Reviews

Anyone who loves 'Until the End of the World' -- for the way it looks, sounds, and feels first, and then for its ideas -- should feel no differently about this short film made around the same time, which is a sliver from the same pie. Wenders even uses at least one of the same locations (if my judgment here is correct).

Like UtEotW, this is a work of its time, though fortunately it's around this time that pop culture pretty much ceased to age badly. With the new century (and millennium) less than a decade away, Wenders' snapshots of the worry and excitement (and resignation) of a global culture bracing itself for the shock of the new are perhaps paralleled only by the later work of Krzysztof Kieslowski. Wenders is mindful of a planet increasingly dense with the imagery of corporate branding, electronic technology, and the impersonal shapes and lines of modern commerce. But he doesn't brood about it; rather, he uses this cold, neon new world as a playground. 'Until the End of the World' saw Solveig Dommartin jet- setting across a heavily commercialized near-future on a supply of stolen loot, in a jet-black wig that seemed encased in proverbial quotation marks. Here, we have Rudiger Vogler in a bear costume, dancing a jig, and Wim Wenders in a Santa suit, filming him via handicam, on a foggy night at a BP filling station.

Later, Russian tourist Anna Vronskaya's minivan becomes its own microcosm of a global village, as she, her children, Wenders and Vogler, and a hitch-hiking Vietnamese family sing along to... Nick Cave's "The Weeping Song." As always, Wenders' taste in music is superb. Particularly if you share that taste, you can lose yourself in a sequence like this.

This sequence, and this film, may not have a great deal to say, unlike 'Until the End of the World,' but the upside is, those whose enjoyment of 'Until the End of the World' was cut short by its occasional ponderousness (I didn't mind) will find this much easier to take. In a way, 'Arisa' is an abstraction of UtEotW's beatific, rock-infused style (one which would dominate Wenders' work from 'Wings of Desire' to date). UtEotW was a notoriously difficult shoot, and 'Arisha' doubtless was a breezy little departure from the stresses of a major, wayward production. That's the sense I got watching it, yet Wenders still wanders the realm of some of the themes he explores in UtEotW, 'The End of Violence,' and to some extent in 'Lisbon Story' -- namely, the way this new world, and its emerging technologies, threatens to isolate us even from those in close physical proximity. This is more directly confronted in his features -- Bill Pullman's computer conferences in 'The End of Violence,' and Dommartin's imprisonment inside her own dreams in UtEotW -- but it's still evoked here (Vronskaya's laptop, Wenders' handicam, forcing him into a "secondhand reality"), and fleetingly triumphed over (the Nick Cave sing-along, encounters with Croatian refugees, and the overall communal attitude). But finally, the paths diverge; Vogler, on his locomotive, goes one way, and Vronskaya and family, in their minivan, go another, with Wenders -- still dressed as Santa -- stranded in between.

It's a lovely closing image, and this short film is pure bliss, as well as a playful affirmation of Wenders' singular bighearted cool.

'Cocktail' has more value than one might think, albeit a value that was not originally intended. A bad movie, yes, it certainly is, but on a purely visceral level, it's never without points of interest. I may even go so far as to assert that it's thoroughly enjoyable. It's also a movie that merits study, as it's quite revealing of the values and preoccupations of America in the 1980s. This is one of the token Hollywood movies of that decade, and were I to, say, teach a course on or curate a retrospective of films depicting the cultural climate of 1980s America, this film, along with De Palma's 'Scarface,' would be among the selected.

Let's first consider Tom Cruise. 'Cocktail' is one of the three or four movies most vital to the establishment of Cruise as the foremost male Hollywood sex symbol of the last two decades. Yet, on screen, he is curiously blank, even sort of dumb. His charisma lies in the fact that he is innately uncharismatic and charming only because he's an innocuous naïf whose cock is his compass, able to mimic the walk and the talk, bemused by his own ability to stand out in a situation by trying so hard to adapt. There's a vast, shall we say, rift between the charm of suave screen idols of the fifties and sixties, like Cary Grant, and the looks-sexy-in-a-business-suit boyish charm of latter-day capital-h Hunks like Cruise and Kevin Bacon. In 'Cocktail,' he is able to dominate women simply because the domination is effortless and incidental. Most of the one-night-stands Cruise's character scores are achieved because of a bet or a dare. The conquests appear to be of little consequence.

'Cocktail' is a movie that seems to be written and made by people who have spent a lot of time drinking at bars, but not serving at them. The movie's two main characters have real redblooded bartender's names: Brian Flanagan, played by Cruise, and Douglas Coughlin. It could only have been science that led to these names. Flanagan, fresh out of the military, establishes his sense of masculine privilege in the very opening scene, when he and his army buddies pull over a Greyhound bus with a red strobe light (the kind they have in undercover squadcars). He boards the bus and heads off to Manhattan with books on and naïve ideas of entrepreneurship, expecting to hit it rich as an executive but simultaneously harboring a working class man's resentment of the rich. He doesn't have a college degree, though, so he gets some advice from his uncle, a bar owner, and enrolls at a university after taking a gig at T.G.I. Friday's, where Coughlin (Bryan Brown) mentors him and turns him into the Hollywood version of a "great" bartender. That, of course, entails a cross between a circus performer and a Busby Berkeley one-man chorus line, as Flanagan can't shake the habit of tossing bottles, shakers and glasses into the air and practically juggling them. It's bartending as stuntwork.

Coughlin, who likes to spout off-the-cuff platitudes under the heading of "Coughlin's law" (be prepared to roll your eyes), and Flanagan become buddies and form a deep masculine bond that is so cloying it fails to actually cloy. They have a falling out and Flanagan, having given up academics, heads to Jamaica to tend bar on the beach. There, he meets and has a torrid Harlequin Romance Novel-cover affair with Jordan Mooney, played by Elisabeth Shue who's the best thing in this movie. Shue is beautiful here and very convincingly projects intelligence and vulnerability. The two lovers milk the photogenic landscape of Jamaica, making love under Dunn's River Falls in broad daylight as though they were posing for a blue postcard for exhibitionist tourists. The Jamaica shown here, by the way, wouldn't even qualify for the adjective "postcard." It's a department store Jamaica, ripe for the windows of a travel agency.

Flangan is reunited with Coughlin, and his penchant for conquest drives Shue's good girl away, silently returning by night to New York. Other circumstances trigger Flanagan's return to New York, and this is where the movie begins to seriously misstep. Prior to this point, it's somewhat level in its depiction of masculine conquest and capitalist fantasy.

In New York, Flangan has been shacking up with a rich elitist with whom he has nothing in common aside from their shared awe of his penis. Meanwhile, Coughlin is a newly married and newly wealthy man, whose riches make his fundamental shortcomings all the more apparent to him. Flanagan dumps the rich witch and locates Shue. Cruise's scenes with Shue from this point forward hit all the wrong notes, and even worse are the scenes between Flanagan and Jordan's father. These scenes miss a very open opportunity for honesty and simply reinforce expected stereotypes.

'Cocktail' is one of those movies that just feels meticulously constructed and laboratory-tweaked to rake gold at the box office. It is, in its depictions, completely naïve, and as an entertainment product, full of thoroughly deliberated contrivances. Even the reparteé reeks of being engineered, and it's enjoyable on that level rather than as banter. This is a "good times" movie that resembles the music you hear in chain restaurants like Chili's and this feature's very own T.G.I. Fridays. It's like a magazine without content, with full-page ads from cover-to-cover. Of course, from an anthropological perspective, you can glean a lot of info from magazine advertisements from the distance of a decade or more. In this magazine, there are only two types of women: Madonnas (Shue) and whores (the rest). The female viewer, though, will likely be too distracted by Cruise to notice, as this is a housewife's movie, designed and successful at inspiring masturbatory fantasies in women and wish-fulfillment in men. The movie is iconic, though. In its way, 'Cocktail' is the 'Casablanca' of the '80s, and that's not necessarily praise.

Wim Wenders is one of my favorite filmmakers, and like Scorsese and Tavernier, he is a world-class cinephile, as much in love with watching movies as he is making them. The problem with 'The American Friend,' I think, is similar to the problem of most contemporary films noir, which is, it's made with the knowledge it's a film noir. But it fails for a different reason than, say, 'L.A. Confidential.' The latter film is simply a big-budget period reconstruction of film noir, like something from the candy sampler box of film genres. It has no life of its own and is sort of like the model they show you when you're shopping around for a home in a new development; the furniture's well-chosen and neatly in place, but no one lives there. Other contemporary noirs, like Altman's 'The Long Goodbye,' approach the genre from a revisionist angle, and 'The American Friend' does it from the wrong angle, from a cinephile's angle.

The movie feels studied, like an academic exercise. It has no edge, no spontaneity. One can appreciate the movie, its cheeky comment on the art world, its humanism, without really enjoying it, and that's the trouble.

I've seen the movie twice and while its bold primary colors were appealing, and its meditative pace pleasurable to an extent, I found it a bit of a chore. It's interesting to see noir slowed down to a crawl, and Nicholas Ray is a delight, and surely, some sequences are involving, but the whole affair is lacking. Wenders' intensity has always been augmented by a certain lightness of touch, and that's what made the noir elements of 'Until the End of the World' a lot of fun. 'The American Friend' is too austere, though. Too muted. I thought 'Purple Noon,' René Clément's 1960 adaptation of the other Patricia Highsmith novel, was too muted the first time I watched it, but on subsequent viewings thought it to be engaging, almost musically so. Metaphysical heaviness for once bogs down a Wenders film rather than enhancing it.

'Appleseed,' reportedly a landmark animated feature in its marrying of 2D animation and 3D landscapes, draws its syntax from more basic sources such as Hollywood cinema and MTV. As visually breathtaking as it often is, its style is very kinetic, hyperkinetic -- think Michael Bay on speed. I had very little idea what was happening during each action sequence, and resigned myself to waiting until afterward for some explanation or play-by-play via dialogue.

The movie opens with such a sequence. First, it surveys a devastated metropolitan landscape shrouded in the grey of night, calling to mind 'Blade Runner' (what post-apocalyptic film doesn't call to mind 'Blade Runner,' these days?), and before we can much admire the digitally shimmering detail of this environment, large machines and robo-warriors appear. Explosions ensue, and a female soldier called Deunan Knute, the kind of name that screams "Make me a trademark name," jumps into the action. I couldn't tell you in detail what happens, though, because I couldn't follow it.

What I do know, however, is that Deunan is knocked unconscious and whisked away to the utopian metropolis of Olympus, a sprawling crowd of skyscrapers and bridges recalling Lang's 'Metropolis,' Spielberg's 'A.I.' and the 'Weird Science' comics of the '50s. The city is populated by humans and bioroids, human-like creatures who are designed without the capacity for anger, envy and biological reproduction, intended to instill a 'balance' scientifically determined to prevent the human race from destroying itself. The city is run by two forces, basically: the human "regular army," and the bioroids. Overseeing everything is a large, incandescent sphere called "Gaia," informed by a band of elders whose dialogues with one another advise it of the proper path. The "regular army" is commanded by Uranas, who wants to rid Olympus of the bioroids and regain human control.

It sounds a lot like 'I, Robot,' and indeed, there's a lot of watered-down philosophizing borrowed from the more popular faces of 20th century philosophy and science fiction. The parallels to Greek mythology are heavy-handed and not nearly as edifying as they'd like to be. If the action sequences are extreme, so is the expository dialogue. Characters explain and explain, almost as though they're reading from the film's own Cliffs Notes. The American actors hired to dub the dialogue sound particularly flat.

The aesthetic qualities of the film are varied, but mostly with good results. 3D models were constructed for the film and photographed digitally, and sometimes this is striking (particularly the shots that are indistinguishable from actual footage, such as those of a hyperreal ocean), and other times, ugly and tarnished by digital artifacts such as aliasing (when diagonal lines appear pixelated and take on the shape of a staircase). The cel-shading is the most impressive quality, resulting in a remarkably fluid sense of light and shadows that is rarely seen in animated films.

The movie engages intermittently. I liked the daylit skyline and exterior details of Olympus, particularly the floating vehicles and the mirror-like causeways on which they travel. It's hard to care much about what happens on screen, though. Much of the movie plays like a non-interactive video game. The movie's technical innovation is rendered almost trivial by the creators' lack of imagination, sappy use of pop music and generally uninspired writing, yielding none of the resonance or wonder of recent triumphs of Japanese animation such as 'Spirited Away.'

Despite whatever intoxicated tangents Ken Russell has embarked on in some of his other works, 'The Boy Friend' is a particularly enchanting anomaly for this director. Working loosely from Sandy Wilson's Broadway musical 'The Boyfriend,' Russell's screenplay relegates Wilson's original work to a mere production-within-a-production -- 'Noises Off'-style, as it were. Set in1920's London, the owner of a decaying theater company in the East End realizes that a big-shot Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeThrill, has dropped in to watch a performance, and he instantly regrets thrusting the young Assistant Stage Manager, Polly (played by Twiggy), onto the stage to fill the shoes of the show's star (Glenda Jackson, in an uncredited cameo), who's laid up in the hospital after getting her foot stuck in a tramline while en route to the performance. As with 'Noises Off,' the movie is a farce dealing with a potentially disastrous stage performance, although the backstage drama is more interwoven with the onstage production itself, so that the play dominates the duration of the film while serving as a window onto the backstage chaos.

The members of the theatre company are vain and starved to impress DeThrill, bitterly upstaging one another and overreaching for the Hollywood bigwig's attention. Amidst them, of course, is Twiggy's Polly, humble, nervous and in love with leading man Tony, who may or may not be carrying on an affair with one of the company's coquettish young actresses. Her feelings, at any given moment -- ranging from adoration to heartbreak, based upon what she half-observes -- dictate the course of her onstage performance and her ad-libs.

Wilson's play deals trivially with class divide, and it's interesting to note how the company's performers, all unrefined East Enders, play on their slanted notion of the upper-class. The actresses Russell has cast have a particular big-eyed, blinking appeal, the wider their shark-like onstage smiles, the greater the underhandedness being masked. The farcical elements are well-played, and Russell's signature brand of calculated bawdiness is appropriate for this context.

The brightest element of the movie, however, is Twiggy. Here, she is endearing and delicate, charmingly unsophisticated in an Eliza Doolittle fashion. Her performance in 'The Boy Friend' is unusually pure and sympathetic for something found in a Ken Russell film, and in a way, her character's predicament can be seen as a metaphor for Twiggy's appearance in this film. She is commanding through her gentle submissiveness, standing radiantly apart from the gloss of what surrounds her. Russell's strategy in establishing Twiggy's Polly as a most sympathetic protagonist seems to be directing her to perform, onstage, in the most naturalistic way possible, while every other member of the company performs in alternately forced, unnatural, and ham-fisted manners (pandering to DeThrill, of course, but at times reaching bizarre extremes of unnaturalness).

Unfortunately, for much of the film, Twiggy is completely swallowed by Ken Russell's extravaganza, in which he either pays homage to or simply satirizes Busby Berkeley with quite glorious (but characteristically excessive) widescreen tableaux. He has his entire library of tricks on hand, expressed in 'fantasy' sequences, in which an American flag backdrop dominates the entire frame in one instance, and a black & white movie projected onto a screen, positioned squarely in the center of the frame, itself turns into a Berkeley-style number. Another fantasy sequence, shot in a rustic outdoor environment, is ugly and dated, and does not fit with the rest of the film. It should have been excised.

Like most of Russell's films, 'The Boy Friend' looks and sounds great. The movie is often a joy to watch, particularly in its first hour. As much as I admired its visuals and the tight rhythms of its wit, I found myself longing, after it ended, for more of Twiggy's warmth and less of Russell's technical virtuosity. Still, a most enjoyable movie.

There are two types of horror films, really. There are popcorn horror films, good for a cheap in-the-moment thrill at best, and there are serious horror films, movies that linger in the mind and in the bones. I have just watched Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' and my spine is frozen. It's 4am, I'm alone, and I have a heightened awareness of sounds and sights I usually don't notice.

Here is a movie that's both resolved and unresolved, ultimately growing more ambiguous as it progresses and becomes more complex. After it is over and has become a complete(d) work to the eye of the viewer, the lasting impression is that of mystery. Too many films in this genre bark up the wrong tree, working to explain all of the events that unfold. By explaining nothing, by being almost abstract, questions and images will haunt the viewer indefinitely. It is what it is, and while this movie can be watched over and over, and the events that occur can be anticipated, they will forever remain an enigma. This is true cinema, purely visual and aural, without the helpful but ultimately self-defeating aid of a proxy observer; the viewer is the direct observer, and there's no filter through which the events and images develop any sort of tidy rationality.

Donald Sutherland's performance here is sober, adult, the grief of his character palpable. And in the face of this grief is a force that runs through the movie like a dark current, evoking the eternal and spookily ethereal and subterranean; less an eternity of the heavens than the eternity of a crypt. Venice is not merely the ideal location for this story, but the necessary location; it could not take place anywhere else. The unquestionable, and indeed imposing, Gothic majesty of the churches, whose interior height dwarfs their human occupants with the spiritual dread of the ancient, overlooks the canals of Venice like the wicked-faced stone gargoyles Sutherland finds himself physically embracing, while the canals that run through the city are literally the ghost of this couple's personal tragedy. Living in Venice, in light of the details surrounding their loss, seems almost a perverse choice, perhaps a masochistic one; they could be punishing themselves for their daughter's drowning by living in a flooded city.

It's not that Sutherland's character is a rational man in an irrational environment, but rather a rational man in an environment whose own secret code, which one may trust makes perfect sense to itself (like a tree in the forest that will only fall if no one is around to hear), is inaccessible and inexplicable to him, baring itself only in fragments in a way he chooses to ignore, just as you might ignore a spectral voice in the dead of night, dismissing it as a product of your imagination.

The movie's notorious love scene is jarringly explicit, yet rather than erotic, it is profoundly sad, and takes on a deeper (even creepy) resonance after the film ends. That the scene is intercut with scenes of Sutherland and Julie Christie dressing prevents the two from ever being completely naked and united; this editing choice changes the dimensions of the love scene in a way that I've never seen attempted elsewhere. At other points, Roeg inserts moments and images that carry sinister implications, none of which are ever concretely substantiated and only leave the viewer with more questions.

The film drifts along at a wandering pace. The final twenty minutes are among the most atmospheric and suspenseful twenty minutes in any film, culminating in a montage that is absolutely chilling.

'The Blair Witch Project,' made over two decades later and probably influenced by this, has similar aspirations, but finally has only a fraction of the emotional gravity.

Starring Brian Dennehy, an unusual actor for a Peter Greenaway film, as Kracklite, an architect, a career we don't often see explored in cinema, Greenaway's 'Belly of an Architect' is somehow bigger and more emotionally ambitious than most of his other works, which lack human resonance. In his other films, the characters are uniformly British and so Greenaway's coldness and archness toward them is indicative of a general misanthropy. Here, it's aimed squarely at Romans, whose loose morals and carnivorous practices contrast with the enormity of Kracklite's ego and generosity of spirit. His stomach is being eaten away by some unknown illness or cancer, and this serves as a metaphor for his ego being eaten away by the carnivorousness of Roman culture. His wife, his identity (which is a vicarious one, given his devotion/debt to his idol, Bouleé) and his work are being repossessed by the conquestful Roman carnivores who aim to destroy him simply for the material gain of taking what is so ostentatiously his. But his devotion to Bouleé, his need to make Bouleé's work more widely known, is not a singular or altruistic act; the exhibition he is organizing will make Bouleé more commercial and accessible, but it will also be an addendum to his own career, a manifestation of his ego. His diary is written in the form of letters to Bouleé, to whom he is almost praying as his own personal God. And his devotion to this God is not a selfless one, since Bouleé is so inexorably an element of his own identity.

Rome and its buildings are given a golden, postmodern glow, their clarity enhanced by Wim Mertens' musical score, which adds its own sunlight to the proceedings. But the sunlight that glows throughout Rome and permeates the aura of the film is an impersonal one, an indifferent one, as ancient as the ruins of Rome, which our Roman characters observe have been more useful and influential as ruins than they were prior. "They're better as ruines," a character observes. "Your imagination compensates for what you don't see, like a woman with clothes on." The Romans are depicted here as carnivores (and the word "carnivore" is used multiple times) who not only want to devour and repossess, but want to strip. Brian Dennehy's performance here is indeed stripped, larger than life, fiery. He explodes on screen, bringing the film into another realm, introducing emotional dimensions not often seen in the films of Greenaway; and in this, the film has a power that inhabits the movie's symmetrical form (mostly every shot is symmetrical), its architecture, and threatens to destroy it. The coldness that is typical of Greenaway, that architecturized godlessness, is at war with fiery human passion in all its flawed nakedness.

Greenaway's movies, in their arctic wit and obsession with symmetry, are cinema as architecture more so than storytelling, so 'The Belly of an Architect,' contrary to the claim by many that it's his most mainstream and therefore weakest work, is perhaps his most appropriate film, and maybe his best

The major problem with Alejandro Jodorowsky's films is that the imagery does not stand alone; it stands for something else. The essence of surrealism, of course, is its lack of rational coherence, its absence of logic and meaning. The images in 'Un Chien Andalou' were dreamt up, while Jodorowsky's are contrived. He imposes meaning and does not seem to believe in free association. He is, in a word, didactic.

'The Holy Mountain,' an improvement upon his muddy cult epic 'El Topo,' begins promisingly enough with an eerie, wordless prologue in a temple in which the heads of two women are shaved by a cloaked deity as an initiation rite. The imagery here is striking, as is the imagery throughout most of the film, but I dare say it'd all be a lot more significant with the volume muted.

What follows is, initially, strained attempts at blasphemy serving alone as satire on Christianity, with a Christ-like figure smoking herb and making kissy-kissy with a limbless midget, and then happening upon a Christ factory (representing Christianity as a commercial product, in case you're slow). Following this, we see a reenactment of the Mexican revolution with a cast of frogs. After this display, our hero is led into the peak of a tower through a rainbow-colored corridor, where an alchemist locks him in a retort and his excrement is transformed into gold. Pelicans appear. The movie evolves again, this time into a satire on consumerism.

This initially striking feature becomes more grating as time wears on, and the juvenile tone of its satiric statement seriously compromises the power of its visual compositions. My heart sank as the film drifted further away from ambiguity and abstraction into the land of the cerebral and polemical. Jodorowsky is more suited for comic art and graphic novels than films, as the reconciliation between literal ideas and otherwise abstract images here is poor. Jod himself appears unmasked in the final scene, with a revelation that seems wrongheaded and smug.

This movie and my appendix (which was successfully extracted last year, courtesy of appendicitis) have a significant commonality, and that is, they are both absolutely useless. 'Under the Lighthouse Dancing' is completely flat and unmemorable, and worse, it's about boring upper class Aussies. Now, very few movie-going audiences are sympathetic to the affluent and prefer the on screen rich to be depraved, sinister or comical in some way, and this film offers several affluent characters who are none of these things. Too bad. Whenever I go to see an Aussie film, I expect colorfully dysfunctional and typically coarse Australians slinging twangy vitriol at one another. This here's a film without wit, the well-to-do filming themselves. Basically, its sole distinction is that it's one of the most bland and uneventful instances of self-indulgence I've ever seen. No one wants to watch the home movies of the rich and dull. I'd expected snottier from one with a name like "Graeme Rattigan," and meatier work from the usually robust Jack Thompson. Very boring.

'Code 46' is the most beautiful film I've seen in quite some time. It's funny how something entirely new is produced when the properties of film noir and futuristic sci-fi are married. Like 'Until the End of the World,' 'Strange Days,' and 'Gattaca,' three films which 'Code 46' potently recalls, this is above all else a mood piece, wherein character and plot are secondary to the drifty, elegiac flow of the film.

The action is underplayed, and the performances have an earthy tone; Tim Robbins recalls William Hurt in 'Until the End of the World' and Bill Murray in 'Lost in Translation,' in that his perpetual jet lag has cultivated an easy, weary charm. The movie is set, one gathers, in the future (or an "alternative present," to paraphrase another reviewer). Like the best futuristic films, it's set on the same planet Earth, but the planet's simply been restructured; the old occupants have left and the new ones have moved in. No longer are there countries, only cities, only business destinations.

Pleasure is not a goal, but a side effect. The locations photographed are, as in 'Alphaville,' as in 'Sans Soleil,' not manipulated or artificial, but they are photographed in a new way. Contemporary cities look futuristic, commercial, busy, cold, with pools of dark glass and beads of light from skyscraper windows. For me, this kind of imagery is the among the most romantic and evocative. Cold, impersonal environments like these simultaneously forbid and necessitate human warmth. Intimacy becomes something to escape into.

Michael Winterbottom and his screen-writing partner Frank Cottrell Boyce have done great work before, and inevitably, a lot of viewers and critics are dismissing 'Code 46' as a number of things, including listless and convoluted, but I think that's symptomatic of approaching this film with the wrong expectations. Far beyond simply being a trivial footnote in what will hopefully be a career of formidable longevity, I think 'Code 46' is perhaps Winterbottom's best work yet, the movie I intuited Winterbottom had dormant in him. The movie has a sort of purging effect, like Wenders' 'Until the End of the World,' and as with that film, my immediate environment felt different to me, changed, upon exiting the theater.

I guess I can understand why 'Harold and Maude' has become a cult classic -- its love story is defiant of convention and the movie celebrates and romanticizes society's outsiders. While it's an innocent enough film, I suppose, or maybe simply a naïve film, I can't think of many other movies that have made me feel such genuine discomfort.

The problem is not that 20-year old Harold falls in love with 79-year old Maude. The problem is that Maude is not sexy, not endearing, and not real. Harold may have been written as an asexual, but I somehow doubt that screenwriter Colin Higgins (whose career has not been an impressive one, having since yielded movies like '9 to 5' and 'Silver Streak') considered that. Harold has no interest in girls his own age and thwarts each of his mother's matchmaking attempts with grotesquely faked suicides.

Harold, as played by Bud Cort, is nevertheless the only character in the film who takes on the dimensions of an actual human being. Everyone else is written as a caricature, and that's one of the film's major flaws. Harold's mother, for instance, is an obnoxious, classist heiress who asks her son questions and then answers on his behalf. The character is written in one key and is played in one key by Vivian Pickles. The filmmakers' attitude toward this character is so obvious that by simply placing poor Harold as her son, in her company, a certain angelic aura is given to him in contrast. Harold is laconic and glum, wears mourner's attire and drives a hearse, and his economy of verbal expression elicits the viewer's sympathy almost by default, since every other character in the film may as well be using a megaphone.

Then there's Maude. Ruth Gordon is a fine actress, and it's heartwarming to see a woman of her age exhibit as much verve and energy as she does here. But her character of Maude is yet another caricature, and her every line drips with saccharine forever-young sunniness that sounds like flower-child parody. She brings some joy, some sunshine, into Harold's life, and some excitement; it's supposed to be ironic and funny when Maude steals a car and speeds away from the police.

The movie is entirely too precious about Harold, about Maude, and about Harold and Maude. Even Harold's suicide forgeries are framed with a glow of Gothic tragedy, which just prevents them from being funny (although one prank, where Harold pretends to chop off a hand in order to scare off another arranged date, is funny). Making matters worse is the musical score by Cat Stevens, which is now painfully dated and sugar-coats whatever remaining black comedy could have been salvaged from this material. All of these touches are intended to make the film feel-good and liberating, I would presume, but it's ultimately just depressing and made me feel pretty queasy.

Watching this movie, nothing about it screams 'classic.' It looks like it should have remained some forgotten and embarrassing relic of the early '70s.

The conceit of 'Coming Apart' is that the film is footage from a hidden camera placed by a married psychiatrist in his Manhattan flat-away-from-home to document sexual encounters with various women, as a way (perhaps) of rebutting against the mistress who broke his heart and not incidentally lives in the same building.

Rip Torn is the psychiatrist, Joe Glassman, Viveca Lindfors is the mistress, Monica, and Sally Kirkland is a young former patient, Joanne, slowly coming unhinged and projecting her failures onto Joe.

In its voyeurism and genuinely objective cinema vérité style (the camera never moves, unless Joe is positioning it for another encounter), it resembles some of the films of Andy Warhol, but this is more resonant because Warhol's films depicted a counterculture, while this one depicts something closer to normal. 'Coming Apart' is absolutely gripping and fascinating to watch in a way that most ordinary films, edited and filmed with a point-of-view, are not. The camera just sits there, the scenes unfold, and I entered a sort of hypnotic state. The movie makes a clear illustration of the function of cinema as voyeurism, and also a convincing argument for voyeurism as the purest form of truth on film. The filmmaker, Milton Moses Ginsberg, has made a movie predicated as much on film theory as on personal experiences. In the latter respect, it is uninhibitedly candid, and often very painful. The actors give performances that are naked and free of affect, and this is particularly true of Sally Kirkland, who is barer here than any of Lars von Trier's heroines, and it's a brave performance.

Because the dramatic elements are so intense and effective, this is not merely an exercise or an experiment, because it transcends its form. The symbolism is a bit heavy-handed at times, but it isn't unsuccessful. Joe is the ultimate self-reflective individual, looking inward, looking at himself, filming himself, somehow vacant and lacking a distinguishable personality, with a large mirror behind the couch on which he sits (a courtesy to the viewer, as well) -- how could his surname be anything other than "Glassman"? That he is a psychiatrist adds another layer of provocation. A vicious cycle is depicted. Joe's instability makes it impossible for him to responsibly treat his patients, and the instability of his patients makes sexual intimacy with them dangerous to his own already fragile psychological state.

The movie is not perfect, and it gradually introduces jump cuts (accompanied by a thundering snapping sound) and presents the final scene in slow-motion. While these things are dramatically effective, they are inconsistent with the parameters established by the movie's conceptual conceit and therefore constitute a severe flaw -- being, the introduction of a point-of-view, of a director's manipulation of the material. While it can't be overlooked, it can be excused, I think, in the face of this extraordinary film's many other merits.

'Coming Apart' was not well-received, yet I think it would have been were it a European film. There are things that European filmmakers can get away with but American filmmakers cannot, and 'Coming Apart' is daring, penetrating, and probably, in its way, ahead of its time. Sadly, it was buried for over 25 years and Milton Moses Ginsberg had to settle for a career as an editor. This is unfortunate, as I'd love to see the filmmaking career he might have had.

All of John Waters' early films, beyond being purposefully shocking and repulsive, have this really tangible dirty, raunchy quality to them. They're movies with bad hygiene, like the porno movies whose actors have dirt under their fingernails or pimples in all the wrong places. Waters has a special gift for compiling the most disgusting items and the most disgusting combinations of items (lesbian glory holes, marshmallows and Cheez-its, egg-addicted 250-lb women, bleeding gums and French kissing, 'Surfin' Bird' and anal lip-syncing) for maximum effect, filming everything in grainy, artless 16mm with alternately wooden and over-the-top line-readings not dissimilar to the acting in a porno flick.

If you've seen Waters on television, he has a certain sophisticated charm to his wit, and perhaps a dirtier director wouldn't have the right sensibility to make films as authentically dirty as this one, or the discretion enough to choose performers as dirty-looking as Turkey Joe and Kenny Orye. The fact that Waters does not show any contempt or opinion about his subjects is important. He has this open, accepting non-judgmental affection for everyone in his films that makes the films themselves OF the filth they are depicting rather than simply about that filth, and he embraces those of notoriety and dubious character such as Patty Hearst and Liz Renay. He's subversive not by philosophy or decision, but by nature. Subversiveness for Waters means a good time. What distinguishes his work as "underground" rather than "exploitation" is that he celebrates the depravity and freakishness of his performers rather than exploiting.

Every single character in 'Desperate Living' is a sociopath, as it takes place primarily in a fairy-tale town called Mortville, to which housewife Peggy Gravel (Mike Stole) and her 300-lb black maid Grizelda (Jean Hill) flee after the latter murders Stole's husband by sitting on his face. Everyone in Mortville is trashy and, well, desperate, and there's a vivid pre-punk vibe here amongst psycho-dyke Mole, played by Susan Lowe, and others, and in the garish, tacky colors of the town's decor, which Waters reports was constructed entirely out of garbage with only one exception.

While I find Waters' 'Pink Flamingos' boring once the shocks become familiar, 'Desperate Living' is a fascinating movie to watch. It's probably Waters' most depraved and outrageous movie, and the funniest of his pre-'Polyester' movies. You get to see the hefty Jean Hill naked, rolling around in bed with Mink Stole, and you get to see Waters regular Edith Massey in all her snaggletoothed wonder as the wicked Queen Carlotta, being pleasured by one of her many leather-clad man-servants. You'll see this and, if nothing else, probably want to catalogue these bits to friends or show them the film, just to get a rise out of them.

'O Lucky Man!' was hit-or-miss for me, and it's my least favorite film from Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis trilogy. The songs by Alan Price have dated poorly, I think, in the same way that the Cat Stevens music from 'Harold and Maude' has. It was a substantial distraction, given that it appears quite often in Greek Chorus style and contributes a lot to the tone of the movie.

Malcolm McDowell's Mick Travis character is the same person in name only, across the trilogy (which begins with 'If...' and ends with the underrated 'Britannia Hospital'). His smiling, vacant coffee salesman here seems to have little to do with the angry youth from the first film, and despite the epic length of 'O Lucky Man!,' the movie is an episodic satire without much resonance. It's very funny, at times -- my favorite sequence concerned a medical experiment for which McDowell is offered money -- and highly ambitious, superficially similar in some ways to 'A Clockwork Orange,' but in the end, it's too broad, aims at too many targets, and doesn't have the cinematic flair to match the energy of its satirical free-for-all.

When I saw 'Myra Breckinridge,' the projector broke down no less than eight times throughout the films's 94-minute duration. In most cases, this would be an inexcusable annoyance for me, but in this case, I was grateful. After every ten minute stretch of this film, I felt like I needed some respite.

The only reason to see this movie, the only thing I found remotely entertaining or funny, is to see film critic Rex Reed masturbating. Years later, Reed savaged David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' with an angry zeal and called the movie "brain-damaged garbage" and also displayed a fragile sensitivity in denouncing the sickness of Pasolini's 'Salò.' Watching him in 'Myra Breckinridge' gives new dimensions to those reviews.

Whatever the merits of 'Valley of the Dolls,' it's a genuine camp movie because it achieves that status unintentionally. It played itself straight and failed as a drama. The intent with 'Myra Breckinridge' seemed to be, from the very start, to make the next camp classic, and so the film has no dramatic level on which to fail. It cuts straight to the camp and does it horribly.

'Kamikaze Taxi' opens with a newsreel-style prologue examining the conditions of South American immigrants of Japanese origin, who have returned to Japan only to find unemployment and discrimination. The prologue moves on to cover the contemporary (as of 1995) state of Japanese government, and then proceeds into a film which depicts political corruption and its effect on Japan's cultural climate.

On the surface, however, it is a crime film in the vein of those by Tarantino or Kitano, and like those films, it motors with a beat that's both gritty and stoic. It is frank about both its violence and the commercial sex it depicts, and its story begins with a young yakuza named Tatsuo whose job is to procure and train prostitutes for the crooked, lascivious Senator Domon. After the violent demise of a prostitute dear to Tatsuo, the story begins to fork excitedly in new directions, part road movie, and part gangster film. The moral center of the film becomes Kantake, a Japanese-Peruvian immigrant to Japan who speaks badly broken Japanese and has a gentleness that's deceptive to the film's tough guys; when forced to use violence, he does, but only when necessary.

The movie is sometimes faintly, pleasantly elegiac, and if there's any flaw, it's that it often seems a bit labored, its execution lacking the confidence of its overall ambition. Still, it's rousing and original, and by the film's end, one is left with the impression of a poetic arc and a righteous anger.

'Stop Making Sense' is more than simply a concert film. It is pure cinema. It engages all of the senses, it creates a mood, it establishes an atmosphere, it has narrative logic, and it jolts the viewer with electric energy. You can't sit still while watching this. You can't keep your head from bobbing, or your mouth from moving, if you know the words to the songs.

Twenty years later, the sound and image of Talking Heads still feels new, maybe even post-new. It's frightening to look at this film and then consider that all of the Talking Heads are now in their fifties, and David Byrne's hair is as white as Steve Martin's. Byrne's music has mellowed just as people mellow with age, and his fascinating career along with the direction it's taken is emblematic of the excitement that youth brings to an artist's work. To watch 'Stop Making Sense' is to be alive, and for someone who never had and probably never will have the opportunity to see Talking Heads live, and even for those who have, it is a blessing to have a film such as this to preserve the unmatched innovation and energy of this band. Watching David Byrne perform in this film is an awesome sight. Schwarzenegger and Stallone were never this thrilling.

While it may not have the class of some of Billy Wilder's other films -- you could say it's a bit lurid -- this is an absolutely brilliant satire on the news media, one of the best there's been, and it's absolutely relentless in its attack on not only media hypocrisy and amorality, but the seediness of human nature in general. Few films are quite so misanthropic and almost completely lacking in any display of human goodness (you'd have to look to Pasolini's 'Salò,' although I wouldn't encourage you to look in that direction), yet you can't really argue what's being presented here.

This is a comedy that is almost perfect without quite being funny. It's satire that cuts so close to the bone, it's scary. One could call it prescient because it resembles recent news items, but those recent news items resembled less recent news items which resembled even less recent new items, as the media repeats itself. 'Ace in the Hole' will always be timely, because it will always apply. The media is now as it was then and things aren't changing any day soon. When the carnival finally rolls into town here (the movie is aka "The Big Carnival"), it's at once absurd, metaphoric, and completely plausible.

And that title. "Ace in the Hole." Triple, possibly even quadruple entendre.

Amazing.

I think 'The Leopard Man' is the most memorable and frightening of the three Lewton-Tourneur collaborations. While it may be more straightforward than 'I Walked With a Zombie' or 'Cat People,' it's more atmospheric and more effective because its chills are predicated on agoraphobic horror. 'I Walked With a Zombie' was confined to a tropical island setting, while 'The Leopard Man' takes place in a New Mexico border town, on the edge of town, so that we travel along the desolate and wide open spaces of the sleepy Southwest at nighttime.

Early in the film, a young Mexican girl is sent on a late-night errand by her mother to buy some tortilla. Being that the shop is closed, she must traverse the sandy expanse between town and the nearest open shop. During this trek, she must pass under a bridge, and the shadows and sounds that stalk her are terrifying. Recalling this scene, right now, gives me goosebumps.

Horror is the most cinematic of all genres, because it works directly on the viewer's emotions and fears, using atmosphere, sound, and montage as its tools. Most horror films are either exploitative or slick and empty, unfortunately, but to watch 'The Leopard Man' is to encounter the full potential of the horror genre, as Tourneur paints with shadows and not entrails. Forgive its plot holes and its lunkheaded denouement, because the journey there is a hair-raising walk in the dark.

For its time, a time when segregation was still aggressively enforced in the United States, 'Song of the South' was likely a progressive film, a major family film many of whose main characters were black, and whose animated characters were voiced by a black performer. Now, of course, 'Song of the South' is considered problematic due to its depiction of black slaves as happy and complacent, and its portrayal of them as Uncle Tom stereotypes.

Look closer, however, and you'll see a fine family film, warmhearted and gentle, both a technical landmark and a dazzling series of fables as told by Uncle Remus, the movie itself serving up a number of its own morals -- like the fact that a parent's good intentions can unwittingly stifle their child, or that storytelling is key to one's moral and social development.

None of this matters, of course. Walt Disney has now chosen to ignore the film on the basis of its reportedly offensive depiction of African-Americans in the post-Civil War era. For one, this film was not intended as propaganda or considered offensive at the time, and was merely the product of American perceptions of the 1940s; it's not any worse than the scores of westerns that depicted Native Americans as savage Injuns. Of course, Native Americans were and continue to be a marginalized group while African-Americans have maintained a desire to assimilate and have. Being that African-Americans have been far more vocal in their rejection of the injustices committed against them, it goes without saying that white-on-black bigotry is a far more sensitive issue than white-on-Indian bigotry (despite the fact that the Native Americans have suffered just as greatly at the hand of The Man as African-Americans), and therefore, we're less willing to excuse movies like 'Song of the South' than we are films like 'The Searchers.'

But then why is 'Gone With the Wind' still given the green-light and not 'Song of the South'? Well, the answer is simple: The Walt Disney Corporation. Walt Disney will go to any length to keep its reputation clean, and 'Song of the South' is construed as a serious threat to it -- therefore, placing the film on moratorium and making it unavailable simply deters controversy. They can't undo it, but they can certainly hide it. It matters not the value of the film. In a heartbeat, Disney would withdraw something as beloved as the 'The Little Mermaid' if it were one day decided that the film was unfair or offensive in its depiction of mermaids. In 'Song of the South,' one sees an innocence and warmth. In current Disney films, one sees a lot more of the cynicism and calculation of a soulless capitalistic corporate entity.

The depiction of blacks in current cinema is a lot more shameful and offensive than anything in 'Song of the South.' Consider personalities like Chris Tucker, Martin Lawrence, and films such as 'Phat Beach' and 'Friday,' which depict African-Americans as lazy, dope-smoking ne'er-do-wells who treat women badly and have no morals. I guess the fact that these films are largely created by African-Americans for African-American audiences gives them a dubious seal of authenticity, being that African-American entertainers are, ostensibly, no longer being exploited by the white man and have developed their own independent voice. If that's true, why is it so much more difficult for black filmmakers such as Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, filmmakers with a truly independent voice, to either find financing for their films, or be met with commercial acceptance? 'Song of the South' might be inaccurate in its depiction of slavery, but it never makes a point of being *about* slavery, and it's no more inaccurate than hundreds of Hollywood's historical epics and costume dramas.

By making 'Song of the South' unavailable, Disney is doing a disservice to those involved in the film and, more importantly, to the millions who harbor fond memories of it.

Srdjan Dragojevic dedicates his film 'The Wounds' to "post-Tito generations," and it can be seen as of a piece with his previous film 'Pretty Village, Pretty Flame,' an allegory concerning the Bosnian conflict that was one of the angriest, most jarring anti-war films I've seen. 'The Wounds' is an even more aggressive film, told in non-linear fashion, like 'Pretty Village,' beginning in 1996, coiling five years back in time, and progressing to its starting point, so that the events that follow from thereon have an even greater immediacy. The storyteller is a young man named Pinki, born on the day of Marshal Tito's death, named such because his father was arrested after naming him "Tito" -- in honor of the fallen leader, but interpreted by authorities as an insult.

Pinki and his pal Kraut idolize a gangster known as Dickie, who lives in the same housing project. Dickie, an impulsive sociopath who carries a gun at all times and fires it into his television set at random, takes them under his wing and grooms them to become violent criminals. The film, by this point, may begin to remind a viewer of 'GoodFellas,' or the more current 'City of God,' from Brazil. But while those films were stylistically bold, this film is stylistically outrageous. Srdjan Dragojevic slings acid in the face of the viewer, forever surprising his audience with uncompromising nastiness. One does not grow inured to the shocks, however, because the shocks have poetry and relevance, and the movie is tremendously entertaining. This is very exciting filmmaking, the likes of which dwarfs recent work from American filmmakers like Scorsese and Tarantino. Furthermore, it's probably better than anything else from the arguably competitive recent spate of films from the former Yugoslavia, all of which yield a collective cry of anger in the face of the Bosnian civil war, the social conditions of that region, and the region's recent history.

Like other Yugoslav films, 'The Wounds' employs a burlesque tone in its depiction of sexuality, violence, social revolt, and family strife, and yet it does so with such conviction that the movie becomes hypnotic. It would be satire, except its anger is so palpable. It would be allegory, except its writing is so vivid. Whatever it is, it's not easily forgotten.

So many horror films, both then and now, exist solely to provide cheap titillation to gore hounds and casual thrill-seekers. 'Dead of Night' (aka "Deathdream"), however, is serious business, and seriously scary. Comparable to 'The Exorcist' in its exploration of the parent-child dynamic when the child is given over to something sinister, I personally liked this more than I liked 'The Exorcist.' It's leaner, more suspenseful, and less pretentious.

Richard Backus is Andy, a soldier who returns from the war (presumably Vietnam) the very night his parents and sister are informed of his death in combat. The homecoming is not a happy one, however. Andy just isn't quite himself. Laconic, humorless and irritable, he doesn't want to go out and isn't interested in seeing visitors. Worse, there could be a link between him and the gruesome murder of a truck driver that occurred the night of his return.

Like 'The Exorcist,' 'Dead of Night' - a reworking of "The Monkey's Paw" -- aspires to be more than simply a horror film. It aspires to be a Vietnam allegory, and it aspires to be a family drama. Remarkably, it succeeds as all three. It makes a compelling statement about returning soldiers, is a truly frightening horror film, and also a harrowing family drama. John Marley, as a Andy's father, conveys torment and confusion effectively, and Lynn Carlin is especially good as Andy's mother, a woman who has disappeared completely inside of her denial. The suspense is unbearable, and there's skillful use of both sound and space in creating it. The chills are never cheap and are consistently hair-raising. The movie marches headlong into its inevitable conclusion and is utterly uncompromising throughout. That it was rated PG at the time is a shocker.

The movie has some flaws and lacks visual polish, but this is almost irrelevant given how brilliantly everything works. The director is Bob Clark, who would go on to direct the first two 'Porky's' films, 'A Christmas Story,' and 'Baby Geniuses,' and he has made a rare horror film, one that is intelligent, thoughtful, and damn scary.