Reviews

The 2006 restoration of this amazing 1919 film presents one of the very best opportunities to learn about the period from watching a contemporaneous film. Aesthetically, it stands on its own merit as a completely engaging and emotional piece, which on the whole deserves a much wider audience. The restoration drops whatever there was of a phony happy ending in the 1922 re-release, and adds an excellent score by Robert Israel. Israel scores are a quick tip that a silent film has been given a sensitive and elegant restoration that will be very palatable to modern tastes.

The story is a complex family/romantic melodrama built around a poet in love with a woman trapped in a bad marriage to a violent man. With the war, the two men become comrades in arms, and complications ensue. (I really dislike reviews that go on and on telling the film's story. If someone is going to watch the movie, it is up to the director to tell the story in his own style and at his own pace.) I believe the film is mischaracterized as an anti-war film. No one is really for war, so a realistic film like this by a veteran and using real footage will include a lot of pathos that will serve the purpose of an anti-war message. But everyone is anti-war, the difference between a pro-war and and an anti-war film is that a pro-war film blames the war on the enemy and creates situations for nobility based on service of the just cause. An anti-war film turns the proponents of war into greedy liars, emphasizes the humanity of the enemy, and creates situations for nobility based on refusal to participate in the war. So defined, this piece (like The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse - 1921) is a pro-war film.

This is a dreamy and at the same time intensely realistic film about the life of one or two or three women living empty, lonely lives in a small California desert town. If you have not already seen it, and if you like any films by Ingmar Bergman or Robert Altman or David Lynch, then stop reading this or any other review and see the film for yourself.

The fun of a movie like this, that is so realistic that it has no "correct" interpretation and even the movie's director and writer is not entirely sure what it "means," is to come up with your own theories and share with others who saw the film. My theory is that the three women are all separate individuals, who are alike in the sense that we are all one, but who are not alike in the way female characters/actresses are the same person in Persona, That Obscure Object of Desire, or Mulholland Drive. The sweet old couple really are Pinky's parents, and the suicide attempt leaves Pinky with amnesia, which is why she forgets her parents and confuses herself with Millie as she tries to reconstruct her life. Poor old Edgar gets shot by one of the women, or maybe all three, who make it look like an accident. It makes no sense for his body to be hidden in the tires, as that would not be an effective way of hiding him, the stench would attract attention, and the staged accident is consistent with a traditional body disposal. But maybe it is his body, just because stuff that happens in real life often makes no sense.

The real fun of this movie for me was the shock of the familiar, in picking out the tacky details of real life circa 1977. I was 20 when the film came out, and yes I do remember making shrimp cocktails, and cooking pigs-in-a-blanket like it was a new gourmet treat, and sorting out Sociables crackers eating the broken ones and saving the whole ones for company with canned cheese squirted on. I even had one of those silly laugh-toys (not a hag face, just a little box in a felt bag) that made the laughing sound and cracked everyone up. I didn't smoke Trues or drive a Ford Pinto, but I was around others who did.

And the Shelly Duvall character, with the heart of gold who lies constantly to try to make herself more interesting and who tries so hard to make everything perfect she annoys all the people she is trying to befriend? Too real.

Autobiographical documentary directed by and starring Julia Pimsleur in which she films her reunion with her long lost brother, Marc. Julia is a bisexual New York Jewish film maker and Yale grad, and brother has dropped out of UC Berkley, become a born-again Christian, and moved for the past ten years to a commune of like-minded folk on an Alaska farm.

At the risk of a plot spoiler, there is sort of no punch line or expose to this reunion. Brother is about as loopy as any born-again Christian, and sister is a bit annoying in trying to bait her brother into a debate, but ultimately they both accept each other, and there is nothing to suggest any improper activity or compulsion at work on the commune. Where the film is interesting is as a positive role model for how real people at opposite ends of the current culture wars can hang together in peace.

Its hard to know how to rate a personal film with minimal production values that you watch on the web. Are we comparing it to Casablanca? Or to home movies on YouTube? I will say that it is interesting and worthwhile.

South Park does not get all the credit it deserves as our time's most perceptive and fearless source of social and political commentary. This 2003 episode is one of the best examples. The kids can serve as neutral observers to the angry confrontation between adults in the left-wing "war is not the answer" faction against the right-wing "support the troops" faction. The opposing camps have competing permits for the same space, so a direct acting out of American culture wars is coming.

It is hard to imagine a more complete and perceptive chronicling of the intense division that was part of the real world circa 2003 over the war in Iraq. It is interesting that this is an episode where they got Norman Lear as a collaborator and guest voice, as the usually right-leaning Parker and Stone manage a balanced and completely ingenious resolution of the culture-wars conflict, which manages to puncture the pretense on both sides.

The real love story in this classic is between the director Fellini and his life-long wife, Giulietta Masina. The person who falls in love with Cabiria is you sitting in the audience. In the audience, we share a number of intimate moments with Cabiria like when she is alone in the movie star's bathroom, and when she is praying to the Madonna for a better life, and when she is preparing hopefully for her marriage. No character in the film ever gets to know her as intimately as we do.

In the film's denouement, she is sort of walking off into the future with us as her adoring audience. We share with her the little smile when she sees reason for hope among the young people playing music.

Romantic melodrama starring Gloria Swanson as the devoted daughter to a cash-strapped captain. Swanson agrees to marriage with a fat, old, social-climbing grocery tycoon, but on her disappointing honeymoon she falls in love with a young British aristocrat (Rudolph Valentino). The powerhouse combination of director Sam Wood with arguably the two best actors in the romantic silent melodrama genre delivers an engaging and touching story.

How you react to any film depends on your expectations, so it seems that people seeing all the hype about the significance of the recent reclamation of the film were expecting too much. Going in with no expectations, I was enthralled by how really touching an old-fashioned love story can be when the characters do virtually nothing more than exchange glances and graze each other's hands. The attention to detail in the wardrobe, the exotic locations, and the dreamy depiction of British aristocracy in the early 20th Century, make this a must-see for fans of the genre.

Romantic wartime adventure starring Rudolph Valentino as a wealthy Argentine-born Frenchman who travels to Paris, teaches ladies to tango, and has an affair with a married woman that becomes complicated by the onset of the Great War. The film is a comprehensive, albeit maudlin, account of WW1 from the French perspective, and succeeded in 1921 as a means for the families of wartime casualties to process their grief.

I disagree with the comments calling this an anti-war film. A pro-war position will often include intense grief over the casualties of war, but will see those casualties as necessary, and serving a great cause. In The Four Horsemen, the French are noble, the Germans are virtually all monsters, the Americans are heroes, and the only really unsympathetic character (besides the Germans) is the Frenchman who shirks his patriotic duties.

All Quiet On the Western Front is an anti-war film, but The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse makes you want to put on a uniform and fight.

Silent romantic melodrama about a moody WWI vet who returns from war hoping to consummate his marriage, only to find his marriage has been annulled and his ex is married to another. He's then put in a precarious position between the sexually aggressive ex and her new hubby's "Order" of moral vigilantes.

Users who see this as a pro-Klan film are missing the point of the movie, and failing to check their history. There actually were incidents of Klan groups in Alabama in 1927 (the year before release of this film) practicing vigilante punishments, including flogging, of whites who had committed moral transgressions. Far from being "untouchable" in 1928, the daily newspaper in Montgomery, Alabama ran a series of editorials against the Klan, for which it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In 1928, a Catholic was elected governor of Alabama, and Klan membership began to fade.

The Mating Call is clearly part of the mainstream backlash against the Klan. The only Klan member is an outright hypocrite, and the Klan vigilantes are shown whipping an innocent man. Where does anyone get favorable treatment from that?

Quirky, comic love story starring Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor as neurotic misfits who meet at a group therapy encounter session and reluctantly fall in love. Over-the-top satire is used to needle the touchy-feely psychotherapy process, as well as the surrealistic dysfunctional families that created the intensely flawed central characters.

Through angry encounters, the two lovers begin vomiting out uncomfortable truths, and then settle into a warm zone of mutual acceptance and intimacy. Near the end, Bologna blurts out that 'I love you, but I don't want to love you. I want to love someone prettier than you and smarter than you. But that person may never come along so I have to settle for you.' The real plot resolution does not come until the film's final frozen frame, when you see the two look at each other with an amused, knowing smile. The real happy ending is when you find out that Bologna and Taylor were married for six years at the time they both wrote and starred in the film, and that as of 2005 they have still been married for 40 years.

Happy anniversary, congratulations, and thanks for a great film.

Humorless but powerful social drama starring Catalina Moreno as a brave but necessity-driven Colombian girl who is exploited as a "mula" by drug smugglers. The film is a well-researched and thorough exposition of how poor Colombians are abused by a scheme in which they put their lives at risk by carrying drugs in their stomachs. It has a foreign-film feel, but was actually written and directed by American white-boy Josh Marston.

The first third of the movie drags us through the pathetic circumstances of family necessity that push newly-pregnant Moreno to the big city in hope of earning some cash. Next comes an extended second act in which we are mercilessly exposed to the graphic detail of how obscene amounts of the potentially lethal contraband are gagged down by the mules (think Fear Factor without the music). The third act involves the actual smuggling, which goes in to traditionally structured cinematic conventions of crisis and conflict.

Two things sweeten what would otherwise be a bitter pill, long on importance and short on entertainment. One is the fact that nearly every frame includes Moreno's pretty face, and we are ultimately encouraged by her resourcefulness and courage. The other is the inspiring presence of real-life hero Orlando Tobon ("Don Fernando"), whose real-world travel agency and charitable efforts on behalf of the mules become the centerpiece of the film's American segments.

Movie snobs like moi will consider Maria time well spent, but don't go expecting a war-on-drugs action-adventure shoot-em-up.