (mouth-wateringly sweet and sour) and pretzel ice cream (is that correct? or even possible?) with a yogurt-Granny Smith sauce and tiny spheres of deep-fried cheddar cheese. The pleasurable and unusual dining experience flew by and I was at Ko more than two hours; in fact, I literally closed the place.

A few days later I realized the Asian guy behind the counter the whole time whom I’d assumed was David Chang was, in fact, David Chang, which made me wonder whether I should have engaged him in conversation deeper than discussion of Mitchell, one of his chefs, and how he tried to break into the restroom while I was in there.

Update, 3:40 p.m. Hold up: the guy I thought was David Chang may have been Peter Serpico, shown here. We may never know.

Also: David Chang likes Bob Dylan. The restaurant’s soundtrack is supplied by his personal iPod and I counted no fewer than five Dylan songs amid the shuffle of Joy Division, Public Enemy, Elton John, The Flaming Lips, Neil Young, Jurassic 5, Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive,” and a song named “We Here” from some group from Singapore.

And that’s not even all I did on my Summer Vacation, I mean, November. But that’s all I’m writing about. Because I don’t tell all. Also, I’m tired. Could I have a more exciting month? Oh, probably. Bring it, December.

Trois Pommes

• 260 Fifth Ave. (near Garfield Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 230-3119
• Meal 45 of 52: a jelly donut ($3) and a coffee ($2).

Chavella’s

• 732 Classon Ave. (between Park Place and Prospect Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 622-3100
• Meal 46 of 52: quesadilla flor de calapaza (cactus flower) ($4.50), a giant bowl of rice pudding ($4.25) and two Pacificos ($4.00 each).

Momofuku Ko

• 163 First Ave. (between 10th and 11th Streets)
• (212) 500-0831
• Meal 47 of 52: a bunch of mind-blowing food and drink ($150)

¹ I know! I didn’t think it was possible, either! [back]
² I am not forgetting my Manhattan-based brethren and will plan an outing with y’all soon. My life is torn; a children’s book written about me would be a tender tale entitled Jason Has Two Boroughs. [back]
³ No. [back]
⁴ No. [back]

Burn After Reading reminded me of a more trifling and broadly comedic version of the Coen Bros.’ Fargo: dim schemers get in over their heads; some die horribly. I liked John Malkovich’s character the best; he is angry the entire movie and sputters at the stupidity he feels surrounds him. Also, he is responsible for the best, most shocked reaction from the audience, which at BAM where I saw the film tonight, crested from the front of the theater to the back in a wave of shock and horror, then exasperated laughter.

One of my favorite things about Southern California is the architecture and the signage frozen in time. And having recently rewatched The Karate Kid, I like this site that revisited the film’s locations and found little had changed in 22 years. Daniel’s new apartment building (shown as “a dump” in 1983, mind you) and his high-school (the real-life version of which has since closed) look exactly the same. Must be the lack of humidity.

My one-word review of The Dark Knight: meh. It’s too long. It contains too many action sequences filmed too closely, with quick cuts, in low light. Famous dead person Heath Ledger was fine as the Joker but I don’t know if it was enough to combat Christian Bale’s Batman, which was boring and brooding. (Say what you will about Michael Keaton’s Batman, I liked that as Bruce Wayne he was a goofy, quirky-eccentric. Bale’s Bruce is a brooding, cocksure grump, a combination of emotions I didn’t even think possible.) And his gravelly, seemingly digitally lowered voice is distracting. Worst, for an action movie, none of the action thrilled me; I felt floaty and detached from the fights and chases.

The standout moment of the outing by far was the extended cut of Barkin’ Marty Scorsese’s "Silence your Cell Phone" PSA from Cingular buried amid 20 minutes of already-forgotten trailers and commercials. His speed-freak direction is hilarious.

Marty

[interrupting mom tucking her son into bed while having his Dad say good-night to him via cell phone] No, no, no, no, no, no... look, the plot of this phone call just isn’t working for me. I’ve seen it a million times.

and

Marty

[to mom] You: you’re trapped in a loveless marriage. Totally loveless, okay?

It was the first time I’d seen it and I laughed a lot. And compared with emotions elicited by The Dark Knight: 0.

Ah, the Ramones: the original dysfunctional punk family. They seem to have been always ugly and always in disagreement with each other, as evidenced in the documentary I watched tonight (End of the Century: Tommy, the spokesman and early producer; Joey, the group’s gangly heart-and-soul; Johnny, the sour decision-maker; and the seemingly brain-damaged troublemaker Dee Dee. But I always appreciated their aesthetic, in light of the frequent mockery that they knew only two (perhaps three) chords: “You don’t have to be good—just get out there and play.”

I’m a year behind on my Will Smith-based summer blockbusters. So tonight I watched I Am Legend. I’m reading The World Without Us so it made sense to check out a cinematic view of a Manhattan populated only by Mr. Smith, his spunky German Shepherd, a few generic humans and hordes of computer-generated barefoot zombies.

According to what I’ve read in the Manhattan doomsday scenario presented early in Without Us, there likely wouldn’t be any rats around New York City after a few years without human life: the only reason they’re here now is for our garbage. (Incidentally, despite survive-a-nuclear-blast urban legends, cockroaches would die off without humans around to provide the warm habitats they need.)

I also think the roads of Manhattan wouldn’t be as smooth as they appear in the movie. One of the first things to fail in New York without electricity, according to Without Us, would be the pumps that keep the subways dry. The tunnels would fill quickly, the subways’ steel support columns would rust and collapse, and the streets above would gape and sink. In some cases, rivers would appear in their place.

The movie in five words: Cast Away set in Manhattan.

If I’ve learned anything from the films of Godard, it’s to what degree structure and convention bind other films. I most recently saw his Alphaville but that took place in a future Paris overruled by an omniscient, evil computer and therefore had an excuse to be wacky. Two or Three Things I Know About Her is even more unconventional because it contains the same non-sequitur philosophizing of language/meaning, thought/reality and change/stasis as Alphaville but takes place in present-day Paris (1966), all ennui and contemporary fashions in Kool-Aid colors. Characters address the camera directly, talking off-handedly about what they’re doing, what they’ve done and what they’re going to do. The narrator whispers every time he speaks. A child asks his mother what language is and she replies, “Language is the house man lives in.” You know: the sort of stuff that gets French films slapped as snotty and ponderous.

I liked it anyway, although the frequent cuts to cranes, dump trucks and the construction of skyscrapers confused me. There’s a token American in the film played by a Frenchman who speaks loud, stilted English and introduces himself as John Bogus, a Vietnam War profiteer from Arkansas. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with an American flag on it and even the flame from his cigarette lighter seems blatantly outsized and particularly American. Which is fair enough considering Americans’ takes on stock French characters. (See: Inspector Clouseau and any maître d’ character ever.)

The soundtrack dips in and out and at times disappears. Conversations are overlaid with occasional orchestral snippets but mostly diegetic sounds: traffic, a toy gun, people talking, a pinball machine. The plot has something to do with a woman (Maria Vlady) wandering Paris as a sort-of weekly, half-hearted prostitute to amuse herself while her husband’s off at work. There’s a scene in the film of one guy reading random sentences from a giant stack of paperbacks as another guy transcribes everything, and I wondered if it wasn’t commentary on the abstract dialogue of Two or Three Things itself. “If you can’t afford LSD, try color TV,” whispers the narrator as part of a litany reminiscent of Renton’s “Choose Life” soliloquy from Trainspotting. And if you have neither mind-bending drugs nor television, just watch Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

For us young ones who only remember Jack Palance from his aged turns in Batman, those one-armed push-ups at the Oscars or that Skin Bracer commercial in which he urged viewers to agree that “confidence is very sexy,” it’s startling to see him, in his first movie role, as the spindly villain of the bioterror/noir Panic in the Streets. The dude’s 6'4" with a rasp and sharply angled face custom-hewn for a black-and-white thriller. Very sexy, in a sinister fashion.

I was talking with friends recently about the genius of self-proclaimed “B movie actor” Bruce Campbell and his work in the Evil Dead trilogy, which inspired me to reread his funny and startlingly ego-and-bullshit-free autobiography from 2001, If Chins Could Kill. This time around, I noticed in the acknowledgments that Campbell reveals his inspiration to write the book was John Hodgman, who worked as a literary agent before becoming a professional comedian-raconteur-anthropomorphic PC.

Campbell writes:

A hundred years ago, a guy named John Hodgman contacted me by e-mail.

“Ever thought about writing a book?” he wrote. [. . .]

“Yeah, right,” I answered. “Another actor writes a lame-ass book. Snoresville, baby.”

John refused to back off, based on a series of rants and anecdotes I had posted on my website. He was convinced that if I could put together a “demo” book, a publisher would step up to the plate.

Campbell did just that, writing his first draft on the back of a lousy unsolicited screenplay some Dutch guy handed him at Cannes.

Hodgman confirms Campbell was his first client in an interview with Cracked.com, adding:

Like many whose lives have been touched by the genius of Campbell, my road with him began when I e-mailed him blindly, and to my astonishment, Bruce swiftly and politely wrote back. He showed an enormous amount of trust in me. I recommended I help him find a, you know, experienced agent, but for whatever reason, he let me do it.

And that’s all I have to say, really. I appreciate finding small connections like these between my favorite actors, authors, artists and musicians. Someday I’ll graph them all on a chart.

I told myself last night that Violent Saturday would be a cracking-good film noir. I mean: Violent Saturday? (Seen on a Saturday, no less.) Doesn’t that sound noirish to you? The titles looked noirish, at least.

Relying more on the facts, I remembered that director Richard Fleischer (who at the time had just completed Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) helmed the classic noir that’s also one of my favorites, The Narrow Margin. But Violent Saturday is just a failed small-town bank-robbery scheme interwoven with interconnected bits on the lives of the people of a small town.

So much of the dialogue consists of those super-stilted ’50s/’60s line readings, which, yes, as a convention I’ve taught myself to ignore, like anyone who loves Film Forum fare has, but here it’s just really, really annoying. Lee Marvin, who plays the rumpled, nasal-inhalant addicted member of the bank-robbing trio, has a grumpy, sarcastic bite about him that elevates him above the robotic line readings, such that it’d seem he’s acting in a different era. (I also like that his character is the sort of asshole who purposely steps on the fingers of an annoying child just to get the kid out of his hair.) Meanwhile, Victor Mature, who I’ve always thought of as the love-child of Tony Curtis and Cary Grant, plays, uh, a mining engineer with a feisty, disobedient son. And, best, Ernest Borgnine plays, uh, an Amish farmer, who overcomes his Amish ways to stab Lee Marvin in the back with a pitchfork at the end of the film. All in panoramic CinemaScope and those colors of alien vibrancy that have only ever existed in photographs and film stock from the 1950s.

It’s simple enough: upon the death of his grandmother, who would have never approved of such an enterprise, author Jonathan Safran Foer flies to the Ukraine to research his grandfather’s life. Upon his return he writes a novel (unread by me) based on the trip. Then actor Liev Schreiber adapts the book and directs the film of the same name, which I watched tonight.

It’s like two movies. It starts out as a wacky road trip—Elijah “Frodo” Wood, resplendent in slicked Eisenhower-era hair and huge plastic-framed spectacles, is a fastidious collector of his family’s ephemera--a wall in his house bristles with artifacts, photos, knickknacks, his grandmother’s false teeth, each carefully dated and labeled in a Ziploc bag. “Why do you do this?” he’s asked. “I guess sometimes I’m afraid I’ll forget,” he says.

Freshly off the plane in Europe, his translator, Alex (Ukrainian actor and bandleader Eugene Hütz), serves as a translator and guide, breaking Foer into a world that doesn’t understand or accept his Jewishness, vegetarianism, fear of dogs, humor and clumsy attempts to offer helpful locals boxes of Marlboro Reds as tips. (“I read you can’t get these here,” he explains.)

Alex’s grandfather Boris Leskin), his partner in their scheme to help “rich Jews” from America find their families, is vocal, cranky and blind—or only thinks he’s blind—which makes him the second-scariest non-English-speaking person to be in a car with, after only Roberto Benigni in Night on Earth. Every so many mistranslated misunderstandings. My favorite travel narratives are written by Bill Bryson and Illuminated is filled with these sorts of fish-out-of-water characters.

Then the second half slows the movie’s pace; its flip tone dissolves and leaves in its wake a surreal and reflective voyage of self-discovery for all three men (and a batshit-crazy dog) crammed into that ridiculously small Eastern European car. It was something different for certain, and unexpected, which is often all I ask for in a movie.

Is it just me or is every Michael Bay movie like the throbbing boner of a 15-year-old boy?

Via kottke.org, I read Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere article, “Addressing the didn’t-see-’em factor,” about how movies, particularly those mighty specimens nominated for Academy Award Best Picture, are meant to be transcendent:

...movies are not supposed to be pills that you take to feel better. They’re not traveling carnivals with elephants and jugglers. They’re supposed to be aesthetic journeys and emotional hikes that get us in touch with things that too many of us tend to push away (or anesthetize ourselves from) in our day to day. They’re supposed to be compressions and condensations that create indelible moments, insights and excavations into our collective soul.

Wow, that’s arty. On days when I’m feeling like an elitist twat, I may agree. But it’s wishful thinking because I don’t see anything wrong with movies as pills that make me feel better.

I have several action-adventure flicks, stupid comedies and horror movies in my DVD collection, precisely for when I want a quick emotional lift—genre classics like Die Hard, Ghostbusters and The Evil Dead. Let’s read a much more eloquent version of my point by Pauline Kael, from her essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” published in the February 1969 issue of Harper’s:

A good movie can take you out of a dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

Sounds downright pharmaceutical to me. A sentence later, Kael qualities that when she writes of “a good movie,” she truly means something that’s maybe a five on a 10-point scale:

The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

As an irritation aside, I’m also not big on Wells lambasting “regular people” who “are living such insulated and cut-off lives that they can’t be bothered to go to some of these [non-Hollywood] films.”

But what about people other than those who live in or near major cities, such as myself, Wells and most professional film critics? It’s tough to see good movies in this country’s smaller places, period, and I can’t blame folks there for not willing to take chances on riskier, independent fare. I was talking to my Mom last night and she mentioned that she and my sister had taken the roughly 30-mile, 45-minute drive from the southwestern suburbs to the east side of Cleveland for the nearest—likely only—theater in the area showing Persepolis. They loved the movie but it’s not a commute they’re making regularly. My brother and his wife have it worse: they live in Wyoming and have to drive an hour to reach the nearest civilization, in Colorado, to see non-blockbuster films. Not quite as easy as hopping on the A/C/E train after work to see an art-house flick at the Film Forum within 15 minutes.

In sum: eat it, Wells. Moviegoers, enjoy the highbrow, enjoy the lowbrow, when you want, if you can.

Katie had a concise one-sentence review for Michael Clayton that I don’t remember the exact wording for but which is essence is: watching this movie is a consistently tense experience. Directed by Tony Gilroy, who wrote the Bourne trilogy, it’s got the same sort of real-world weariness, without the stunts, the frenetic jump cuts and techno soundtrack. We kind of sat there the whole film, mesmerized by the weaseliness of the film’s lawyers and the business world in particular—watching “fixer” Clayton (a weary, smirk-free George Clooney) go though the motions of helping save rich people who aren’t worth saving from legal prosecution, while dealing with his debt from a failed restaurant, his gambling problems and his divorce. The big case in which he’s involved concerns corporation try to cover up the fact that one of its products is killing people, the firm’s icy, perfectionist lead council (Tilda Swinton) and the possibly certifiable “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” renegade from the defending law firm (Tom Wilkinson) who makes the most humane motions in the film. I liked it. And most of the exteriors are shot in New York City, always welcome by me.

I hate to vex you, because I know you love Daniel Day-Lewis, but I wasn’t a big fan of There Will Be Blood.

I wanted to like it. I mean, it wasn’t horrible: the period set design and costumes, cinematography and special effects are all top-drawer. And Day-Lewis is perfect as a paranoid monomaniac. But he stays that way, with few surprises and a foretold conclusion; in the absence of a branched storyline, he is the movie, a sputtering, mustachioed black hole for plot and character development. Most of the “pivotal scenes,” especially those between Day-Lewis and the smirking, sphere-headed young preacher Paul Dano, are so top-heavy with overacting, it was like Jack Nicholson barking “You can’t handle the truth” at me over and over again. There was much presumably unintended laughter from the audience.

Also, I remain undecided whether Jonny Greenwood’s often discordant, glissando-rich score is a good thing and this from a guy who roots for Radiohead and its associated endeavors. It didn’t fit at times, while other times it did. Sometimes I didn’t notice it and other times it was equal parts hornets and air-raid sirens in my head. I’m going to lean toward the Philip Glass end of my Musical Score Love Scale and claim that I didn’t like it, slightly.

I’m also going to let you in on a little secret: I am not a big Paul Thomas Anderson fan, as a writer or as a director. Hot air and half-baked new-age sentiment bloat his screenplays, his movies and he himself. At least There Will Be Blood has an irredeemable, vengeful, near-satanic oilman up front, which will hold my interest longer than Adam Sandler buying pudding. (And with Day-Lewis as I described, is the tale of Daniel Plainview an allegory of our president, as some reviewers have theorized? I guess with some creative leaps of interpretation it is. But leaps like those land inevitably in college-essay territory, wherein we have explicated Moby-Dick as a stand-in for slavery, Manifest Destiny or penis envy.)

I’d call the puffy enterprise a moderately good movie inflated by marketing as Oscar Bait. My post-show giddiness was nowhere near the levels of critical acclaim this thing’s been garnering. Maybe I’m missing something. Let me know what you think if you’ve seen it. I, too, may be puffed up by marketing.

At first, I’m all like, how come there were never girls around like Juno when I was in high school? I mean, not pregnant, because I was educated by stern Catholics, but quick-witted, fun-loving, sassily independent girls, possibly in possession of telephones shaped like hamburgers. And then I’m like, hold on, there totally were girls like her then. They dressed in weird clothes, excelled in art, music and English, and had penchants for music their college-age siblings passed down, like My Bloody Valentine or whatever, because twee had yet to be invented.

Damn you, Mr. Friel. Your health class taught me about gonorrhea and how I’d most certainly contract it should I premaritally insert my penis into a vagina, but you never mentioned the part about how a shy boy could approach these weird girls and just hang out with them, what with them being so quick-witted and fun-loving and all.

Juno’s best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera) has caught on to this whole world of odd girls, so much so that he impregnates her, while chewing orange Tic Tacs, no less. His own gawkiness and frequent cross country getup is spot on for those of us who may have been similarily gawky and participated in cross country at one time.

I’ve noticed some of the Juno backlash centers around the dialogue, specifically how no one actually talks in the calculated yet fluid way that Juno and the other characters do. Well, that’s great, because if I wanted to listen to the way people talk in real life, I’d spend my weekends on the M60 bus. Diablo Cody’s bitingly funny, slang-slinging screenplay is consistently quirky (yet more funny to me than the self-consciously quirky screenplays of, say, Wes Anderson). Also it’s touching when it needs to be and, just before crossing into schmaltz, quickly self-corrects. For instance, I like how the charmingly cliché line of Juno’s dad (J.K. Simmons) appears in the trailer (“the best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly what you are”) when in the film, it’s followed by the line, “Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think that the sun shines out your ass.”

Ellen Page as Juno is outstanding and I like that she’s surrounded with sorta-familiar but definitely not played-out supporting-role character-actors from various TV series. Putting her sharp features to effective use as an overachieving yuppie who’s unable to have a baby but has dibs on Juno’s, Jennifer Garner delivers an heartfelt performance, or at least one worlds better than on that show where she ran around in bad wigs, fighting terrorists. (Although I’ve never known of any woman who’s expecting who cites What to Expect When You’re Expecting-style tidbits as much as her character does; doesn’t this woman talk to her mother or have a single child-rearing friend?)

Anyway, I dub Juno “Jason’s Feel-Good Movie of the Year.”

La Vie En Rose, a French biopic of singer Édith Piaf, scales the hill of tragedy and almost tumbles into the valley of comedy. It’s just that much of a bummer; what a life she led.

Left for dead by an indifferent mother, she’s raised by prostitutes and nearly blinded by an infection. She falls in with a pimp who threatens to make her turn tricks if she doesn’t bring in enough scratch from her street-corner singing gigs; her father, a failing circus performer who sees Édith as his way out, doesn’t treat her much better. At the start of her rise to fame, she’s mentored by a nightclub owner with mafia connections. In a moment that would make Shakespeare smile, the love of her life is killed, unintentionally, by her own behest. She can’t break through in America although she was (and perhaps remains) France’s greatest pop star. Addictions to drugs, alcohol, her own legend, questionable taste in friends and an unstoppable belief that the show must go on all exacerbate her descent to a pitifully early death. Only when she sings is she, and the movie, glorious.

As Édith, Marion Cotillard, only 32 years old, deserves an Academy nod for playing a woman that ages remarkably from a fidgety, wide-eyed ingénue who fits her stage name perfectly—piaf is French for sparrow—to a hunched, near Norma Desmond type. And the look of the film itself is sumptuous and hyperreal, staged like the melodrama it nearly is.

I didn’t know enough of Piaf to pay respects at her grave at Père Lachaise when I was in Paris in 2004. But non, je ne regrette rien; next time.

No Country for Old Men really may be the second-coming of Fargo, in some respects almost literally, with a weary keeper-of-the-peace (Tommy Lee Jones) presiding over grisly murders in the middle of nowhere. In the ultimate hangdog role, all the Botox and Valium on the Upper East Side couldn’t lift the sag of Jones. I got the impression his character won’t so much retire as he will merge with the desert, reborn as a lone, craggy tree.

But No Country has only a fraction of Fargo’s goofiness. It’s bleak and violent, with scenes of extended dread during which the audience can cringe and await nasty things to happen. (I have experienced or heard of two separate instances where people watching this film did that frightened thing where they grab a random limb of the person sitting next to them.) Typically these moments involve the cat-and-mouse game between the sort-of protagonist Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who has helped himself to some money that isn’t his, and the stone-faced bounty hunter sent after him (Javier Bardem), a man of few words, a Prince Valiant haircut and a relentlessness that makes Ahab seem laid-back.

Although I saw the usual Carter Burwell composer credit, I can’t remember hearing a score; without (or little) music, the tension heightens and makes way for the sound design, which is great especially during the movie’s main chase scene. Recognizing I’m a Yankee and wouldn’t know Dixie if Foghorn Leghorn bit my ass, the Southern accents also sounded true, which is always a concern for me.

Great cinematography by Coen-fave Roger Deakins, focusing on the beautiful wide open spaces of the plains. I didn’t realize until later that the movie’s supposed to take place in the early ’80s; the costumes and set design are retro but I thought it was an unironic look of a backwater South from today.

The trivia page on IMDb.com, which I like to read after I’ve seen a film, notes the screenplay uses wholesale chunks of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, retains the story”s order and ends exactly the same way, all of which is unlikely and amazing. I feel I need to read the book now.

All said, a straight-shooter.

I have two cinematic weaknesses. At least I think they’re weaknesses. For someone with as many out-of-print Pauline Kael review compilations and François Truffaut’s Hitchcock on his bookshelves, they might be classified as such.

But they are these: I really like physical comedy, not just classic stuff like Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges, but lowerbrow fare ranging from the Pink Panther series to Adam Sandler getting angry. I can’t help it. People falling down, people getting struck in the head by objects, a flailing of limbs in general: these things make me laugh. Some movies, the physical comedy is all I remember. When I think back on, say, The Weather Man, a lousy movie to be sure, what I immediately recall is Nicolas Cage getting nailed in the head, in slow-motion, by a six-piece box of Chicken McNuggets, and I love it. I snickered just now as I wrote that sentence.

My other shame is that I like light comedies with fast-paced, witty dialogue. If Oscar Wilde were alive and flaming today, he’d be writing these or at least doctoring the screenplays uncredited, the David Mamet of the romcom set. Some of these favorites of mine in this category are more storied than others: The Philadelphia Story, for one, or Sabrina; or ones I’ve written up here before, mostly oldies seen at the Film Forum: Divorce, Italian Style, Libeled Lady, Irma la Douce, A Foreign Affair and so on.

I can add to that list The Moon Is Blue, a trifle from 1953 that I saw tonight at the Film Forum as part of the Otto Preminger retrospective. Often I’ll think a movie like this was more solid upon its release and has merely mellowed over time into its marshmallow fluffiness. Ah, no. For this is one of the things my copy of The Complete New Yorker is good for: a reviewer in the July 18, 1953 issue calls it “a pleasant little comedy” that’s “quite a bit tamer than some pictures I’ve seen that concentrated on the mute grapplings of lovers and lasses.”

Yet initially controversy (in which Preminger relished and encouraged) swirled around the picture for its use of seduction and the words “virgin” and “mistress.” David Denby notes in his New Yorker review of the retrospective that The Moon Is Blue and The Man with the Golden Arm, which was on the double-bill tonight, hastened the death of the Production Code and “the liberation of movie content.” But seen now, it’s mostly playboy William Holden and his ex-girlfriend’s father (David Niven), his wit as dry as a Martini, lusting after a pretty, chirpy young woman (Brooklynite Maggie McNamara) who’s somewhat less naive and certainly smarter than they think. And that’s it: a bunch of cocktails, sharp verbal sparring and good humor. I laughed; I loved it.

What’s maybe distressing is that I would not have freely chosen to see a based-on-a-true-story movie about a guy who can move only his left eye and some of his internal organs. But I hadn’t read the reviews or seen any trailers or commercials for The Diving Bell & The Butterfly so I went to a screening tonight at the BAM Rose Cinemas on the recommendation of a coworker and enjoyed it.¹

Diving Bell tried my patience in synch with the trying life of its protagonist, an Elle editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), who awakens unable to speak or move after a massive stroke, although his mind is clear and racing. Sentences composed in his head, he narrates the memoir on which the movie’s based by blinking: an aide recites the letters of the alphabet, ordered by their frequency in French, and he blinks when the letter he wants is spoken. It can take minutes to spell one word.

It’s corny to say but the film did “make me think,” about the economy of language, the challenge of communication, the futility of regret (carpe diem!) and the vitality of imagination. Bauby frequently imagines himself suspended in a deep-sea-diving suit (the diving bell of the movie’s title), which serves as a metaphor for his handicap. He finds he can chase away this claustrophobia with thoughts of happy times from his life. For instance, sick of not being able to eat solids, he conjures a grand meal with his wife in his mind, with oysters, no less.

Emotionally, I’m a marble pillar, at the movies and otherwise, and even I nearly got something stuck in my eye at moments during the life-scenes Bauby recalls with his feeble yet strong-minded father (Max von Sydow). It’s poignant that it’s not the stereotypical case of a son estranged from his father; before the stroke, the two expressed their love for each other deeply and the real tragedy is that despite his age and handicap, the father will outlive the son.

And thank the gods that the movie didn’t insist I Learn to Love a Little, Learn to Laugh a Little, a la most other disabled-character films I hate for their schmaltz, such as Awakenings or Rain Man.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t humor in Diving Bell. Bauby’s dour situation in leavened with internal laughter at jokes made at his expense, frustrations over his blowhard physicians, watching soccer matches on TV, and, at one point, a fly that alights on his nose that he’s powerless to shoo away. In the company of the women he loves and his attractive therapists, his randiness stirs in an otherwise rigid corpus.

Great cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, especially for Bauby’s POV shots, with the jerkiness, askew frames and smudged colors of disorientation. The soundtrack’s also great, although I may have been biased because it included two Tom Waits songs and I did mistake the Joe Strummer track that plays over the closing credits for a Pogues song, a la “Fairytale of New York,” which played over the closing credits of an earlier movie by director Julian Schnabel, Basquiat.

Go, dark-horse Academy-Award nomination, go!

¹ At home after the movie, I watched the trailer online and was amused, as I usually am, that trailers in the U.S. for foreign-language films rarely have dialogue, because, you know, we speak American here. Also, the trailer uses every inch of non-wheelchair/bedridden footage available to make it seem as if the film is 90% French orgy, 10% bummer. So I would have been more likely to have seen the film based on the trailer, but I would have felt duped. [back]

Well, I asked for it. Traditional obscurity-fame-fall-redemption biopics of bands and musicians like Walk the Line and Dreamgirls are formulaic and boring, while sticking to hagiographic, melodramatic facts (Control) isn’t much more interesting. Where was my musician biopic as unpredictable and engrossing as the musician and his music? It’s right here—I’m Not There—and it’s not for everyone.

Although you don’t have to be a Dylan fanatic, it helps in order to pick up on all the references: to his lyrics, to famous moments in his career, to photographs and album covers, to direct quotes from the duo of documentaries, both D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back and Scorsese’s recent No Direction Home. (In a nod to the latter, Julianne Moore plays a flaky version of Joan Baez, unintentionally funny and complete with turquoise jewelry.) As for specific references to Dylan’s life, a music-store-type guy behind us murmured aloud most of the references and musician cameos (There’s Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth! There’s that guy from My Morning Jacket!) I only picked up on the broad ones: Dylan drunkenly accepting an award and making a contentious comment about the Kennedy assassination, Pete Seeger brandishing an axe to cut short Dylan’s electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival, that kid who shouted “Judas!” during a concert, the motorcycle accident, and so on.

Cate Blanchett, recreating the mean-spirited, drug-addled Dylan from Dont Look Back, gets the meatiest role with the most screentime, and her Dylan is the most Dylanesque with its tics, slouches and shades atop a curly head of hair. (I’m thinking Oscar nomination; the academy digs actor-factors like weight gain, mental retardation and other feats of physical derrring-do, including gender reversals.)

Most reviews you’ll read of the film state that the Richard Gere segment, in which he plays a sort-of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid-era Dylan, is confusing, extraneous and should have been cut. I agree and add that it brings the film to a halt with its languid pacing of long takes and Gere riding around on horseback in search of his lost dog, which is as interesting as it sounds.

Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a version of Sara, Dylan’s first wife with whom his relationship soured in the mid ’70s, and I gotta tell ya, that woman is hot. She’s got this weird angular beauty to her face that results when you frappé the DNA of France’s ugliest man and most beautiful woman.

I’m Not There hops around between Dylans a lot and can be hard at times to follow but I relished its momentum and its wholly fresh take on an equally cryptic subject within the tired biopic genre.

The Criterion Collection finally (well, back on September 4th) released its “director-approved edition” of Night on Earth, perhaps my favorite Jim Jarmusch film. Attentive readers will recall my sister purchased a no-frills European version of the film for me last year when it was still unavailable on DVD in the U.S. (Now Island Records only needs to re-release the out-of-print Tom Waits soundtrack; somehow I snagged a pristine used copy a few years ago for about $8, but copies now on Amazon.com are pulling down no less than $29.99.)

As with Criterion’s edition of Down By Law, one of the most engrossing features is an hour-long audio-only segment in which Jarmusch answers viewer-submitted questions about the film at hand and other random topics, resulting in erudite ruminations packed with curious trivia.

I listened to this Q&A for Night on Earth tonight and, most crazily, Jarmusch reveals that the New York City segment, in which a fare convinces a cabbie with both poor English and driving skills to move over and let him take the wheel, actually happened to him late one night on the Upper West Side many years ago.

He confirms what he’s said in interviews before, that shooting films in moving cars (instead of using in-studio tricks like rear projection) is a major pain in the ass. Camera rigging mounted on the sides of the cabs prevented the actors from exiting in less than 20 minutes, which proved amusing when a tow-line broke one night in Helsinki, depositing an actor-filled vehicle on an active trolley track.

Lighting and sound design in moving cars at night proved tricky too. Light rigging attached to the roofs, just out of frame, bounced combinations of gelled light onto the actors inside, specific to the city: pastels in Los Angeles, for example, and a harsh green cast in New York City. (Jarmusch took pains to blot out the actual cast of New York City at night—orange—because he can’t stand that color, according to longtime director of photography Frederick Elmes in another commentary on the DVD.) The cars in which the actors were towed during filming had a camera mounted where the hood and engine had been removed, necessitating post-production addition of all engine and transmission sounds.

Although Jarmusch wrote the initial script in English (in a mere week, he says), he worked closely with translators and the actors themselves in the Rome, Paris and Helsinki segments to revise the dialogue, ensuring the language and slang were correct. And although it would seem otherwise, Roberto Benigni’s manic monologue was only somewhat improvised by the actor and mostly based on a script outline Jarmusch and Benigni had developed in advance, based on many of the actor’s jokes and habits, such as only driving the wrong way down one-way streets late at night in Rome.

Also, Jarmusch prefers Carl Perkins over Elvis and his favorite Clash album is Sandinista!

For what’s nearly a comedy of manners with stereotypes as thick as mama’s meat sauce, Divorce, Italian Style sports wicked-good dialogue (the screenplay won an Academy Award in 1962) and fun physical comedy.

In the Sicilian summer heat, everything about Baron Fefè (Marcello Mastroianni) seems at rest. His eyes are hooded, a cigarette in a long holder dangles from his mouth and his moustache lounges limply on his lip. His movements are minimal, almost regal. An occasional tic, a twitch of his cheek, substitutes for a raised brow. His libido, however, remains active. Spurning his clingy wife Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), a large-toothed woman with Kahlo facial hair and a braying giggle, he lusts after his teenaged cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli) who lives across the way.

But divorce is illegal so Fefè upgrades his active imagination to murder schemes; for a crime of passion, he can get out of jail in three years, with good behavior. All the action’s in his head, in voiceover and dream sequence. Rosalia dies unlikely, black-comedic deaths: early on, he pushes her into a cauldron of boiling tallow, while later, at the beach, she’s buried alive and screaming in quicksand.

Then he learns he might not have to do anything. After discovering a cache of old love letters in the attic, he locates Rosalia’s ex-flame (Leopoldo Trieste) and hires him to restore the family manor’s frescoes, conniving to reignite passions that will justify his wife’s murder.

Fefè’s voiceover is at its funniest when he imagines his own trial, at which his lawyer’s impassioned statements to the court are revised and restated as quickly as Fefè alters his calculations, deciding, for instance, that his gun will be hidden more poetically in an antique credenza than a modern end-table drawer.

The plan backfires when she skips town with her beau. Fefè feigns depression and locks himself in his bedroom. Gossips brand him a cuckold. His social club is displeased. The town’s don whispers suggestions on how he might solve his little “problem.”

Fefè ends up shooting Rosalia, but not before the painter is shot moments earlier by his own disgruntled wife. And as planned, Fefè’s out in three, marries his cousin and lives happily ever after. That is, until the movie’s parting shot: in the Sicilian summer heat, her mind’s on another man.

Half-Nelson breaks the heart because it’s the only film I’ve seen since maybe Requiem for a Dream that not only portrays a hard drug user (a crack-addled history teacher Ryan Gosling) as sympathetic and well-rounded but more impressively for a movie of this type, portrays a drug dealer (Anthony Mackie) as a fully formed character, and not the cliché he could have been easily. And Brooklyn girl Shareeka Epps is excellent as the old-beyond-her-years middle-schooler torn between these two deeply flawed but possibly redeemable men.

Having exhausted the merchandising possibilities of box sets, lunchboxes and inaction figures, the executors of Kurt Cobain’s estate have lined up a writer for a biopic of the rockstar. It makes me want to curl up on the couch, strap on the headphones and listen to In Utero because biopics are inevitably a letdown compared to a band’s audio-only output.

Either such films feature that cookie-cutter pyramidal plot I’ve written about before (say, for Walk the Line or Dreamgirls). Or as with Control, which I saw tonight during a sold-out Film Forum showing, they’re no more intriguing when presented as a flat stretch of fanboy facts. Joy Division never had a thrilling career to begin with: they formed, released two alien punk-pop albums that later proved extremely influential, kicked around Europe on tour, then ceased to exist. Their lead singer, Ian Curtis, hung himself in his estranged wife’s kitchen on the eve of a potentially career-altering American tour, forever sealing the tormented-genius-dies-young mythology, an archetype profitable both emotionally and economically.

Ian’s the focus of this film and the actor who plays him, Sam Riley, resembles him very nearly, with the wicked grins, shifts of hooded eyes and robotically flailing limbs the real Curtis exhibited onstage, and sometimes off. Longtime celebrity photographer, first-time director Anton Corbijn has filmed Control in stark beauty; every first frame of each shot is composed so meticulously it could stand alone as a Corbijn photograph in ultrahigh-contrast black-and-white.

The whole thing is just such a slog. Joy Division made mostly glum music, lyrics of isolation bleated in Curtis’ weirdly deep baritone singing voice, as swampy guitars and mechanical drumbeats swirled in basement echo. Stack atop that the gloom of working-class England in the ‘70s, Curtis’ epileptic seizures, his lovetorn confusion between his young wife (a frumpy and deluded Samantha Morton) and his European mistress (Alexandra Maria Lara), a mostly diegetic soundtrack of murk from Bowie, Iggy and Roxy, plus, you know, the whole suicide thing, the buildup for which consumes the final second hour of the film, and Control clouds over as a major bummer.

A scene in 24 Hour Party People suggests that, contrary to popular myth, Joy Division wasn’t all doom and gloom by recreating a scene of the group playing a gleeful cover of “Louie, Louie,” a rowdy club audience singing along. Control tries a smidge of levity, too: Curtis claims his favorite film is The Sound of Music, and after Riley, the film’s best performance is easily the exasperated, profane and very funny Toby Kebbell as the group’s den-mother manager, Rob Gretton.

But it’s all too little of interest and for too long. A woman in my row leapt to exit as the credits hit and I heard a fragment of her complaint—not soon enough—which I would agree with in reference to the movie, perhaps less so regarding the death of Curtis and Joy Division, which can also be good headphones music to listen to on the couch.

I can’t say I enjoyed Oldboy, a recent Netflix rental; I thought it would be more in the vein of chop-socky/gunplay/action-adventure when it’s instead a discomforting psychological thriller about torture, revenge and masochism, set to a pleasant orchestral score, much as A Clockwork Orange is set to a pleasant orchestral score. Consider that Oldboy’s squirm-worthy scenes include but are not limited to:

• tooth removal by hammer claw
• tongue removal by knife
• vivid hallucination of ants under skin
• man jabbed in eye with toothbrush
• man killed with compact disk
• consumption of live octopus

Authors of course draw on experience from travels for fiction. They can’t make up everything from scratch, after all. This isn’t a revelation: Hemingway’s adventures in World War I informed his novels and Melville’s trips at sea informed his, and so on. But I read two articles today discussing a novel and a screenplay centered around spur-of-the-moment journeys, each of which were written based on trips taken explicitly to inform said novel and screenplay. Which also probably isn’t unique, though I find the coincidence appealing.

In a review of the Beats in general and of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in particular, reviewer Louis Menand writes in the October 1st issue of The New Yorker that although Kerouac began the book before his first cross-country drive with Neal Cassady, the trips for On the Road “were made for the purpose of writing On the Road. The motive was not tourism or escape; it was literature.”

Likewise, in a profile of Wes Anderson this week in New York magazine (“The Life Obsessive With Wes Anderson”), author David Amsden writes that Anderson and his cowriters, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, reserved a month to travel through India by train in order to write most of the script for the director’s newest film, The Darjeeling Limited:

“I guess we went to India as research,” says Anderson, “but the more precise-slash-romanticized description would be that we were trying to do the movie, trying to act it out. We were trying to be the movie before it existed.”

A USA Today article further notes the trio ended up in the Himalayas with a bulky printer in tow, just like one of the characters in the movie. “We literally finished the script on the highest mountain we went to,” Anderson says.

And to think once upon a time, not so long ago, I was wide-eyed about film crews in Manhattan. I’ve seen so many since, they’ve blended into the background, one more thing blocking my sidewalks.

Making my usual Friday trek to Academy Records, I had to walk down the middle of 18th Street to bypass the trucks and equipment set up to film a scene of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit at Books of Wonder, a children’s bookstore a few stores down from Academy, where the staff was equally blasé.

Random Woman:

They could film in here!

Academy Guy Behind the Counter:

[eying sweaty, pudgy loner pawing through the 99-cent bin] Yeah, we got our “special” victims.

Later in the evening, walking the wrong direction looking for the Upper East Side American Apparel store, I came across a building on East 64th Street off Park Avenue, floodlit and with gels in the windows. A weary man, part of a large black-shirted craft services crew lounging around and pulling down union scale, guarded the beverage and snack table on the sidewalk and told me that they were filming a scene for Sex and the City: The Movie. Again, no reaction from me. Other than, man, would Sarah Jessica Parker really miss one small bag of Fritos?

Maggie Gyllenhaal is convincing in SherryBaby as a heroin addict who’s released from prison and has to come to terms with the fact that her brother and his wife have become surrogate parents to her daughter. The movie mostly sidesteps “Give me Back My Baby!” Hallmark-special melodrama by presenting Gyllenhaal as a strong, conflicted woman driven to rehabilitate herself and regain the respect of her kid. Also, this is definitely the movie to see if you’re interested in viewing Ms. Gyllenhaal’s breasts, as she appears topless during several scenes.

Headline:

The title of the new Indiana Jones movie [will be] Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Jason:

Wasn’t this the title of a Nancy Drew Mystery?¹

O.:

Christ, I thought it was a Harry Potter book.

Jason:

Now we just need to fire up the tired jokes everyone will make or has already made about Ford’s agedness.

Jason:

Indiana Jones and the Slightly Soiled Adult Diaper

O.:

Indiana Jones and The Tower of Cialis

Jason:

Indiana Jones and the Sansabelt Slacks

O.:

Indiana Jones and the Early-Bird Special

Jason:

Indiana Jones and the Low-Battery Hearing Aid

O.:

Indiana Jones and The Clapper (costarring Paris Hilton)

Jason:

Indiana Jones and the Jaundiced Pallor

Jason:

Indiana Jones and Those Damn Teens

O.:

Indiana Jones and the Redolent Smell of Urine

Jason:

You win.

O.:

Oh, I’m just getting started. Indiana Jones and the Wraparound Sunglasses, Indiana Jones and the Ostentatious Red Convertible, Indiana Jones and the Inappropriately Young Girlfriend, Indiana Jones and the Colonoscopy of Evil, Indiana Jones and the Wobbly Walker of Death

Jason:

Cut it out, spazz.

¹ Almost, as it turns out. Legend of the Crystal Skull will be the name of the newest Nancy Drew video game, to be released next month. [back]

I only own, like, one pair of jeans. Levi’s 511s. Don’t worry, I wash them weekly. Okay, maybe once every two weeks, but more often in the summer when they’re likely to get sweaty. I don’t know about you, but I’ve tried buying backup pairs of jeans to these ur-jeans, but I end up not wearing them, because the ones I always wear are the comfiest. You’d think I’d just buy multiple pairs of the same jeans, but see: how do I know I like them until I’ve worn them for awhile? If I don’t like them, and I’ve bought three pairs, that’s three pairs never to be worn again. And by the time I find I like a pair, the time has passed to buy multiples, because the first pair have become my favorite pair.

And here it is: The Bourne Ultimatum is like a favorite pair of jeans. Comfortable, lived-in, a little sweaty, nothing unexpected and unlikely to be a cause for undue recognition/adoration, unless you’re writing a blog entry seemingly about jeans or you’re the nerds on IMDb.com who have, as of last check, voted the film the 66th best of all time. Ultimatum isn’t that; it’s more of the same: manic cutting of scenes of hand-to-hand contact and car chases, grim bureaucrats tracking Bourne and an even grimmer Bourne tracking the bureaucrats while trying to find his raisons d’ être and/or true identity. Popcorny summer fun!

Instant ramen noodles constituted a formative brick of my collegiate food pyramid. I will admit eating many a pack of chicken-, sometimes beef- flavored Maruchan Ramen back in the day, bought for pennies apiece and flavored with a salty powder included in a foil square reminiscent of a wrapped condom.

In my adult life, ramen ranks among my favored home remedies of tempering a sinus headache. I hold my face close over the hot steam as the noodles boil, then fork down the gunk to rebalance my electrolytes and ease my fatigue, or something like that.

My sense before tonight of eating ramen in an actual ramen establishment seems informed by dystopic sci-fi movies¹. In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s been fired. In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s being arrested by Edward James Olmos. “He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard,” quoth the wizened Asian ramen-vendor. “He say you Blade Runner.”

Taking place in a futuristic Los Angeles (“November, 2019”), Blade Runner visually adds, as I think William Gibson has, that you must eat your ramen while wearing an overcoat and seated at a counter of a stall-like street vendor, beneath a florescent-lit awning, as around you, the cold rain pours and crowds mill by under umbrellas with rods that appear to be light sabers.

Well, it was dark and cold and rainy tonight, and New York, at least the East Village, is probably as grittily deteriorated a match to Los Angeles 2019, so I took the L east then walked over, under my unlit umbrella, to Ramen Setagaya, an outpost of a Japanese noodle chain. There are a scant few tables for two and I sat at the narrow counter on a black-lacquered wooden stool. I was only about two feet away from the two cooks, who scurried about the tiny kitchen preparing dishes in clouds of fragrant steam. Each gentleman wore a yellow T-shirt printed with the chain’s logo and, oddly, had a white terry-cloth hand-towel wrapped around his head and tied in the back, as if he’d just exited a shower.

A flat-screen TV near the entrance looped a bewildering array of cooking shows, gameshows, commercials and promotional videos, all of which seemed to feature Setagaya ramen, and none of which had subtitles or a lick of English otherwise. After calling for a Sapporo, I started out with the Oshinko pickled vegetables, none of which I recognized but all three of which were tasty. For my noodles, I opted for the pork BBQ salt ramen (or “cha-syu-men,” according to the mostly Japanese menu, unless that’s actually a pronunciation guide). The tender, thin-sliced pork floated in a rich noodle broth of various chopped vegetables, seaweed and half of a soft-boiled egg with a vibrant yellow, goopy yolk, floating there like a lifeboat.

Unless this is a prank on Westerners, I’m told that in Japan it is good manners to slurp one’s noodles, as if to audibly yet nonverbally complement the chef. Suspicious of this, I ate mine silently and with a minimum of wet whiplash, although two Asian gentlemen down the counter to my right were consistently and noisily Hoovering in large tangles from their bowls. A sideways glance revealed that, with noodles dangling from their faces, they resembled Cthulhu and his “awful squid-head with writhing feelers.”

All told, and as expected, much heartier and tastier ramen than those dehydrated bricks from my youth, and better yet, nothing bad happened to me during my meal, unless you count that giant puddle I accidentally stepped in on First Avenue afterwards.

Ramen Setagaya

• 141 First Ave. (between St. Marks Place and East 9th Street)
• (212) 529-2740
• Meal 34 of 52: pickled vegetables ($2), pork BBQ ramen ($11) and a bottle of Sapporo ($4).

¹ I’ve seen Tampopo, but I’m going to conveniently ignore that here. [back]

I’d passed through cities and towns with bucolic names and rashes of strip malls yet had no clear idea where I was other than the enticing signage on the Long Island Railroad platforms indicating I was headed “to Points East.” I was in a rush at Penn Station and had no map, so I trusted the prerecorded voice of the conductor would tell me when to transfer at Huntington and when to depart at Smithtown.

It did, and later on the strip of beach where I found a smooth white rock that would have made Brâncusi smile, Tina crouched in a clearing among the pebbles and shells.

“Long Island is sort of shaped like a fish,” she explained, drawing it with her finger in the wet sand, the peninsulas of North and South Fork forming the tail fin, the arcs of North and South Shore its body. She indicated our position in Nissequogue, near the dorsal fin, and I realized that given the once-upon-a-time shipbuilding communities and whaling ports nearby, the fish is an apt simile for the country’s most populous island. Now, though, the ghost of Gatsby haunts the shores and forests of old-money packrats and nouveau riche commuters.

I’m neither and was there because I needed some R&R from the bustle and dirty-bomb paranoia of Manhattan and because Tina’s parents are in Italy for their first vacation in 10 years, so we had run of their sumptuous, spacious home, acquired for a steal-worthy sum in the ’60s and upkept by the shiny rewards of shrewd investments and a lucrative family-run scrap-metal business.

In the back yard, just past a pair of scraggly pines, the lawn drops off into a cliff, beyond which lies Long Island Sound.

Inside is tastefully weathered furniture, hardwood floors, a beautiful but unruly macaw and most immediately, a rowdy quintet of Brussels griffon, which sounds like the name of an investment bank but is in fact a toy breed dog with a face that appears to have been struck with a dictionary. Their eyes bug out, their noses are squashed and their tiny teeth are revealed in an underbite. Their breathing sounds labored and congested, like a fat man snoring, though they make a purring sound when they’re content. They did that protective thing where they barked at me and snapped at the back of my pant legs before ascertaining I wasn’t a threat, but after I’d left and returned to a room, the cycle began anew. I found that when I sat, they were more calm because I wasn’t 10-times taller than they were and they could easily investigate me, often by walking over, pawing and licking my ticklish self all at once, like a bum rush by a gang of slobbery Tribbles.

The recent looming of the Check Engine light in her Volkswagen convinced Tina to rent a car for the weekend until she had more time to take it to a garage, and Enterprise offered us the Pride of DiCaprio, a Toyota Prius, in Environmentally Concerned Gray. The gasoline-electric hybrid doesn’t appear much different than other midsize automatics, excepting its push-button starter and park buttons, with a tiny joystick-like gearshift mounted below. There’s an impressive-looking video display on the center of the dash that indicates the fuel consumption of the car in motion via advancing numbers and bar graphs. Tina didn’t like it. The acceleration was slow and throaty, with dodgy visibility out the bisected rear window.

We drove out to the furthest point of interest, Port Jefferson, where we toured the village center and encompassing park, then had cones of mint chocolate chip and Moose Tracks at Port Jefferson Frigate, billed as the largest ice cream/candy shop on Long Island. On our way back to Smithtown, we stopped by some more parks and nature preserves, via various Scenic Routes. In a spicy mood for dinner, we had enchiladas at a Spanish restaurant, Casa Luis. Back at the house, we watched the not incredibly thrilling Rear Window remake for teens, Disturbia, then half of the languidly paced Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I had a touch of trouble getting to sleep with the constant whir of crickets and cicadas outside the guest bedroom window. The next morning, after pointing out to Tina a dry shell left on a walnut tree by a molting cicada, I learned she’d never before noticed these exoskeleton-like curiosities. When I was a kid, we used to collect these; they were easy to stick in people’s hair without them noticing.

I haven’t seen many films that have been able to nail the elusive character of the prototypical hard-boiled New Yorker, that mixture of gumption, aggravation and good humor, but The Taking of Pelham One Two Three gets close. Film Forum snuck it into its “NYC Noir” five-week festival but it’s not especially noirish. First, with such snappy and funny dialogue, it’s more of a comedy. It’s not even in black and white as I had assumed but simmering with the alternately grim and garish hues of mid-’70s Manhattan, the latter best exemplified by Walter Matthau’s lemon-yellow necktie and a button-down shirt patterned in a multicolored checkerboard pattern resembling the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever.

Matthau plays a exasperated yet savvy lieutenant in the MTA’s police division whose workday takes an unexpected turn when he learns a subway car’s been hijacked and the passengers are being held for a $1 million ransom. For a film focusing mostly on this non action-packed standoff (and surprisingly little on the hostages, which are stock characters), the storyline managed to keep my attention, not only by slowly revealing how the four hijackers are planning on escaping with $1 million from a subway tunnel, but by bringing to life the city-worker characters: the salty coworkers of Matthau’s, the cranky flu-ridden mayor (the Koch-like Lee Wallace), and various cops bound by procedure and red tape.

After post-movie drinks downtown, instead of taking the subway home, which would have been only appropriate after watching perhaps the greatest New York City subway movie ever made, I took a cab, which I almost never do. I don’t recall seeing one of these before but my cab had a TV screen built into the back seat to bombard me with commercials, though at a push of the touch-screen, brought up a map that refreshed every few seconds to show the position of the cab as a green dot. Not very useful to me but mesmerizing anyway.

Having viewed the recently released trailer, I’m anticipating the Coen Brothers’ newest, No Country For Old Men. After years of lighthearted goofiness, Old Men suggests the second coming of Fargo, which does feature goofy moments yet remains bleached by dread, murder and desperation. It’s based of the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy and I was amused to come across a line from Jeffrey Lent’s review in The Washington Post a few years ago that, “His descriptive passages are lucid and visual—this novel needs no film adaptation.” Tough luck, Jeffrey. If anyone can pull off lucid and visual, it’s the Coen Bros.

Mr. Harvey Weinstein
Miramax Films, Inc.
88 Central Park West
New York, NY 10023

How’s it hangin’ Harv? Low and to the left as usual? Seriously, though, I hadn’t seen you in forever and I can say, as your friend, the Atkins is doing a world of good. You’re down at least one chin and no less of a holy terror for it. Nothing better to temper a man’s fat than by laying low on the pasta and uncontrollable rage for a few months. I speak from experience here; scriptmen know but two kinds of exercise: jack and shit.

Anyway, I thought about our brainstorming session down in St. Barts last weekend and you were right to option Rubenstein’s article on the rare dime transporter; you don’t have to give newspapermen big billing or points and we can take fuck-all liberties with the material sans reprisal. Bottom line, we’ll do it but it needs a punchup and your patented pacing.

O.K., ready? Nic Cage plays rare coin dealer John Feigenbaum on a cross-country flight with the world’s rarest dime. I’m thinking we’d ask him to play the browbeaten shtick he’s banked on recently, plus a splash of Con Air ruggedness, and probably the hairpiece and suit from Lord of War. No one saw that one, right? Does he keep those hairpieces in storage or what? Small favor, Harv: don’t tell Nic I asked about the hairpieces.

So the entire flight, he doesn’t sleep. He’s worried about the dime getting lost or pinched. He’s in first class but drawing glances because he’s dressed in jeans and flip-flops. But let’s make ’em Crocs and pull in a triple-digit placement fee while they’re still hot. And we’ll need suspicious seatmates for Nic, to add color: maybe someone who’s down on the deal, or paid to get tight with him and cop the coin. I don’t know, fill the seats as you will, maybe a turncoat femme fatale, eventual love-interest, Helena Bonham Carter-ish. Or maybe hit younger with a tech-startup computer-expert sort. Can we get Dane Cook? The idea is it’ll be like The Narrow Margin or one of those Agatha Christie everybody’s-a-suspect things.

Now, after the flight lands at Newark, they transfer to a sedan to Manhattan, and we’ll want to spike a chase in there post haste. I mean, we’ll have been locked on the plane for hours, with the taut, psychological thriller stuff, so we need to slap awake our popcorn-stuffing ticketholders. Let’s get the guy who did the stunts for the Bourne movies. I want rolling police cars. I want explosions in Midtown. I want shit flying at the camera so the audience ducks. I think you’ll agree, Harv.

So they beat the gauntlet and arrive at the vault. Maybe the driver’s been clipped just as we started to warm up to the guy; make him a scrappy youngster with a Queens accent. Wait—maybe this could be Dane; can he do Queens?

And for the New York coin dealer, let’s get someone literate and respectable, British, gravitas: Ian Holm, Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, whomever. Plummy is your expertise, friend; call in a favor from your period drama heyday. I’m thinking there’s a double-cross, with Feigenbaum dropping off the coin to what he thinks is the buyer’s vault—only it’s a setup!—then we can bring it all back home on a Die Hard-style run through the building.

On second thought, let’s not consider Holm. He was in Lord of War and if we already got the hairpiece and the suit, we don’t want to swipe much more.

So as you can see, we need to make some edits, though one thing Rubenstein got spot-on: this cross country trip is the stuff of intrigue! Can we get something like that on the poster? Needs finesse, but you get the idea.

You pitch ’em, I hit ’em, Harv. By the way, the check is in the mail for that JetSki. I said it in St. Barts and I’ll say it again: that dolphin came out of nowhere.

Yours,

J——

P.S. Title ideas: this is your bailiwick, Scissorhands, but consider: Spare Change, Flight of the Dime, The Rarest Coin. And so on.

After watching the new extended cut of the silent, historically top-ranked classic Metropolis, I wondered how this film was received when it was released in 1927. Was it relegated to the art-house circuit, as it is now, or was it the Transformers of its time? Its special effects, (then and in some cases still), likely entertained to the degree of the latter: Blade Runneresque Art Deco cityscapes, sprawling at the beginning, collapsing by the end; a Dali-like fever-dream sequence; hundreds of extras, running in panic or marching solemnly but always en masse. On the other hand, the lack of a soundtrack results in some comically exaggerated acting and the social commentary about the “heart” mediating the “head” (upper management) and the “hands” (the proletariat) is propaganda. But there’s something for everyone here, including a scantily-clad-lady sequence of the sort the Hays Code would effectively stamp out only a few years later.

The documentary Manufactured Landscapes makes more of an overt political and environmental statement than Edward Burtynsky’s mammoth manmade panoramas, the results of what he calls “the pursuit of progress”: heaps of waste or recyclable materials; earth scarred from the extraction of copper, nickel and iron ore; literal mountains of coal, photographed from such a distance they resemble densely forested hills.

With a nudge of focus, Burtynsky’s subjects could be Sebastião Salgado’s men bent by the labor of imposing environments. But his most recognized shots don’t feature people at all and if they’re there, they’re included only as yardsticks of scale, dwarfed by their surroundings.

Director Jennifer Baichwal reveals these details only implied by Burtynsky, the creators and tenants of these landscapes, which turns the film into more of An Inconvenient Truth than a documentary on Burtynsky, which is what I’d been hoping for, though the details are engrossing and disturbing. Something approaching half of all computers disposed in bulk (charmingly termed “e-waste”) end up in Asia, where they’re harvested for valuable metals in the circuit boards. In a snip of voiceover from a lecture given by Burtynsky, he notes some villages where this recycling takes place have become so toxic with lead and heavy metals that the water is no longer safe to drink and must be constantly trucked in.

The documentary also highlights China’s manufacturing sector, showing madly repetitive work. A woman assembles a circuit breaker by hand in about a minute: she can crank out 400 per shift, she says proudly, and she’s been at it for six years.

Some of the most intriguing images come from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam project, which Burtynsky was invited by the Chinese government to document earlier this decade. It’s startling that many of the more than one million people displaced by this project have been responsible for demolishing their own cities.

“It’s a very broad view,” says a Chinese man, viewing a Polaroid Burtynsky has taken of him waking through the dam project with a bundle of sticks on his back. “It’s hard to see the details.”

I saw a movie poster for the recent stinker Captivity on the C train after work today, and my eye was drawn to the MPAA ratings reasons. These things are great and it’s obvious moviemakers love them, particularly for R-rated movies; they’re meant to warn but they’re essentially mini-reviews that boil down the movie to its essence for any teenager hoping to catch a glimpse of a disembowelment and/or Elisha Cuthbert’s cleavage.

Anyway, as shown in my photo, the ratings reasons for Captivity are

FOR STRONG VIOLENCE, TORTURE, PERVASIVE TERROR, GRIZZLY IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND SOME SEXUAL MATERIAL

Whoops! Unless there really are brown bears trundling amid the ultraviolence, the copywriter meant to suggest the images are grisly.

With four of ’em under my belt, I think it’s time the recurring “Just Because You Spellchecked” posts got their own tag; so let it be written, so let it be done.

Yay! Another robot for the military that resembles those from Short Circuit. The Ranger III from FLIR Systems Inc. can track vehicles from 12 miles away and will be stationed along the southern U.S. border by the Department of Homeland Security.

But does it feel remorse if it accidentally squashes a grasshopper?

For the New York Asian Film Festival at the IFC Center, I was keen to see the one with sneak-attack breakdancers but swayed instead to see Dasepo Naughty Girls. I must give naughty girls an edge over sneak-attack breakdancers. And without breaking a sweat, Dasepo should qualify as the strangest movie I will see this year.

Let’s see: it’s a candy-colored teen sex-comedy/soap opera/musical, kind of like if you captured Baz Luhrmann, Porky’s and Grease in a sack and ran it through the “English to Korean” filter on Babel Fish.

Among the horny students and teachers at No-Use High School are a poor girl forced into prostitution who becomes best friends with her first john, a paunchy middle-aged cross-dresser. He’s uninterested in sex but obsessed with putting on makeup and schoolgirl outfits to pose for cellphone snapshots, giggle and gossip about boys; later he becomes the girl’s manager for her sudden and unexpected musical career. There’s another student with one eye who has a transgender sister (brother?). And there’s a teacher who likes getting spanked. Frequently the characters break into song, the Korean lyrics highlighted syllable-by-syllable across the bottom of the screen, just like in karaoke.

The reptilian-eyed principal brainwashes the class into model students while restoring their long-lost virginity. At the showdown conclusion, a Medusa-like dragon-lady emerges from the principal to smite the students, but they gather and use the cosmic power of group masturbation to defeat her. Then everyone assembles in the gym and starts dancing.

I’d say there was something lost in translation but, no, I think Dasepo Naughty Girls is just that weird.

That voice: a tenor, so soft and naive. I didn’t know whether a man or a woman sang “My Funny Valentine” until I saw William F. Claxton’s photos of Chet Baker, trumpet in hand, jutting jaw, pompadour, full lips, high cheekbones, heavy brow. Sexy bastard. I guarantee Chris Isaak and Morrissey have at least one photo of Chet taped up in their locker.

Another photographer, Bruce Weber, made a kind of documentary, Let’s Get Lost, a eulogy in high-contrast black and white, as the jazz trumpeter/singer haunted Europe and California in the late ’80s. Chet floated then—floated like that voice, really—in a fog of cigarette smoke and methadone, recall so ragged he nearly couldn’t remember the name of a son by his first of three wives.

But that love was a long time ago, when he played with Stan Getz and Charlie Parker—imagine, this Okie trumpeting with those guys and epitomizing West Coast Cool. Chet latched onto the expat jazz scene in Paris of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Drugs dragged him down further and he spent a year in an Italian jail for possession. Back in the U.S. in the ’60s, a group of toughs jumped him and knocked out his teeth, or so he says. He never let the truth intrude if it didn’t need to.

In Santa Monica, he’s 60 but looks 80, and in the tightly cropped shots of him seated glassy eyed in the back seat of a speeding convertible at night, he resembles a more fiercely weather-beaten Kris Kristofferson. One or two anonymous pretty women accompany him wherever he goes. He horseplays on a beach and rides in bumper cars with some young fans. They’re giddy to be in his presence although they don’t much know him beyond the fact he used to be famous for something. One asks if his trumpeting sounded anything like that of Miles Davis. Not to anyone with two ears, Chet says.

A few months after the release of Let’s Get Lost, he fell from a hotel room window in Amsterdam and died. According to Weber’s postscript, Dutch police on the scene initially reported they’d discovered the body of a 30-year-old musician.

The Paris of Paris, Je T’aime, 18 short films by as many directors taking place in the city, mostly serves as a backdrop for stories that could have taken place anywhere, save a few particularly French threads: xenophobia, parking problems, mimes and a general sense of fabulousness. And, of course, a love/hatred of Americans. When they pop up, they’re generally transplants, either tourists (in the segments by Alexander Payne, Wes Craven and the Coen Brothers) or actors (Natalie Portman in the Tom Tykwer segment and a hash-addled Maggie Gyllenhaal in the Olivier Assayas segment).

Love and loss unite the segments more than the city: there are first and last meetings of love, grief over a dead child and a dying spouse, all spiced with comedy both broad and sly, plus a touch of melodrama. Also, vampires, and one segment that somehow manages to outfruit the fruitiness of Moulin Rouge. In short, there’s something for everyone here, if you don’t mind becoming invested in the characters just as each segment ends, often without a denouement. (Although it works favorably the other direction, too: if you hate the scene or the characters, no worries, because you won’t be stuck with them for long.)

The Payne segment, about a Midwestern Jean Teasdale-type who reaches the sad realization that Paris is the only reciprocal love of her life, garnered the most laughs. She sports a fanny-pack and a high-school grasp of French, demonstrated at length in her stilted voiceover, which the audience at my screening couldn’t get enough of. Knowing beforehand that Payne directed one of the segments, this one is unmistakably from the same guy who helmed About Schmidt. In this respect, I liked how the time constraints placed on each director magnified his style; blindfolded and spun, I could have matched each segment with its brand-name director based on the combination of stars, staging, camerawork, editing and dialogue.

For example, Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy and Good Will Hunting) still has a thing for pretty, milk-skinned young men. Tom Tykwer double-times his film speed, slicing in manic cuts, with Natalie Portman taking over Lola duty. Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) opts for a single fluid shot tracking a walk-and-talk between a young girl and Nick Nolte, who looks and sounds as if he’s eaten nothing but ashtrays of unfiltered cigarette butts since his arrest. And the Coen Brothers assault a wordless, hapless tourist (whipping boy Steve Buscemi) trying to mind his own business in the Tuileries station of the Metro, in what plays like an outtake from a French remake of Barton Fink.

In one the funnier segments, Craven films in Père-Lachaise and opts not for the lurking horror I expected but the ghost of Oscar Wilde materializing to dish out relationship advice to Rufus Sewell, who’s just tripped and conked his head on the playwright’s famously ugly tomb.

A painful attempt to unite the characters of some of the segments louses-up the movie’s conclusion, featuring multi-screen edits and a jaunty, inspirational soundtrack that turns the whole thing into an HP commercial. But in general I enjoyed the multi-director/same-city concept. Let’s do this for other world cities, especially New York. Yes, yes: New York Stories, but how about that with more directors and rapid-fire segments.

Arrrgh, another summer and again the waves and cannonballs crash as the chow-mein face of Davy Jones waggles, but the biggest special effect and richest treasure of the Pirates of the Caribbean series remains Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, the unflappable, flamboyant cad. Like the previous installment in the series, this one’s too long, with a convoluted, overpopulated plot and not as much swashbuckling as befitting a summertime popcorn flick. But you can’t go wrong with Capt. Sparrow bickering with and comparing telescope sizes with Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). And during a particularly vivid hallucination in exile, Jack gets to argue with dozens of replicas of himself. Oh, and the Keith Richards cameo: a waste. He’s got like 2 minutes screen time, lazing about while strumming a guitar and speaking in a voice that seems to be electronically modified to sound deeper and clearer than the slurring scoundrel we’ve come to love via Depp’s homage.

I like horror flicks but I’m picky. Formulaic slashers bore me; I think I may be getting too old to enjoy them properly. My more non-typical favorites include 28 Days Later (it-could-really-happen apocalyptic horror!) and Requiem for a Dream (descent-into-drug-addled-despair horror!). I don’t know if either of those are considered horror movies, but I say they are because both make me anxious and sweat profusely. And in my heart is reserved a special space for that rarest of the breed: the horror-comedy. After the The Evil Dead trilogy, I didn’t think I’d be seeing the likes of such a combo meal again, until I watched Shaun of the Dead on DVD tonight.

Not only is it great because it directly references the Evil Dead (and George Romero’s oeuvre) in everything from whip-pans, to an S-Mart style nametag, to a throwaway line about a guy named Ash; it’s also great because it’s British. Plus 10! You could write a dissertation about its jabs at staid limey social mores—the doldrums of the working-class, the stoic mother, the starchy intellectual—but it’s just a bunch of kick ass fun as Shaun (Simon Pegg and his dopey, flatulent friend (Nick Frost) fend off the living dead with wit, a cricket bat, Prince records and shotgun skills learned from video games.

Hard Boiled, notable as John Woo’s final movie prior to his Hollywood-blockbuster directorial career, serves as an action-packed showcase of his signature style combining acrobatic fisticuffs with frequent spurts of slow motion. Also about 230 people are shot dead, if you’re into that sort of thing. The elaborately choreographed gun battles thrill, even though my DVD appeared to be a bootleg with dubbing from one Chinese dialect to another and poorly translated English subtitles. It’s certainly representative of the cop-movie drama, packed with the following cliché plot elements:

1. Our hero (Chow Yun-Fat) has a score to settle.
2. Because a crime syndicate killed his optimistic young partner, who talks lovingly about his children then gets killed in the first 15 minutes of the film, setting up the Revenge Factor.
3. The cocky young replacement partner (Tony Leung) crimps the style of our hero. But they see through their differences and join forces.
4. Bonus: The cocky young partner lives on a houseboat.
5. The crime syndicate features a Boss and a Henchman of the Boss, with renegade flair and long hair to differentiate him from the Boss.
6. A plucky female colleague proves her mettle late in the film: she picks up a gun with a limp-fish grip and shoots dead a bad guy who doesn’t believe she’s capable.
7. All of the handguns fire far more bullets before reloading than one would think possible.
8. And my favorite: imperiled children to magnify our hero’s humanity. In this case they’re quite young: merely newborns in a hospital nursery. The bad guys have hidden a weapons cache in the basement of the hospital, then decide to blow up the whole building. The drawn-out conclusion features SWAT guys getting picked off as they pass the babies out a hospital window down to safety. Our hero rescues the last one personally, leaping through the flames and rubble in slow motion.

The Criterion Collection is reissuing The Third Man on DVD. Normally this wouldn’t be news to me. Movie companies are forever releasing then re-releasing films on DVD, adding features, anamorphic encoding, commentary and other goodies to entice fans to purchase the movie multiple times. And the cycle renews itself as studios push new Blu-ray and HD DVD technology.

Criterion has long been the gold standard of DVD releases of snotty films, particularly those from outside the U.S. “Film school in a box,” I’ve heard their releases called, due to their riches of scholarly commentary, documentaries and other highbrow extras. Even their crisp and uncluttered package design calls to mind the classic posters of Saul Bass. Criterion’s most revered and fearful releases remain their works by infamously fussbucket directors. My favorite is their brick-like three-disc edition of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil which contains a lifetime of extras and two separate versions of the entire film.

In short, Criterion is renowned for its definitive editions. I already spent like $50 bucks on the first “definitive edition” of The Third Man in the early ’00s (Criterion’s luxury treatment on disk is reflected on pricetag). The new version contains a bonus disk of juicy new extras, a documentary and commentary by director Steven Soderbergh. I weep zither-sweetened tears.

It’s The Day After Tomorrow and polar melting has disrupted the North Atlantic current. Ocean temperatures drop 13 degrees and the weather of the world goes bananas. Snow blankets India, hail the size of toaster ovens hammers Tokyo and tornadoes raze Los Angeles, pausing briefly to Hoover away the iconic Hollywood sign. Ian Holm, in a wasted opportunity for such a fine actor, plays the Voice of Scientific Reason who offers unheeded warnings then freezes to death with his colleagues in a weather station in Scotland, but not before hoisting a single-malt “to mankind.”

Extra-special wrath is saved for Manhattan. A disgruntled taxi driver once mused, “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Look out, Travis; here it comes. Tidal waves buffet the city and flood it. Then comes the window-breaking, flesh-stiffening cold: it’s the beginning of a new ice age. Jake Gyllenhaal and his motley band of survivors hole up in the New York Public Library, burning books to stay warm. They bicker, forage for food, get chased by wolves, ponder what the future will hold, etc.

The movie is bookended by a hammy environmental message, particularly at the queasily macho America-will-soldier-on conclusion that has a Dick Cheney-lookalike President admitting "we were wrong" about all that ozone layer and global warming stuff. I particularly enjoyed the phrases uttered in wild-eyed seriousness throughout by environmental scientist Dennis Quaid, who gets to say lots of lines like, “I think we’ve hit a critical desalinization point!”

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the special effects. And in a way I’m glad the filmmakers were aware the CGI served as their leading lady. If they’d bothered adding more dimension to the stock disaster-survival-movie characters and plot, they only would have made the digital enterprise less enjoyable. There’s little chance the actions of Man can compete with the sight of a tidal wave cascading down Fifth Avenue or the Statue of Liberty spiked with giant windblown icicles and buried to her waist in a glacier.

Libeled Lady: they sure don’t make fluffy romantic comedies like they used to. I savored the amphetamine-rapid patter of dialogue forged in the fires of the ’30s; the comedic hits come fast and furious and I wished everyone I knew, myself included, spoke as quickly and with as much wicked cleverness as these characters.

William Powell steals the show as Bill Chandler, a Walt Disney-resembling pencil-mustachioed dandy, alternating between foppishly suave and stammering fall-down goof. He’s macking on Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy), a rich socialite haughty enough to probably set cute baby chickens on fire with merely a glance. She’s suing the New York Evening Star for $5 million for printing a saucy bit of untrue gossip about her. The paper’s editor, Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), thinks he can nullify the suit by getting a photo of her messing around with a married man, so he puts Chandler to the task—after having the dashing fellow temporarily marry his own fiancée, Gladys (a brassy, sassy Jean Harlow). Hilarity ensues.

At first this film shapes up to be perhaps the only romantic comedy featuring two couples that gives balanced plot-time and screen-time to everyone, which practically never works (like in, say, You’ve Got Mail; although maybe Sideways comes close). But the focus grows to be Chandler and Allenbury genuinely falling for each other, but not before he makes a comic ass of himself. There’s a long bit wherein, attempting to ingratiate himself with Allenbury’s fishing-fanatic father, he pretends to know how to angle for trout. Then the father invites Chandler’s on a fishing trip with himself and his daughter. Whuh-oh! Bring on the physical comedy: lots of Chandler falling down in the rapids and grasping at the slippery fish just out of his reach.

Hello, Hollywood: this movie totally begs for a remake, particularly given the continued prevalence of tabloids skirting legal lines and debutante romance. Yes, it was remade [only 10 years later!] in ’46 as Easy to Wed, but I’m talking a remake now. Additionally I ask: why has not Myrna, as in Myrna Loy, become the new hotness in names for baby girls? It’s got that foxiness-by-association that other old-timey names like Ethel somehow haven’t been able to retain.

When Escape From New York came out in 1981, its premise could have been considered a distant possibility—that by the late ’90s, Manhattan would be a maximum-security penal island, blocked on all shores by a 50-foot wall and patrolled by helicopters and jets. Other than that, the only rules are once you get chucked in there, you don’t come out.

Kurt Russell is about to get chucked in there for robbing the federal reserve, then cuts a deal to guarantee his freedom if he can rescue the President of the United States whose plane has crashed on the island and who’s being held captive by a bunch of goons ruled by a twitchy-eyed Isaac Hayes.

The fact that like only one scene was filmed in New York City kind ruined everything for me. New York had to have been gritty and deteriorated and filled with enough unsavory locals to make it work, although probably not without the theft of some cameras and John Carpenter’s wallet.

I do like that Kurt seems to be channeling his sneering rasp directly from Clint Eastwood (and like Eastwood, seems to have spend an awful lot of time blow-drying his silky hair for an alleged tough guy). I also appreciated that the President of the United States, whom Kurt succeeds in saving from certain peril, has a British accent for no discernable reason.

I know I’d seen The Long Goodbye before, and at the Cleveland Cinematheque, because—bless the place—but it has the most uncomfortable lecture-hall-style wooden chairs from the ’60s ever.

From my much more comfortable seat at the Film Forum, I mused I’d forgotten how funny Goodbye is, particularly film-noir gumshoe transplanted to the creamy yoga center of 1970’s Los Angeles Elliott Gould with his dopey looks and dry self-deprecating humor. Witness the strangely extended opening sequence where he learns he’s out of cat food, drives to the grocery store to buy more, discovers they’re out, reluctantly buys a different brand, returns home, opens the off-brand can and scoops it into an empty can of the cat’s usual cat food, then makes a big show in front of the cat about pretending to serve the cat its regular food. Of course, the cat knows it’s the wrong brand and refuses to eat it, which the audience has expects all along, but it’s really funny somehow anyway.

I have to imagine guys like Gould must have been a true mystery as leading men of ’70s cinema. How did these mugs become stars? To my point, see also two other not-especially handsome, alternately endearing/annoying, frequently charming guys (and also from Brooklyn!) from that era, Richard Dreyfuss and Woody Allen.

Wandering around the East Side before the movie, I regret to inform you I missed an awesome New York photo-op. On the Bowery I noticed that a League of Their Own style tour bus had just pulled up outside the Bowery Mission. A group of Amish people had just stepped off, the ladies clad in plain shapeless dresses and wearing those lace kerchiefs on their heads, while the men had on plaid long-sleeved shirts and black pants. They started photographing the various transients who were lounging around smoking and napping. One guy sitting on the stoop outside the door was all like, “Here I am. C’mon, muthafuckas, I’m right here,” with his arms raised, so they all clustered around and started taking even more photos like they were at the zoo and they’d just come across a surly emu. Meanwhile another mission resident off to the side was hastily scribbling a beggar sign on a scrap of cardboard.

Can’t see how I missed Repo Man until now, bound in grittily real-yet-surreal textures. Unexpected and violent and silly. Kick-ass punk/new-wave soundtrack, too.

It’s weird that Kill Bill: Vol. 2 contains all the back story and exposition of the first one didn’t. Only a few people die and there’s plenty of rambling, stilted Tarantino dialogue. Couldn’t have he just made one shorter film with equal balance kung-fu and chatter?

Our mumbly mountain man (Marky Mark, with the pornstar name of Bob Lee Swagger), a war veteran let down by the government he believed in, is called back to duty to protect the president¹ from a long range rife assassination. Whoops! He’s set up and accused of capping the guy standing right next to the president. He’s on the run! The opening of Shooter sorta resembles The Fugitive and sorta exciting, as long as you suspend the fact that he seems to drive his getaway car around Philadelphia in full sight of 1000 helicopters and police cars and is not noticed or stopped by any roadblocks that would have instantly arisen.

But later in the movie, things get darker, like a shinny 2000s version of Charles Bronson or Dirty Harry as Mark gets all extroverted-Kaczynski, exacting self-righteous murders of the shadowy men who did him wrong.

¹ Casting “the president” in your action movie must be a thorny task. You’re not making a parody so you have to make sure your man doesn’t resemble any presidents past or present or else the audience will laugh or think you’re trying to make some ham-handed point. Yet the guy still has to look “presidential” and what’s that, really? The casting call can probably be boiled down as, “Tall white guy, mildly charismatic, late 40s/early 50s, nice hair.” [back]

Kill Bill: Vol. 1: a revenge plot Velveeta-rich with kung-foolery. It sank for me as soon as Uma and Vivica A. Fox rock the suburbs with that spectacular dust-up at the beginning.

So you don’t have to, I listened to the actor/director’s commentary on my super-deluxe edition of Say Anything tonight and watched the alternate/deleted/extended scenes. The most amusing group of extras concerns the famous shot of our hero Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) hoisting a boom box to serenade his girl Diane (Ione Skye) as she sleeps with the wistful strains of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”

In the movie, it comes together perfectly (if a touch sentimentally) and the image of Lloyd has become something of my generation’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

What’s amusing is that director Cameron Crowe originally scripted the boom box music to be Billy Idol’s “To Be A Lover” and as the scene was filmed the song actually playing was a then-favorite of Cusack’s, Fishbone’s “Turn the Other Way,” neither of which fits the scene; Idol is too fast, Fishbone too funky. Gabriel’s song works on an emotional level and the lyrics are written as if for the scene.

Even better is that although it seems perfectly obvious now that Lloyd must elevate that boom box with the confidence and pride of a boxer hoisting the championship belt, alternate takes reveal that Cusack and Crowe first tried every other possible combination of Man with Boom Box before settling on the iconic image just as they lost their light of day.

“This is the first round of holding up the boom box,” says Crowe regarding these first few shots, from footage taken on March 25, 1988, and apparently meant to take place across the street from Diane’s house. “He’s not happy about it,” Crowe adds, unnecessarily, over footage of Cusack handling the boom box like it’s a poo-filled diaper.

The next round of boom box takes (a session that included the one used in the finished film) were shot in a comparatively more scenic park on May 2, 1988, although most of them are ruined by inexplicable and out-of-character gum-chewing by Cusack. “I think that the chewing gum and anything of that sort of indifference was going to be wrong,” comments Crowe, when he probably should have just shouted at Cusack, “The world is full of guys. Be a man!”

Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: About a Girl and as substantial as the cakes and lace that surround her. The anachronistic 80s punk and wispy instrumental soundtrack kicks ass with unexpected choices: Gang of Four? Adam Ant? Shimmering, galloping New Order? Aphex Twin on harpsichord? Yes, please.

But the first half of the movie sags in the repition of lavish dinners and Kirsten Dunst’s Marie wondering when she’ll get porked by Jason Schwartzman’s indifferent Louis XVI. Then it’s off for some garden parties and marathon wardrobe-selection sessions until the angry mob shows up.

Although I expect product placements in the recent films of the James Bond series, I don’t ever want to see him driving a Ford again, even if it’s a prototype hand-constructed by Germans in labcoats. That prominent blue oval logo on the grille disturbed me, appearing so soon after the opening scenes of Casino Royale. I thought it a sign that, for the rest of the film, Daniel Craig would sport ill-fitting Gap casuals and demand his Cosmos shaken, not stirred¹. Thankfully he soon switches to a boner-popping 1965 Aston Martin, the purr of which made me forget the Ford until now.

If I may speak for men as a whole, we watch and enjoy Bond films because 007 is more handsome, athletic, suave and tamper-resistant than we are. He’s what we’re not. Because it is within my means to drive a Ford, I do not wish to see James Bond driving a Ford, any more than James Bond would expect me to wear an Omega wristwatch and shag a 27-year-old (Eva Green) so stunning that she actually stops time at several points. Or that may have been just me pausing the DVD to sneak a closer look at her sleek luxury styling.

¹ In general, the number of elements in a drink is inversely proportional to its manliness. Whiskey, neat or directly from the bottle = nothing more manly. Whiskey on the rocks = solidly manly. Whiskey sour = slightly sub-manly. Any drink with 3+ ingredients or fruit garnish = womanly. [back]

I was in the elevator this morning, going back down to the sandwich shop off the lobby to fetch a carrot-raisin muffin because the line was too long earlier, and this girl who got on at 16 started talking to me. She made full-on, somewhat startling eye contact and at first I thought she thought I was someone else. Then she said, “How are you doing?” I said fine and asked if she’d just come from an audition, because 16 is where the audition studio is. She said her audition was in an hour and I’m unsure why I didn’t ask what it was for.

I imagined for some reason that she played a musical instrument, possibly because she didn’t have on enough makeup to be auditioning for a show. You recognize those girls in the elevator right away. You also recognize those girls from a block away because their facepaint has been applied to be visible from a mezzanine. Instead this girl was cute in an unobvious way, resembling Chloë Sevigny in Boys Don’t Cry, with a fairy-dusting of acne.

She asked if I was there for an audition myself (which was strange because I didn’t get on at the 16th floor) and I told her, no, but that I work on the 17th floor and could usually hear piano playing, loud acting and singing rising from below.

“That must be annoying,” she said wryly.

“Sometimes. But sometimes, at the end of a long day, it can be soothing,” I said, which was a lie but necessitated by my lack of anything more clever to say on short notice.

By then we’d reached the lobby and she said awkwardly, “Well, have a nice day,” and we parted, never to see one another again.

Now, if this had been a romantic comedy, at the point when she asked whether I was there for an audition, I would have started singing Kenny Rogers’ “You Decorated My Life” charmingly badly and she would have laughed and then we’d have gone out for coffee at The City Bakery and I’d start hanging out at her place, writing lyrics for the songs she’d compose on her viola. There’d be at least one scene in Central Park in autumn of us walking and talking. There’d be some misunderstandings but we’d work them out thanks in part to the advice of my wizened-sarcastic coworker-friend from Brooklyn played by Paul Giamatti.

Or maybe I’m digressing like this because I saw Music and Lyrics tonight, which sort of follows the formula of the above paragraph. He, a washed-up pop singer from the ’80s. She, hired to take care of his plants. Ah, but she’s a closet writer. They burn the midnight oil crafting the perfect song together, on a commission from some sort of Christina Aguilera popstar knockoff. They learn about themselves, they learn to love, they learn to rhyme again. Argh. I did enjoy watching them brainstorming for a day straight over the minutiae of perfect words and chords, which reminded me of that clichéd truth of Twain’s that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is ... the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

Drew Barrymore left me wondering: Can she turn that lisp of hers on and off like some actors can with an accent? Because she sounded more lispy than usual here. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s charming but obviously I have issues. Hugh Grant plays his patented randy/foppish quippy-Brit character albeit with more pelvic gyrations and an appropriately age-beaten face that no doubt still gets some sort of sandalwood scrub applied daily to its T-zone.

Technical issues: wince-worthy lip-synching by Hugh and Drew to their voice doubles when their characters are required to sing, which is often. Most unforgivable is opening the film by depicting the hit music video Hugh’s character made in the ’80s but not treating the picture to make it actually look like it was filmed in the ’80s (i.e. the music videos from different eras shown in This Is Spinal Tap).

As a white male, age 18 to 49, I’m required to watch and enjoy director David Fincher jerk the marionette strings of his characters as he maneuvers them onto paths trapped with danger and despair. To a certain degree. I find Fight Club and Seven entertaining and I own both as deluxe dual-DVD box sets, but I wouldn’t rank either among the top-40 films of all time, as the mouth-breathers on IMDb.com have.

Like those films, there’s disturbing violence in Fincher’s newest, Zodiac. It’s a movie about a real-life serial killer, after all. Zodiac’s murders both attempted and successful are depicted as swift, brutal and unexpected, strung with tension until their resolution. Despite what the film’s trailer implies, these assorted scares, shootings and stabbings are but punctuation in a movie long on deskwork and desperation: this is more a gather-the-facts potboiler like All the President’s Men than a traditional action-thriller.

San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) obsesses over the case. He solves ciphers, tracks clues, follows up on leads that turn into dead ends and posits wild-eyed theories. He pesters the cops on the case (Mark Ruffalo and a toupeed Anthony Edwards) who are bogged by overwork, politics and jurisdictional bickering. He also does a lot of hovering around the desk of the paper’s addled crime writer, Paul Avery (a funny Robert Downey Jr.). The case swallows Graysmith’s life, marriage and job. As in real life, the identity of Zodiac is suspected but no one’s ever charged or caught. It’s a bit of a slog to sit through and though the movie is paced briskly for its more than 2.5-hour length, it’s hard work with little payoff for both the audience and the characters.

Kudos to Fincher for crafting his usual dark and rich obsessive-to-detail vision. In Zodiac he captures seemingly every object from the ‘70s, from the rotary phones to the cigarette machines, and fleeting touches I remember from my own childhood in that decade, like a View-Master and a commercial for the Slinky. There are also some nice touches of trademark Fincheriffic computer-enhanced scenes as when he depicts Graysmith envisioning giant hovering versions of Zodiac’s ciphers superimposed over the Chronicle newsroom during a long tracking shot (which is actually just like the shot in Fight Club when Edward Norton imagines his apartment as the pages of an Ikea-like catalog, product names and descriptions suspended over the furniture). And when Fincher flashes forward from ‘69 to the early ‘70s, he does so with a fast-forward speed CG clip of the iconic Transamerica Pyramid being built. Clever.

I took a Metro-North train from Harlem up to Westchester County early this afternoon because that was the nearest location of After Hours, which is not a gentlemen’s club but the formalwear chain my friend Joe has selected for his wedding party’s tuxedos, two-button Tommy Hilfiger models with long ties and “truffle vests.”

After a relaxing half-hour ride, I set out on foot from the White Plains station, spotted a large blue Sears sign, then walked over and entered the mall it was attached to. There was no tuxedo store to be found. After calling Joe, I learned I was in the wrong mall. Joe mapped my predicament online then relayed to me via cellphone that White Plains has a pair of malls approximately eight city blocks apart and I was in the more ghetto of the two, the Galleria.

After arriving at my correct destination, the Westchester Mall, I took in its modern architecture, carpeted floors, Apple Store, Sharper Image, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus and roving packs of Asian teens. I stood in line at After Hours with a bunch of gawky high-schoolers whose older brothers were getting married, had various body parts tape-measured and tried on two in-store “test jackets,” smelling of sweat and cigarettes, to pinpoint my size (37 long, for those keeping score at home).

I took an express train back to Grand Central because I had plans to see The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last month. It’s reminiscent of Coppola’s Hitchcockian The Conversation, in which a snoop (Gene Hackman) thinks he’s heard a murder in a wiretapped apartment through his headphones. To a lesser degree, I thought of 3-Iron, in which a young couple lives for moments at a time in the vacant apartments of strangers.

In Lives of Others, Ulrich Mühe plays a member of East Germany’s Stasi in the Berlin Wall-divided early ‘80s. Resembling Stanley Tucci from certain angles, he’s an expert interrogator who switches to the passive end of the business when he takes on a life-consuming wiretap stakeout of a writer who’s suspected of harboring a subversive streak. The same stone-faced officer who’s patient and exacting enough to sweat the “truth” from suspects at the station has difficulty finding fault in a man whose complicated life he’s exposed to in conversations the writer has with his girlfriend and friends. The end, sappy yet satisfying, gets choppy with jumps in the timeline of multiple years at a time. But I’d recommend it.

And, yes, I still think it deserved Best Foreign Language Film over Pan’s Labyrinth. That film, while wondrous in its effects and imagination, had a predictable fairytale plot and little character development. Lives of Others is more unexpected and focuses on the nuances and complexities of human nature and expression. Katie disagrees. “I guess you don’t care about the plight of a little girl,” she snapped in disgust, as she, Andie and I briefly discussed the films afterwards. I didn’t take it further because I’m not smart enough to win an argument with her. She should consider a career in politics.

Bruce, the family member of Andie and Katie’s I visited last year when Katie and I summered in Rhode Island, was an actor in Wind, the Americas Cup movie that finally popped-up in my Netflix queue. I watched it tonight and it’s a fairly standard sporting movie setup with a down-on-its-luck team triumphing over adversity in The Big Game. Specifically it’s:

1. Boy has girl and boat.
2. Boy loses (in order) girl, race, boat and self-respect.
3. Boy spends a few lost months on the salt flats of Utah.
4. Boy regains self-respect, boat and girl.
5. Boy wins race.

Really what’s impressive (and, I’m told, the reason Bruce likes the movie, too), is the graceful and seemingly effortless cinematography and editing of the boats racing neck-in-neck via a combination of tracking shots from other boats, on-boat action footage and helicopter shots, seamlessly stitched together. Even more impressive is knowing this movie was made in the early-‘90s and likely contains little if any CGI trickery, compared to more recent seaborne fare, like, say, Master and Commander, which was a lot of Industrial Light & Magic and a giant water tank in Mexico.

This screencap depicts Bruce as Sheik, looking pensive about a loss in a race. Although mostly he’s seen in the background, toiling aboard the American boat, he’s one of the lead crew members, addressed directly by stars Matthew Modine and mid-nosejob Jennifer Grey, who yell at him during a crucial moment to “put up the Womper,” a giant spinnaker co-invented by Gray and crafty genius Stellan Skarsgård.

You will agree Bruce is a handsome fellow and I can tell you this is doubly so when he’s in manly action, tacking, scrambling up rigging, getting the jib down, and a bunch of other sailing stuff I didn’t fully understand. (Although Wind’s on-boat maneuvers may be a rush of confusion to landlubbers, the movie explains sailing race strategy by unobtrusive and effective cutaways to live footage of a TV commentator and animated graphics of the races’ turning points.)

Late one recent night in Brooklyn, Ned needed to get from one end of the Slope to the other, so he hailed a cab. Of all the taxis in all the neighborhoods in all of New York City, he walked into Philip Frabosilo’s, an overt Christian who preaches to his fares, dishing out smiley-face advice, miniature paperback bibles with orange covers and hand-labeled copies of his own documentary/biopic, Rolling for Jesus. He gave Ned a copy of this DVD after not charging him for the ride, so it was practically a given that it would be first-up in the rotation for Ned’s Movie Night II tonight.

Phil, who’s had his medallion about 37 years, has removed the partition from his cab and tricked out the interior with dozens of photos, inspirational messages and Beanie Babies, in order to utilize it as a “ministry for Jesus.” A big part of this is acting as a bread truck, stopping by breakfast cart vendors and relieving them of their day-old donuts and bagels. He loads the stale dough into plastic bags, crams them in his trunk and tools around the city donating them to the poor, if a fare happens to take him near a shelter or homeless person. In between stints preaching at storefront churches and missions, Phil takes his rods to the East River and fishes for striped bass. (Thank god he doesn’t eat his catches or attempt to multiply them because they’ve got to be among the filthiest, garbage-choked creatures in all the land.)

Most of Phil’s preaching is Praise the Lord boilerplate but when the camera catches him in slightly less scripted moments, he tosses out funny and confused metaphors, like how he’s “discovered that most New Yorkers are like clams, way down at the bottom of the ocean.” Phil’s married but spends more time at his Mom’s place, where she handles all of his taxi and ministry-related paperwork from her kitchen table and owns some of the coolest, most hideous wallpaper ever.

Most of the times he’s shown with his wife, it’s in 30-year-old wedding photos. She’s interviewed separately wearing a denim shirt that she appears to have embroidered and sewn a bunch of decorative buttons to. In the movie’s best line, she admits, in a statement phrased like a question, “I’m proud of Philip but I’m not [pause] proud of Phillip.” Earlier she’s admitted they have a constant “hot and cold relationship,” in part because Phil’s Mom lives in the same apartment building and demands a lot of his time, and in part because they ‘re both argumentative types.

From the documentary, here’s what would seem to be a typical exchange, best imagined with thick New York accents:

Phil:

[proudly waves tube of heat-and-serve biscuits] I bought buttermilk biscuits.

Phil’s Wife:

[defensively] For who? What kind of diet are you on?

Phil:

These were three for a dollar!

Phil’s Wife:

Yeah?

Phil:

So I bought four of them.

Phil’s Wife:

So who are they for? You buy me diet bread [angrily shakes loaf of “Light Style Wheat” at Phil] and then you buy buttermilk biscuits! Where is the logic?

For the requisite bad movie segment of Movie Night, Megan couldn’t locate a copy of Riding the Bus With My Sister on short notice so she settled for Gigli, which also features an offensive rendition of a mentally disabled person, in this case played by Justin Bartha as a watered-down Rain Man. An ultra-guido Ben Affleck mocks and manhandles the kid while getting cutesy/obnoxious with J-Lo in some of the most stilted dialogue ever scripted. After about 20 minutes in, two things became clear:

1. The Christopher Walken cameo would be the movie’s high point.
2. Ned’s head would explode Scanners-style if we didn’t play another movie fast.

So we put in Jesus Camp. You know those kids in the Middle East who are taught that it’s a good idea to strap on belts of handmade explosives to kill their enemies because their god (who apparently is not the same as their enemies’ god) will smile upon them and grant them afterlife bonus prizes of virgins, goblets of honey and all the free cable television they can handle? The evangelical Christians shown in this documentary are just as scary, if not moreso. In one scene, one of the adults even compares the teaching of their children to the education of young holy warriors. And these folks aren’t strangers living in a desert halfway around the world; they’re from Missouri and more powerful than bombs. The movie reminds that the growing ranks of this “religious right” helped bring our current president to office.

Cute as the devil and just as spooky, the spawn of the adult evangelicals attend bible camp, pray, attempt to convert strangers, speak in tongues, weep in religious ecstasy and talk in ways that sound well-coached. (There they are, praying for the souls of the unborn near the abortion clinic, just like regular fifth-graders.) They’re largely home-schooled and essentially brainwashed by their parents and teachers who keep them closeted from the world in their homes and communities. They’re not even allowed to read Harry Potter books (although some of them do anyway).

I have questions and comments for this film: foremost, what were the filmmakers’ motivations for making it? There is no voiceover, few text overlays other than a handful of stark facts about the staggering numbers of evangelicals in the U.S., and no commentary, other than occasional footage of Mike Papantonio, co-host of the Air America Radio program Ring of Fire, during a live show on evangelicals during which he takes their calls and intelligently knocks holes in their dogma.

Also, I’d be interested in seeing what happens, Seven Up!-style, once these kids hit puberty and/or a time when they might have an option to experience the world beyond all they’ve ever known. Do many of them wise up and leave it behind or do they go on?

Finally, as with any documentary, I wondered about what was left unfilmed or on the cutting room floor and what was magnified by selective editing. When we watched the deleted scenes on the DVD we saw the kids goofing around and playing like normal kids their age; but none of this made the movie, where they’re presented as robots.

Ned’s a Herzog fan (you may recall we watched that director’s Grizzly Man during Ned’s inaugural Movie Night) so we caught the first bit of The Wild Blue Yonder. Brad Dourif stars as a wild-haired, conspiratorial and shifty eyed alien, as if he’ll steal your wheel covers as soon as your back is turned. Then there was a bunch of NASA space travel footage cut in and I lost track. You can slag Herr Herzog as you please but you cannot deny the man takes creative risks and keeps his work always unexpected.

To cap the evening, Ned and Megan were shocked and appalled that neither Katie nor I had ever seen H.R. Pufnstuf (“Sid and Marty Krofft?” they asked, dismayed as we shrugged.) I’d try explaining it but mere words cannot do justice to something so surreal. The pilot episode from 1969 that we watched is an acid-tinged version of The Wizard of Oz, so at least I had a shaky point of reference amid the lumbering Muppets, an amphetamine-cranked witch, singing flute and rapscallion British boy.

For sustenance during this marathon session we ordered in from Song, a fine, very tasty and cheap Thai restaurant. I ordered my favorite Thai dish, tofu pad see ew, which is flat rice noodles, broccoli and bits of grilled scrambled egg in a sweet brown sauce. I would have tried the tasty-looking som tam grated papaya salad but like a lot of Thai food, it was rife with chopped peanuts.

Song

• 295 5th Ave. (between First and Second)
• Brooklyn, New York
• (718) 965-1108
• Meal 10 of 52: pad see ew ($6.50).

Raise the Red Lantern spans the four seasons of a year in ’20s China within a closed compound of a rich man and his four concubines. Each night his choice among them is made known by the ritualistic decoration their quarters, indoors and out, with red paper lanterns, which are lit and remain so until the morning. Three of the women (the fourth is too old to get much play) spend their time exercising juicy Shakespearean-quality levels of vanity, trickery, lies, plotting and backstabbing to get what they feel is their fair share of lantern-lighting. That the lead concubine (Gong Li ) by the end is literally driven mad by unfortunate events she’s set in motion felt like a copout.

Leisurely paced, brilliantly colored, with a painterly symmetry in its staging, Raise the Red Lantern is a stack of mostly long static shots, straight on and centered. And red: lots of red.

Boy, Hitch really liked stories of ordinary men in over their heads, which he never covered more realistically than in The Wrong Man. He even traded his traditional cameo for a brief introduction emphasizing his script was wholly Based on a True Story. Unfortunately that also makes it one of his least engrossing films: linear with few surprises, and, as in many Hitchcock films, dwelling on the director’s phobias and kid fears, in this case, of cops and of wrongful imprisonment. The style and cinematography, unlike most anything else Hitchcock directed, glows like a European arthouse film mixed with film noir, all downturned hats and shadows, and a vivid time capsule of a gritty New York City in 1956. Fifty years later and the bridges and the subway stations look the same.

And what better everyman to play Mr. Guilty Until Proven Innocent than Henry Fonda, a doe-eyed upstanding American with a face like a laborer in a Great Depression breadline.

Vera Miles as his wife portrays a worrisome decent into madness with a beauty you can see would have worked for Vertigo. Hitch wanted her for the role of Madeleine in that film but when she got pregnant, it went to Kim Novak.

Everyone’s always going on about how the “baptism scene” in the original Godfather is a cinematic tour de force. You know the one: at the end of the film, when Michael attends his nephew’s baptism, renouncing Satan and all His works. Meanwhile, intercut with the scene are alternating shots of Michael’s men eliminating the Corleone family’s enemies one by one, all set to a overwrought organ soundtrack. Michael’s not scampering away to Sicily this time to lay low for a year. No sir. He’s proud new owner of the Bad Motherfucker hat. Men will kiss his ring and do his bidding.

Yeah, it’s O.K. But the scene in that movie that always gets me, even again as I watched the movie tonight for maybe the dozenth time, is the one in which Michael caps Sollozo and Police Captain McCluskey during their dinner meeting at Louis’ Italian American Restaurant. It’s nowhere near as complex as the famous sequence of quick cuts in the baptism scene, but I think it’s more effortless and effective.

Part of this is because of where Michael’s at in his development as a character in the film. By the end, at the baptism scene, he’s in charge and unstoppable in his convictions to defend the Corleone name; his actions are an inevitable conclusion.

But the scene in the Italian restaurant serves as Michael’s self-imposed initiation to the family business—will he or won’t he turn to the dark side? It’s unclear. Although he’s a freshly returned war veteran, at this point in the film he’s still very young-looking and, though serious, detached from the dealings of his family.

The scenes directly before the restaurant scene set the stage with doubts as to whether Michael can carry out the job. Clemenza and Sonny repeat advice to him: “don’t forget: two shots apiece in the head” and repeated reminders to drop the gun right after the murders. Michael has trouble squeezing the trigger of the gun as he tests it beforehand, then says “my ears!” after he fires. There’s a tense nearly silent Chinese takeout dinner in the kitchen at the Corleone before Michael leaves on his assignment.

Once he gets picked up by Sollozo and McCluskey, they feign a trip to New Jersey, possibly to shake a tail, possibly to suss out whether Michael knows the location of the meeting. He’s not supposed to, but he does, and he hides this knowledge with a seeming lack of concern.

After Michael, Sollozo and McCluskey arrive at the restaurant, they order. Sollozo talks with Michael in Italian and Michael interjects in English to demand that his father be left alone. Then, as planned, Michael excuses himself to go to the restroom. He takes a time scratching around behind the toilet tank where the gun’s been taped/hidden in advance, just enough time to make you wonder whether it’s there and whether he’ll find it. I don’t believe you can actually see him put the gun in his pocket as he leaves the restroom, which is a great touch. Instead you see his reflection in the mirror as he runs both hands through his hair. (Someone seeing the film for the first time may wonder whether he’s chickened out and left the gun in the restroom.)

Also great is how Michael disobeys Clemenza’s earlier advice to "come out blastin’." (As his father’s son, that wouldn’t be within his character. Although not adverse to swift retaliation, Michael is cautious and extremely calculative. So this could be him doing things his own way, the way he’ll conduct all of his business as don. Or it could be because he’s nervous and forgot what Clemenza told him. Or a bit of both.) Instead he walks out of the restroom, stops, makes eye contact with Sollozo at the table, then walks over and takes his seat again.

The tension at this point is high. Sollozo continues where he left off in Italian—like before, it’s not translated by subtitles, which is appropriate, as Michael’s not paying much attention anyway. The only other sound is an elevated subway rumbling by outside, growing even louder in a rush. Michael’s got a distracted stare into middle distance, occasionally glancing at Sollozo. Then he stands up quickly and cold caps the guys, Sollozo clean through his head, McCluskey in the throat, then through the head. It’s over in seconds; a bloody mist hangs in the air.

He doesn’t drop the gun right away, either, like he was told repeatedly. He’s nearly out the door when he flings it to the floor from his hand like it’s hot.

What a marvelous confluence of acting, pacing, editing, scripting and sound design. This scene, unlike any other in the film (and barely any others in any other films) makes my heart race every time I watch it.

Pan’s Labyrinth, a current Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, reminded me of Amélie. They’re both adventures of precocious young women spiced with fairy-tale elements rendered in spectacular CGI. Although, as Andie points out, Pan’s Labyrinth has an awful lot of graphic violence. I read that in Mexico, the film’s producers added stickers to movie posters warning idiot parents that the film isn’t suitable for their children, despite its elements of whimsy.

These elements center around a mysterious, possibly sinister faun who looks as if he’s made of wood and makes spindly wicker sounds when he moves—nowhere near as cuddly as C.S. Lewis’s Mr. Tumnus. He sends heroine Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) on a series of quests deep in the forest and a labyrinth located conveniently nearby. In the real-world plot running parallel to this world of pixies and mosters, Ofelia’s mother is sick while pregnant with the son of a sadistic captain of Franco’s army in rural Spain. The worlds begin to overlap at the corners: the faun helps Ofelia cure her mother with a mixture of mandrake root and milk only to later suggest that she bring the newborn baby to him for reasons unclear. Is Ofelia’s fantasy world actual? Or is it birthed from an imagination formed to escape or confront her fears in real life?

What a great tale and, more vividly, what amazing special effects, bringing life to magnificent creatures and settings you’ve never before seen or imagined.

In a prelude on the DVD for The Asphalt Jungle, director John Huston sums up his characters in a way that could descibe those in some of the better noir (or really even in film overall): bad people with whom an audience can still sympathize.

On one hand, there are noir characters like Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, despicable from the get-go. The pleasure arises from them sinking deeper into trouble: Oh they’ll get their comeuppance. But in Jungle the criminals, while unsavory as they plan and carry out a jewel hesit, carry the problems and desires of actual people: the safecracker has a young child and a worried wife, the muscle (played by Sterling Hayden with a terrible Southern accent that comes and goes) longs for the day he can return to his childhood Kentucky home to see his family and his horses again, and Dr. Riedenschneider, the brains of the operation, has an older man’s penchant for fine cigars and the company of pretty young women. They rob a jewelry store and everything that can go wrong does, from an accidental fatal shooting to a double cross resulting in more death. (The film’s also notable for including perhaps the first standout role of Marilyn Monroe, who stands out so radiantly and breathily among the rouge’s gallery that she’s nearly miscast.)

Why aren’t there more well-rounded bad guys like those in The Asphalt Jungle? Usually the bad guy is so bad the audience’s only currency in him is the clever way in which he’ll be dispatched by the hero. Do we really like our good and evil so clean cut? Is sympathy harder to write into a character brimming with flaws?

It seems I’ve only ever seen Judi Dench in her roles as a matron beyond reproach or royalty, as proper and as classically British as a bone China cup of tea at 3 p.m., so I was refreshed and alarmed to find her in Notes on a Scandal as Barbara, a literate, bitter loner with a pruny face and harsh lipstick. By day, she teaches history to a public school class of motley teens she hates. At night, she records her thoughts in a diary, stickering the pages with tiny foil silver and gold stars.

A lot of space and stars get dedicated to Sheba (Cate Blanchett), the school’s pretty young new art teacher, as Barbara becomes intrigued, taking the wispy, ineffective woman under her wing by describing herself as both mother superior and battle axe. After spotting Sheba shagging a young student in the school studio after hours, Barbara realizes she can blackmail her way into a deeper relationship. “You must inform me of everything,” she orders Sheba one night over drinks, her creeping lust barely suppressed. After Sheba bemoans how she’s compromised her marriage, family and job, Barbara reassures her, “Oh, you poor thing. I want to help you,” which is so decidedly untrue it makes the audience cringe. Once Barbara has confirmation of the affair (and later that it has continued in secret after Sheba swore she’d end it), Barbara worms herself deeper into the poor girl’s life and records more creepiness in her diary (“I always knew we’d be friends.”).

In short: deserved nominations for best screenplay and supporting actress for Blanchett. And an even better-deserved best actress nomination for Dench. Will she win the real deal since taking home best supporting actress for her piffle of a role in Shakespeare in Love? Will she square off against Helen Mirren, star of critic-favorite The Queen, in a battle of the Brits? Yes, I think so.

I did feel unsatisfied by the ending but since I can’t think of a better way the lose ends could have been tied, it’ll have to do for now.

About the score: Have I mentioned how much I hate Philip Glass? His composition for Notes on a Scandal is as blatant as most of his work, flush with strings and brass that alternately noodle and swell, steamrolling what’s onscreen instead of complementing or suggesting it, as a good score should. It’s as if every moment of action is a cliffhanger. A quarter of the way into the film, I was exasperated. I wanted to grab the metaphorical sledgehammer of a score and knock Glass in his literal nutsack with it.

A philosophical French sci-fi film noir inspired by a Paul Éluard poem? Now we’re talking. With a vision strange and new, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville conjures a not-too-distant future despite taking place in black-and-white on the rain-dampened streets and in the mod buildings of mid-’60s Paris with minimal dressing.

Weren’t elements of this plot swiped for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation? A omniscient computer named Alpha 60, like a digital Big Brother, controls the city’s pill-popping technocratic inhabitants and speaks to them in French with a electronically processed voice that sounds like a belching toad or a deeper version of Boussh. There are few outbursts in Alphaville because there is no memory of the past or hope for the future, and those who behave illogically are condemned to death, as are those who use forbidden words, such as love, why or conscience; revised dictionaries are issued daily so the populace can keep up. The executions are carried out as entertainment at an indoor Olympic swimming pool. The free spirits are lined up along the edge and allowed some final words, which they usually reserve to rally against their hive mind oppressor, then they’re shot. After they topple dead into the pool, a team of synchronized swimmers leap in and perform a routine. Then the audience applauds.

A secret agent by the name of Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is dispatched to Alphaville and soon sets out on a mission to bring down Alpha 60. Donned in fedora and trenchcoat, he moves about the city under the guise of a newspaper reporter, packing a 35mm Agfa and a revolver, both of which he fires often and with little notice. A classic film noir hero, he’s a hard-bitten chain smoker with a face as chiseled and weathered as Robert Stack’s.

Despite his impassiveness, he has more emotion than anyone else in the city, even more so after he meets Natasha (Anna Karina), a pretty confidante and guide. Alpha 60 is intrigued and has Lemmy brought in for questioning. It begins as boilerplate: what’s your name, where were you born, how old are you. Sensing a higher intelligence, Alpha 60 moves to philosophical abstraction:

Alpha 60:

Do you know what illuminates the night?

Lemmy:

Poetry.

Alpha 60:

What is your religion?

Lemmy:

I believe in the inspirations of conscience.

Alpha 60:

Do you make any distinction between the mysterious principles of knowledge and those of love?

Lemmy:

In my opinion, in love there is no mystery.

With that last answer especially, Alpha 60 is convinced Lemmy is lying and a bad influence. Realizing he’s worn out his welcome, our hero guns his way out with little resistance, killing the computer’s inventor/controller for good measure. The hold on its collective mind severed, Alphaville’s populace staggers around dumbfounded; most of them, we’re told, die eventually. Lemmy steals a car and hustles Natasha inside. As they speed off back to the outlands, he warns her not to look back and she says for the first time, “I love you.” Awww.

Although I can see how you could disparage Alphaville as oh so very French with its pointed artiness and meandering musing, I found it engrossing and entertaining enough.

When I first saw Superman II as a kid, it bothered me the way Zod, Ursa and Non so callously killed those astronauts on the moon. That they were allowed to drift off into space, dead or nearly so, was especially disturbing to me.

Now what startles me, rewatching the movie for the first time in years, is to learn Richard Lester, the guy who directed A Hard Day’s Night, directed the reshoots for this troubled sequel and added most of the annoying camp. I also learned that, like the original, Superman II was written by Godfather author Mario Puzo. That’s weird.

Finally, I noticed that the camera Lois uses at Niagara Falls is a late-’70s OneStep Polaroid Land Camera with rainbow “racing stripe,” a model I own as part of my Polaroid collection.

[See here and here for the two other entries in the Kid Fears series.]

I’d rather have seen Spike Lee’s biopic on James Brown, but because that directorial decision was made as the Godfather’s body cooled in its solid-gold coffin and production won’t start at least until next year, I settled for Dreamgirls, a fictional biopic of the Supremes.

Like that famously popular girl-group, the Dreamgirls change in sound and personnel as they turn successful. The original lead is Effie White, the strong girl with the belt-out voice, played by popular American Idol karaoke participant Jennifer Hudson. At my screening, her centerpiece songs were lavished with heart-swollen applause by the audience. It’s deserved, I think. Because I’m writing this later than the datestamp implies, I can tell you that Hudson has since won a Golden Globe for her role, but even had I not known that, I’d have predicted an Oscar nomination.

Effie’s got soul but Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Jamie Foxx), the group’s wolf-eyed manager, wants the top-40. He entangles himself in backhanded business tactics of payola and mafia funding to build his empire. Most egregiously, he fires the superior Effie and promotes Deena (Beyoncé Knowles) and her mass-appeal voice to lead, echoing what happened in reality with Diana Ross.

It’s a strange meta-commentary on the continued homogenization of pop music that the bland Beyoncé, a real life singing sensation, is promoted as a radio-friendly unit shifter. And although the audience knows this from the get-go, Deena is slow. With spite, Cutis reveals to her late in the film that he’s been using her for her voice, which he admits isn’t that great anyway; she’s the only one, onscreen and off, who’s shocked.

The funniest run in the movie also has to do with the commercial realities of pop music, showing how white singers appropriated songs by black musicians, cranked out watery blue-eyed versions and propelled themselves up the pop charts. Curtis makes the point that “Hound Dog” wasn’t originally by Elvis, it was by “Big Mama” Thorton, a large, growling black woman, and as such, considered a “race record” with limited appeal. The cracker with the swivel hips and curled lip turned that around and set the standard for rock musicians to pilfer the riches of their R&B forbearers.

As James "Thunder" Early, a James Brown-Little Richard hybrid for whom the Dreamgirls sing backup until they eclipse him in fame, Eddie Murphy injects the film with a randy comic zip that makes his downfall even sadder. (Like Hudson, Murphy also won a Golden Globe and there may be an Oscar waiting for him as well.) He begins as a king of chitlin circuit but as the market shifts, finds himself marginalized. He turns to drugs and is relegated to croon showtunes on the Vegas circuit. With ants in his pants one fateful night, he bursts of out his new straight-laced, white-friendly persona into a shouting soulful stomp, gets down and gets funky with his horn section, then drops trou on live TV. He shocks the audience and he’s fired on the spot for breaking character.

Featuring as many songs as Dreamgirls does, most are forgettable and produced (ironically?) in the bland style the film protests. And as much as I tried to suppress my prejudices, the very idea of musicals still bothers me—that people will exchange dialogue then burst into perfectly synchonized song without skipping a beat. Dreamgirls also puts some couplets of dialogue to song (usually Effie’s), a more unnerving tactic than head-on musical numbers.

Finally, I must say that if the costume and/or makeup designs for this flick don’t get Oscar nominations, there is no justice in this world. Both chart a perfect course from the cake-frosting colors and frills of the 50s, to the slim, mod styling of 60s to the flared and sequined ’70s. The getups depict the advance of years better than any nudge of prop or dialogue could. The parade of couture progresses seamlessly, save those tight red vinyl wrap-dresses from the ’60s that make the plump Hudson resemble a really comfy La-Z-Boy.

Tears of the Black Tiger was a spur of the moment choice. Of Film Forum’s three now-showing movies, I liked its stills, poster and capsule quotes best. My challenge was that this may have been the first Thai film I’ve seen, so I wondered how much of it was conventional for Thai film and how much of it was merely weird, because the whole thing was pretty weird.

Most every shot and many plot elements are straight from Sergio Leone’s westerns except taking place in present-day Thailand. Then everything’s all hopped up in saturated Technicolor and heavily stylized violence, like exaggerated spurts of food-coloring-red blood and creatively unlikely deaths, swiped from Tarantino or from the grindhouse slasher flicks he stole them from. So not only do you get things like standoffs with Leone-style crosscut closeups of the gunslingers’ eyes and hands hovering near their holstered guns, you get contemporary slow-mo follow-the-bullet shots or shots that manically follow the bullet’s path as it pings off various objects before dispatching a bad guy in a lively fashion.

The plot’s mere icing on the pineapple upside-down cake: the female lead, Stella Malucchi, is sought after by her sweetheart since childhood (Chartchai Ngamsan, the Black Tiger of the title) who has since folded himself into the roving band of renegades that killed his father. Also vying for her affections is her new fiancée, the ambitious police captain (Arawat Ruangvuth) who’s closing in on the Black Tiger gang. Malucchi spends her screentime weeping silent, theatrical tears at her window or lying on her bed in gauzy closeups copped from nameless B&W romances of the ’40s. She’s taken a page from that era’s Elizabeth Taylor playbook of luxuriant lazing and precision eyebrow maintenance.

When a character laughs in Tears of the Black Tiger, it’s usually a guy and it’s always a laugh forcibly expelled from deep in the chest and sounding exactly as it’s written (“Ha ha ha!”), which made the audience laugh, but not because what the character was laughing at was funny. We also laughed at the campy ridiculousness of the acting, the hammy line readings, the blatant Once Upon a Time in the West ripoffs, and the rubbery mugging and worst-ever pencil moustache of the Black Tiger’s sidekick/eventual turncoat. I grumbled about the score, which was lively and appropriate enough, though it sounded like video game music, like the producers couldn’t afford an orchestra, so they settled for a Korg.

I may be disappointed to later learn not all Thai movies are this bendy and unexpected, so I’ll savor it as memory permits.

Fandango, which I use to reserve tickets for many of the mass-market movies I see, recently added a feature that remembers the theaters you frequent, then provides a quick link to their showtimes. Strange that the character should sort-of resemble me, with the big lips and chin, and messy blonde hair.

He looks even more similar if I Photoshop my glasses onto him.

Broken Flowers is a loose collection of long, nearly motionless takes, awkward silences, deadpan dialogue, a great soundtrack and no resolution. I liked it, but I like director Jim Jarmusch’s style. He’s not for everyone.

The film stars Bill Murray, still in his ruminative, sad-sack phase, taking a road-trip he’s goaded into by his friend and next-door neighbor, Jeffrey Wright. Murray aims to glean whether one of his four ex-flames could have written him an anonymous letter on pink stationary that alludes to a son he was responsible for producing a few decades back. He looks for clues during his visits but mainly learns how the women, and by extension, himself, have grown into their lives over the years.

A mesmerizing extra on the DVD is a stitched-together mini-movie consisting of a second of footage of the slate getting clapped for every shot in the movie. Not every scene, every shot. It’s like a flipbook version of the whole film.

Ah, to be young and Warren Beatty in mid-’70s Los Angeles. His character in Shampoo, a hairdresser who dreams of one day opening his own salon, alternately coifs and beds the decade’s leading ladies, including Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie and Princess Leia.

What a handsome rake he was. If you attempted to recreate his high-volume hairstyle today, now-bannned emissions from the cases of Aqua Net alone would require a team of short-sleeved nerds from ILM to tease a googol-haired digital ’do via supercomputer. His frilly white Keith Richards blouse-shirts and turquoise rings and bangles are also beautiful, while his bluejeans appear to have been decoupaged directly to his legs and pelvis.

After flimsy excuses and broken promises but plenty of casual pre-AIDS sex, Warren is caught in flagrante delicto by girlfriend Goldie and the man whose mistress he’s schtupping. Goldie hurls a lawnchair through the poolhouse window in disgust. But Warren hasn’t learned much from his escapades other than his heart is temporarily broken and he won’t be getting the loan for his salon from that guy after all. As he observes early in the film, “After a while, women get to be an occupational hazard.”

Groggy and leaden from New Year’s alcohol and festivities, I guessed Alfonso Cuarón’s new dystopian-future film Children of Men would match my mood this drizzly, foggy evening and I was right.

The plot is simple: a perpetually haggard Clive Owen protects an expectant mother (the somewhat wooden Claire-Hope Ashitey) and later her newborn daughter, too, in a near distant future. The world has fallen except for Great Britain, now a police state taken to caging refugees and shipping them to internment camps. Also there’s no one alive under 18 and women are unable to get pregnant, which makes Clive’s mission crucial, apparently.

Everything in the movie’s world existed vaguely to me because there’s little back-story (or if there was, I missed it), leaving me to wonder: What’s the deal with the children? What are Clive’s motivations? (We learn later he and his now ex-wife (a robotic Julianne Moore) lost a child, yet get no insight from Clive other than a furrowed brow.) What is this possibly nonexistent Human Project to which Clive is hustling the mother and child?

Even not knowing these details, the film’s more style over substance, free from the obvious philosophical debates of dystopian sci-fi fare like Gattaca. But what fine style it is. Cuarón’s future vision matches much of the present with overcast skies, graffiti-scrawled buildings and streets strewn with garbage. There’s guerilla warfare, burning piles of diseased livestock, signs urging the public to report suspicious activity and glimpsed images that quote those of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The cars even resemble shitkickers from the ’90s with added plastic fins and retrofitted digital display screens inside. The most futuristic elements are the omnipresent billboards and TV screens that loop jingoistic PSAs, grim news headlines and commercials for plastic surgery, mood-altering drugs and, of course, the Gap.

As these elements pile up, Children of Men clarifies as a straightforward chase movie taking place in a fever dream of the present. There are a few expertly cut sequences involving humorously small but crucial physical impediments to Clive & Co. that nearly end their escape as the bad guys advance haltingly in the background. It’s like a nightmare of being pursued by something evil but only being able to move forward as if walking in high water. And at the conclusion, there’s a firefight that matches the intensity and body count of the battle scenes from Saving Private Ryan. Riveting! Bad times for Children of Men’s characters means good times for the audience.

Fortress of Solitude:

Cone of Silence:

Agony Booth:

My favorite Christmas movie fills me with cheer and testosterone.

There’s so little emotion in The Holiday, it’s criminal to bill it as a romantic comedy. It’s a movie written by robots, for robots, with its glacial pacing and the empty sentiment of Avon’s holiday catalog. Much of the dialogue sounds straight-from-a-script, not how people actually talk; if I concentrated, I could smell the stale sweat and rotisserie chicken of the writers’ room.

Things begin badly by taking forever to unfold the premise, which the audience already knows from the trailer. Kate Winslet, a writer for London’s Daily Telegraph wedding pages, and Cameron Diaz, a movie-trailer editor, are just exiting painful relationships with their caddish boyfriends. They need a vacation! For two weeks, they switch houses, initiating the deal by instant-messaging one another as they read aloud exactly what they type. Hot dog if they don’t find romance in their fish-out-of-water environments.

Kate, implausibly giddy over Los Angeles and the bland but spacious house of Cameron, first befriends an ancient screenwriter who wanders the neighborhood with his walker. He imparts crusty meta-wisdom to her, explaining what a meet cute is and how she needs to be the leading lady of her own life, not the “best friend” character. Too much time later she ends up with Jack Black, who looks as if he may explode under the repression of his mugging. He’s just barely able to keep his trademark smirk and eyebrow cock in check, illustrating he should stick with the manic-sarcastic characters on which he’s built his fortune.

Meanwhile, Cameron christens Kate’s fairytale country cottage by shagging Jude Law, the mere sight of whom caused several women in the audience to launch into estrus. Undeniably smooth and British, he comes off to Cameron as a player, until his terrible secret is revealed: he’s a widower with two young daughters, each as sweet as a can of frosting crammed into a ten-pound bag of extra fine cane sugar. Jude and Cameron spend most of their time together glancing at one another with longing, then they shag some more.

Would you be surprised to learn this tale ends with everyone celebrating New Year’s by hugging, dancing and gamboling ’round the hearth as the camera cranes away?

We drove back to Cleveland from Thanksgiving at Grandma’s and lazed around in the typical post-gorging stupor. We watched the ABC Movie of the Week, Shrek 2, which I don’t think any of us had previously seen. It was laugh-out-loud funny for all of us. Definitely worth a rental if you haven’t seen it.

I liked Adaptation and thought I would have liked Stranger Than Fiction more than I did.

Will Ferrell is O.K. as an anal IRS agent who realizes he’s a doomed character in a novel being written by a frazzled and pasty Emma Thompson. Her narrative voiceovers, heard only by Ferrell and the film’s audience, run too long for a device that isn’t that funny to begin with. To drive home the metafiction, computer-generated graphics occasionally pop-up and hover superimposed over the action to show, for example, the steps Ferrell counts to his bus stop and the number of strokes he makes when brushing his teeth.

If you’re expecting Ferrell to act like he does in any of his other movies to date, you’ll be disappointed here with a Serious Role that he doesn’t make his own. Someone more well-versed in traditional romantic comedies like Tom Hanks or even Adam Sandler could have been substituted with little difference. And like Jim Carrey circa The Truman Show, Ferrell has added baggage in an audience expecting him to be funny when he’s performing his Serious Role. Trouble is brewing when a movie starring Will Ferrell expects to generate more laughs from costars such as Emma Thompson

His love interest, introduced in perhaps the first-ever Meet Cute during a tax audit, is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal as a sweet firebrand who owns and runs a hipster bakery/coffehouse. I am moved by law to refer to her as “impish” and add her to my often-shifting list of Top-Three Hottest Lady Actors¹.

He woos her with his dopey seriousness and love of her fresh-baked cookies, but what seals the deal is his heartfelt serenade with Wreckless Eric’s song “Whole Wide World”, which he plays for her on her acoustic guitar. She’s so moved, she jumps him right there on the couch for a vigorous makeout session, without even pausing to think that there is no way an anal IRS agent would have ever picked Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” as the first and only song he learns to play on guitar, despite the fact it’s a brilliant two-cord whiff of punk/new-wave magic.

The whole reason he takes up guitar is because Dustin Hoffman, a natty community college prof just like the one Robin Williams played in Good Will Hunting, inspires him to change the direction of his stale life and foil his untimely demise with a bit of the old carpe diem and carpe puella. That all works brilliantly for characters in movies with messages shopworn as these.

¹ Naomi Watts and Kate Winslet, because I know you were wondering. [back]

Like the U.S., South Korea is a country fretting over a sizeable baby boomer population fast becoming senior citizens. Solution? Why, robots!

According to a UPI article yesterday from The Korea Times, scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology are developing a voice-recognition robot, dubbed H-Robot 1.0, that will care for the elderly. When it’s completed circa 2013, it will be able to monitor heart rate and blood pressure, order takeout food, clean the house and “summon help in an emergency when its owner falls to floor and doesn’t get up,” according to researcher Kim Mun-Sang, just like a LifeCall device on wheels.

Meanwhile, Samsung recently finished developing a robot that can help out the booming Korean population by rubbing some of it out. Known as the Samsung Techwin SGR-A1, it can autonomously track humans and fire an automatic weapon at them. According to Robots.net, the robot sentries will be deployed next year along the DMZ between North and South Korea, replacing 650,000 South Korean troops.

Samsung’s spec page includes the rendering shown above and lists all sorts of juicy features, such as “laser range finder,” “Intruder recognition and identification using xoom-in [sic],” even a “weapon antitheft device,” which I imagine sounds like one of those annoying repeating-pattern car alarms.

Jeez, didn’t mankind learn anything from the ED-209 and the SAINT? The nerds at Samsung apparently at least Nexflixed Short Circuit because they’ve picked up the SAINT’s spindly wickedness as well as the Evil Glowing Red Eye that’s been a hallmark of evil computers and robots for years.

When I mentioned to my coworkers that for Andie’s movie-character costume party tonight, I was dressing as mailroom clerk Norville Barnes, The Hudsucker Proxy protagonist played by Tim Robbins, I was met with responses ranging from “No one will know who that is!” to “What?” But of course everyone at the party got the reference, from “I’ve seen that movie, like, five times,” to “That’s the one where the guy jumps out the window, right? And Paul Newman’s in it?”

And that’s why these people and I are friends.

Here are some photos of Tim and myself dressed as Norville.

Costume Ingredients

• shop apron. The apron in the movie is dark gray but a dark blue denim one was the closest I could find. I was thinking of sewing buttons to the top corners like Tim’s, but I can’t sew. Plus, who cares. I bought it from a supplier in California called PK Safety Supply via Amazon.com for a mere $3.50. That’s about what it’s worth: the edges frayed and curled after I laundered it. Fortunately, the shoddy stitching of the breast pocket made it easy to remove for purposes of ironing-on the Hudsucker Industries logo using...
• Avery Ink Jet Dark T-Shirt Transfers. A pack of five iron-on sheets for $14.99 at Staples. I learned this about iron-on transfers: for dark fabrics, definitely use the “dark T-shirt” variety, not the standard “white T-shirt” variety, which will transfer barely visible to a fabric like denim. And all iron-on sheets are meant for transferring solid blocks or blobs of graphics, not detailed things like logotypes. In other words, instead of directly transferring the background-less type, I had to print the white letters on a square colored an approximate denim-blue. It turned out O.K. for the low-light environment of a typical party. I built the logo in FreeHand, opting for solid type instead of the inline type used for the “Hudsucker Industries” part of the logo. The internet identified that typeface as the anachronistic Bodega Sans (Bodega Sans Oldstyle for the S’s) and the design posse at work helped me approximate the typeface used for the logo tagline, “The Future Is Now,” as Harlow Solid.
• brown shoes. These were “Walk-Overs” from George E. Keith Co., pride of Brockton and donated a few years back by my previous boss in Ohio.
• dress shirt. I used an old J. Crew pinstriped variety I’d been planning to donate to Goodwill.
• bow tie. I couldn’t find a mostly solid-colored maroon one so I purchased a ’50s-vintage blue and silver rayon and acetate Botany clip-on. I got this at The Family Jewels, one of those funky thrift shops in Chelsea I hesitate entering because it’s never clear whether they carry any clothing for guys. I’m happy to say they have a handsome collection of bow ties piled into a velvet top hat resting atop a counter in the back corner. It cost $26, which I didn’t mind because I like supporting local shops like this. Yet it pained me to see the original 1950s price-tag still attached: $1.
• visor. Norville wears one in a few scenes, such as when he’s sorting mail. I bought a sporty denim model from Conway on the north side of W. 34th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a Garment District stretch of intense clothing cheapness. $2.99, although I had to wait in line 10 minutes.
• trousers. I got a pair of tan Claiborne cotton dress pants in my waist size but cut “long” for hiking up above my waist ’50s style for $4.99 at the Goodwill on W. 181st Street, purchased that day I was called Papi.
• suspenders. I had a tough time finding these, unless my problem was that I wasn’t looking in enough geezer shops. I ended up getting a burgundy clip-on Y-back pair online from JCPenney for $14.99.
• a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. In the film, Norville keeps a folded up piece of paper with him and at a moment’s notice will unfold it for display, explaining, “You know...For kids!” No one knows what the hell he’s talking about and then he goes and invents the toy based on his idea, the Hula Hoop, saving Hudsucker Industries from financial ruin while getting himself and his costume promoted from shop apron to tailored suits.

It’s another exciting video quiz featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 and 2/3 New York City subway lines! Similar to the previous subway signage quiz, each image below is from a movie and it’s your duty to determine which. You’ll have to trust me that the symbols of the 1/2/3/9 are just visible through the falling snow in the upper-left corner of the first screencap and that the out-of-focus entrance sign in the background of the second screencap reads “Franklin St. Station.”

That the characters of Running with Scissors are based on those of Augusten Burroughs’ actual immediate and extended family is shocking. What a fucked up childhood this kid had.

His father’s an alcoholic (played to sodden perfection by Alec Baldwin). His mother Deirdre (Annette Bening, angling for an award of some sort) fancies herself a poet destined for fame. Instead she sinks into drug-addled madness and pawns off her son to her possibly insane shrink (the excellent Brian Cox) and his wacky family. Running with Scissors is creepy and slow with manic bursts of energy and gallows humor (and a great ’70s soundtrack); the ending feels tacked on, but there are some fine performance burried here.

I suppose there are worse movies to fall asleep to than Contempt, which features Brigitte Bardot naked. Or was that just a dream? Hmm.

Tonight at the Film Forum I saw Robert Altman’s California Split, a great movie about gambling, a not-bad buddy movie and one full of supersaturated stylings from 1974 Los Angeles.

George Segal ostensibly has a job writing for a magazine but he only ever seems to argue on the phone with his bookie or sneak out of his office to the track. He’s a bundle of nervous energy with a home and a job, but not for much longer as he sinks deep in debt. At last he pawns his typewriter and car, skipping town to Reno on a Greyhound with Elliott Gould for a last chance at the big score.

Gould, with his relaxed gait and charmingly goofy long face, cracks wise as he drifts through life gambling, his only ambition to wonder where he might gamble next. He wears a series of button-down shirts with collars wide enough to generate aerodynamic force and with designs so explosively hideous, I became mesmerized, then desensitized, then convinced that they looked cool.

As the movie opens, the two meet and become friends while scamming suckers at cards and as it closes they've gone their separate ways after counting their chips. In between there’s little plot and a lot of odds-beating. They play poker, blackjack, craps and roulette. They gamble on basketball, boxing and horseracing. After many beers at a dive bar one night, they even bet on which of them can name all Seven Dwarfs and neither gets further than three valid dwarves and Dumbo. Gould later disappears, then shows up unexpectedly days later at Segal’s house wearing a giant sombrero and bursting with tales of Tijuana track dog racing.

Altman’s trademark everyone-talking-simultaneously¹ is the low, constant current that powers the film and at points, it’s like when you’re in the middle of a busy party or family gathering, cocooned in the warmth of friends and conversation. There’s a great breakfast scene taking place the morning after Segal and Gould get jacked for their cash. They crash at the home of friends, two heart-of-gold hookers (Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles), nurse their bruised flanks with a dubious remedy of warm shaving cream, then sit down to breakfast on sugar cereal. Clad in a bathrobe, Gould cracks open a can of Budweiser to complement his bowl of Lucky Charms. They’ve just lost their money and you can sense their weariness, but everyone at the table is joking and talking and eating at once, and, dammit, that’s a breakfast you want to be in on.

With its grittiness, wavering camaraderie, bursts of violence, black humor and desperation, this film is like Trainspotting, the thrill of the bet substituting for smack.

¹ There was a wonderful meta-moment during the film when a couple seated a few rows in front of me got so caught up in the constant overlapping conversation onscreen that they began talking themselves, apparently thinking it would blend in naturally. The angry coot sitting in front of me shouted, “COULD YOU PLEASE TAKE YOUR CONVERSATION OUTSIDE. THANK YOU.” The couple said nothing further but finished their large bag of popcorn slowly, chewing very, very loudly. [back]

Jessica Simpson looks weird. It’s like her head was squashed in a vise, spreading her eyes and mouth to nonstandard widths. And her breasts, at least in Employee of the Month, which I saw tonight, are unnaturally spherical and thrust upwards, just sitting there like two lead shot on a salver. Then there’s her skin, which has the peachy-orange hue of Barbie plastic.

Her personality is pleasant enough, and she’s of course the love interest in the film, competed for by two buffoonish employees of a Sam’s Club-like warehouse store in a race to prove their worth by winning Employee of the Month. Their good deeds are rewarded by management with a gold star stuck to a chart in the break-room and when scruffy underdog Dane Cook got his first star, our group lead the theater in a round of applause over this ridiculous formulaic plot development.

There are a few laughs here and there, some fun physical comedy of people getting injured and a cool clubhouse where Dane and his friends drink and play cards. It’s hidden way up in a hollow among the stacked, cube-like pallets, accessible only by forklift.

Afterwards, Jimi, The Man and I headed to the Film Center Cafe to see if it had reopened from its renovations. It has and now it’s annoyingly fancy, with a DJ booth and resulting DJ-style music, too-bright lighting and waitresses dressed like those girls in that Robert Palmer video. Gone is the dim atmosphere and the large sturdy tables good for groups. Our sever messed up the order and the food was only O.K. Worst for me, Guinness has been taken off the drink menu.

As in most Woody Allen films, those of young director Michel Gondry, though much fewer in number, are shaping up to feature protagonists that stunt-double for the director’s own arrested development. Although for Gondry, these emotions are less along the lines of self-loathing and angst, and more along the lines of repressed emotion. Woody Allen, for instance, seems slightly less likely to feature a dream sequence in which the surrogate-protagonist smacks-down his boss with a pair of giant foam hands worn like mittens¹.

Consisting mostly of dreams, Gondry’s new film, The Science of Sleep, excels during these flights of fancy. An artist frustrated with his menial job at a calendar printhouse, Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) has these dreams of telling off his coworkers, shagging the moderately foxy receptionist and wreaking havoc on Paris, which he levels and rebuilds from cardboard with a sweep of his arm. Gondry fashions the film’s dream-sequence props and stop-motion animation from an explosion of found objects and Kindergarten art supplies—cardboard boxes and tubes, egg cartons, paint, yarn, cotton gauze, cellophane and tinsel. These childlike elements fit the story’s whimsical mood snugly where CGI just wouldn’t do.

As Stéphane takes more notice of his next-door neighbor, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), she becomes a highlight of the dreams. There they’re together, but in reality he’s an emotionally stunted boy who makes clumsy or unwelcome passes at her in the hallway and still sleeps on bedsheets printed with cartoon cars. Their initial meeting is especially fun as he helps her move in to the apartment across the way and they’re earnest yet each a tad too self-consciously nonchalant. Soon, he’s involved himself with her arts-and-crafts projects and bestows his crazy handmade inventions on her, perhaps in his dreams, perhaps not. These include genuine 3D glasses, a one-second time machine featuring a Polaroid flashcube, a mind-reading device fashioned from two bicycle helmets connected by a string, and an animatronic felt pony that later turns real.

Trouble is, Stéphanie isn’t particularly interested in Stéphane as any more than a friend. He soldiers on and tries to win her over with methods increasingly realistic in his dreams but increasingly desperate in real life. Both he and the audience have more trouble telling the two apart, and by the un-Hollywood ending, he’s regressed in emotion to a taunting child, pouting over what he can’t have. What a happy, sad and confusing film.

¹ O.K., so maybe Woody would have done this circa Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex..., which featured a breast the size of a small house rolling down a hill and Woody himself dressed up as a sperm, but those days are long gone. [back]

As a handsome parting gift from our Roman holiday, I received in the mail today a package from my sister in Ireland, a DVD of perhaps my favorite Jim Jarmusch film, Night on Earth.

In Rome, we’d scoured a few record chains for the movie, which is strangely available most everywhere else in the world but the U.S. Unfortunately, the copies I located there were hardwired with Italian subtitles during the non-English segments, so I passed. The version my sister sent me she purchased in Ireland, so it’s in English and, in a happy coincidence, has no regional lockout, which means I can watch it without issue on my PowerBook.

Like much of Jarmusch’s work, Night on Earth is slow, surface-simple and reflective. It’s comprised of five independent mini-movies about taxi drivers and their fares in five world cities over the course of the same night. The dialogue of each segment is in the country’s native language and unfolds like a one-act play, volleys of conversation or monologue about life in general, salted with Jarmusch’s strange humor and occasional bursts of cursing. The story in each of the five cities is a life lesson that could be summarized something like this:

1. Los Angeles segment: Know what you want and go after it. But keep in mind you may not get it.
2. New York segment: ”There are eight million stories in New York City. This is one of them.“
3. Paris segment: Sight may be the least reliable sense.
4. Rome segment: For the love of all that is holy, do not get into a cab driven by Roberto Benigni¹.
5. Helsinki segment: Someone always has it worse than you.

All this, plus a soundtrack by Tom Waits. You cannot go wrong with Night on Earth. Here’s hoping Jarmusch will get the thing on DVD in the states officially to make an honest man of me (and to give me a bonus disc of extras, like he did with the bang-up Criterion Collection edition of Down By Law).

Maybe he’s embarrassed with the poor focus in many of the scenes of Night on Earth, which are obvious on the DVD transfer but which I hadn’t noticed on the crappy VHS copies of the movie I’d seen previously. I’d have to imagine this is a result of shooting most every scene in an actual moving car and not resorting to staged or effects-driven trickery. As Jarmusch stressed in a 1999 interview with Geoff Andrew of The Guardian, “Shooting in a car is really, really difficult and anyone who has made a film in a car interior will tell you, ’Don’t ever do that again.’”

¹ Incidentally, Jarmusch directed Benigni in his break-out American film role, Down by Law, in which the hyperactive Italian had not only the best lines but one that sums up Jarmusch’s oeuvre: “It is a sad and beautiful world.” [back]

Kelly, a friend who’s a true old-time movie buff, says that the critics with their lists always rank The General as the best Buster Keaton film, but she made a good argument for Sherlock Jr. being not only funnier but more accessible for viewers unfamiliar with silent film. (Although if you savor stunts involving trains, The General should be your pick.)

If memory serves, I don’t even think I’d seen a movie made pre-1937 before tonight when I saw Sherlock Jr. I hang my head in shame, for I once considered myself a movie buff. Now that the whole era of silent film has been re-emphasized to me, I’ll have to preface that claim with, “but talkies are my specialty.”

I’ve also never seen any Chaplin, the more famous and beloved silent star, but from what I’ve read and from what I saw tonight, Keaton is my man, and not just because of that impassive face. Here’s Roger Ebert, writing for his Great Movies Series about Keaton:

His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes after it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornadoes, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.

As you may have guessed, Film Forum is in the midst of a Keaton retrospective and right off here’s one of several reasons why that place kicks ass: the film tonight was scored live by a pianist sitting off to the side of the screen, just at it was in the ’20s when the movie was first released.

The plot is simple: Keaton and Ward Crane are rivals for “the girl.” Crane steals her father’s pocketwatch and Keaton is blamed. Back at his job as a projectionist, he dreams himself and everyone else in his life into the movie that’s playing. Suddenly he’s a gallant detective on the case of some stolen pearls while avoiding death traps as readily as Inspector Clouseau.

The stunts are mind blowing. You sit watching, astounded and laughing, then wonder how the hell he pulled it off without killing himself, like in the scene where he’s almost hit by a speeding train as he rides down the street and across the tracks on the handlebars of a motorcycle. He falls constantly, including one of the best ever banana-peel slips, where he somehow seems to land on the side of his face. Kelly told us of watching another Keaton film on DVD, mesmerized as she paused and frame-advanced a scene where he flips himself head over heels while holding a cup of coffee, lands and hasn’t spilt a drop.

But the minor stunts, the more slapstick physical comedy in Sherlock Jr., are what sealed the deal for us. My favorite scene has Keaton shadowing a suspect in his case, walking in perfect synch, and often into trouble, as he trails the guy. Katie and Megan, who I saw the movie with, enjoyed the bit where Keaton escapes a gang of toughs by leaping through a window directly into a dress. Disguised as a woman, he shuffles off in plain sight as the goons scratch their heads over where he went.

What this movie and others by Keaton inspired or prefigured must be immense. At the least it includes the whole Wizard of Oz-style dream sequence before that film made it famous; surely one of the first instances of a film-within-a-film; the primitive but effective special effect of Buster’s dream-self leaving his sleeping body; and most importantly, stunts and physical comedy borrowed or ripped off outright for everything from Warner Bros. cartoon shorts to the films of Jackie Chan.

I caught The Illusionist tonight at the Angelika Film Center and it’s not bad. It really captures a time and a mood, with sepia tones and vignetting in its depiction of turn-of-the-century Vienna, where Edward Norton plays a stage magician of the mysterious, bearded type.

I believe in magic. Or at least I used to. When I was a lad, I bought the double-sided coin, the trick deck, the false thumbtip and all that other Archie McPhee stuff, then put on shows for family members. At one point, I even had the Fisher-Price Magic Kit, or whatever it was called. But I don’t think magic translates well to the movies; CGI and the death of whimsy killed it. More immediately, consider that movies are already visual illusion and deception. Then try to depict visual illusion and deception within that illusion and deception and things get unbelievable in a rush.

The audience, in both the film and the theater, gets to see a lot of this cold CGI trickery while learning little of Norton’s motivations or backstory, leaving his characterization as transparent as the spirits he conjures. Same with Paul Giamatti, who plays the town’s chief police inspector, a likeable, ramrod straight, no-nonsense fellow with a loud, clear and confident voice; in other words, all elements the exact opposite of most every recent role Giamatti’s played, which to me demonstrates his fine versatility as an actor.

He’s intent on exposing any tomfoolery in Norton’s act, but things get complicated by a chance meeting between the magician and his childhood sweetheart, Sophie (Jessica Biel), who’s now arranged to be married to a tyrannical prince (Rufus Sewell, from one of the best sci-fi flicks of the ’90s, Dark City). There’s a murder, a mystery, and more magic before a Shyamalanesque ending (or is that Fletcheresque)?) where the misdirection behind the whole second half of the film is explained away in a dialogue-less montage of about 15 seconds. It has Giamatti practically smacking himself in the forehead as the train leaves the station.

Continuing my series of reviewing movies or TV shows with bits that freaked me out when I was young, I recently rewatched Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, which I remember seeing on TV at some early point after it appeared in theaters in 1982. Other than Ricardo Montalban in general and several things Shatneriffic (toupee, girdle, halting speech, “Khaaan!”, etc.), there’s one big kid-freaky thing in this sequel: Ceti eels.

Y’see, to extract information about why Chekov and Captain Terrell are on Ceti Alpha Five, Khan drops a sluglike Ceti eel into each of their space helmets, then puts the helmets back on their heads and has their hands held tight behind their backs. The eels drop onto the faces of Chekov and Terrell, and as for what happens next, Khan explains:

[T]heir young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex. This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion. Later as they [dramatic pause] grow, follows madness. Death.

In closeup, this is quite blatantly a special effect, with ears sculpted from what appear to be glycerin-sweated blocks of Hickory Farms cheese, but it’s still unsettling. No one wants a bug entering that orifice. This scene ranks up there on my list of movies with Unsettling Body Part Torture, which memorably includes teeth (no, not Marathon Man; Cast Away gets my Tremulous Wince Award), eyeballs (A Clockwork Orange or perhaps Blade Runner) and fingernails (Syriana).

Two and a half hours! Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest could have used a cutlass in the editing room for the expository blather and the too-many scenes and subplots that don’t or marginally feature our heroes three: Johnny Depp, again resplendent in Richards; Keira Knightley, who has either started eating or received cheek implants; and Orlando Bloom, handsome and bland.

There’s fun, Buster Keaton-style physical comedy in the swashbuckling of Captain Jack and the lads escaping a cannibal island and swordfighting atop a waterwheel rolling through the jungle. But too much exposition! Too many subplots! As much as the filmmakers would like it to be Pirates of the Rings, especially with their filming-multiple-sequels-at-once shenanigans, this franchise has neither the scope nor majesty of Middle Earth and Tolkien’s storyline. Give me back mindless summertime movies that don’t deaden my ass. There was a big ol’ fishstick of fun to be had here, but it was mostly breading.

The most enlightening part of my moviegoing experience was the realization that one can enter the trio of wide, barren terraces, presumably reserved for receptions, on the upper floors of the AMC Empire 25 that overlook the lights and sprawl of 42nd Street between Times Square and Eighth Avenue. It’s very windy up there, which makes it difficult to spit with accuracy on the tourists queued up for Madame Tussauds, but you can’t beat the skyscraper panorama and the clear view west to the Hudson and Jersey beyond, where a sherbet sunset hovered and eluded my attempts at a majestic photograph.

On the terrace below, a kid in a mohawk and expensive sneakers was hacking away on his laptop, presumably downloading porn or posting a blog entry about Colin Farrell’s Miami Vice moustache.

The three-day Animation Block Party wrapped tonight at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn with a screening of 15 animated shorts, each under 15 minutes.

The biggest draw at the event, which focused on narrative works, was Henry Selick’s first solely computer-generated production, Moongirl, a fairytale of a hayseed kid who catches a jarful of fireflies. He’s spirited to the moon and meets its keeper, a girl named Lorelei who lights the satellite using the insects and an enchanted carousel. Selick made his fame as the stop-motion animator and director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, but the imaginative design and movement of his characters doesn’t translate well digitally. The large-headed kids of Moongirl are too smooth-featured and creepy, like those dolls whose eyes roll open when they’re held upright. Matters aren’t helped by dialogue stuffed with wide-eyed kid-talk clichés. As the credits rolled, I was surprised to learn the dreamy orchestral score was provided by They Might Be Giants in what’s the least They Might Be Giants-sounding music I’ve ever heard from the guys.

One of my favorite shorts was The Wraith of Cobble Hill, directed by Adam Parrish King, a film student who submitted it as the thesis project for his master of fine arts degree at the University of Southern California. He also submitted it to Sundance earlier this year and won a Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking.

It’s refreshing to have a production of wire, latex and clay mimic life instead of the surreal cartoon universes of Selick or Aardman. The antihero here is Felix, a Brooklyn teenager who lives with his apathetic, alcoholic mother. He’s entrusted by the owner of the corner bodega, from whom he shoplifts regularly, to watch the store while he’s away on vacation. The story’s quiet resignation, like something out of Raymond Carver, is a tiny epiphany of trust and duty.

It’s filmed in 16mm B&W on a Bolex, the Fisher-Price My First Camera setup of film students, but the smudged, vignetted look of the picture works in its favor, contributing to the settings of a wet winter and bleak urban interiors. King handled the sound design, too, which is amazing, especially the music and voices Felix hears muffled through the walls of his apartment. There’s some wonderful incidental dialogue, too, as Felix and his friends climb a fire escape to their building’s roof to drink 40s and he debates the merits of Space Invaders with his incredulous friends.

Sprinkled among more staid or experimental works, the funniest short of the evening was The Moustache Contest by artist, animator and comedian Mike Hollingsworth, a black-and-white stick-figure production. It revels in the ridiculousness of four sea creature buddies who challenge each other to grow the baddest-ass moustache. You can watch it here.

The most informative short and one of the most beautiful was McLaren’s Negatives, a 10-minute documentary about the films of Norman McLaren, directed by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre using footage of and narration by McLaren, as well as his own animation techniques. These involved drawing directly on film, producing thick-lined rotoscopes, even generating sawtoothed music by hash-marking the soundtrack portion of the physical filmstrip as one would transcribe notes.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend has been getting whipped by stinky reviews, but when I saw it tonight, I laughed a lot and awarded it my favorite Mass-Market Hollywood Summer Blockbuster Movie so far this season.

My feelings may have been inspired in part by my moviegoing environment. The composition of the sold-out theater off Times Square was my preferred type: the model New York City crowd, equally attentive and boisterous. Even a tourist in the audience would have recognized this from the start. The trailer for Pathfinder was booed loudly by nearly everyone, while cheers were bestowed upon Will Ferrell’s newest, the promising Stranger Than Fiction, in which he plays a man shocked to learn he’s a character in a novel.

The general reaction to My Super Ex-Girlfriend was laughter and although the film is nothing super overall, the dialogue, characters and situations are engaging and lowbrow silly. (It’s likely relevant that director Ivan Reitman also helmed the beloved Ghostbusters.) Uma Thurman¹, who makes me want to spell hot as hawt and add several t’s, plays a rare and welcome comedic role as Jenny Johnson, a mousy bespectacled art gallery owner who moonlights as the superhero G-Girl. Despite having the worst name ever, she saves Gotham from crime, fires and errant missile strikes with the standard superpowers of strength, speed and flight. Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson) falls for Johnson after a romantic subway/purse-snatching encounter, only to learn her secret identity comes with an intense overpossessiveness. He dumps her and takes up with his true love, the blandly angelic young hottie in his office played by Anna Faris. Doubly enraged, G-Girl spends most of the rest of the movie exacting psycho revenge on Saunders, doing unspeakable things to his apartment, car, goldfish, forehead and sanity, then gets him fired. Wilson, whose movie characters are often quietly befuddled types, is the perfect everyman foil to Thurman’s split persona.

Amusing support is presented courtesy of Rainn Wilson (the jerk with glasses from the American version of The Office), who plays Saunders’ wizened-sarcastic coworker/friend, a character required by law in romantic comedies, and Eddie Izzard as the least charismatic supervillain ever, which is why he’s so funny, actually. He keeps a keg-sized meteor that can sap G-Girl’s powers in his refrigerator, right next to a ham.

The special effects seem purposely cheesy, especially a wince-worthy approximation of the Statue of Liberty, from which Saunders is suspended upside-down after a particularly nasty spat with the ex. When the special effects are good, they’re used in situations unbelievable to the point of hilarity, as when G-Girl winds up a live shark and pitches it at Saunders through his apartment window, where it thrashes around the floor, snapping at him and taking large bites out of his furniture.

The editing is rough around the edges, plot elements are introduced and never followed-up on, and I think there were continuity issues with G-Girl’s costume, which seemed slightly different each time she suited up. Of vexation only to New Yorkers are the disjointed circuits through the streets of Manhattan, wherein a character emerges from a building downtown, then turns the corner onto an uptown street.

Despite these flaws, I was entertained by My Super Ex-Girlfriend. So sue me. It won’t win any awards or, apparently, any other sorta-positive reviews, but I found it funny.

¹One of our frequent Friday Night Movie guests, Jason, who’s a designer at a religious trade press in the city, said he had lunch once with Uma’s dad Robert, a tall religious studies professor at Columbia who sports an ill-fitting glass eye. Jason said the prof had trouble eating his salad without getting it all over himself, but that one would be hard pressed to notice the mess when there was that eye to avoid staring at. [back]

Jack Lemmon makes me laugh. My weakness at the movies is slapstick comedy and as Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce opens, he’s just a cop named Nestor twirling his nightstick while walking his beat on the Rue Casanova in Paris. Already I was snickering at his loose gait, the slow turn of his head and the slight scrunch of his round, open face when he realizes something is awry. It’s the rubbery expressions and tics of Jim Carrey combined with the aw-shucks stammers of Jimmy Stewart.

Nestor’s brand new on the job and slow to gather that his street is favored by the local prostitutes, who lounge on the sidewalk outside the by-the-night hotel for convenience’s sake. He’s honest and naive, and calls a raid, for which he’s chewed out and fired by his boss, a coincidental “guest” in the hotel at the time.

The real goofiness takes off after Nestor defends the honor of the most popular girl by dusting her abusive pimp in a barfight. She’s Irma (Shirley MacLaine), known for her green underwear and Coquette, her small, Champagne-drinking dog that she takes with her everywhere. She’s in high demand and expertly raises her take with tales of woe that she fabricates on the spot. She welcomes Nestor in as her flatmate and de facto manager, but as a man smitten with her and unhappy with her line of work, he schemes to get her off the streets and with him exclusively: by disguising himself as an eccentric and anonymous British lord who hires her into a room for 500 francs a night, during which time they only talk and play double solitaire.

It’s an exhausting and costly ruse that Nestor must soon supplement by working in the wee hours at the local outdoor market, stacking produce and lugging meat. I laughed watching him stagger across the cobblestones with a beef carcass slung over his shoulder, like an ant attempting to make off with a hot dog bun.

Nestor’s “Lord X” persona incorporates a bowler hat, gray suit with cravat, dandy walking stick and a pair of large false teeth and bushy eyebrows both of which Lemmon waggles overtime in concert with a hilarious mock British accent, complete with all the sticky wickets and capital!s. It’s childish, ridiculous, and an excuse for scene-seizing by Lemmon, but I enjoyed it immensely, laughing those laughs that make one euphoric for having expelled them.

The movie itself goes on far too long—nearly two and a half hours!—dashing over a brief imprisonment for Nestor and an even faster wedding ceremony, after which Irma births their child right there in the sacristy. Irma la Douce is middling as a technicolor fairytale of prostitution, but it’s Lemmon’s over the top performance I’ll recall most fondly.

Pop quiz, hotshot: Can you name the source of these three screengrabs, each featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 2/3 New York City subway lines?

Hint: each image is from a commercially produced video source, so I’m not putting up anything too obscure. Challenge: as you can see, when widescreen screengrabs are proportionally scaled to my blog-standard image width, they gain the size and quality of a Bazooka Joe comic.

The line for tonight’s 9:40 show at Film Forum snaked out the doors and down West Houston. I was towards the end of it and the couple in front of me was displeased about the crowd. “It’s an obscure movie from 1951,” the man moaned. “It’s Ace in the Hole,” the woman added, stressing the title with exasperation, as if we were there to see a preschool puppet show.

Don’t these people read the papers? I was there foremost to see a Billy Wilder drama about a journalist. But also, as I suspect most of the rest of the line was, to see an exceedingly rare breed of film: one that’s been forever unavailable on VHS or DVD (at least legally). The internet holds more than a few tales of Ace in the Hole fans like the guy who cherishes his tape dubbed from a late-night TV broadcast somewhere in Florida in the early ’80s.

The film looks pristine despite its scarcity and age, with rock-solid black and white, great contrast and clean sound, but it’s not a lost gem. During its first 15 minutes, I thought it might be. The film’s star, Kirk Douglas, has admitted himself that he relished playing son-of-a-bitch roles, which he does here with an added dash of comedy.

His character, Chuck Tatum, a fast-talking traveling newspaperman from New York, rolls into Albuquerque sitting in a car under tow, hops out and tells the driver to keep it running. He’s looking for a job by bragging about the number of papers he’s been fired from along the way. He talks himself into the office of the local-paper editor-in-chief Jacob Boot (Porter Hall) by promising him $200, which he then explains is the amount of money Boot would save monthly by hiring him for the reduced salary of $40 a week.

“I’ve done a lot of lying in my time,” Tatum admits to Boot during the job interview. “I’ve lied to men who wear belts. I’ve lied to men who wear suspenders. But I’d never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears both belt and suspenders.” Tatum eyeballs this wardrobe anomaly and after the perfect pause says, “You strike me as a cautious man, Boot.” My kind of humor.

Boot hires him nonetheless, soon finding he now has a pacing firebrand on his staff who obsessively builds matchstick ships in empty liquor bottles and isn’t content to cover rattlesnake festivals or any other soft, middle-of-nowhere news. A year passes quickly, by which time Tatum himself is sporting the belt-suspender combo and complaining about his lot, including a scene in which he says the most unlikely phrase ever by a Douglas. Let’s just say it was a touch of movie magic for me to hear him exclaim “Chicken tacos!” in his gravelly, anguished voice when told they’re the closest substitute for the chicken livers he’s requested for dinner.

This fun passes soon. The film grew tiresome for me when the moralizing kicked in, foretold in the opening scenes by the embroidered credos hanging prominently in the newsroom that read, “Tell The Truth.”

Tatum smells a big story and his way to bigger and better newspapers when a cave wall collapses in a nearby town on Leo (Richard Benedict), the owner of a shabby roadside curio-stand/diner. Barging his way through a rickety-walled tunnel, he consoles the poor guy and takes some exclusive photos of his predicament, legs pinned under rock. His resulting story is embellished as “Ancient Curse Entombs Man,” featuring a sensational backstory that Indian spirits caused the cave-in because Leo was stealing tribal pottery to sell at his store.

His story well-received, Tatum realizes a trapped man is more valuable to him than one who’s free, or as he puts it, “Bad news sells best because good news is no news.” (Later, he chucks out that chestnut about “yesterday’s news” and fish-wrap.) He’s able to convince others: Leo’s wife (Jan Sterling) was planning to leave him, but decides to stay on because the Mourning Wife makes for better copy. And once the gawkers start showing up for a glimpse of Leo and up-to-the-minute updates on the rescue effort, they spend lots of cash at the diner. Tatum even convinces the rescue team’s engineer to put a photogenic drill atop the mountain that will bore a rescue tunnel straight down. The task will take nearly a week, many more news cycles than the 16-hour plan the engineer had originally, to merely shore-up a passageway to Leo with timber to save him easily. As the effort crawls forward, onlookers arrive in caravans, turning the desert floor into a sprawling parking lot.

A midway spouts up, complete with Ferris wheel, souvenir stands and a band that performs ballads about Leo while selling copies of the sheet music. A circus rolls in and pitches its big top. Following these amusements are newsmen from other papers, TV and radio, who embed themselves in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of the hubbub, not necessarily because it’s a newsworthy event, but because everybody else is there to cover it. They’re displeased their requests for details and quotes need to be vetted by Tatum, who has convinced the sheriff to keep his competitors at bay and his access to Leo exclusive. After a while, the newsmen wonder aloud whether Leo even exists.

I’d have liked Ace in the Hole better if it had sustained its madcap comedic opening throughout and became more of a Wag the Dog-style media farce. Maybe Tatum could have been unrepentant about his bullheadedness in getting (or really, creating) the Big Story. Maybe Leo could have been assigned some unredeeming characteristics to balance the good-hearted simpleton he is; as such, every painfully long scene of him in that cave, flat on his back and eventually succumbing to pneumonia the morning he’s to be rescued, is meant to tug at our heartstrings but instead is excruciating. Most of the film, I felt like I was stuck in a mountain myself.

Like Welcome to Collinwood, The OH in Ohio is a well-meaning but stilted movie taking place in my old hometown of Cleveland.

Parker Posey, the Queen of the Independent Pictures, plays a economic development executive for the city who’s so repressed, she’s never had an orgasm, although she’s memorized the number of times she’s had sex with her hangdog high-school bio teacher husband (Paul Rudd, who was Alicia Silverstone’s stepbrother Josh in Clueless).

She blames herself, though, for her orgasm-free life, and takes a new-agey sex-ed class taught by Liza Minnelli, who encourages the women, clad in white robes and standing at easels, to write down a pet name for their vaginas. In a cutesy script, Parker writes down “Vagina.” After careful consideration, she adds “My” above it. Later, with hesitation, she buys a vibrator at a sex shop staffed by an uncredited Heather Graham and before you know it, she’s a masturbation addict, and after nights on the town with various random men, a full-fledged sex addict.

The pinnacle of her satisfaction comes from a fling with local swimming pool magnate Danny DeVito, whose cheesy TV commercials she grew up watching and whose own pool has a waterslide so high, you can see the entire downtown Cleveland skyline standing atop it.

Meanwhile, Parker’s husband moves into the garage, then into an apartment building on what appears to be Euclid Heights Boulevard called the Manly Arms (that’s this movie’s type of humor, if you haven’t already guessed). There he has a fling with an overeducated student of his, played by Mischa Barton, who looks a lot older than her 20-year-old self. His midlife affair inspires him to clean up his act, as he gets in shape, trims his beard and dresses more sharply, but both his character and his storyline disappear mysteriously by the film’s conclusion.

I liked that one of his last scenes takes place in Vidstar Video, the tiny independent video store on Coventry Road that I used to visit nearly nightly when I lived in Cleveland Heights. There are many other great Cleveland locations in The OH in Ohio: another scene on Coventry by the parking garage, exteriors and interiors at Jacobs Field and the Frank Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis Building, and Cleveland Heights High School, which Jimi attended. These scenic touches revived memories both fond and pained among the Cleveland expatriates in our group, but the movie as a whole left us disappointed.

A Scanner Darkly: I don’t think I understood what was going on here. I also think maybe I wasn’t meant to. If your movie takes place in a dystopian Californian near-future (something like “10 years from now”) and deals with mind-warping designer drugs that have literally captured a weak public’s imagination, you have a lot of leeway in terms of the linearity and clarity of your plot.

The computer-generated rotoscope animation allows for some nice effects, like the dizzying “scramble suits” that DEA officers of the future wear to make themselves appear as if they’re wearing a constantly shifting slideshow of disguises.

The scenes I enjoyed the most were those in which the film’s addled protagonists simply bantered about their paranoia, conspiracies and sweet nothings. Motormouthed Robert Downey Jr. gets some of the best patter with his untrustworthy, double-crossing, loose cannon of a character. Keanu Reeves per normal seems to strain in conjuring emotions other than blank stares. Playing his character’s girlfriend/dealer is Winona Ryder, who has just enough screentime to make everyone wonder what the devil she’s been up to the last few years.

The Lost Weekend is one of Billy Wilder’s more award-winning films, netting Oscars for his direction and co-written screenplay, as well as for Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role (Ray Milland), but it’s tedious.

And I’m not a fan of character-defining disorders or anomalies, although they can be good for two things Hollywood likes: hammy acting and Best Actor Oscars. Consider the Oscar payoffs alone from blindness, autism (with savant abilities), obsessive-compulsive disorder, paralysis, cerebral palsy and schizoaffective disorder, among others.

Milland plays an alcoholic within a straight-as-an-arrow plot in what amounts to a one-man-show of borderline-believable drunk act. He tells his sob story to his bartender (Howard Da Silva), worries his too-forgiving girl from Toledo (the wholesome hotness of Jane Wyman) and hides bottles from his pointdexter brother (Phillip Terry). By the end he’s scared himself sober after hallucinating, falling down a flight of stairs and landing in Bellevue. Then he vows to write that great American novel that’s always been on his mind. His girl takes him back and his bartender returns the typewriter he left in the street while on a bender. Good for them; I just couldn’t bring myself to care about these characters or this film.

I returned to the Film Forum for more Essential Wilder and tonight it was A Foreign Affair, a fluffy comedy about the shenanigans of U.S. occupation troops in post-war Germany and the congressional delegate on a mission to expose any conduct unbecoming. Critics in 1948 were miffed that Wilder would find comedy in the bombed-to-hell city of a vanquished enemy so soon after the war’s close, not to mention visual jokes involving Hitler and swastikas (which actually are funny).

As the story goes, Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (the prim Jean Arthur) is on a fact-finding mission to gauge the morale of the U.S. peacekeeping troops stationed in Berlin. What she finds are gleeful GIs profiteering from the black market and taking advantage of the fact that there are many suddenly unattached fräuleins living among the ruins.

We’re introduced to Marlene Dietrich, as the ex-Nazi-sympathizing nightclub singer Erika Von Schluetow, in the least-divalike way imaginable: as she brushes her teeth, then spits it playfully at her boyfriend, Captain John Pringle (John Lund), who has just traded a chocolate birthday cake from his girlfriend in the states for a mattress.

After some undercover work for which she pretends to be one of the aforementioned fräuleins, Frost suspects Pringle’s fraternizations with the enemy, so he switches sides and starts putting the moves on her instead. I got a kick out of watching him loosen her from a tense, by-the-books politico to a full-fledged showboat, peaking in her getting sauced at a bar then launching into her state’s actual unofficial song, “The Iowa Corn Song,” the chorus of which is:

We’re from I-o-way, I-o-way
State of all the land
Joy on ev’ry hand
We’re from I-o-way, I-o-way
That’s where the tall corn grows.

A Foreign Affair is stuck as a lesser entry in the Wilder oeuvre, but it’s still an entertaining one, even if it has lost some of its satirical political bite.

Looking over the schedule for Film Forum’s new series, Essential Wilder, I’m reminded not what a great director Billy Wilder was, but what a great screenwriter he was, a character creator. He said as much himself, that he was taught restraint as a director, to be unnoticed. “He should be invisible,” Wilder explained. “You should notice the characters.”

For instance, I don’t recall The Seven Year Itch so much as a whole as I do Marilyn Monroe’s character explaining that she prepares for hot summer days by keeping her “undies in the icebox.” And everyone, even those who haven’t seen the film, knows the iconic image of her white dress briefly lifted by a gust from a subway grate.

Wilder’s scripts are writerly, especially when you consider his fondness for scene-setting and character-establishing voiceovers. Here I’m thinking of a beyond-the-grave William Holden in Sunset Boulevard (“Funny, how gentle people get with you once you’re dead.”), Audrey Hepburn as the title character in Sabrina (“Once upon a time, on the north shore of Long Island, some 30 miles from New York, there lived a small girl on a large estate.”), and Jack Lemmon in The Apartment:

On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six-and-a-half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company, Consolidated Life of New York. We’re one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of uhh... Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the 19th floor. Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861.

Double Indemnity, which kicked off the Essential Wilder series tonight, uses a similar setup, but beginning at the end, with insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) shot in the chest and spilling his tale of fraud and murder into the Dictaphone at his desk.

He’s been crossed by the sly blonde Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), clear winner here of the Worst Wig Ever Award, who has charmed Neff into taking out a policy on her husband without his knowledge, then having Neff bump off the guy. Neff’s a cad himself; they banter and gambol sexually in the confines of Hays Code prudishness and the number of times he refers to Dietrichson as “baby” are as irritating as his dead monotone throughout. He’s quick to leap into the scheme and a relationship with her, but he’s unaware she’s been suspected of murder previously, a hidden fact that eventually fouls his best-laid plans.

Being in the business of exposing rackets like the one he’s perpetrating, Neff formulates his scheme meticulously. What he doesn’t count on are the insights of his boss, Barton Keyes (the sparky Edward G. Robinson), who chips away at Neff’s resolve through clever reasoning. Keyes’ own boss has a misguided pet theory that the death was a suicide and the scene in which Keyes literately and speedily punctures his argument while telling him off as a front-office buffoon who’s never read an actuarial table, is the best in the movie; people at my screening applauded it. Just as Keyes has all but pegged Neff as Dietrichson’s partner in crime, relations sour between the two criminals. Neff unwisely tries to pin the racket on her in a last ditch attempt to save himself. Too bad he didn’t know about that gun of hers.

Double Indemnity is classic film noir, steeped in sex, murder and double-crosses, spiced with the dark humor that’s Wilder’s trademark.

The Devil Wears Prada follows my own recent career path: a college journalism major from Ohio pursues dreams of working for a magazine in Manhattan. Like me, we know our hero, Andy Sachs, (Anne Hathaway), has little sense of style and is from the Midwest because of the opening montage, which shows her throwing on her Banana Republic and taking the subway to work—the subway for fuck’s sake—while all the other montage girls motor away in hired Lincolns or flag down suspiciously available and immaculate cabs.

The plot diverges from my life, however, upon the introduction of Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the editor of the Vogueish magazine Runway. Against all odds, she hires Andy as her assistant and it’s made as plain as Andy’s wardrobe that the poor girl doesn’t know what she’s in for. If you haven’t heard, Miranda is the devil referenced in the movie’s title, a Cruella de Vil with a frosty gaze, a voice of whisper-sweet honey, and speech of solid snide. She leaves teeth marks all over the scenery and supporting cast.

Oh, the things she says, so cutthroat and mean-spirited. She is not to be questioned or trifled with. She mows down coworkers and colleagues with wicked asides and blunt putdowns. She asks the impossible of her assistants. (The other is played with exasperated British charm by Emily Blunt and has my favorite line of the movie, about her diet of eating nothing until she gets dizzy, at which point she allows herself “a cube of cheese.”) Miranda’s missions-impossible have Andy sprinting across the city, once to purchase a gourmet steak that ends up uneaten, another to procure a copy of the newest Harry Potter novel—so new it’s still in galleys—for the reading enjoyment of her bratty, redheaded twins.

Miranda evokes one of those acid-spitting horrors from Alien regurgitated as a queen-bitch fashionista. At least two of the gentlemen in my party remarked that the fashion sense, snarky dialogue and general fabulousness of the film were most appropriate for an audience of gay gentlemen. That does seem to be the case; there’s plentiful mockery inspired by Andy’s initially frumpy attire, particularly her blue, cotton-poly blend sweater and there was a big laugh over her inability to spell Gabbana. The clincher was not one but two Madonna songs on the soundtrack, one of which is “Vogue,” which I believe backdropped the necessary Cinderella-style wardrobe montage.

Runway’s swishy art director Nigel (Stanley Tucci), Andy’s colleague and confidant, instigates this makeover, and the audience knows the transformation is complete when it gets the requisite bottom-to-top tilt of her standing there in her haute couture. Now she’s hot and sports a bangs-intensive haircut, a Treo, a car service and, most importantly, confidence. Also, apparently, a lot more money than earlier in the movie, when she was bumming around her apartment in a Northwestern sweatshirt, eating grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. She’s a woman aglow, like an actor in a shampoo commercial, and with renewed vigor tackles the demands of her beastly boss, basks in the nightlight of the Big City, beams Julia Roberts-wattage smiles, and allows for a fling with an apparently non-gay clothing designer (Simon Baker), who is as smooth and interesting as a sheet of Formica.

That the pure and naive Andy is gone forever, replaced by this girl from a Robert Palmer video, is realized most painfully by her live-in boyfriend (Adrian Grenier), who appears to be a member of the Strokes. He broods about how much she’s changed—and not in a good way. She spends too much time at the office and on her cell with Miranda, and not enough time with him, he suggests. But this seems petty and not a genuine concern of anyone who would actually work and live in Manhattan; you work as much as you must in order to afford that SoHo apartment, Fabrizio. Those lonely cobblestone streets you sulk upon at night don’t come for free, you know.

Tidily, Andy alienates her friends, too, even after plying them with swag from her job, including an ugly designer purse and a Bang & Olufsen phone that resembles a futuristic silver dildo. The movie’s plot hinges on Big Choices like these: work life vs. social life, self-promotion vs. screwing over a coworker, and good vs. evil, but they really aren’t choices at all. The characters, despite small variances, are hard-wired as archetypes. There’s no exercising the demons from Miranda, aside from a scene shoehorned in to show her beaten down and symbolic without her makeup, baring her soul briefly to Andy. Andy ends up learning Valuable Lessons from her year at Runway and handily secures a reputable journalistic job at a local rag. Everything’s back to the way it was when it started.

The Devil Wears Prada is a summertime trifle and a moderately entertaining diversion. I must award it at least a few stars or thumbs because, as you know, I dig this city and movies filmed in it. Prada makes this grade, even if its Manhattan is the scrubbed-till-it-glows edition seen in most Woody Allen films. I was especially amused to spot a scene taking place at Craft, where I had dinner on Monday, a coincidence recalling the one where I ate at Sea, then saw it depicted the same weekend in a scene from Garden State.

The sun and rain conspired for a rainbow today, which I photographed as I walked from the subway home after work. The red, orange and yellow are clear, but my camera swallowed some of the spectrum; in reality it was a full seven-color marvel.

Lately I’ve been thinking about (and smelling) fresh colors in association with my apartment building. Perhaps emboldened by the city’s recently approved rent hikes, my superintendent has been making capital improvements, such as repaving the front steps and repainting the trim indoors. All week he’s been slopping violent red enamel-gloss over the previously brown surfaces of window frames, molding and banisters. Today, he went for the door exteriors on my floor, and as I turned the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw mine was the color of an evil candy apple and just as sticky.

It reminds me of a detail from this Guardian article about Stanley Kubrick’s quest to film the perfect red door for Eyes Wide Shut. During preproduction, he ordered scouts to canvass London and photograph cinematic red doors. The one included in the movie was simply built on a set at Pinewood Studios and only appears onscreen for a few seconds, as the character played by Tom Cruise is welcomed through it by a prostitute. And still, somewhere in Kubrick’s estate in Hertfordshire, among the storage boxes of obsessive research, correspondence and notes, are hundreds of snapshots of anonymous red doors.

Red is one of my favorite colors, so I like my door’s makeover. It’s fighting a winning battle with the walls in the building’s stairwells and hallways, which are the texture and color of sulphur. The combination may be as garish as a 1970s Fiestaware pattern or a McDonald’s in hell, but it’s better than the previous pairing with brown.

Wordplay is a documentary whose idea of an action sequence is to have Merl Reagle rush to his overstuffed home library, grab his abridged dictionary and page through it excitedly to see if redtop is listed, because damned if it wouldn’t be the perfect fit for the crossword puzzle he’s building. And it is a word! For a type of grass! The crowd goes wild.

Reagle is forever puzzling, driving by a sign for Dunkin’ Donuts and remarking that the simple switch of a letter makes them Unkind Donuts. I had always wondered if guys like him used computer programs to help develop their masterworks. Apparently not. An extended scene shows Reagle hunkered at his kitchen table with a laser-printed grid of blank squares and armed with nothing but a mechanical pencil and his wits, as he speedily fills the page with letters that by some strange magic form full words or phrases in both directions.

Are there any words that can’t be in The New York Times puzzles Reagle concocts other than the obvious obscenities, vulgarities and offensives? Yes. They must pass the same “breakfast test” as the stodgy newspaper’s photos and editorial content. In other words, the Times wishes not to offend crossword fans of delicate constitutions who come across rectal or urine while eating their sausage and eggs, so words like those are verboten. Reagle bemoans that enema alone, a banned noun with a word-nerd tempting alternating vowel-consonant-vowel structure, could have bailed him out of many a literal and figurative corner.

Then there’s Will Shortz, the thin, dapper, mustachioed editor of the Times puzzle, who invented his major at Indiana University (enigmatology) to turn his childhood passion into a field of academic authority. He’s described at one point as the “Errol Flynn of crossword puzzling” and the movie’s funniest moment has him reading selections from the cache of letters he receives daily from the confused or irked members of the puzzle-solving public.

Representing the demand side of puzzling, we are presented neatly encapsulated lives of the odd group of world-class solvers, who can routinely complete an entire puzzle in two minutes, but otherwise seem at a glance like normal people. Ellen Ripstein, perhaps the top female puzzle-solver, is shown performing another one of her hobbies, an endearingly clumsy baton-twirling routine, which wouldn’t be as weird if she wasn’t in her late 40s.

Wordplay also features great segments from interviews with celebrity fans of the Times puzzles, including a raucous Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina, and the Indigo Girls.

I braved the throngs of Puerto Rican Day Parade revelers, who were giddy with jingoism and clad in the island’s colors of red, white and blue, on my long subway ride to Astoria, Queens, for the Kubrick retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image.

The first film of the double-feature was Killer’s Kiss, essentially a student film Kubrick wrote, directed and edited when he was only 27. There are a few flashes of his future cinematic brilliance: the strange angles from odd staging and lens choices, the long tracking shots, and dramatic facial close-ups, including one magnified grossly by a fishbowl.

It’s mostly a love letter to Kubrick’s hometown, with shots of Times Square at night, the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway back when the seats were cushioned with fabric, and spooky warehouses around Fulton Street. The bookending scenes take place in the original Penn Station, which I recognized immediately from Berenice Abbott’s photos from the mid-’30s.

The plot is slow and basic. Davy, a down-on-his-luck welterweight (played by Jamie Smith) takes up with Gloria (Irene Kane), a “dime a dance” girl who lives in the studio apartment just across the way. They catch glimpses of each other at night through their windows and pretend they don’t know the other is looking. Her boss Vinnie (Frank Silvera), the greasy, jealous type, tries to have Davy bumped off, but kills his manager by mistake, causing the cops to implicate the boxer. After chasing one another up a fire escape and over rooftops, the climactic showdown unfolds in a mannequin factory, with Davy hurling plaster limbs and torsos at Vinnie, who retorts with wild swings from a fire axe.

Between the showings, I played Katamari Damacy on a six-foot wide wall-mounted screen in the museum’s ground-floor video game gallery. It’s a mutant arcade combining classic upright games with console systems in a clinical museum setting. So there’ll be a staid little plaque for, say, PaRappa the Rapper (“NaNaOn-Sha, 1996”), affixed to a wall above a TV and a PlayStation encased in a tamper-resistant plastic box. You can take a seat right there and play the game to your heart’s content, or at least until the 10-year-old standing behind you starts casting scowls at you and your amateur gameplay. They also have an original Mortal Kombat arcade game unit, rigged so you don’t have to insert any quarters to play.

Back in the theater, my new seat was aside two elderly women, one with a walker that she rammed into every object between the door and her seat, and the other smelling as if she spent her free time pickled in naphthalene. Both talked throughout Day of the Fight, the 15-minute short preceding the second feature, because they thought it was the second feature. “Is this the movie? What is this?” they kept asking in those voices that old people use when they think they’re whispering when in fact they’re talking loudly.

What Day of the Fight was was a “This Is America” news brief Kubrick filmed in 1951 for use like those Warner Brothers cartoons that used to screen before the main feature. It’s a day-in-the-life story of a New York City boxer and noteworthy for having a bunch of setups Kubrick obviously restaged for the fight scenes in Killer’s Kiss—one, at mat level, shows a boxer sitting in his corner and framed by the legs of the boxer seated in the opposing corner.

The second feature, The Killing, was directed by Kubrick from an adapted screenplay co-written by him and belongs among the best noir. Although it was made only a year after Killer’s Kiss, it had a budget, a director of photography who stayed at odds with Kubrick, and stars: Sterling Hayden as the ex-con Johnny Clay who masterminds a racetrack heist, and Marie Windsor, who’s just as great here as in The Narrow Margin, as the sniping, conniving wife of the milquetoast member of Johnny’s gang. The filmmaking is tighter and more confident than in Killer’s Kiss. Here the tracking shots follow characters as they walk all the way through several rooms of an apartment, and there’s that signature close-up of a static, oddly lit, popeyed face.

The reportedly studio-imposed narration in The Killing is obnoxious, announcing the time and place of most every scene like a police scanner, but the masterfully twisty plot and action make up for it. This is one of the better convoluted-timeline heist stories and you can tell Quentin Tarantino saw this movie like a dozen times and was taking notes, circa Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You suspect Johnny and his gang of mostly sharp and well-meaning but ultimately outsmarted hoods aren’t going to pull off their caper without a hitch, so the fun is in watching their master plan unravel, the body count mount, the stolen cash literally whisk away, culminating with Johnny in the final scene too weary to outrun or outgun the cops closing in on him and his girl.

Al Gore has been showing a digital slideshow on the current environmental crisis, by his estimate, more than 1,000 times over the last six years, all around the world. I was leery to see the film based on this presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, because let’s face it, most PowerPoint affairs are constructed in an attempt to enliven boring data and bullet points. In Gore’s case, the information is clear and scary and the presentation involving. The man’s a politician and knows how to deliver a speech; with this one, he’d better, seeing as he’s given it hundreds of times.

The structure of the movie is crafty in that 90 percent of it is footage of Gore presenting his slideshow before an audience, yet it’s engrossing to the movie theater audience, too. The editing reminded me of concert films, which are also relatively static actions requiring deft cuts and movement, with creative angles and framing to remain watchable. Plus, Gore’s more animated and funny than I thought; apparently those image consultants he so infamously consulted really believed he was more appealing with the personality, humor and poise of an empty pine coffin, instead of the literate-dork thing he has going on in reality. (For more on this, see Spike Jonze’s apparently unaired “home video” of Gore and his family taken prior to the Democratic Primary in 2000.)

The other 10 percent of the film is brief scenes from Gore’s life and career that transition into and out of the slideshow to provide a reprieve from the statistical doom. There’s him losing the election, presented in a fleeting montage of ballots and Supreme Court justices. Later, he discusses the death of his older sister from lung cancer and his father’s decision thereafter to stop growing tobacco as a moral for catastrophe-inspired-change. Some of the transitions are too Windham Hill, especially the opening shots of ambling forests and brooks, voiced-over by a hushed and sleepy-sounding Gore about how swell the great outdoors are.

Something that wasn’t included surprised me: damnation of the current administration’s environmental policy. Not until after I read a review later today did I realize that W’s name isn’t mentioned once in the film. Gore does include footage of a soundbite made about him by the grammar-challenged Bush Sr.:

You know why I call him Ozone Man? This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme, we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American. This guy’s crazy, he is way out, far out, man.

But Gore takes pains not to point fingers or politicize the debate. The premise of his argument is that global warming is a fact, not a theory or even a debatable position. I thought he made a solid case. Of course, after I saw the film, I read a lengthy article from The Washington Post (“The Tempest,” by Joel Achenbach, Sunday, May 28, 2006) about the “handful of skeptics” who say global warming is a hoax or overrated.

Let us be honest about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything.

Everything is a war now. This is the age of lethal verbal combat, where even scientific issues involving measurements and molecules are somehow supernaturally polarizing. The controversy about global warming resides all too perfectly at the collision point of environmentalism and free market capitalism. It’s bound to be not only politicized but twisted, mangled and beaten senseless in the process. The divisive nature of global warming isn’t helped by the fact that the most powerful global-warming skeptic (at least by reputation) is President Bush, and the loudest warnings come from Al Gore.

The best of the computer-animated creatures in Over the Hedge is Hammy, a hyperkinetic squirrel voiced by Steve Carell, especially a scene near the end that involves the funniest use ever of the now-cliché bullet time. The rest is a simple moralistic tale about the damnation of consumerist society and the importance of family, pushed along by easily merchandised characters voiced by a bunch of B-listers and one A-lister slumming for an easy paycheck; I’m talkin’ ’bout you, Willis.

Brooklyn girl Barbara Stanwyck is a leading lady of film noir great and small, including one of the best, Double Indemnity, as well as several lesser examples of the genre, two of which I saw tonight—you guessed it—at the Film Forum.

Stanwyck always seemed to be smart and flinty, yet constrained by the decidedly less charismatic characters she often played. In Witness to Murder (1954), she’s interior decorator Cheryl Draper, who observes a murder, Rear Window-style, in the apartment across the way, then tries for the film’s remainder to make the police believe it actually happened.

The murderer, Albert Richter (the composed and eloquent George Sanders), speaks exactly like Kelsey Grammer’s Sideshow Bob character in The Simpsons. He’s crafty, too, having hidden the body and evidence, as both he and the unwitting police strive to convince (or in Richter’s case, dupe) Draper into thinking she just dreamed up the whole thing. That a rational person could ever explain this much away is stupid. The lieutenant on the case (Gary Merrill) alternates between reassurances that Draper is merely a hysterical woman and taking her out to dinner. Eventually, Richter gets overly cocky in his mind games and opts for the more direct approach of trying to hurl Draper out her own window. A chase leads them up the winding stair of a clock tower for a confrontation at the top, with some filmwork prefiguring the finale of Vertigo four years later, although not as technically adept.

Crime of Passion starts with Stanwyck in a firecracker role as Kathy Ferguson, a San Francisco advice columnist who tells her women readership to take no guff, sasses back to her boss and tells various men point blank to shut up. Then yet another oddly calm lieutenant, Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) moseys into her life and suddenly she’s gooey in love, married and rockin’ the bedsprings with him. (The latter point only implied by some sly dialogue; this was 1957.) All of a sudden, she’s the perfect suburban housewife, fretting over her husband’s social standing among the nattering wives of his coworkers who stop by for canapés and cigarettes, gossiping about who’s been invited to what party and whose husband is getting promoted over whom. And that whole adage about a woman scorned: look out, man. Her conniving ways become increasingly frantic and after an affair calculated to improve her husband’s position at work backfires, she caps the man, a senior cop played by Perry Mason-era Raymond Burr, by shooting him clean through his handsome, raccoon-eyed head. Then she drives home and falls asleep. There’s the Stanwyck I know and love, even though Doyle eventually cracks the case and has to arrest his own wife.

Tonight, I saw Army of Shadows, released in 1969 but never shown in the U.S. until now. It’s getting good word of mouth and reviews—a week ago, Ebert called it the best foreign film this year and added it to his “Great Movies” list. Showings at the Film Forum have been regularly selling out, including tonight’s. And it’s not a bad film for two-and-a-half hours of World War II Résistance Française drama.

There are escapes, ruses and sudden deaths, but this isn’t The Great Escape or even a Chicken Run. The pace is leisurely and the composition of the scenes, chiefly in shadowy interiors and wet winter exteriors, is painterly, all of which amplifies the few scenes of tension.

In one of these, which reminded me of that Hitchcock quote about how difficult it is to kill a man, a trio of resistance members is charged with dispatching a teenaged traitor. They’ve taken an out-of-the-way apartment in which to kill him, but a family has moved in next door and the walls are thin. The basement is connected to the family’s and noise will carry too well in the attic hollow. They don’t have the silencer they wanted for the gun. Should they instead use the gun butt to bludgeon the kid? Instead, should they knife him? Strangle him maybe? They discuss this all the while the traitor stands alone in a corner, listening to their conversation and watching them with fear. It’s one of many grim scenes in a nonetheless engrossing film.

Being the weekend of Fleet Week, the sidewalks surrounding Times Square tonight were dotted with sailors in crisp white uniforms and a larger-than-usual number of prostitutes. But I was there to see X-Men: The Last Stand at the AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street with Jimi and Company.

It’s another throwaway big-budget actionriffic extravaganza, but the earlier battle scenes don’t match the intensity of the final confrontation pitting bad mutants vs. good mutants + humans. I won’t give anything away but it’s got a lot of pithy maneuvers and lines of dialogue that made many members of the audience lunge forward in their seats and shout out in glee, drowning out entire lines of the dialogue that followed.

There many key mutant deaths in this film, which makes it the grimmest of the three films now in the franchise. It also has the weightiest message, with a plot of a “cure” for “mutant behavior” apparently alluding to “homosexuality.” Finally, this installment contains the most non-celebrity mutants nobody cares about, all of whom seemed to be dressed as extras for a Michael Jackson video and none of whom taxed either the scriptwriters’ imagination nor the film’s special effects budget.

I wish I would have not read those reviews that revealed a bunch of the fun bits. More of the usual superhero shenanigans from the gang, including Halle Berry, who must have threatened to beat the producers with her Oscar until they agreed to give her more screen time. She still can’t act.

If you see the film, make sure you sit all the way through the credits. There’s a brief scene planted at the very end that plays off on a throwaway detail from earlier in the film. It caused the few nerds left in the theater to nearly wet themselves with glee.

So I was standing outside the Film Forum, looking at the schedule posted there and deciding whether I wanted to see yet another B Noir or L’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows), when out of nowhere this cute girl asks what I’m planning to see and starts talking with me about how she saw Army and thought it was great. Blah, blah; we talked about movies. Then she told me she bought a necklace today and pulled it out of her bag to show me. It was beads interspersed with what appeared to be large Chiclets speckled with glitter, and she held it up to my neck and said it’d look good with the shirt I was wearing.

At this point, Necklacegirl’s friend, who was inside the theater buying tickets, came out and started talking to me about the movie they were going to see, Stagedoor, and that she had briefly been a child actor. I told her I worked on the floor above an audition studio on Eighth Avenue and she said she knew the place. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I said, “What’d you do, cereal commercials?” Coincidentally, that’s exactly what she did, one in 1989 for Breakfast With Barbie, a limited edition Ralston Purina cereal that she said tasted like sickly sweet cotton candy. She had to cheerfully ladle many spoonfuls of it into her mouth, but spit it into a bucket as soon as the camera stopped rolling. She also appeared in a Six Flags commercial when she was 14 but looked 10, and Necklacegirl cheerfully interjected, to Cerealgirl’s apparent embarrassment, that the ad still runs occasionally.

So were these young ladies just being friendly like, or were they hitting on me, or what? I was wearing my nice pants, the ones that several of my female coworkers have complimented, so perhaps that was it. But maybe they were grifters; having seen all this noir lately, I’m suspicious of loose women. I would have offered to see the same movie they were, in order to gather more information, but I wasn’t interested in showtunes and hyperkinetic pint-sized fabulousness. I think I need a contingency plan if this ever happens again.

Also, I should have opted for Army because the B-Noir I saw, Trapped, was the pits. Counterfeiter Lloyd Bridges (Jeff’s dad) breaks free from federal custody and tries to track down his ex-partners, who have been profiting from his operation since he was jailed seven years ago. Along the way, he unwittingly leads the feds to close in on the racket. Barbara Payton plays the dame while John Hoyt channels Alan Arkin as the secret service agent undercover as the high-stakes gambler who gains Bridges’ confidence.

It’s a snoozer with robotic line readings and some of the worst fake fighting and reaction-takes I’ve ever seen, even accounting for the stagy conventions of most films made before the 1970s. The best line is a throwaway at the beginning by a bank teller to a flustered merchant, who has tried to deposit a $20 bill unknowingly accepted as counterfeit. The teller explains some of the fake’s imperfections, chiding, “You’ve got to look for these things in a bill of this size.” See, the movie was made in 1949, when $20 was a lot of money. Ha ha!

It’s true Hollywood magic—meaning never would it happen in real life—to have Kim Novak mashing lips with Fred MacMurray, as they do frequently in Pushover, which I saw tonight, another installment in Film Forum’s “B-Noir” series.

Even less likely is their meet cute, as he rescues her from her stalled car, then gives her another hand, as it were, on his couch. (He: “Your place or mine?” She: “Surprise me.”)

It is not possible to even glance at Novak with chaste thoughts, with her flawless features, oft-parted lips, and as in Vertigo, a bra-begone philosophy to getting dressed. Carnal, said Truffaut, and he was exactly right. MacMurray’s redeeming qualities, on the other hand, are limited to thick, oddly angled eyebrows, lumpy chin and ’50s suburban blandness. He’s like a high school math teacher. I kept thinking, “Watch your step, buddy. That dame’ll double-cross ya first chance she gets.”

But here in her first speaking role, Novak is mostly eye candy as a bank robber’s girlfriend who sticks with MacMurray against reason until the inevitably bloody end. She’s the subject of a stakeout by him and his honest partner (Philip Carey), glimpsed by them through binoculars from an apartment window across the way. MacMurray gets involved with her on the sly, hatching a plan to make off with her boyfriend’s stolen loot. It’s thrilling to watch MacMurray’s lies, fake alibis and body count sink him deeper into trouble. The film’s a cross between Double Indemnity, a noir that also involves MacMurray and greedy schemes gone awry, and Rear Window, with its voyeuristic snooping.

Of the two halves of tonight’s double feature, I thought I’d enjoy Pushover more because it featured familiar actors. But I liked the other film better.

Having seen many installments now in the “B-Noir” series, I’ve decided my favorite element of the genre is the archetype of the strong and saucy woman. Sure, tomatoes like Novak are fun to ogle, but they’re boring. Better are the hard-bitten, curt and fiercely independent ladies (or at least until an inevitable sappy ending), like Ann Sheridan, who fires off zingers left and right in Woman on the Run. She spends most of the film evading the San Francisco cops and cracking wise with them. They suspect she’ll eventually locate her near-estranged husband (Ross Elliott), who’s on the run himself since witnessing a gangland murder that opens the film. A newspaperman (Dennis O’Keefe) gains her confidence and tags along to help in the hunt so he can get a scoop-worthy story from the husband. Sheridan’s character unfolds gradually to realize that she doesn’t know anything about her husband and that she still has feelings for him. Unfortunately, the ending is a cheesy, stretched-thin set piece in a waterfront amusement park, with Sheridan breaking character and getting all fretful, on a hurtling roller coaster, no less.

Even more jarring than any sudden plot developments was this guy sitting in the row in front of me, one of these sweaty, overweight, middle-aged loner types clad in a too-snug short-sleeve knit shirt from the ’70s, who ate a procession of individually wrapped foodstuffs from his plastic grocery bag. He kept rooting around in there like it contained buried treasure, producing prolonged noises of polyethylene rustling, cellophane crinkling, then mouth-smacking, prompting people to hiss at him to shut the fuck up.

It may surprise you to learn that there are more inconsiderate jerks in the average Film Forum audience than at the megaplexes I’ve been frequenting lately, and Film Forum is supposed to attract all the smugly overeducated, politically conscious, Village Voice-reading types. When Katie and I were there on Sunday, we witnessed a literal screaming argument between the double-feature involving some white guy who apparently told a chatty Asian woman during the film to be quiet, which she felt was racist. As their debate reached a fevered pitch, we gathered in a loose circle to bask in the hysteria, yet kept our distance and our postures catlike in case gunfire broke out and we needed to dive under the seats.

A simple, tightstrung drama taking place mostly on a train ride from Chicago to Los Angeles, The Narrow Margin didn’t have a big budget or name-brand talent, even by 1952 standards, but it’s an engrossing noir thriller backed by crackly Oscar-nominated writing.

I couldn’t help but think afterwards that if the same film had only starred A-list actors, it’d be better known today, instead of bearing the could-be-worse consensus “best of the B-noirs.” Katie and I popped over to the Film Forum tonight to catch it, another installment in the movie house’s excellent six-week series of gritty, second-billed mysteries and crime dramas spanning the mid-’40s to the mid-’50s.

Charles McGraw plays the overworked, underpaid flatfoot Walter Brown with jangled nerves and a voice of grimness and gravel. He’s charged with protecting and transporting one Mrs. Frankie Neall, a take-no-guff moll who has switched sides and is on her way to a trial at which she’ll name names in her slain husband’s operation. “She’s a 60-cent special,” rumbles Brown. “Cheap, flashy, and strictly poison under the gravy.” About the actress who plays her, Marie Windsor, Katie and I independently had the same thought: she’s a ringer in style, sass and substance for Allison Janney of The West Wing fame. See for yourself:

Director Richard Fleischer makes best use of suspense and action within the train’s close quarters, while flooding scenes with the harsh light and dark shadow of A-list noir. He steadily introduces aboard a series of mugs disguised as businessmen who have been hired to put the hit on Neall without arousing suspicion and maybe bump off Brown while they’re at it. Seemingly peripheral characters are folded into the mystery, all of whom Brown is initially loathe to trust. One is a comely mother (Jacqueline White) whom Brown takes a shine to as he fends off her mischievous, untrusting young son. Another is a mysterious overweight fellow, played by Paul Maxey, who admits, “Nobody loves a fat man, except his grocer and his tailor,” as passengers try to shy past him in the train’s narrow passageways. Clever twists culminate in a final act cunning enough that even the New York Times critic of the day kept as mum as an M. Night Shyamalan reviewer, admitting “to elaborate here would be to ruin an ingratiating swindle.”

Do you know who was sitting directly behind me tonight at The Da Vinci Code? Elizabeth Berkley. Or so I was told by a couple of excitable gay gentlemen in my party. I don’t like turning around to stare at celebrities in movie theaters any more than I like turning around to stare at people such as yourself in movie theaters, so I faced forward, watching the pre-movie commercials for cars and soda, but remained amused as the gentlemen stole glances and tried not to whisper the word Showgirls too loudly.

That was fun, but as for The Da Vinci Code, it stars Tom Hanks as an expert of anagrams and concerned looks. He would beat you at Big Boggle every time, but he would derive no discernable pleasure from it. Audrey Tautou plays a French hottie with fabulous legs who tags alongside Tom and asks questions (“I don’t understand,” “What does it mean?”, “Is it an anagram?”) that serve only to expel chunks of expository dialogue.

In any other Hollywood production, Audrey would become Tom’s love interest, but The Da Vinci Code is too emotionless for that. The closest we get is Audrey tenderly massaging Tom’s large head to exorcize his childhood trauma of falling into a well, which like every other main character’s backstory, we get to watch in a bleached flashback.

Since I’m only going to be making more fun of this movie, I should point out now that I haven’t read the book. This article convinced me not to. I don’t know how many of Dan Brown’s ham-fisted sentences made it through the studio meat grinder intact, but there are plenty of clichés left in the script, like “You are in grave danger” and many others I couldn’t be bothered to remember or write down. There are also clumsy sixth-grade reading-level nudges (“Sub rosa. Literally, ‘under the rose.’”) and repeated subtitling of obscure French exclamations like oui and merde.

The plot is basic and linear. Tom and Audrey flit around France and England on a Nancy Drew-style treasure hunt to solve the murder of Audrey’s grandfather, a curator at the Louvre. They find relics that should have rightly disintegrated or been found and sold on eBay many years prior. And thank goodness all those French clues are written in plain English.

Ian McKellen’s eccentric character injects some much needed energy halfway into the film, but by the time the fruity old Brit pops up with tea and glee, I was feeling drowsy, and although Elizabeth Berkley may not have been sleeping per se, she was very quiet. I realized too that although Sir Ian plays an over-the-top character that adds a spark of fun and revitalizes Tom and Audrey, he’s talking the same style nonsense as everyone else, about finding secrets hidden in B-list Bible gospels and da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I hear that in a deleted scene on The Da Vinci Code DVD, Ian will demonstrate how you can fold a $20 bill to discover hidden pictures of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks!

The whole Bible-busting backstory of Mary Magdalene bearing Jesus’ child, the search for the Holy Grail and secret societies of self-flagellating men who speak Latin on cell phones is preposterous, or no more plausable than many other tenets of religion offered as fact. I’d hope the Louvre would be more up in arms over this movie than religious zealots, if not only because now visitors will think they can snatch Caravaggios from the walls without immediately drawing armed guards or an embittered Jean Reno. Plus the museum will likely get even longer lines for the Mona Lisa and slack-jawed questions about where that painting is with the key hidden behind it.

There’s no one quite like Sterling Hayden. My only previous knowledge of him was getting shot in the neck by Al Pacino in The Godfather and as the general concerned about “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove.

In Crime Wave, which I saw last night as part of Film Forum’s series of “B Noir” films chiefly from the bottom of the bill in the ’50s, he’s the impassive Detective Sims, on the trail of an ex-con and his wife who he wrongly thinks are involved with a gang of cop-killing criminals. As it should be in the best noir, it’s a varied bunch of thugs with memorable mugs, including a 33-year-old Charles Bronson as the lunkhead muscle of the group.

Sims is always wearing a too-short necktie that’s inevitably flopped around backwards, and boasts a twisted scowl into which he sticks an endless succession of cigarette-substitute toothpicks, plucked from the breast pocket of his tweed suitcoat. The film makes no bones about the fact Hayen was 6'5", showing him towering over the other characters in the film.

He’s shrewd and unflappable as his case plays out, and although he’s not emotional outright, you suspect something vile is simmering under his lowered hat and behind his unblinking, ink-black eyes. Hayden’s been described as sadistic in this film, dogging the ex-con and his wife, saying he knows of their guilt (they’re actually being blackmailed by the criminals), but his actions border more closely on manic relentlessness, like Ahab and that whale.

The end is a surprise as he lets the ex-con and his wife free in thanks for their aid in foiling a bank robbery planned and nearly executed by the criminals. There’s a nervous relief at the film’s end as Sims leans against a building to pause finally for a job well done. He pulls a bent cigarette from his pocket with surprise, lights it and takes a drag, then winces and throws it to the ground, screwing a toothpick back into his mouth while squeezing out a smile.

Not everyone loves Frank Gehry. The architect’s most recent project is an unenviable task: forming the skyline of Brooklyn. On Friday, with developer Forest City Ratner, Gehry unveiled his model of the borough’s Atlantic Yards Project, a 22-acre plot of glass, brick and metal skyscrapers that would poke up over historic, low-rise neighborhoods, the residents of which aren’t universally happy.

Opponents say he’s painting a gloss over ’60s-style urban renewal and have demanded he alter the density and size of his project. Although the developer has committed to contract the plan by about five percent, Gerhy said Friday that he had been “paring back” the design himself. “It is a process,” he added elusively, according to The New York Times.

This process is a strange one, although you can glimpse it in Sydney Pollack’s new documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, which I saw this afternoon.

And begin with a sketch it does, loping and loose, like a drunken scrawl on a cocktail party napkin. Models are next. Gehry can’t or won’t use computers, and instead we see him as the film opens, paunchy, white-haired and plain-spoken, seated at a table with a pair of Fiskars scissors, Scotch tape and sheets of thin, silvery cardboard. He has half a model before him, and he cuts, folds and places panels here and there, moving some, adding others, cutting holes. He contemplates and fiddles some more.

“It’s so stupid looking, it’s great,” he says, suggesting later he’s not fully satisfied unless he’s tweaking something. Touring one of his own creations soon after its completion, he says wryly, “By the time I get to the finished building, I don’t like it.”

Gehry is defined several times as an artist or an artist-architect, with the baggage the name may imply: ego, form over function, a drive to perfection, the creation of beauty.

At an early age, Gehry is praised for his masterful sketches and later takes a ceramics class that foreshadows his architectural career; in his statement for the 1980 edition of “Contemporary Architects,” Gehry writes that he approaches each building

as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.

Perhaps his first great project is his own house, a container within a container. Gehry is told the pedestrian Los Angeles bungalow he buys in the late ’70s is haunted, and he decides by “the ghosts of Cubism” as he builds an angular shell completely encompassing the original structure. He pays tribute to artist-contemporaries he admires—Johns and Rauschenberg—by using industrial materials out of context, such as chain link fencing and corrugated sheet steel. A shot of Gehry’s kitchen shows its rear wall is the front of the original house, siding and windows intact. Shaving one morning in an upstairs bathroom, he becomes disgruntled by a lack of natural light and punches a hole in the roof with a hammer to let in the sunlight.

After his alterations are more or less complete, the president of a local real estate firm visits Gehry at the house and is flabbergasted the architect would live there but take comparatively pedestrian commissions. Gehry changes his ways of working to be self-reflective and since then has brought well-monied clients and the public his curves and unusual angles, uncommon materials and most famously, his sprawling, undulating roofs and panels of metal.

A fascinating segment of the film occurs when Gehry discusses the unobvious entwining of art with his work. Pulling from an office wall a color laser print of Hieronymus Bosch’s 500-year-old painting Christ Crowned with Thorns, Gehry shows that the shape, position and contrast of its central characters directly influenced the floor plan of the Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance, Center for Human Dignity, in Israel.

Just as art informs his architecture, Gehry’s high-powered clients describe his buildings in unarchitectural terms. Ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner doesn’t hesitate to compare the roof of a Gehry hockey arena in Los Angeles to breasts, while Barry Diller speaks of panels from a project he commissioned as boat sails. Gehry himself has defined a centerpiece element of his Brooklyn project as a bride’s veils. When Pollack asks him if he thinks of the surfaces of his structures as “painterly,” Gehry disagrees. Pollack proves him wrong with a montage of Gehry surfaces absorbing and reflecting light, sky, earth and water, resembling materials unlike themselves: iridescent fish scales or a copper desert floor at sunset.

Only one detractor gets significant air time and offers the instance of Gehry’s most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, as an example of architecture overwhelming art. The artist Julian Schnabel, surely having some fun clad in a white terry cloth robe and shades as he sips a brandy and dangles a cigarette from his other hand, counters that if Gehry’s surroundings are said to devour art, maybe that art’s just not good enough.

Praise is lavished thickly in Sketches of Frank Gehry, not much time is devoted to any one project and physical failures of Gehry’s work are completely ignored; there was a well-publicized problem, for instance, with the roof of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which until it was sanded, blinded people on sunny days and heated adjacent sidewalks to 140°. But the film works well as a talk between two old friends, interspersed with bits of the architect’s history, personality, drive and creative process.

What was I thinking?

No, wait; what were the makers of Poseidon thinking?

Dialogue tainted by every cliché in the book. Typecast characters I didn’t care about, including a jerk nicknamed Lucky who dies and a screechy child who regrettably survives, although not without constantly wandering off to become imperiled. Ultra-linear, by-the-book plot. Kurt Russell looking and acting like he just finished scarfing down an entire uncooked meatloaf.

Some of the special effects are moderately absorbing, but nothing that hasn’t been already gaped at in Titanic nearly a decade ago.

And there’s trouble in the cards, Poseidon people, if your movie packs the opening-day 8:05 p.m. show in Manhattan only half full. There were more people lined up across the street to see Guns N’ Roses at the Hammerstein.

I went with Jimi and the boys (who I think I shall start calling “the J. Crew” to avoid writing “Jimi, The Man and Michael” each time) to catch Mission: Impossible III.

We crammed into one of the colossal theaters upstairs at the Lowe’s on 42nd Street with approximately the rest of Manhattan, although it was an attentive and well behaved group.

During his brief moments on-screen, villain Philip Seymour Hoffman is dull and angry, like he was just shaken awake from a nap. Instead of spending time trading zingers in a hero-villian showdown, this movie is more about Cruise globetrotting to retrieve a rogue plot device known as the Rabbit’s Foot, which appears to be an amber liquid in a glass cylinder.

Tons of shaky handheld camera work, to dizzying effect, particularly because our movie screen was one of those so wide that during a two-shot scene, I had to move my head back and forth to track the actors talk to one another.

But as usual, this is a movie less about talk and more about rock. There’s Tom in Rome, China and Germany, dodging missiles and bullets, firing guns, walking up walls, sliding down buildings, impersonating people with those CGI/latex masks again, and freefalling off tall buildings, all within the Violence Lite confines of the PG-13 rating. There’s an amusing scene with Tom scribbling what appear to be advanced geometric equations to plan a swing from one skyscraper to another, Spider-Man style.

There’s so much action, I had forgotten all of it by the time the movie was over. I did however remember the trailers for Over the Hedge and Nacho Libre (starring Jack Black as Chris Farley in Beverly Hills Ninja), both of which I’d like to see; and to a lesser extent, X-Men: The Last Stand and Superman Returns, to fulfill my summertime superhero movie quota.

Afterwards we walked over to the Film Center Cafe for dinner. It’s located in the Theater Distric across the street from the Film Center and keeping in the theme, features a décor of movie posters. Plus, I saw some chick wearing a Ghostbusters T-shirt. For a nice price, I had an extra large and delicious hamburger smothered with mushrooms.

Film Center Cafe

• 635 Ninth Ave.
• (212) 262-2525
• Meal 18 of 52: mushroom burger with fries and cole salw ($9) and a pint of Guinness ($5).

Film noir with high school students? It really shouldn’t work, but it does as the premise of Brick, the film I saw tonight.

The moody, loner protagonist still holds a flame for his ex-girlfriend, seeking out her suspicious disappearance among a rouge’s gallery of femme fatales, henchmen, a kingpin, a brainy sidekick and informers, all speaking in quick, clipped slang. Sounds like classic noir, yet most everyone in this cast is a teen and the film takes place in the present, on the grounds and environs of a high school in San Clemente, California.

This isn’t that O.C. It’s 21st Century California Gothic, like Mulholland Drive, with overcast skies, unpeopled landscapes with only a freeway or palm tree punctuating the distance, and secret dark places in culverts and the basements of suburban ranch homes. The score is creepy and percussive, with sounds of battered bells and chimes, and the dialogue’s a mash of slang both current and filched from gangster films of the ’40s and ’50s.

Aside from two scenes that are perhaps intentionally flip because they contain the movie’s only adults, Brick is consistent and grim, dropping squarely into the genre of detective noir, especially The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown. Our hero Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, penance paid for 3rd Rock from the Sun) is sharp and obsessive unraveling the movie’s mystery, willingly getting in too deep investigating the interconnected cliques, gangs and drug ring he suspects have to do with the disappearance of Emily, played by Emilie de Ravin of Lost. He’s repaid with increasingly brutal beatdowns and spends most of the last part of the movie coughing, bleeding, doubling over and blacking out.

Brick is a low-budget production of the Heartwarming Road-to-Fame backstory, shot in 20 days with money scrounged from friends and family, written by director Rian Johnson and edited by him on a Macintosh in his bedroom. It premiered at Sundance last year as a favorite, won the Special Jury Prize “for originality of vision” and has gained generally appreciative and I think deserved reviews.

The greatest detriment of the gumshoe’s shoestring of a budget is that for such a talky, fast-spoken film, much of the dialogue is poorly recorded and tough to catch. That’s a shame because it’s essential to hear it in order to keep straight the characters and their web of connections. I think I’d need to see the film again to really work everything out, although some of the confusion may be hardwired, as in The Big Sleep, which had plot points so obtuse even Raymond Chandler couldn’t clarify them, and he wrote the damn book.

If you’re a fan of landscaping, topiary and lush gardens of flowers, shrubs and trees, each of which has one of those little name placards posted near it, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is your place, friend.

I was there for the first time today for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. It is a marvel to walk under richly scented canopies of cherry trees in full bloom, showers of petals catching on the wind and cascading around you, like you’re in a commercial for a feminine hygiene product. There were many people there: frisky young couples rolling around on the grass, families with rambunctious kids in tow, burnouts kicking about a hacky-sack, old people moving slowly, amateur photographers aplenty and a handful of geishas. It was beautiful, but I can only take so much mingling with nature. All those blossoms started to look the same and I could feel my body flooding with histamine. Not even the lazy, sun-dappled landscape could whisk my mind too far away from the crowds and the fact that the garden seems to be located directly in a flightpath of JFK.

I decided I wasn’t taking the long haul to Brooklyn without making something else of my trip, so I stopped by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas to see Friends with Money.

Like director Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Lovely & Amazing, it concerns relationships and talking about relationships, this time around with a middle-aged-woman flavor, meditations on aging gracefully, and the help and hindrance money can bring.

Jennifer Aniston costars as the one poor friend who’s a housemaid, obsessive over her ex-boyfriend and Lancôme skin cream samples; she’s not bad although she seems to reprise her role from The Good Girl. Otherwise, it’s a fine leading cast, with Catherine Keener as a screenwriter whose husband ignores her, Frances McDormand as an angry, angry woman who argues fiercely with people who cut in front of her in lines and steal her parking spaces, and Joan Cusack as the most-moneyed friend who’s somewhat shallow and only slowly realizes she doesn’t actually do anything.

Three Times is not a movie to see after a hectic workday wherein you’ve just flown back from Boston. I picked this film because I vaguely recall reading a gushing review of it. The structure of it certainly appealed to me: directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou, it features Chen Chang (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame) and Qi Shu playing a different couple in love within a trio of vignettes taking place in China in 1966, 1911 and 2005.

But the movie runs long and feels even longer than its running time: each vignette takes roughly 40 minutes, but the mostly static takes stretch out at a leisurely pace, nothing much happens and there is little dialog—in fact the 1911 segment has effectively no dialogue, featuring instead updated versions of old-time “dialogue cards” intercut into scenes. There are beautiful subtleties, like the couple at the end of the 1966 segment holding hands as an expression of their bottled-up feelings for one another. And I liked how a few key elements, including a love letter (in the 2005 segment, it’s a text message on a cellphone), recurred in all three timeframes. But these moments are far between the lengthy scenes of mundane or repetitious activity. I can appreciate artfully slow movies, but this one was too poky for even me.

Thank You for Smoking, which I saw tonight, is a consistent, constant farce, yet doesn’t so much mock the bullheadedness and influence of the tobacco lobby as it shows how easy it can be to convince anyone of anything.

Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, a smooth and confident Big Tobacco lobbyist not nearly as despicable as his characters in Neil LaBute’s late-’90s double-whammy of In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. His only friends are key lobbyists for the alcohol and firearms industries; they go out for dinner together regularly and call themselves the M.O.D. Squad, for “Merchants of Death.”

Although the film’s pacing is so speedy and the dialogue so crackly (via the screenplay adapted by 29-year-old director Jason Reitman), there’s a lot of humor milked from some obvious setups that seem like little set pieces: Nick somehow emerging victorious from a live talk show panel that includes health professionals and a bald teenager with smoking-induced cancer, Nick following-through on his brainstorm to get cigarette smoking back into movies, Nick paying off a cancer-ridden former Marlboro Man (the crusty Sam Elliott), Nick embarrassing his young son (Cameron Bright) during Bring Your Parent to School Day. If fact, some heartfelt moments that keep the movie from descending completely into pure satire are when Nick spends time with his estranged son, in whom he instills confidence and a spookily strong ability to debate and question authority.

Other strong performances include William H. Macy as a Grape Nut senator from Vermont who’s Nick’s most outspoken opponent until a wicked turnabout, and J.K. Simmons, who plays Nick’s boss, Budd “B.R.” Rohrabacher, combining nonstop R Rating-justified cursing with the rapid-fire bluster of his Jonah Jameson character in the Spider-Man films.

Katie, Kelly and I saw the new 35mm print of Days of Heaven tonight at the Film Forum. Terrence Malick is the J.D. Salinger of directors: reclusive, revered (often overly so) and with few finished works to his name, having only cranked out four features in my lifetime. After completing Heaven in 1978, he wouldn’t direct another film for 20 years, The Thin Red Line.

Heaven’s dialogue could fit into a short story and the editing is choppy. Much of this has to do with Malick’s infamous style of rolling for miles of film, sometimes without a script, then creating the story in the cutting room. As such, his films aren’t as much plot or character driven as they are expressionistic meditations on life and death, alternating between carefully composed widescreen landscapes and the minutiae of nature, and culminating in sudden manmade savagery.

As for that plot, Bill (Richard Gere, when he was a strapping, handsome lad) and Abby (the oddly pretty Brooke Adams) are iterant laborers harvesting wheat in Texas in the days before World War I. Although they’re lovers, they pretend to be brother and sister, which leads to an entanglement with the farm’s sickly owner (Sam Shepard), who fancies Abby. Linda Manz plays Linda, a chain-smoking tomboy in her early teens who may or may not be Bill’s kid sister. The length of the film features her voiceover, like a New York-accented version of Huckleberry Finn, grammatically askew but clear-eyed and frank, meditating on her and the other laborers’ station in life. The movie winds down with plagues of fire and grasshoppers of Biblical proportions and concludes with a pair of inevitable deaths.

This is a film truly made to be seen on a large screen, with shots of trains traversing the countryside, herds of buffalo, infinite stalks of wheat undulating in the breeze, the sprawling fields dotted with workers at dawn and dusk. The background of most of the harvest scenes features the overseer’s looming farmhouse, lonely in the distance and lit at night, with the angle and Gothic shape of the one in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Much of the dialogue seems poorly recorded, but it may just have to lend even more weight to the sounds that serve as themes in the film: the spinning meteorological whirligigs atop the farmhouse, th