This year kicked of with a video sent from Harry’s buddy, Quint, over in New Zealand. Quint’s been on the set of The Hobbit for the last few months and has been reporting on the filming of the future masterpieces. He did some behind the scene intros for the video and it was all a lot of fun. Then Peter Jackson called Gandalf (Ian McKellen) over because Quint was feeling pretty awful for not being at his best friend’s birthday party. Gandalf did a little hocus pocus and, after some in theatre explosions, Quint was in the audience! Gandalf leaned in to the camera and told us that he had secretly stashed a copy of the trailer in Quint’s bag just before he sent him.

WE GET TO SEE A TRAILER!?!?!

Well, first, Quint had to find a trailer bearer. You see, you don’t just walk into the Alamo projection room. A few people stood up, but it was Elijah Wood who stood up and yelled, “I will take it!” and ran up to Quint.

Wow. We’re all such freakin’ geeks, because this was awesome.

Well, they couldn’t get the trailer to work, so we had to go into the first film, but we did eventually see the trailer…three times in a row. I can’t tell you anything specific about it, but godDAMN, it looks amazing. I am hardly going to be able to wait until next December to see this movie.

The first movie that we saw was one that Harry introduced by saying that we had all probably just paid to see it very recently. He didn’t care, though, because it’s his birthday and he doesn’t care if it was just released a couple of weeks ago. The movie was pretty much about him and, as soon as he programmed it, all the rest of the programming just fell into place. Luckily, Hugo is probably my favorite movie this year.

Watching it a second time, I really noticed all of the more subtle film images throughout the entire movie. All of the clock faces and gears look like film reels and many of them make the noise of a film projector. Hugo runs around the clockworks, looking out of all of the windows as if he’s watching movies about all of the people who work at the train station. He’s a voyeur just like we all are when we watch movies.

I love this movie and it’s at least as good on a second viewing. It also helped to introduce what ended up being an underlying theme of the festival and, really, all movies: unexpected adventure.

Next up was a movie that plays a big role in Hugo.

A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Georges Méliès
Written by: Georges Méliès

Georges Melies was THE early visionary of film. Before Melies, film was a sideshow technology. Even the Lumiere Brothers had no idea that film would be a truly big deal. Melies figured out that you could actually tell a story with film.

A Trip To The Moon is Melies’ most famous film and deservedly so. It tells a simple story of a group of scientists (or wizards, depending on how you take the long beards and hats that they wear) who figure out how to go to the moon. They all climb aboard their rocket, hit the man in the moon in the eye, fight some mooninites, bring one back to Earth and are heroes. End story.

While the story was huge for its time, the sets are what amazes now. It’s all stage sets, but they still look better than a lot of CGI sets made today. Because of his background as a magician, he was the first filmmakers to use special effects on screen. His use of jump cuts to make people and objects appear, disappear and change instantly was an accidental invention, but he used it all the time to amaze his audiences.

If you have any interest in film history, A Trip To The Moon is absolutely essential to your film viewing. If you like sci-fi films, this was the first. It’s beautiful to see on the big screen. I wish it had been a tinted version (hand-tinted, of course), but it’s still a great film that should be seen by anyone with the slightest interest in film.

JUST IMAGINE (1930)

** (2/5)

Directed by: David Butler
Written by: Buddy G. DeSylva/Lew Brown/Ray Henderson

In 1930, Hollywood was looking for something new to put on the screen. Movies had just started talking fairly recently, so what could they do with this new version of the media?

Well, a sci-fi musical, of course!

That’s right, kids. This is not only Hollywood’s first sci-fi film, but it’s the first sci-fi musical!

Let’s not take that as a great thing just yet.

Basically a remake of A Trip To The Moon, Just Imagine takes place in 1980, a time far too distant for citizens of 1930 to even dream about. Cars have been replaced by airplanes, marriages have to be approved by the state (weird…we’re pretty much just starting that now), everyone has a number instead of a name and there are no people with pigment in their skin.

In other words, it’s a Republican dream!

LN-18 (a pre-Tarzan Maureen O’Sullivan) and J-21 (John Garrick) are in love. Unfortunately, another man has asked for permission to marry LN-18 and he is above J-21 on the pecking order. This, of course, means that he gets first priority. Unless, of course, J-21 can distinguish himself in the his field: aviation.

What’s a boy to do when everything’s already been done in aviation?

Luckily, esteemed scientist X-10 (Wilfred Lucas) wants to send J-21 to Mars. If he succeeds, he’ll be able to marry LN-18 and everything will be hunky dory. This can only happen, though, if he survives the trip.

Along for the fun are his best friend RT-42 (Frank Albertson) and Single-0 (El Brendel). Single-0 is a man who was somehow frozen in 1930 and is thawed out. He’s all about comic relief and has almost no bearing on the story. He just runs around with a Swedish accent (“What about yustice?!”) and does some vaguely funny Harpo Marx routines. El was a comedian at the time and this was his schtick on vaudeville. He’s kinda funny, but nothing to write home about.

Really, there’s not much to write home about for any of this movie. The sets are pretty amazing and the effects are nice. (A couple of the uncredited effects guys would go on to break down barriers with King Kong a few years later.) But that’s really it. The story is silly, the acting is stiff and the songs are kind of awful.

This isn’t an easy film to see. Amazon is out of stock and the ones that are for sale by other sellers are $999.99. Trust me. It’s not worth all that. If you really want to see the sets, check out a serial from the same time period. A lot of them were reused for…well, I can’t actually remember the serial. Apparently, it’s awesome, though. Too bad.

If you do see it, check out the strangest song of the entire movie where RT-42 and his wife sing about how they no longer kill flies because that fly might be in love with another fly. Then they save a pair of flies just so they can force them upon each other.

Um…what?

Also, there’s a jab at Henry Ford’s antisemitism. THAT is some funny stuff.

Next up was a different kind of adventure.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (2011)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Tomas Alfredson
Written by: Bridget O’Connor/Peter Straughan
Based on book by: John le Carre

John le Carre is one of the preeminent Cold War spy novels. With books like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1962) and The Looking Glass War (1965), he basically invented the cerebral, inward-looking spy novel. His books aren’t about globe hopping and lady laying. His are about the inner struggles of being a spy and the inner workings of MI6 and the Circus, the upper echelon of British spies.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) is one of his best loved novels with his most well known creation, George Smiley. Smiley is a man whose entire life revolves around the Circus. Although he’s married, his wife is barely a character in the story…or his life, for that matter.

In the beginning of the film, Smiley (Gary Oldman) is in the middle of a forced retirement. His former boss, Control (John Hurt), calls him back into duty to find out who the mole is among his co-workers. They all seem to have different views from Control, but one of them is feeding information back to the Soviets. Who could it be? When Control dies, Smiley is basically on his own to save his country.

There’s the entire plot. Just a few lines. But, while the movie is VERY good, it’s also incredibly hard to follow at times. In fact, in my already tired state at this point in the day, I was pretty much lost by the time I got my burger. (In fact, that might have been what totally distracted me from what was truly going on. Don’t eat while watching this movie. You’ll get lost and never find your way again.) With all of the names, double-crosses and characters, it was nearly impossible to truly figure out.

This, of course, does not make this a bad film. The plot is kind of a McGuffin. We don’t necessarily care who the mole is. What we care about is seeing Smiley go through the motions of finding the mole. We care about the toll that it takes on Smiley. We care about seeing all of these characters interact together.

It also helps that Gary Oldman is at the top of his game here. Smiley is a very “normal” character and Oldman manages to make him real. There were definitely times that I forgot that this was Sid Viscous/Beethoven/Sirius Black that I was watching. His voice has a British aristocracy lilt to it that I’ve never heard from him before. His face, although not really made up, was older than ever before. And he was perfectly amazing.

The rest of the cast was just as good. Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch (it was nice to see Sherlock play Holmes), Ciaran Hines…all were great. Alfredon’s (Let The Right One In) direction caught all of these performances perfectly, often from a distance away…much like a spy would have.

After sitting through the two hour film, just about everyone had the same look on their face: “That was great! What happened?” Luckily, the studio knew that they had made possibly the most cerebral and complex spy film in decades, so the Alamo staff was provided with dossiers for every audience member, complete with plot points, character sketches and basically a flow chart explaining what the fuck happened.

I kind of love them for it.

This is definitely a film that warrants multiple viewings. I can’t wait to give it another shot and see if I can follow more of it. I’ll have one up on the rest of the audience with the dossier in my hand.

Hell, I actually can’t wait to read the book.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS (2011)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Guy Ritchie
Written by: Michele Mulroney/Kieran Mulroney
Based on characters created by: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes has come back in a big way lately. In 2009, Guy Ritchie directed the amped up version of the world’s greatest detective to accolades and dollars. Then there was the BBC update of the original stories perfectly cast with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson. There will also be an American version of the Holmes legend on television soon.

Now, Ritchie is back with the sequel to the film that restarted it all. This time out, Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr) and Watson (Jude Law) are on the run from Holmes’ greatest enemy, Professor James Moriarty (creepily played by Jared Harris). The two men are perfectly matched in just about every way with one exception: Moriarty is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way. Even the innocent.

Watson, of course, is about to get married when he and Holmes reconnect, so he is none too excited to get caught up in this latest adventure. The bromance is palpable and the near homosexuality of the two leads is played up even more than it is in the BBC show. “Lay with me, Watson.”

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen the original, so it’s hard for me to compare the two. From what I remember of it, though, I think this one is just as much fun and just as good. Yes, there are plenty of explosions and the direction is kinetic, as always. This is no sedate, Basil Rathbone film, but I think you all knew that. To say that it has a Michael Bay style is to insult the movie. It’s not dumb like a Bay movie. It’s not shit like a Bay movie. This is a Guy Ritchie film and he is getting back in our good graces by using other peoples’ characters. (His next project is The Man From U.N.C.L.E.)

Of course, this movie really has almost nothing to do with the original stories. There are things that fans will recognize, but there’s no story that I know of that follows this kind of path. (Somehow I doubt that Conan Doyle teamed the boys up with a sexy gypsy woman (Noomi Rapace) who kicks just as much ass as the two men. And I don’t think that Mycroft (Stephen Frye) was as…strange…as this version of him.)

This was an incredibly fun movie and, honestly, I can’t wait for these folks to team up again for a third film.

THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Robert Florey
Written by: William Fryer Harvey/Curt Siodmak/Harold Goldman (uncredited)

At one time, a man like Peter Lorre could be a huge star. With his bugged out eyes and crazy voice, you would think that he would be a hard sell. But Lorre was a movie star pretty much from the first time he stepped onto the screen in M in 1931. He has never stopped being an icon.

That’s why it was a bit surprising when Harry said that he had never played a Lorre film at BNAT. The fuck you say?

The Beast With Five Fingers was a pretty good way to start.

Lorre plays an astronomer who lives with an eccentric old pianist (Victor Francen) who has lost the use of his right side. His music has been rewritten by a cynical young man named Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda). When the old man dies leaving all of his money to his nurse (Andrea King), his descendants descend upon his house to try to make it seem like the old man was a blundering fool and that the money should come to him. Of course, Bruce and the nurse are in love.

Oh yeah…Peter Lorre. He actually plays a big role in this, although the description makes it seem like he doesn’t. He is pretty much the catalyst for the whole thing to happen. He’s incredibly protective of his books and his research and wants everyone out of the house…except for the nurse, of course. She can stay.

As time goes on, Lorre goes crazier and crazier and starts to see a disembodied hand crawling around the house and occasionally playing music. Sometimes it even kills people.

This is a great little film that, unfortunately, is hard to find outside of this sort of festival. It’s never been released on DVD and Warner has no plans of releasing it. That’s really too bad because I think the movie could find a niche audience now.

If you ever get a chance to see it, check it out.

G.I. JOE 2: RETALIATION TRAILER

Well, they got rid of Stephen Sommers, so I guess that’s a step in the right direction. But they replaced him with Jon M Chu, director of such classics as Step Up 2, Step Up 3D and Justin Beiber: Never Say Never.

Uh…what?

First off, was anyone really clamoring for this sequel? Second…shit. I don’t even know. I don’t remember anything about this trailer. Whatever. Do what you want, Hollywood. Enough stupid people will be into it.

Let’s move on.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (2011)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Steven Moffat/Edgar Wright/Joe Cornish
Based on comics by: Herge

Tintin is one of the most popular characters in the world. Created by Georges Prosper Remi (aka Herge) in Belgium in 1929, he has become like Mickey Mouse to about 85% of the world.

So, you ask, why have you not heard of him? That’s because people in America don’t really care about what happens in any other country. Most Americans had never heard of Jackie Chan until Rumble In The Bronx in 1995. He had only been making movies for about 25 years before that, becoming the most famous man in the world. Why would we have heard of him?

I’m not saying that Americans are stupid. We’re just very insular. Many people see something foreign and they suddenly become uninterested. That really is a shame, though, because other countries make some amazing stuff.

Anyway, enough PSAs. Tintin is like a Belgian Mickey Mouse. He’s a boy reporter who was able to have 23 and a half adventures before Herge died in 1983 while writing the 24th. Sometime in the early 80s, a young director named Steven Spielberg became interested in Tintin because someone compared Raiders Of The Lost Ark to his adventures. Herge then became a fan of Spielberg saying that he was the only man who could possibly bring Tintin to life. Spielberg bought the rights in 1983 and has never let them go.

Skip ahead nearly 30 years when Spielberg goes to fellow Tintin fanatic Peter Jackson to see about using WETA to do special effects for a live action Tintin movie. Jackson says, “No! The only way to do it is motion capture and CGI!”

Agreeance!

I’ve never read a Tintin book, but I feel like I need to now that I’ve seen this movie. It follows Tintin (Jamie Bell) as he and his dog, Snowy, run amok all over the world. They meet Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), rescue him from smugglers led by Mr. Sakharine (Daniel Craig) and then search for treasure. There’s also the Inspectors Thompson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), two identical policemen who bumble their way through helping Tintin catch the bad guys.

And it all starts with a model ship.

This is a really fun movie with amazing animation. For just about the first time, motion capture isn’t totally creepy. I think it’s probably because they don’t try to make these characters look realistic. They look like slightly more realistic versions of the real comic book characters. (Watch for the analog drawings at the beginning of the film.) The 3D works beautifully, too. Not as essential as Hugo, but still a good addition to the film.

I think, though, that even if the animation was as creepy as Polar Express the movie would still be a lot of fun. Story and action go a long way and this one has both to spare. The action is basically non-stop, just like it would be in a comic book.

My only complaint is that maybe the story moves a bit TOO fast. I felt like we got caught up right from the start and there wasn’t enough time to really figure out what was going on who who these people really were. Then again, maybe that’s how it would be in real life. Just go, go, go and don’t stop to think.

I think I’ll have to see it one more time to really get a good feel for it. I had a lot of fun with it, but I think it may be a movie that a second viewing would give it another half star…maybe even a full one.

THE DEVIL INSIDE TRAILER

From the producer of the Paranormal Activity movies and (sigh) Insidious, this looks like Paranormal Exorcist. Lots of people (same person? not sure) getting possessed and then breaking their own backs. Oh, and found footage. Of course. We can’t make a horror movie anymore without found footage.

I dunno. Maybe I’ll check it out on video. I just don’t really want to give this guy THAT much more money.

Oh yeah, when the trailer said, “Based on a true story,” the whole audience laughed.

PORCO ROSSO (1992)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Hayao Miyazaki
Written by: Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki is one of the best directors alive today, live action or animation. The man is amazing. All of his films are at least entertaining on some level. There are some that I don’t like as much as others (don’t shoot me, but I’m just not that into Totoro), but they’re all great.

Porco Rosso is one that has always been on my list, but I’ve just never gotten around to checking it out. I mean, it’s about a pig who flies airplanes. Why does that sound good? Well, it has the name Miyazaki attached to it. That’s why.

Porco is the best pilot in the air just before World War II breaks out. He makes his living as a bounty hunter and rescues people from air pirates. He also happens to have had a spell put on him that turned him into a pig. This, of course, does not stop him from romancin’ the ladies. There’s one lady in particular that he’s had his eye on, but he’s constantly thwarted by Curtis, a fellow flying ace.

This was definitely a movie that I could not stay awake through just from sheer fatigue. It had nothing to do with the quality of the film because, you know, it’s Miyazaki.

Here’s the deal, though. This is Harry’s favorite Miyazaki film. He dressed as Porco for Halloween this year and just loves the shit out of this movie.

I don’t think it’s going to be one of my favorites. I just couldn’t quite connect with it like I did something like Princess Mononoke or Castle In The Sky. It’s a good film (note the four stars), but I don’t think it’s Miyazaki’s best. I will, however, give it another shot sometime.

CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Drew Goddard
Written by: Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard

Joss Whedon did a LOT for the horror genre when he created Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It’s a real turning point for horror if only for the girl-centric plot of the whole thing.

Unfortunately, he’s also inspired a lot of rather uninspired clones over the years.

Cabin In The Woods is his way of knocking all of them down a peg or two…even if that’s not what he says it is.

I’m not allowed to do a detailed review here, but I can tell you that this movie kicked my ass. It’s so freakin’ smart, funny and full of turns that you don’t quite expect that it’s hard not to fall in love with it. It takes every trope of horror movies and turns them on their inverted ears in a way the Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson couldn’t quite bring themselves to do with Scream.

It’s been a long and winding road for this movie (it was filmed a few years ago, I think), but it’s finally coming out and I hope that it endears itself to lots of fans. It deserves it.

GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE (2012)

** (2/5)

Directed by: Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor
Written by: Scott M. Gimple/Seth Hoffman/David S. Goyer
Based on comics by: Roy Thomas/Gary Friedrich/Mike Ploog

When Harry announced this one, I think most of the audience groaned a little bit. Seriously? Ghost Rider 2? Why would we want to see a sequel to that shitty movie?

Actually, he had the same reaction when Columbia asked if he wanted to screen it at BNAT. He said, “I need to see it.” He did and he thought it was completely different from the first one and kinda loved it.

Again, I’m not allowed to write a detailed review…but I’m not really sure that I could even if I wanted to. I not only couldn’t stay awake through it, I wasn’t interested enough to stay awake. Sure, Nicolas Cage is in Bad Lieutenant mode here, so he’s a lot of fun to watch while he goes through his weird faces and crazy voices. That, unfortunately, doesn’t make the movie particularly good. It’s good enough to be better than the first, but that’s not saying much. Really, only the kinetic direction (from the guys who brought us the Crank saga…they do know how to get into the middle of the action) and Nic’s craziness keeps it from being the worst movie at BNAT this year.

THE GREY (2012)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Joe Carnahan
Written by: Joe Carnahan/Ian Mackenzie Jeffers
Based on short story by: Ian Mackenzie Jeffers

Joe Carnahan is one of those directors that everyone just kind of lost faith in. When Narc came out in 2002, everyone thought that the 70s cop drama was coming back. It was a great story of dirty cops in a dirty world.

Then things started going slightly awry. Smokin’ Aces came out and no one but me liked it at all. No, I didn’t think that it was a great film, but I thought that it was fun. I was all alone. Then came The A-Team.

Done with that.

I really hope that The Grey changes peoples’ minds again. It’s the story of Liam Neeson vs. very large wolves.

Ok, it’s more than that. Liam and his co-workers go down in a plane crash in the snows of Alaska. Only seven of them survive. He is the wolf expert, so he becomes the de-facto leader, even if some of them aren’t so happy with that “decision.” The wolves pick the men off one by one as Liam becomes more and more of a badass and, actually, more full of regret and pathos. His mind is constantly on his wife back home. What happened to make him put his shotgun in his mouth just before he got on the plane?

No action movie is this, though. This is a dark action drama where the men are worse enemies to themselves than the wolves are. The infighting is believable and sometimes hard to watch. Even without the infighting, though, nature is stronger than man. This film never lets us forget that. Never…

This is a great film and I really hope that it brings Joe back in favor. He has pulled a performance out of Neeson that very well could be award caliber. Liam is one of my favorite actors currently working and I love that he’s become a thinking man of action. This is one of his best performances.

After this flick, we all piled onto buses and headed for the IMAX theatre down the road.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL (2011)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Brad Bird
Written by: Josh Appelbaum/André Nemec
Based on television show created by: Bruce Geller

Why the fuck can’t I dislike Tom Cruise movies anymore? Why the fuck does he keep making good movies while he, personally, still sucks?

Sigh. Whatever. The Mission: Impossible franchise has become his goto to make more money and, actually…they’ve become pretty goddamn great. After the mediocrity of the first and outright badness of the second, the third was awesome and the fourth is at least its equal. This has become the director’s franchise that Tarantino has always wanted the Bond series to become.

This time out, the IMF have been disbanded because the American government think that they have gone rogue. They were framed by a mysterious man (Michael Nyqvist, the original Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish Girl Who… trilogy) who wants to start a nuclear war between Russia and the US. In fact, he has made tension run higher than it has since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After the Secretary (Tom Wilkinson) is killed, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is forced to go underground with his crew (Paula Patton and Simon Pegg) and the Secretary’s adviser (Jeremy Renner). The four of them become a well-oiled machine…even if their machines aren’t so well-oiled. In fact, that’s kind of a running joke in the film. None of their equipment seems to work quite right.

Funnier than the last film which, if I remember correctly, was a bit dour, Ghost Protocol is non-stop action and a LOT of fun. I’m not sure what made JJ Abrams and Tom Cruise entrust animation/Pixar director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) with their baby, allowing him to cut his live-action teeth on the fourth installment, but it looks like their gamble paid off in spades. He handles the job like a pro and I hope it leads to more action flicks like this: fun, thoughtful and full of actual story.

A lot has been said about Jeremy Renner being a possible replacement for Tom if he ever decides to leave the series. They’ve been denying it, but I would be up for it. Sure, I don’t think Tom is going to leave his cash cow anytime soon. But if he does, they could do worse than Renner. He’s a really good actor and handles the action very well. Honestly, if this was Cruise’s last M:I film, I wouldn’t be sad. Brandt is a good character and could totally hold the franchise up.

By the way, I would totally buy this Saul Bass inspired poster. Why have I never seen it before? One of the best posters I’ve seen in a while.

So, that was it. One of the better lineups for BNAT, I think. Only two movies that really weren’t up to par, but they even had their place in keeping the flow. (Without Ghost Rider 2, when would I have slept?!)

Another Butt Numb-A-Thon down. I’m already ready for next year.

This year I actually got to talk to Harry and he was about to tell me WHY I was chosen when he was distracted by a shiny object. DAMMIT!!! I need to know so I’ll know to do it again every year!!

Anyway, whatever the reason, I had my butt in a seat at the Alamo for 26 1/2 hours watching some awesome movies. Here’s how the night went:

We had to start off with the annual torture of one of the Alamo friends. Tim always tells him that he’s going to show Teen Wolf during BNAT and, every year, something “fucks up” and he doesn’t get to show it. This year he had a Dolby “representative” (actually Scott Weinberg in a Dolby shirt) guarantee that the screening would go off without a hitch because of their brand new digital system.

Of course, hitches happen and Scott gave Tim a check for $15,000 “on behalf of Thomas Dolby.”

Many yuks were had by all. Then the movies really started.

FAUST (1926)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: FW Murnau
Written by: Gerhart Hauptmann/Hans Kyser
Based on play by: Johann Wolfgang Goethe

FW Murnau’s Faust has always been pointed to as one of the more amazing achievements in silent cinema. The special effects are still pretty awesome to this day.

If you don’t know the story, you’ve probably been living under a cultural rock, but I’ll explain a little bit here. God and the Devil are hanging out and make a bet. God says that Faust (Gosta Ekman), a genuinely good man, can’t be corrupted. The Devil (Emil Jannings), however, thinks that he can, and he sets out to prove it. He comes to Earth as a man called Mephisto and gives Faust back his youth, helping a beautiful young woman fall in love with him.

Faust shuns him at first, but then decides to allow Mephisto to give him a trial run of a day. When that’s not long enough, Mephisto has him and it’s all over.

In its day, it was one of the biggest spectacles that audiences had ever seen. It’s still pretty spectacular, although it’s easier to see how they did all of it now. And Jannings is perfect as the slimy and underhanded Mephisto. He vamps it up and is generally evil in all the right ways.

The organ accompaniment was pretty perfect, too. I wish I could remember the guy’s name, but it’s been a few days. Anyway, he was great.

If you ever get a chance to see this movie, go. And, in going, be amazed.

THE LOVELY BONES (2009)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh/Philippa Boyens
Based on book by: Alice Sebold

Peter Jackson can probably do no wrong in Hollywood right now. Sure, King Kong didn’t do was well as everyone wanted it to do, but he directed and produced fucking Lord Of The Rings! Give that man anything he wants!

So they did. He wanted to do a small story this time out, so he chose Alice Sebold’s novel about a young girl named Susie (Saoirse Ronan from Atonement) who was killed by a neighbor in the early 70s. She narrates the story from a place called The In Between. Not quite Heaven, but definitely not Hell. More like a fantasy land that is almost like Earth, but much more surreal.

Meanwhile, her family tries to go on. Her dad (Mark Wahlberg) is obesessed with finding her killer. Her mom (Rachel Weisz) can’t seem to move on, but can’t stand what her husband is doing. Her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) is a bit of a drunkard who tells everyone that she’s 35. Her younger sister and brother are doing their best, but it’s hard when their parents can’t seem to cope.

Meanwhile still, the investigation is almost going nowhere under Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli) doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The killer (Stanely Tucci) is still at large and still living about 100 feet from Susie’s family.

I gotta tell you, two movies into BNAT this year and I was emotionally drained. The Lovely Bones was something that I usually don’t go in for: a beautiful movie. Not only was the story beautiful (Susie’s journey from needing to have revenge on her killer to just wanting her family to cope), but the In Between was beautiful, too. Surreal, dreamlike and heartwrenching at times.

I loved this movie. It’s long, but I don’t expect much less from Mr. Jackson. He knows exactly what to leave in and wheat to cut out, and he knows how to pull the heartstrings without making us feel like we’ve been duped into crying.

Maybe it’s not the best film out there, but it didn’t matter while I was watching it. And it still doesn’t matter to me. I kinda want to see it again. I don’t necessarily believe in any kind of afterlife, but goddamn, this movie gave me hope for kids who die like Susie.

GIRL CRAZY (1943)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Norman Taurog/Busby Berkeley
Written by: Fred F. Finklehoffe/Dorothy Kingsley/William Ludwig/Sid Silvers
Based on play by: Guy Bolton/Jack McGowan

After Lovely Bones, we were all pretty much beaten down. As Harry said, though, what better to bring a room back up than a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musical?

Well, I can think of a LOT of things, but this’ll do.

Mickey is a rich playboy who is sent out West by his father to learn a lesson in life. Unfortunately for Mickey, the place he’s sent is an all boys school. No girls at all! What’s a girl crazy boy to do?!?!

Well, he doesn’t have to worry too much. This small town has one girl: Judy. And he instantly falls for her, even if she doesn’t fall for him so easily.

Of course, her grandfather is the dean of the school. And, of course, there’s a guy who she’s pretty much paired with. And, of course, hardly any of the other guys like Mickey. And, of course, the school is threatened with closure unless they can come up with money/applicants.

Car wash!!

Ok, no. No car wash. But there is a rodea, which they pronounce like Rodeo Drive in Hollywood, as opposed to an actual rodeo.

Hollywood. Psh.

It’s a pretty fun little flick, but I’m not rushing out to rent the rest of Mickey and Judy’s collaborations. There was, however, a pretty good Busby Berkeley number at the end. Busby was supposed to direct the whole movie, but he was fired after they filmed this one scene. Too bad, because the movie could have used some of Busby’s flair.

Of course, the script did have some gems like “The things you see when you don’t have a gun!” and “Money is just like women and popcorn: The more you get, the more you want.” I still don’t understand the gun line. The fuck was Judy saying?!

THE RED SHOES (1948)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger
Written by: Emeric Pressburger/Michael Powell/Keith Winter
Based on fairy tale by: Hans Christian Andersen

This is one of those movies that I’ve always heard about, but never seen. It’s a ballet movie and I have very little (if any) interest in ballet. Why would I care?

Well, it turns out that…um…I was right. This was the movie that I had the least fun watching at BNAT this year. But Harry didn’t program it. I’ll get to that later, though.

The Red Shoes is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a young dancer who wants to be the best dancer in the world. She buys some shoes from a shoemaker that make her dance perfectly…but then she can’t take them off and she can’t stop dancing.

But that’s not what the movie is about. The movie is about a young woman (Moira Shearer, who was really a ballet dancer) who is chosen to be the lead character in a new ballet based on The Red Shoes written by a young writer (Marius Goring). The two start to fall in love, much to the chagrin of the leader of the dance troupe (Anton Walbrook). He is emotionless and feels that his dancers should be, too.

The movie was really good, but I hated the two men. They were both jackasses. And the girl really wasn’t a whole lot better. Add to that a lot of scenes of ballet (which, I guess, were great) and I was just kind of uninterested.

The best thing about the movie (besides Moira being a beautiful redhead) was seeing how amazing the print was! Martin Scorsese’s film restoration crew have really outdone themselves on this one. It looked like it was made last year. The Technicolor was beautiful and made me miss that process a lot.

I’m glad I saw it, but I probably won’t revisit it.

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: Laeta Kalogridis
Based on book by: Dennis Lehane

Now we get to the guy who actually programmed The Red Shoes. Harry originally wanted to lead in to Shutter Island with Sam Fuller’s asylum masterpiece Shock Corridor. He wasn’t even sure if he would get Shutter Island when he got that print. He had to write a letter to Scorsese to see if he could show it and to explain what BNAT is.

Well, Marty wrote him back saying what an amazing idea BNAT is and how he wished that he could join us. But there’s just one thing: don’t lead in with Shock Corridor. Lead in with The Red Shoes. Here’s a print.

How do you say no?

There is actually a very direct link between the two movies, so I can see it. But I would have rather seen Shock Corridor.

Shutter Island, on the other hand, was pretty great. Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Boston US Marshall in the 50s sent to a local criminal asylum to investigate a missing patient. His new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), was brought in from Seattle to help Teddy out. Why is it that it almost seems like the missing patient never existed? What is Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) hiding? Is Dr. Jeremiah Naerhing (Max von Sydow) a Nazi doing crazy experiments? And why can’t Teddy let go of his dead wife (Michelle Williams)?

It took me a little while to really get into this movie, mostly because the editing seems to be really awful in the beginning. Eventually, though, I realized what was going on and it all worked out. The movie is a mind-fuck of the highest order and it made me want to red the Dennis Lehane novel that it was based on in a way that Mystic River did not.

It may not seem like the most Scorsese-iest of movies, but he’s done well again. Keep up the streak, Marty. We like you being back.

LE MAGNIFIQUE (1973)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Philippe de Broca
Written by: Philippe de Broca/Vittorio Caprioli/Jean-Paul Rappeneau/Francis Veber

I wonder how much John Candy’s Delerious borrowed from this movie.

Bob Sanit-Clair (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is the world’s most famous secret agent. He shoots randomly into trees, hitting hitmen before they even know that they are hitmen. He sees through every disguise. And he always gets the girl (Jacqueline Bisset).

He’s also being written by Francois Merlin (also Belmondo), a writer who just knows that he can do something besides these crappy pulp spy novels. But they make him money to live off of and they’re very easy for him to write.

On the other side of his aparetment building is Christine (Bissett again), the young lady he’s slightly obsessed with. Can he win her over by letting her read his awful books?

The movie is way funnier than it sounds like it should be. It opens with the spy story and looks like the Zuker brothers and Jim Abrahams had decided to make a spy movie. (Oh wait…they did. It was Top Secret. But this is funnier!) It’s full of great slapstick and some awful puns that make you cringe and laugh at the same time. Add to that the Merlin side of the story that makes you feel for this guy and you’ve got a movie that even French haters can love.

Harry has been trying to show this movie for seven years. I’m glad that he finally got to. It was worth the wait.

MICMACS (2009)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Written by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet/Guillaume Laurant

I had no idea that Jean-Pierre Jeunet was even working on a new film, much less that he had one in the can! I would have been MUCH more excited if I had known.

Bazil’s (Dany Boon) dad was killed by a land mine when Bazil was very young. Thirty years later, Dany is shot in the head and survives. The doctors can’t take the bullet out without possibly making Bazil a vegetable.

Eventually Bazil falls in with a group of homeless folks who collect junk and make it into amazing things. He also finds out that the weapons companies that made the land mine and the bullet are right across the street from each other. The rest of the movie is a Rube Goldbergian plot to bring down both companies…and yet so much more.

If you’ve ever loved Jeunet’s films before, you’ll love this one, too. He brings his usual sense of humor and (shudder…I hate this word) whimsy to the screen and makes us fall in love with this ragtag bunch of geniuses, which includes his old standby, Dominique Pinon.

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Adam Green
Written by: Adam Green

Adam Gren has a lot of enemies in the horror world, and I’m not really sure why. Hatchet was a fun flick that didn’t try to be anything more and Spiral, while not brilliant, showed us all that he had some talent for something besides gore.

Now he mixes those two things to bring us something like Open Water on a ski lift. (On the fake lineup that Harry always posts, this slot was filled by Lifeboat. I can see why.)

Three college kids (Emma Bell, Kevin Zegers and Shawn Ashmore) are on a weekend ski trip. It’s Sunday and they want one more time down the mountain. They talk the lift guy into letting them go up one more time, but through a chain of events, they end up stuck on the lift. And the resort doesn’t open again until the next Friday. Now, how do they et down? And are those wolves they’re hearing?

That little premise holds a lot more fear than it seems like it should. Not only is there plenty of suspense, but there’s more emotion than you would think of coming from Adam. The two guys have been best friends since grade school and the girl is dating one of them. You can see where that’s going.

Not an amazing film by any means, but absolutely worth checking out. One of my friends who hates Adam said that this is absolutely his best film. He liked it quite a bit. If that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what is.

THE CENTIPEDE HORROR (1984)

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Keith Li
Written by: Amy Chan Suet-Ming

Hong Kong isn’t really known for thier horror movies…and there’s kind of a reason for that. Most of them are pretty silly. I mean, Mr. Vampire is a great movie, but it’s silly as hell.

The Centipede Horror really won’t win any converts for HK horror. In fact, it will probably make people run from the genre.

The movie was introduced to us as being horribly vile and banned in many countries. I don’t really understand what the hell Tim and Zack were talking about. Yeah, there were a couple of gross-out moments, but it really wasn’t any worse than most Hollywood movies now. Vomiting centipedes (real ones!) is gross, but it’s not as squirm enducing as they made it out to be.

A couple of young girls go from HK to SE Asia (they talk about it like it’s a country) for a quick vacation. They’ve been warned to never go there, but they go anyway and, of course, one of them DIES!!!! She’s killed by centipedes, which apparently have a bite so strange that no doctor knows what one looks like.

Her brother comes to SE Asia to find out what happened and gets trapped in a plot by an evil wizard who hates the guy’s grandfather. He’s cursing everyone in the man’s family to be killed by centipedes.

What’s really interesting about this movie is how quickly everyone is ready to jump on the “maybe it’s something supernatural” bandwagon. Someone trips and their friend says, “Maybe an evil wizard cursed you!”

It’s a pretty awful movie, but it’s funny in its awfulness. Possibly the worst movie of the day, but it was enough fun that I was able to enjoy it. If you’re a fan of bad, weird Asian cinema, see if you can find it. And watch for the broiled zombie chickens.

THE CANDY SNATCHERS (1973)

** (2/5)

Directed by: Guerdon Trueblood
Written by: Bryan Gindoff

The fake lineup movie for this one was The Lovely Bones. Heh.

Candy (Susan Sennett) is a 16 year old daughter of a jewel store manager. She gets kidnapped by three inept criminals who want a bag full of diamonds from her dad. What they don’t realize is that daddy isn’t too hip to getting Candy back.

I really don’t have a lot to say about this one. It’s an exploitation film that I don’t think made a really big impression on anyone except for the weird relationship that Candy developes with one of the kidnappers. It’s not supposed to be sexual, but it’s still a little bit creepy.

And then there’s the ending with the mute kid and his annoying mom. She’s SUPER-annoying. But her kid isn’t much better, really, and he’s suppoed to be sort of a hero of the movie…kind of.

IRON MAN 2 TRAILER

This was the only clip we had all night! I was a little surprised. It started out as an E! True Hollywood Story style bit about Harry with Jon Favreau, JJ Abrams and Michael Fucking Bay talking about how Harry nearly ruined their careers. Then Jon comes back and introduces the trailer. It looks pretty awesome, although I agree with one reviewer: Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash looks like he’s more of a danger to himself than to Iron Man. We’ll see, though. I’ll be there. You know it.

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Matthew Vaughan
Written by: Matthew Vaughan/Jane Goldman
Based on comic by: Mark Millar

I kind of can’t believe that they allowed a movie to be called Kick-Ass, but that’s really the only way that I could describe the movie, to be perfectly honest.

Dave (Aaron Johnson) is a geek. He’s a little bit obsessed with comic books and spends most of his time with his two buddies at a local coffee shop/comic book store. (Why hasn’t someone opened one of these up in Austin?!)

That’s where he gets the idea. The idea that will change his life forever. How come no one has ever become a superhero? So that’s just what he does. He goes out and buys a wet suit and walks around town until he finds some crime to fight…and gets his ass beat.

Kick-Ass didn’t have a very auspicious beginning, but he soon finds out that there are other people doing it…and they’re much better at it than he is.

Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage and his moustache) is a devoted father to Mindy (Chloe Moretz from (500) Days Of Summer and Hammer’s upcoming remake of Let The Right One In). So devoted, in fact, that he has taught her to kick some major ass…and he helps her steal the movie from everyone else.

Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong from Rocknrolla) is a gangster. He’s also a family man. His son, Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), goes to school with Dave, but he’s never able to make friends with anyone. Too many bodyguards. All he wants to do is fit in at school. And, of course, be just like his dad.

The movie wasn’t quite finished, but DAMN was it good! It never let up! The action only stops long enough to let some more comedy in. And there’s more than enough story and character to go around. It’s surprising to me that this was based on a comic book by the same guy who created Wanted.

I’m not really sure how this movie is going to find an audience, though. It’s a pretty hard R what with all of the violence and cursing being perpetrated by small children. (Mindy says things that would make a grown-ass man blush.) But I really hope that it’s a hit.

Kick-Ass comes out in April with a few CGI tweaks and a slightly different soundtrack. The soundtrack was a major source of consternation amongst the audience. It was fucking perfect the way it was! But Warner Brothers won’t let them use the Batman and Superman themes. That’s really too bad, because they’re used in scenes that are perfect with those themes.

Speaking of the soundtrack, there’s one scene where the audience burst out into applause and then started clapping along to the score. I’ve been to a LOT of movies in my life and that is something that I’ve never witnessed.

Yeah. We all loved this movie. It was my favorite of the day. Go see it in April.

Director Matthew Vaughan was at the screening and talked a bit about the casting process. Apparently, there’s a mother out there who was very upset with the fact that there was a masturbation reference on page three. She thought that it would give her 16 year old son bad ideas. Lady! Your 16 year old son had those ideas at LEAST three years ago! And he’s had those same ideas a LOT! Stop worrying about it!

Before I go, one more plea:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LET MATTHEW VAUGHAN USE THE BATMAN AND SUPERMAN THEMES!!!!

GodDAMN, I can’t wait to see this movie again!

Ok. I’m done. On to the next movie

Visuals: ***** (5/5) Story: ***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: James Cameron
Written by: James Cameron

I really wish that Harry had ended the day with Kick-Ass, but whatever. The day ended the way it needed to, not the way we wanted it to.

We all know what Avatar is by now: James Cameron’s new half-billion dollar movie about aliens, environmentalism and 3-D.

But we don’t all know what it’s like. I do. I’ll tell you.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a Marine who is now paralyzed. His twin brother was part of the Avatar project, which allows humans to go out onto a hostile planet without dying from the atmosphere. They are basically able to project their minds into artificial bodies of the local inhabitants. This also means that they can (sort of) blend in with the aliens.

The Marines are there to take a certain element from the planet, no matter what the inhabitants say. The unfortunate thing for all involved is the fact that the biggest deposit is right under the giant tree that the inhabitants live in.

The other unfortunate thing is that Jake is actually a little bit sensitive. While he’s in his brother’s avatar, he falls in love with one of the natives (Zoe Saldana) and decides that they deserve to live their lives the way they want to.

SHOCK!!

The other side of things involves Sigourney Weaver as a scientist who feels the same way as Jake and Giovanni Ribisi as an engineer (maybe?) who thinks that these “savages” need to get the hell out of the way of Earthling’s progress.

It’s Dances With Ferngully! Add in some comments about how “we ARE the terrorists” and you’ve got a modern fable about America and how selfish we are.

I dunno. The movie is decent as far as the story is concerned. Nothing special, though.

No one cares about the story, though. Not really. They’re going for the spectacle. And that spectacle is fucking amazing! The CGI is nearly perfect. (Still a bit cartoony for my taste, but that’s to be expected…kinda.) The 3-D is amazing. The world that Cameron and his crew created is beautiful. It’s absolutely worth seeing on the big screen in 3-D. Probably even on the IMAX.

I just really wish that he had attached a better story to those visuals.

Well, maybe next time…ten years from now.

That’s it from BNAT! It was actually a pretty amazing day. Harry fully admits that the last couple of years have been a little bit on the lame side. Not terrible at all, but not really want BNAT is all about. He’s remembered now and, hopefully, his mojo is back. We’ll see next year.

See you in the theatre. I’ll be right behind you.

But it’s all in good fun and it’s always great to see so many movies back to back like this…even if I end up sleeping through some of them. (Sigh.)

The themes hardly ever count for anything except MAYBE the number of BNAT that it is. So, this being the tenth BNAT, it was only fitting that the theme was The Ten Commandments. Little did Harry know that those Commandments would be coming to him. One of his writers, Cargill, managed to get ahold of two of the actual tablets used in Cecil B DeMille’s Biblical classic! A group of geeks here in Austin bought the best preserved set at an auction recently and loaned them to Cargill for the festival.

And that’s pretty fucking amazing. Not only were the a pair that were actually used in the movie…but, according to DeMille, they were the ACTUAL TEN COMMANDMENTS.

Uh…sure, Cecil. But they were the ones used in the previews where he explained the purpose of the film. So that’s really cool. Throughout the night, Harry got a few other gifts that were pretty awesome, but none as amazing as this bit of film history.

Then we were ready to start the show. Time League got onstage to introduce the first movie, which was finally going to make a little boy’s dreams come true. He had a special guest waiting backstage who was going to usher in a new era of Universal horror movie monsters, but he would only come out if we all made a lot of noise. So, of course, we yelled and screamed and stomped on the ground and blah, blah, blah. And TEEN WOLF CAME OUT!!!

Ok, so it was Lars dressed as Teen Wolf, but it was a pretty convincing costume. He brought the guy up who, for some reason, loves the shit out of that movie and keeps wanting it to be played at the festival, signed a ball, hugged him and then we started the movie.

And then it broke…again.

Oh well. Maybe next year.

The first real movie indulged Harry’s Fay Wray fetish.

VIVA VILLA! (1934)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Jack Conway/Howard Hawks (uncredited)/William Wellman (uncredited)
Written by: Ben Hecht/Howard Hawks (uncredited)/James Kevin McGuinness (uncredited)/Howard Emmett Rogers (uncredited)
Based on book by: Edgecumb Pinchon/OB Stade

Fay was just off her double shot of King Kong and The Most Dangerous Game when she had a smallish role in this fictionalized bio-pic of Pancho Villa, starring Wallace Beery as a rather stereotyped Villa. He was big, broad and violent, but had an innocence about him that made you realize that he was really just a big kid.

The movie goes pretty much all the way through Villa’s life from the time that he saw his father whipped to death, through the Mexican Revolution and all the way to his own death. As far as entertainment is concerned, it’s pretty great. The battle scenes were pretty good for a fairly low-budget flick of the time and he and Wray had a really strange S&M type scene right in the middle.

Historically, though, it’s pretty much complete bullshit. And, even though it’s all about Villa and supposed to be glorifying his exploits (however violent they were), it really seems to be a eulogy for the short-time president of Mexico just after the Revolution, Francisco Madero (Henry B Walthall). His peaceful ideas are at the heart of the film.

It’s kind of hard to say how I really felt about the portrayal of Villa. He is one of the few heroes that Mexicans really have and he is portrayed as kind of a violent buffoon here. He’s lovable to an extent and his military expertise is shown pretty well, but he’s also extremely violent and will kill anyone at the drop of a hat seemingly for no reason. He accidentally robs a bank at one point not knowing that he is doing so. He thinks that he’s just taking his own money! Seriously?!

Well, that’s how movies were in 1934. Anyone who wasn’t white was a) played by a white man (there were very few actual Hispanic folk in the film) and b) was portrayed in a not always so sympathetic light.

Other than that, it’s a very good movie. Check it out if you can.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Eric Roth/Robin Swicord
Based on short story by: F Scott Fitzgerald

I knew that I would like this movie, but I wasn’t sure that I would love it. Luckily, I did. A lot.

Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is getting younger. He was born at around 80 or 90 and has been getting younger every day. His mother dies in child birth and his father is so horrified by the tiny old person that he leaves him on the doorstep of an old folks home, just hoping that they would be able to take care of him. Queenie (Taraji P Henson), the caretaker at the home, adopts him as her own and becomes his mother.

Benjamin grows up and leaves home to work on a tugboat. But not before falling head over heels in love with Daisy (Cate Blanchett), the granddaughter of one of the ladies at the home.

From then on, the film becomes a love story against time. And, with all of its Forrest Gump-like qualities, it works really well, becoming the kind of timeless film that Hollywood has sometimes forgotten how to make. David Fincher, directing against type here, has used a premise from the F Scott Fitzgerald short story to tell a story about how time sometimes works against us. And how sometimes to show how much we love something, we have to say goodbye.

This ended up being my favorite movie of the day. In fact, I liked it so much that I’m going to take my mom to go see it. So, there you go. If that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is.

CORALINE CLIPS

After about two and a half hours of Benjamin getting younger, it was time to see something a bit lighter. Harry showed us clips of the new film from Henry Selick, director of Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach. This time, he is mining the work of Neil Gaiman. It’s the story of a young girl who wakes up in a dream world where everyone has button eyes and are all controlled by her mother. Everything may be beautiful, but there’s a danger behind the beauty.

The animation was, of course, great and the 3D effects were pretty amazing. (This was the first of three 3D presentations we saw throughout the day.) But I felt like there was something missing. There didn’t seem to be any emotion behind any of it. And that may change with a change of music and the rest of the story filled in. But these clips, while making me want to see the rest of the film just to know where it goes, didn’t make me put it at the top of my list.

Nightmare Before Christmas it ain’t. But we’ll see. It could end up being great.

SAHARA (1943)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Zoltan Korda
Written by: Philip MacDonald/John Howard Lawson/Zoltan Korda/James O’Hanlon/Sidney Buchman (uncredited)
Based on photoplay by: Iosif Prut/Mikhail Romm

Somewhere in the middle of World War II, America wasn’t doing so well. Moral was low and the war efforts just weren’t going where everyone thought they should be going. So the military called on Hollywood to help out. They financed a film that would rally the folks on the homefront and, in doing that, hopefully rally the troops. They got an international cast along with one of the most popular actors of the time, Humphrey Bogart.

Sahara is the story of three Army boys trying to get out of the Sahara desert with their old, beat-up tank, Lulubelle. Along the way, they pick up some British, Australian and French soldiers. They also manage to find an African soldier with an Italian prisoner. Then they’re attacked by a German pilot and pick him up. Finally, they get a change of orders and have to hole up in a fort with no water and 100 German soldiers coming after them.

It’s a great war adventure that pulls out all the stops to try to get people on our side. It shows American soldiers to be good-natured and righteous (even when they don’t really want to be), French soldiers to be brave, Brits to be intelligent and thoughtful, Italians to be basically good people who are led by a weak-willed fool and Germans to be the Devil. Yes, there’s no such thing as a good German in this film. The one that they pick up is a tricky, back-stabbing asshole who can’t be trusted at all.

This was the first point that I actually fell asleep for a little bit. I think I missed about 10 minutes of the movie. And it was still early! But those 15 hour work days didn’t help me much.

VALKYRIE

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Bryan Singer
Written by: Christopher McQuarrie/Nathan Alexander

Just to keep with the WWII theme, Harry decided to show us some good Germans.

Throughout WWII, there were quite a few plots to assassinate Hitler. Of course, none actually worked, but one came pretty damn close. Bryan Singer wanted to tell that story.

Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) was fed up with the way things were working in his beloved homeland. He hated seeing millions of people killed for no reason other than their religion and he hated Hitler and everything he stood for. He knew that he could fight either for Germany or for Hitler, not for both. So he and a small group of people did something about it.

And these weren’t just lowly privates and such. These people were high ranking Nazi officials. Generals, colonels…people like that. People who had Hitler’s ear. (Of course, some denied their involvement.)

With an amazing cast including Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard and Thomas Kretschmann, how could Singer go wrong?

Well, he didn’t really. The movie is actually very good, if not really great. His main flaw is Tom Cruise, who seems to be back to his old self after doing so well in his last few films. I wish that I could say that I forgot that it was Tom again, but I just can’t. He was Tom and there was no getting around that this time. (One thing I’ll give Tommy, though: The movie started with him speaking German and, as far as I could tell, he was doing a VERY good job of it. Maybe he should always act in German…with a bald cap and a fat suit.)

But I really did like the movie and it’s an important part of history that not a lot of people know about. Stauffenberg is seen as a great hero in Germany and has many tributes and memorials around the country. I’m glad that someone in Hollywood finally decided to tell his story. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s a really talented filmmaker and his old writing partner, Christopher McQuarrie getting back together.)

Watch for Carice van Houten from Black Book as Stauffenberg’s wife.

Apparently some people are giving Singer shit about letting everyone use their own accents in the film instead of speaking with German accents. This is, of course, pure bullshit. Who the fuck cares?! I actually noticed it for about five seconds before thinking, “That totally makes sense.” It’s just less distracting than hearing Tom Cruise try a German accent…or a British accent, as they usually do in films like this.

Fuck people.

UP FOOTAGE

Pixar is everybody’s favorite animation studio these days. (And, in many cases, everybody’s favorite studio in general.) So, the news of a new film is always welcome for any thinking human being. I saw the teaser for this one on the WALL-E disc and wondered what the hell it could be about.

Up is, at its heart, about love and dreams and the things we do for them. Carl (Ed Asner) lost his beloved wife, Ellie, a few years ago and is about to lose their home. But if he could find a way to get it to the place that Ellie wanted to move it to, he could save it and his memories. Of course, that place is in the middle of South America. (“It’s just like America…but it’s south!”)

He just happens to find a way, but a young Wilderness Scout tags along for the ride. And they meet some new friends along the way.

Director Pete Doctor (Monsters, Inc.) and producer Jonas Rivera could only show us 45 minutes of the film, so it was pretty frustrating, but amazing at the same time. The movie is nowhere near finished and a lot of the footage was animated storyboards and flat CGI animation. The voice work is basically done, though and it’s on track for its May release. I can’t wait to see what happens to Carl and Russell. “SQUIRREL!!”

METROPOLIS (1927/1984)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Fritz Lang/Giorgio Moroder
Written by: Thea von Harbou/Fritz Lang (uncredited)

We’ve all seen this one and how amazing it. It’s even more amazing with a live orchestra. I’ve reviewed it that way before, but this version was a bit different. This is the version released in 1984 with a Giorgio Moroder score and songs by Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant among other 80s near-icons.

And, you know, as cheesy as the music sometimes is (ok…always), it kinda works for the movie. It has that same retro-future feel that the movie has. It may not be the best way to see the movie, but I think this is a pretty good way to see it. As Harry said, this is the way to party while seeing it.

This version is pretty short and has a lot of stills and drawings supplementing footage that was believed lost. (All of this is explained at the beginning in title cards.) Moroder also added some color and new visual effects to the film to update the visuals along with the sound.

But wait! Just recently, a full print of the entire film was found in South America (?!) and it is being restored right now, if it hasn’t been already. Harry really wanted to get a copy of that print to show us, but he just couldn’t. Instead, he showed us the version that many of us saw in our film history class at UT.

And that’s ok. I really like this version. Maybe it’s not as amazing to see as newly found footage, but that’s ok. I’ll settle for Freddie Mercury.

MONSTERS VS. ALIENS CLIPS

Dreamworks has come a long way since their early animation movies like Prince Of Egypt. While that one was visually pretty amazing, the screenplay and voice acting sometimes left something to be desired.

Now, with movies like Shrek and Madagascar, they are pretty much the only competition that Pixar has. But they haven’t quite reached the peaks that the boys at near-Disney reached even with their first feature, Toy Story.

Monsters Vs. Aliens comes from a love of the old horror and sci-fi classics of the 50s and 60s. The Earth is under attack from aliens. We know nothing about them except that they seem to be indestructible. And the President (Steven Colbert) is useless. The Secretary Of War, WR Monger (Keifer Sutherland), however, has an idea. His crew have been collecting monsters since the 50s and it may be time to let them go kick some ass.

We got to see a clip of the first contact and a clip of the first monster/alien battle. It looks like some pretty fun stuff, if lacking the Pixar heart that a lot of Dreamworks films are missing. But it certainly looks funny enough and I’m all for it. The 3D worked really well, too.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Patrick Lussier
Written by: Todd Farmer/Zane Smith
Based on 1981 screenplay by: John Beaird/Stephen Miller

Speaking of 3D, this is the only feature we saw in 3D today. It’s a remake of and old 80s slasher flick that I’ve never seen. It is apparently a lot of peoples’ favorite slasher movie, so I might have to check it out.

If the plot matters, it’s about a group of “friends” who survive the attack of a miner who was the only survivor of a cave-in. He killed the other five survivors and was put into a coma. Then, when he woke up, he went on a rampage on Valentine’s Day. He slaughtered a bunch of kids and was thought to be killed in the mine.

Ten years later, one of the survivors is sheriff. When one of the other survivors shows up after a 10 year absence, the murders start again. Is the killer back? Or is this prodigal son responsible? Or is it the asshole sheriff?

But the plot really didn’t matter at all. And, in fact, the script and acting didn’t matter at all. There’s nary a good actor in the bunch except for maybe Jaime King (maybe) and the old folks, who are just as much of victims as the younger folks.

The only really good thing about this movie is the gore. It’s pretty amazing. And, while the 3D effects are a bit blatant for my taste (eyeballs popping towards the audience, a pickax being thrown at us, bullets shot as us), it worked well and, I guess, added something to the experience.

Director Patrick Lussier (Dracula 2000 and its sequels and White Noise 2) said that the gore was much worse and the sex scene about three minutes longer when the MPAA saw it. While I would love to see that version, they actually got the cut that they wanted because all of that extra was filmed specifically for the MPAA so that they would cut what the filmmakers didn’t want and the MPAA would think that they were taking their cuts seriously.

Awesome.

I wish that I could recommend this movie to people besides gore-hounds. But, really, this is a pretty terrible movie with great grue. Nothing more, nothing less.

I LOVE YOU, MAN

**** (4/5)

Directed by: John Hamburg
Written by: John Hamburg/Larry Levin

Paul Rudd can do no wrong at this point in his career. It seems that all of the movies that he’s been in lately, even if they’re not really hits, they’re pretty damn funny.

I Love You, Man continues the trend. He plays a man who has never had buddies. He’s always had girlfriends and put all of his time and effort into those relationships. Now he’s getting married and has no best man. His fiancee wants him to go out and find some friends, but he just doesn’t know how to.

That’s when he meets Jason Segel. Jason is brash and introspective all at the same time. And he’s a dude.

This is pretty much the definition of the term “bromance.” Paul and Jason (whose character names I don’t remember and they’re not on IMDb yet) basically fall in love with each other at first sight, but in a totally non-gay way. They want to hang out all the time.

The best thing about the movie is that, while the impending marriage has a slight rift at one point, it’s never in any danger at all. And it’s almost a side-story to what’s going on with the two guys and how much they grow to love and trust each other. And it’s funny as hell. It’s not an amazing movie and maybe not as good as some of Rudd’s other movies recently, but it’s definitely really good and a lot of fun.

The supporting cast is just as good as the two leads. Jon Favreau plays the husband of Paul’s fiancee’s best friend, Jaime Pressly. He’s hilarious as the asshole who just never really likes Paul. Thomas Lennon is a guy who doesn’t quite get what Paul wants out of his man-dates. Jane Curtain and JK Simmons are Paul’s parents. Andy Samberg is his gay brother. And Lou Ferrigno is Lou Ferrigno.

I loved it, man.

WHITE DOG (1982)

*** (3/5)

Directed by: Samuel Fuller
Written by: Samuel Fuller/Curtis Hanson
Based on book by: Romain Gary

Samuel Fuller is one of those filmmakers that every film geek knows, but most of us have really only seen one of his films. And that film does not tend to be White Dog. (We BNATateers have seen at least one. Pickup On South Street played last year.)

Apparently, this is the film that pretty much killed Sam’s career. It was never released theatrically in the US and had to rely on HBO for any kind of real viewing. Why is that?

Because it’s about a dog that was trained to attack black people.

Wait…really? Is that why it wasn’t released? That seems pretty flimsy. I think someone didn’t like Sam, so they buried the movie.

It stars Kristy McNichol (why the hell do I know her? I’ve never seen anything she’s been in, but I know who she is…weird) as a young actress who hits a dog one night while driving home. She takes it to the vet, puts fliers around and ends up falling in love. Her boyfriend, Jameson Parker, tells her that she needs to keep the dog for safety. What neither of them know is that the dog was trained to kill black folks. When she figures it out, she takes him to two animal trainers, Paul Winfield and Burl Ives. (Of course…why wouldn’t The Snowman be an animal trainer?)

Criterion has recently picked this movie up for a nice DVD transfer and special edition. My question is…why? It’s really not that great of a movie! In fact, it’s kind of movie-of-the-week-ish. The acting is ok, but it just seems kind hokey, even by 1982 standards.

It did, however, bring up a subject that not many people even know is a subject. It doesn’t happen so often anymore, but it was once often enough to make a movie about. Pretty interesting stuff, but not Fuller’s best by any means. Check it out if you’re a completest.

PUSH CLIPS

This movie kind of reminds me of Jumper. We saw two clips of it and I’m a little bit underwhelmed. It stars Dakota Fanning and Chris Evans as two kids who can…do…um…just about anything? They push things around, control guns and bullets with their minds and, apparently, control people…or something. I dunno. They just kind of seem all powerful. They also seem like they’re just now coming to terms with it.

Like Jumper, it’s one that I’ll think about seeing, but then skipping until video. And then I probably won’t see it for a long time.

KNOWING CLIPS

Nic Cage is at it again. This time he’s opened up a time capsule put together by kids 50 years ago. They wrote about what they thought the future would be like. When it was opened up, there was one page that was just a bunch of numbers. When the numbers were deciphered, things look pretty grim for the human race.

We saw a clip where Nic chased some dude onto a subway thinking that he was a terrorist. Turns out that he was a pirate and the terrorists had already put a train onto the same track coming towards them…or something like that.

Again, I might see it, but only after everything else is played out.

OBSERVE AND REPORT PREVIEW

Seth Rogen as a security guard who wants to be a cop. It’s been done, but never with Seth. I’m for it. Absolutely.

TERMINATOR: SALVATION FOOTAGE

McG may be a joke to some, but he does really seem to have a passion for film. When he showed up in his bezippered leather jacket, I thought, “Oh god. He really is a douche.” Turns out that he’s a rather well-spoken and eloquent douche. I gained a little bit of respect for him. Not that I hated him before or anything. I think he’s a competent director. I just think he has a funny name and the second Charlie’s Angels movie sucked balls.

It looks like he might do something pretty good with the Terminator franchise. I’ll see it. The extended preview with rough footage didn’t make my pants sticky or anything, but it was some pretty fun stuff.

And, about his name, he said, “Oh, yeah. And fuck you all for giving me so much shit about my name. I’ve been called McG since 4th grade. It’s short for McGinty. Now shut up about it.” Yeah, a little douchy, but also pretty funny.

WATCHMEN FOOTAGE

This was when Harry brought out the movie that we all really wanted to see…unfortunately, he only brought out 22 minutes of it! FUCK!!!

Apparently the movie just isn’t finished yet…which is funny since everyone in Hollywood seems to have already seen it. Kevin Smith said it was better than Dark Knight.

Jackie Earle Haley was there to talk about the footage and said that this was the first time he had seen anything from the film. What the fuck?! How is it that Kevin Smith has seen it, but the star hasn’t? I don’t understand? (People were saying that Star Trek wasn’t finished, either, but Kevin has seen that, too. Who is he?!)

Well, whatever. The first 22 minutes of the movie were pretty amazing, even if they pretty much consist of the murder of the Comedian and a long scene of Rorschach and Nite Owl talking about it.

Cock tease.

CHE

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: Peter Buchman/Benjamin A van der Veen
Based on book by: Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Harry is usually pretty good at scheduling, but lately he’s kinda lost his touch. The last film needs to be something to keep people awake. Something to send them home with a bang. Something to hold them to their seats. V For Vendetta did it. The Lord Of The Rings movies did it. Hell, even Passion Of The Christ kind of did it…in a way.

So, this year he programmed a four hour, subtitled bio-pic of Che Guevara. That’s right. This isn’t the version that is going to be released everywhere. This is the roadshow version, complete with program and 15 minute intermission. From the opening moments, we knew that this was going to be a LOOOOOOONG four hours. It starts with a map of Cuba, very slowly showing the different subdivisions of the small country. Then it very slowly shows the big cities. Veeeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyyy slowly.

Here’s the deal: I really don’t think that I’m very qualified to even review this movie. Pretty much the entire audience and I were all asleep through at least the first half of the film. By the second half we were trying to kind of gear up for the end and the drive back home. But this movie was fucking brutal to watch after 20 hours of movies. It was beautifully shot and well-acted. I guess it may have been well written, but it was hard to tell from all the snoring.

I do seem to remember Benicio del Toro doing a very good job (as usual) and Lou Diamond Phillips actually being pretty good. What’s that all about?! But Franka Potente was in it? Really?! Yeah. Not remembering her in it at all.

Even if this was the best movie in the world, it was a terrible way to end BNAT. But I did get a pretty cool program out of it. It kind of looks like an old copy of Life Magazine.

So, there you go. BNAT in a rather large nutshell. There were some great films and some that weren’t so great, but no real groaners, honestly. Even the “just plain wrong” movie wasn’t that wrong. White Dog, for all its supposed shock value, just wasn’t Teenage Mother or Toys Are Not For Children.

It was a fun time and the theme almost held up for the first time ever. I just wish that he hadn’t ended the night with a four hour epic that didn’t involve orcs and talking trees.

Let’s talk about those movies.

BABEL (2006)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu
Written by: Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu/Guillermo Arriaga

Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has made his short career with non-chronologically told, inter-connected, tragic tales. 21 Grams was a very good movie about life and death, but I’m one of the few people who was not all that impressed with his first film, Amoros Perros. I thought one story was great, one was passable and the other was just downright awful.

Babel falls somewhere in between. There’s not a bad story in the bunch, but one of them seems like such a side item that it could have been taken out with no damage to the narrative.

In trying to save his marriage, Richard (Brad Pitt) decides that he and his wife, Susan (Cate Blanchett) should take a vacation in Morocco. Unknown to him, a Moroccan sheep herder has just gotten a gun from a friend to kill jackals. His sons are sort of trained and they take it out with them to keep their charges safe.

These two worlds collide in a way that you can see coming…especially if you’ve seen the trailer.

Meanwhile, Brad and Cate’s kids are being taken care of by a Mexican woman in their Californian home. When the parents can’t get back in time for the nanny to go to her son’s wedding, she does the only thing she thinks is right: she takes the kids to Mexico with her.

Jumping to another country, Japanese businessman Yasujiro (Koji Yakusho) is blind to the fact that his deaf and mute daughter is so lonely that she is trying to get her dentist to have sex with her. Does it have anything to do with her mother’s suicide?

All of these stories intersect, but the Japanese story really seems to only be here to drive the point home that, no matter if you speak the same language as someone else, you may still not be understanding them. Heavyhanded? Oh, yes. Well made? Definitely.

I think this was a very good film, but I can’t really say that I liked it. It was so downbeat and depressing that I wouldn’t say it was one of my favorites. As one of my viewing buddies said, it was everybody’s worst day ever.

The acting was amazing across the board. Brad (in Tom Cruise’s old makeup from Collatoral) and Cate, of course, were fantastic, but all of the amateur actors were just as good, especially the Moraccan dad.

In this day and age, it’s hard to listen to and understand everything that is going on around you. That’s the point the film was trying to make. One man’s accident is another man’s terrorism. There’s also the fact that white people can get just about anything done (it just takes some time), but people with pigment have a really hard time with it. All good points. I just wish that I didn’t have to be beaten over the head with the point.

By the way, there was at least one person in the theatre near me who didn’t know that the kids were Brad’s until near the end. Talk about a dense festival goer! How do you not know this?! No context clues for me, thanks! I’m full!

DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT (2006)

not rated ’cause I didn’t see all of it

Directed by: Julia Loktev
Written by: Julia Loktev

I wish I had actually been able to stay for this whole movie. I was really liking it, but, alas, I had to work. One of the many dangers of volunteering for a festival.

A young woman (Luisa Williams) goes to a big city (New York, I think) for a mission that we find out a little bit more about as time goes by. The information is given out slowly on a need to know basis. She meets masked men in a hotel room, but she doesn’t seem afraid of them. She is led around by the men almost as if she’s a prisoner, but they never mistreat her.

I could see where things were going, but I really wanted to see how they were going to get there. (Someone finally filled in the twenty or thirty minute blank for me, but it’s not quite the same as actually seeing it.) And Williams’ performance was so good that I didn’t want to look away. She had never acted before. But she was amazing.

The film is a little bit slow, but that’s how a film like this has to be. It was almost like a documentary. The handheld camera was perfect for building the tension and showing us the confusion that the woman was going through.

I can’t wait to have an opportunity to see the whole movie.

SEVERANCE (2006)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Christopher Smith
Written by: Christopher Smith/James Moran

A few years ago, Shaun Of The Dead was one of the best movies of the year. Now the Brits are back with Severance. Christopher Smith decided that the world needed a horror version of “The Office.”

And, for the most part, he was right.

A group of corporate types are out in the woods for a team-building retreat. There’s all the typical characters here: the incompetent boss, the brown-nosing yes-man, the hot girl that everyone’s after, the stoner and the cynical “cool guy.” They drive around for a while trying to find the cabin they were going to have all of these team-building activities in. Of course, they get lost.

That’s when they start to get picked off one at a time, Rambo style.

Severance isn’t the greatest horror/comedy ever made, but it’s definitely worth seeing for us gore/horror hounds. There are a few jokes that fall pretty flat and others that are VERY predictable. But it’s got enough really good comedy to go around and enough gore for two movies. The program called it “‘The Office’ meets Deliverance.” I think it might be closer to “The Office” meets Hostel. But it’s not as disturbing as either of those movies…or “The Office” for that matter.

Check it out if you get a chance. It’s actually already a pretty big hit in England. It would be cool if it was a big hit here.

THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON (2006)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: David Leaf/John Scheinfeld
Written by: David Leaf/John Scheinfeld

Ok, so there was really no doubt about me loving this movie from the very instant I walked in the theatre. Hell, the very instant I saw the first print ad in a magazine a couple of months ago. So that tells you that I’m a really big John Lennon fan.

That also means that I knew a lot of the information in the film before I saw it, so there were really no big surprises for me.

For those of you who don’t know what the deal was between John and the Nixon administration: John Lennon and Yoko Ono were, of course, huge proponents of peace, as any thinking person should be. They held a few events to promote the idea of peace. They were really strange events. Bed-Ins, Bag-Ins, etc. They were willing to be the world’s clowns as long as it meant that their peaceful message was reported in the news.

Good for them, I say.

Nixon and Hoover didn’t think so. Since Nixon wanted the Vietnam War to go on as long as possible (or so it seemed), he was very scared of the fact that someone as powerful as John Lennon was now hanging out with people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. So he set Hoover on their asses and tried to have them deported. What was the charge? John was busted for marijuana possession a few years before in England.

Fuck that. We all know why.

The directors of this film (David Leaf and John Scheinfeld) had been shopping the idea around for ten years. It basically took the Bush administration to get it made. The similarities are amazing. The scare tactics, the tapping of phones, the celebrities being ostracized. The only real difference is that the people of the 60s and early 70s had real heroes trying to stop the war. And there were reporters who weren’t afraid to attack the administration. Where are our John Lennons? Where are our Carl Bernsteins?

Anyway, back to the movie. It’s really hard for me to be completely objective with a movie like this. I’m so passionate about both subjects that I can’t distance myself enough to really say whether the movie was actually as amazing as I thought it was. There were certainly some very powerful moments. And, for someone who isn’t so knowledgeable about the events on those five years, the movie would be a lot more enlightening.

As it was, for me, it was just a very moving experience that allowed me to get just a bit closer to one of my personal heroes.

John Scheinfeld introduced the film by talking about his experiences with Yoko while making it. He took a rough cut to the apartment that she still lives in in the Dakota in New York to let her watch it. She sat silently with no expression taking notes the entire time. There was no way for them to tell how she felt while she was watching. Then, when the credits rolled she clapped her hands like a little girl and said that, of all of the films made about John, this is the one that he would love.

How amazing would that be? She’s saying this over Backbeat (my personal favorite Beatles movie without them actually being in it) and Imagine (one that she had a LOT of involvement with). She liked it so much that she allowed them to go into the studio and take the instrumental tracks from some of John’s songs to use as a score. She’s never allowed anyone to do that before. That’s something to put on your headstone.

A friend of mine saw it at a different screening at the outdoor theatre here in Telluride. She said that, during the scene where thousands of people were singing “Give Peace A Chance” to the White House, the whole audience started singing along. Just one more reminder of how powerful John was and still is.

There will never be another John Lennon. But I wish there could be. We need him now more than ever.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF ALEXANDER KORDA (1968)

***½ (3.5/5)

In 1931, a Hungarian immigrant went to London and changed their film industry forever. Check that: He MADE their film industry.

Alexander Korda, director of England’s first hit film, The Private Life Of Henry VIII, did a little bit of everything in and out of the industry. He was an adventurer, director, producer, writer and studio mogul. He built Denham, a huge studio that had seven separate studio spaces and a huge backlot. He produced some of England’s biggest hits including The Jungle Book, The Theif Of Baghdad and Catherine The Great.

The 1968 British documentary The Golden Age Of Alexander Korda was shown during this program of interviews with Alex’s nephew and author of the biography, Charmed Lives. I had to miss the interview and Q&A, so that sucks. But the film was pretty informative even if it did have the stiltedness of all British documentaries made in the 60s.

Korda was an amazing man that I need to find out more about. And so do you.

MALDONE, aka MISDEAL (1928)

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Jean Gremillon
Written by: Alexandre Arnoux

I may lose my film geek card, but I didn’t like this movie. It was chosen by the guest director at the festival, J.P. Gorin. He chose three films by Jean Gremillon to show us. This one, hopefully, was the weakest one.

Maldone (stage actor Charles Dullin) is a man in turmoil (as evidenced by his constant scowl). He is a rich man who has run away from his riches. He has taken a job as a bargeman and has learned to love the life of a poor man.

He has also learned to love a gypsy girl who can’t really seem to return his affection.

When Maldone’s brother is killed in a horseriding accident, he is rushed back to his home by his family’s trusty assistant who looks like he just stepped out of a Shaw Brothers flick. (Of course, this was made in 1928, so people looked different…but THAT different?!)

His “happy” life back home ain’t so happy, what with a wife he doesn’t love and riches he doesn’t want.

I think a big thing that kept me from truly enjoying this film is the fact that drama hasn’t changed a bit since the silent era. Acting certainly has, but drama has not. I knew exactly where the story was going the instant I saw the gypsy girl. And even the film itself I had seen before. Other silent films did the same stuff before this. So what was the big deal? And it wasn’t even a very engaging story or characters that I could care about. I really didn’t like Maldone. He was pretty much just a jackass. The only person I felt sorry for was his wife.

After the screening, a woman was screeching about how amazing the film was and how it makes today’s films look like shit. That may be true, but she was being obnoxious about it and was almost sucking J.P.’s dick for choosing it.

But it was made better by the fact that she thought that two musicless shots were problems with the print and not intentional silence. Dumbass. If she couldn’t tell that the music stopped for a reason, she had no business talking about the movie…or any movie, for that matter.

LONESOME (1928)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Pál Fejös
Written by: Edward T Lowe Jr/Tom Reed
Based on story by: Mann Page

This film, however, is what I want from a silent film. It’s a simple story with real characters and interesting things happening all the time.

Jim (Glenn Tryon) and Mary (Barbara Kent) are two lonely young people in New York City. As one character says, “It’s hard to be alone in the city.” They have friends, but all of their friends are hooked up with other people, so they feel like third wheels on nights out.

Luckily for them, they are both called to the beach by a truck with a band in it. They meet-cute on the bus and things just escalate from there.

Nothing extraordinary happens in the film, but the characters are so interesting that it doesn’t matter. You really want these two crazy kids to get together in the end. When things don’t look like they’re going to work out, you feel terrible for them…even though you know how it’s going to end.

Lonesome was released in 1928, just after The Jazz Singer broke down doors with sound sequences. Some people will say that digital video is the biggest advancement to ever hit film technology, but it has to be sound. No one has ever said that digital was just a fad. They’ve resisted it, but I think everyone knows that, eventually, all films will be shot on digital. Back in 1927 when Al Jolson told the world that they “ain’t heard nothin’ yet” the entire industry said, “Bah! Talkies will never catch on!” But it’s a technology that is still in use today.

Director Paul Fejos (another Hungarian in Hollywood) knew that The Jazz Singer had something going for it, so he added a few sound scenes to his silent film. He also threw in some tinted scenes to really wow ‘em.

As Bill Pence said in his introduction to the film, the least realistic scenes were the ones with sound. Everything else was spot-on perfect for a romantic comedy and for plain ol’ real life. (“Oh shit! I’m late for work! No time for a shower. Just run a wet rag over myself.” And the way he lets his feet breath after work.)

The story, as simple as it is, is still relevant today. That sense of loneliness at the beginning is still as powerful as ever. Especially if you’re in a big city and all alone with no one to share your life with. (Trust me. Ladies, my number is….nevermind.)

The Alloy Orchestra is always amazing. They added their own soundtrack to the film and brought it to life, complete with a live vocal rendition of “Always” that sounded just like an old 78.

This movie doesn’t get shown very often and I’m not so sure that it’s on DVD yet. The Festival has shown it twice (apparently the only film they’ve ever repeated) and I can see why they would want to. It’s a great film that shows exactly why the movies have been a popular form of entertainment for nearly a century.

And, if you do get a chance to see it, dig those scenes of New York City. It’s funny how the subways have hardly changed at all, but Coney Island is COMPLETELY different. Let’s hope that someone decides to return it to its former glory at some point soon. That would be amazing.

VOLVER (2006)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Pedro Almodovar
Written by: Pedro Almodovar

Pedro Almodovar has, in the past, been Spain’s John Waters. He has shocked with explicit and perverse sexuality and broad comedy. He’s told stories of people that a lot of filmmakers wouldn’t touch.

Strangely, those tend to be the films of his that I don’t like.

A few years ago I saw Talk To Her here in Telluride. I loved it. I’ve only seen one of his other more recent films (Bad Education), but I think that he’s grown so much as a filmmaker lately that I have to check out all of his new movies. He’s dropped a lot of the old shock value and started to tell real stories.

Volver is no different. While it’s not on par with Talk To Her or Bad Education it’s still a very good story told with his usual flair.

Penelope Cruz is Raimunda, a poor mother in the city who is just trying to make ends meet while her deadbeat husband gets fired from every job he gets. Her sister is still in the grips of their hometown where everyone believes that ghosts and bad luck come with the east wind.

Raimunda’s aunt is a dotty old woman who thinks that her dead sister is taking care of her while her next door neighbor has been keeping an eye on her.

When Raimunda’s daughter accidentally kills her dad in self defense and the dead mother (played by past Almodovar muse Carmen Maura) shows up, things get really interesting.

If you’re at all interested in the cinema of Almodovar, check this out. If you’re at all interested in Penelope’s breasts, check this out. They’re on full cleavage display, Sophia Loren style, throughout the entire film. (Barring that, this is probably Penelope’s breast…um…best work. She’s MUCH better in Spanish than she is in English.) It’s not Almodovar’s best film, but it’s very good.

INFAMOUS (or CAPOTE 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, 2006)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Douglas McGrath
Written by: Douglas McGrath
Based on book by: George Plimpton

When director Douglas McGrath went onstage to introduce his new movie to us, he said that he was so happy that we would all be out so late (it was a midnight movie) to see a movie that we had all seen last year. David Thomson, Special Medallion winner at the Festival, said that it’s always good to get two sides of a story.

Well, looks like Douglas was more right than David.

Infamous is the story of Truman Capote and how he came to write In Cold Blood. Yeah. Same exact story as last year’s Capote. Second verse, same as the first.

If this film had come out first, it may have been better. If we had seen Toby Jones as Truman before we saw Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliant take on him last year, we may have thought that Toby was amazing. If we had seen the party scene that opened this film before we saw the party scene that opened Capote, we probably would have thought this one was better.

As it is, Infamous is too little too late. There’s nothing in particular wrong with the film. (Unless you count the fact that the first 40 minutes or so is basically a fish out of water comedy. See how funny Truman Capote is when he tries to fit in in Kansas dressed as a very gay cowboy!) The performances are very good. (Probably Sandra Bullock’s best work as Nelle Harper Lee.) It’s well written. The direction is interesting. And I like the interviews with the characters.

The only true differences in this and Capote are the cast and the addition of an affair between Truman and Perry Smith (Danial Craig who is very good if a bit old for the part). The cast is huge, actually. Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, Peter Bogdanovich, Juliet Stevenson, Jeff Daniels and Gwyneth Paltrow…although I don’t really know what she was doing in the movie. She’s in it for three minutes and has no effect on anyone. In fact, if her scene had been cut, the movie would not have been any different. She was very good, but completely useless.

If you’re really wanting to see another movie about Capote and his time in Kansas, check this out. If not, you can skip it and watch Capote again.

FILM NOIR (2005)

Directed by: Osbert Parker
Written by: Osbert Parker

Take a bunch of random clips from old film noirs. Put them in a blender. Now make a story out of them.

That’s what Osbert Parker has done in this three minute film. And, while it sounds like an impossible task, he managed to do it brilliantly. It’s a totally post-modern dream of a noir cut and pasted in a computer. It’s a cool short that I hope gets Parker a lot of attention.

CARMICHAEL & SHANE (2006)

Directed by: Alex Weinress
Written by: Rob Carlton

A single father is trying to raise twin boys. But he has some interesting advice for others trying to do the same: pick a favorite.

This was probably the funniest and most charming short I’ve seen in a long time. It’s exactly what a comedy short should be: fun and to the point. It never wears out its welcome. Not to mention it’s got two really cute kids in it.

Directors Alex Weinress and Rob Carlton (who also played the dad) said that they made the movie for about $20. It shows, but that doesn’t matter. Story is all that matters here.

THE ITALIAN (2005)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Andrey Kravchuk
Written by: Andrei Romanov

When you’re a six year old boy in a Russian orphanage that isn’t so much giving kids up for adoption as it is selling the kids, you’ve got to know that it’s a hard-knock life. But little Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov) is trying to change all that. He is about to be sold to an Italian couple who seem nice enough. But, when an ex-inmate of the orphanage’s birth mother comes looking for her son, it raises a question in Vanya’s mind: what if MY mother comes back when I’m gone?

So he goes on a journey to find his birth mother. Will his semi-evil captors find him? Will he be rejected by his mother for a second time?

See this movie. It’s a very good Dikensian modern classic that not only shows how a little boy can overcome a LOT of hardship, but it shows us what it’s like to grow up in modern day Russia. It ain’t easy.

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (2006)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Kevin Macdonald
Written by: Peter Morgan/Jeremy Brock
Based on book by: Giles Foden

In 1970, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) graduated from medical school. Instead of joining his dad in what he thinks is a dead-end practice in his Scottish home, he chooses to go to Uganda to do some good.

Little does he know that he’s about to impress one of the most evil people in the history of Africa, Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). When Amin hires Garrigan as his personal physician, he turns from the charming new president to the heartless dictator that the world knows in a heartbeat. Any minute he could go from Scotland-loving fool to violent monster. And that makes him scarier than any Jason or Freddy.

McAvoy (or, as I like to call him, Ewan Lite) is very good in the film, but Whitaker is abso-fucking-lutely amazing. He’s going to be at least nominated for Best Actor this year. No doubt about it. He’s scary and charming in the same breath. (Watch for Gillian Anderson in a small-ish role, too.)

Director Kevin McDonald (no, not the Kids In The Hall guy) guides us through Garrigan’s life in a Goodfellas sort of way. At first, it’s all fun and games for Nick. But, as things go south, we’re pulled down with him as he becomes Amin’s personal advisor and political scapegoat.

This, along with The U.S. Vs. John Lennon were my two favorites of the Festival. Check it out. But be ready for some violence to be done. It’s a harsh one.

WHEN WE ARE BIG (2006)

Directed by: Eveline Ketterings
Written by: Eveline Ketterings

Ok, I didn’t actually see this one. But I want to comment on it.

Here’s what happens: a little girl and an older man go to a pool. They play around for a while and have some fun. Then they decide to play the “hold your breath” game. But he doesn’t let her break the surface. He hold her down while he stares in her face. She fights, but only looks confused instead of scared. Soon she dies at the hand of the man she trusted. Her little body twitches as the last bit of life leaves her. Finally, he lets her go and she floats to the top. Then he surfaces and breaths life in.

What the fuck?!?! Who decides that this is a good thing to film?! Director Eveline Ketterings was booed before she was even allowed to do a Q&A at one screening. At another she was applauded only by the two rows of people that she brought in with her.

I would love to know her reason for making this child snuff film. Was she trying to say, “Look what happens every day. Look at it and don’t look away”? If so, this film needs an explanation. If she just thought it was a fun idea to have a little girl play dead for her on camera, then she’s one sick bitch and needs to have her camera taken away from her.

I guess art is there for debate. If it causes a stir then it’s interesting. But it’s hard to call this art. It’s more like someone who decided that watching a little girl die was interesting. I wonder if she has kids or if she wants them. Too bad for those kids.

So, that’s it for my Festival. I didn’t see quite as many as I usually do, but it was close. And a splendid time was had by all…except for the viewers of When We Are Big.

Either way, this is a great festival. And, even if the movies aren’t as good as they used to be, it’s still a lot of fun. (And, to be honest, the movies are still great. It’s just that once you’ve seen one movie about Iranian women gaining new freedoms, it’s hard to think that you haven’t seen them all. And that seemed to be what ALL of the smaller movies were about this year.)

But the big news of the festival (besides the movies and celebrities running around) was The Palm. That’s the new theatre that took over for The Max this year. It’s still the biggest theatre in Telluride, but it’s a few seats shy of The Max. It’s also an actual theatre. The screen is flown in on a fly system instead of being built from the ground up inside of a gym. The seats are permanent (and some are at really weird angles) and there’s a balcony! No more lugging heavy quartets of seats through the school and placing them very carefully throughout the gym! This is a state of the art REAL theatre!

And, just to keep up with history, there are bits and pieces of the old theatres around. There is a sign from the lobby of The Max, a banner from The Strand (that was before my time AND before The Max’s time) and a giant sign for Vespucci Pictures. (That’s the name given to the production crew of the festival.)

And here’s the strange thing for a Texas boy to notice: The Palm theatre is named after a guy named Michael D. Palm. That, in itself, isn’t so weird. What’s weird is that Mr. Palm was a gay man. Even THAT isn’t all that weird. What’s REALLY weird is that this is a publicly funded school that named it’s facility after an openly gay man who worked for gay rights and died of AIDS. That just would not happen in Texas. Not even in a mostly progressive town like Austin. No, no. There would be so many people protesting it that they would finally just scrap the project all together, wait 10 years and then try to build the thing again under a different name. It’s amazing to me that a small town in a state that, just a few years ago, passed a law that was pretty discriminatory against gays (remember the whole Barbra Streisand thing?) would name a school facility (even a theatre) after a gay man. That’s pretty cool. If only the whole country could be as open minded.

And with that revelation comes the rather unofficial theme of this year’s festival: Gay.

For the first time ever that I know of, there was in fact a movie about gay cowboys at a film festival in a small mountain town. Since I didn’t actually get to see Brokeback Mountain, I can’t tell you if there was any pudding being eaten.

I actually only saw two movies with lead gay characters in them. Here’s the big one:

CAPOTE (2005)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: Dan Futterman
Based on book by: Gerald Clarke

Truman Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman in an amazing performance) is synonymous with witty writing. His books pretty much define the late 50s and early 60s. With Breakfast At Tiffany’s he created one of the most indelible characters of the mid-century with Holly Golightly.

But in 1966 he decided to write a book about the murder of a small Kansas farm family. He read an article about the murders and immediately told his publisher, William Shawn (Bob Balaban), that he wanted to write a novel about the crime. But first he had to talk to the people involved.

Truman and his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener in her best performance ever) go to Kansas and interview the friend of the teenage girl who was killed and Sheriff Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) to get as much information as they can. But it’s not until the killers are caught that Truman gets really involved.

Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) were caught in 1960. Finally, in 1966, Capote completed and published In Cold Blood. Why did it take him so long? This movie (and the book it’s based on written by Gerald Clarke) fills in the gap left by Truman’s emotional turmoil at having met Perry Smith and, basically, formed a very strange almost father-like attraction to him. He saw in Perry the Truman that could have been if he had chosen a different life for himself. He cared about Perry, but at the same time had to use him in order to get his book written. And that tortured Truman. It tortured the hell out of him.

In fact, it tortured him so much that it ends up being very hard to figure out just how you feel about the character. He’s an asshole opportunist who wants to help his subject. This makes Truman Capote one of the most complex characters to come out of Hollywood in a long, long time. Is he finding them new lawyers just so that he can keep them alive long enough to get information out of them? Or does he really want to try to get them off?

The movie is very good, but it’s Hoffman who takes the prize here. His portrayal of Capote is sympathetic and beautiful. He’s a hard man who almost can’t handle being hard. He’s also incredibly fey and gay, but he keeps it at a level that is not annoying once you get used to it. (This is something that an actor in another movie at the festival could have learned from.) This is probably the best performance of the year. I can’t imagine anyone else doing anything better. Absolutely amazing.

And Catherine Keener, who has a bad habit of over playing things all the time, kept herself under control as the future writer of To Kill A Mockingbird. She was better than ever here.

I would also not be surprised if Collins got some accolades for his sensitive portrayal of a could be killer who is still surprised by what happened.

Capote is definitely one of the best films I saw at the festival this year. Check it out when it comes to a theatre near you.

BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005)

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Neil Jordan
Written by: Neil Jordan/Pat McCabe
Based on book by: Pat McCabe

This one, however, was NOT one of the best films. And it’s really a shame because it’s directed by Neil Jordan, who can be a great director, and stars Cillian Murphy, who is on his way to becoming a pretty good actor. It also stars Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson and Jordan regulars Stephen Rea and Ian Hart.

Patrick “Kitten” Brady (Murphy) grew up in a small Irish town. He always knew that he was different from the other kids, so as soon as he was able he ran to London and became the transvestite that everyone knew that he had in him.

Along the way he met up with a rock singer (Bono chum and collaborator Gavin Friday), a magician (Rea) and, of course, members of the IRA. He is constantly looking for his real mother even though there’s not much chance of ever finding her in a city the size of London. Besides, the priest back home (Neeson) doesn’t seem to want him to find her.

And this is the problem with this movie: this is ALL we know about Kitten. (Oh, and he laughs when he gets the shit kicked out of him. Which is aggravating not only to the people beating him up, but to the audience because it’s a pretty annoying laugh.) Kitten is a very “on the surface” character. There really isn’t a whole lot of depth to him/her. And I couldn’t really figure out if it was because of the screenplay by Jordan, the book by Pat McCabe or Murphy’s acting. Or maybe it was all three.

The last is actually a pretty big possibility because at first I thought that Cillian was doing really well with what little he was given. Then I started to realize just how annoying this character was and how, if he was only portrayed as being a little less fey, he would have been sympathetic. But, as it was, I was glad when he got beat up because it shut him up for a little while.

That’s not to say that the movie was all bad. For the first half hour it was actually a lot of fun. Kitten’s childhood was funny and the young actor playing him was pretty adept at balancing the nature of a future transvestite and the boyish mischief of knowing what you want and not really being able to get it.

Oh, and the music was, for the most part, great. I’m not so into disco, but the glam rock stuff was awesome. Of course, it’s hard to do a movie about transvestites in the late 60s and early 70s without using “Children Of The Revolution” by T. Rex. Love the song, but it’s starting to get a bit overused.

If you’re a fan of Jordan or Murphy, I guess you have to see this. Otherwise, it’s really kind of not worth it. Even then it may annoy you enough to where you don’t really like Cillian too much anymore.

But there is a pretty good Crying Game joke in there. Almost worth it. Wait. No it’s not. Nevermind.

A TRIBUTE TO MICKEY ROONEY

Ok. Let me say this first: Mickey Rooney is NOT gay. That’s not why I’m putting him near the top here. BUT he did make a lot of movies with Judy Garland. And I saw one of them, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

First off, let’s talk about Mickey himself.

After telling people that I saw Mickey Rooney at the festival I usually got one of two responses. First was, “I thought he was dead!” The other response I got was, “Oh! I loved him in Sin City!” How sad that no one thinks about this guy anymore. He’s 85 years old. He’s made 360 movies. He’s about the only person still alive who made silent films. He remembers EVERYTHING and EVERYBODY. And, amazingly enough, he still acts like he’s about 12 years old.

He’s also extremely funny. He and Peter Bogdonovich talked during his tribute about everything from his silent film days (he only made a few and he was VERY young) to the state of television today. (“I don’t know Martha Stewart, but I hear she has a new tv show coming soon called ‘Why?’”) He almost ended up turning the interview back on Boggy and asked him just about every question that was asked of him. The guy was amazing. And I’m ashamed to say that, up until this festival, the only movie I had ever seen with him was The Black Stallion. Oh, and there was The Fox And The Hound. Does that count? And I barely count Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Although it’s a great movie, his part was just embarrassing.

They showed clips of a lot of his films, but they didn’t even scratch the surface. Babes On Broadway, Bill, Boys Town (a movie that follows him to this day—he is still a representative of Boys and Girls Towns all over America), The Comedian. All movies that I need to see. (They showed The Comedian and I missed it. Dammit.)

He had stories about every movie, too. He remembered working with Don Siegel on Baby Face Nelson before Don went on to do Dirty Harry. He talked about how Lionel Barrymore played Judge Hardy in the very first Andy Hardy movie, A Family Affair in 1937.

And through it all I kept thinking of how dead-on Dana Carvey’s impression of Mickey was on SNL all those years ago. A bit over the top, but not too much.

BABES ON BROADWAY (1941)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Busby Berkeley
Written by: Fred F. Finklehoffe/Elaine Ryan

After the tribute we were told that one of the TBAs the next day was going to be Babes On Broadway, one of Mickey’s most famous collaborations with Judy Garland. Awesome! I’ll finally get to see a classic Mickey Rooney film!

But the real treat was that Mickey watched it with us. He introduced the film and talked about Judy and couple of the other actors in the film. Ray McDonald was apparently one of the greatest dancers ever and Richard Quine went on to be a director extraordinaire. He also went on about how music today is unintelligible and how the movie we were about to see had songs. That you could understand the lyrics to. And that you could sing along with. Dramatic pauses everywhere.

But I can’t begrudge Mickey for being so dramatic. He’s awesome and he’s had an amazing career. He’s earned a few Shatner-like pauses.

The movie itself is a fun little bit of fluff from 1941 that includes a lot of over the top Busby Berkeley song and dance numbers that, while not the master’s best, were still pretty memorable. The only really bad number was the one that Judy sang for the English exchange students, “Chin Up, Cheerio, Carry On”. And that was mainly bad because of the super-cheesy shots of the kids crying stoically. Even before that they were talking to their parents over a loud speaker back in London in really bad British accents and trying to use “new” American phrases. Sad.

But the movie and the actors had a LOT of life in them. I’m not a fan of Judy Garland, but I could almost see the appeal in this movie. And she and Mickey together were a lot of fun. The show that they do at the old theatre (they’re trying to raise money for the kids that Judy helps out with to go to “the country,” wherever that is, along with getting Mickey and his buddies an audition with a big producer) is hilarious. Especially the bit with Mickey in drag doing a Carmen Miranda dance.

Then came the discomfort. The end of the movie comes with a big minstrel show. Yes. Judy Garland in black face. Her eyes are huge already. With her face painted black they look like her entire face was eyes.

Watching something like this at home alone is one thing. I can watch it and see it from the perspective of time. This is something that, unfortunately, was done in the late 30s and early 40s. In fact, it was probably done all the way up to the early 50s. It was just another way of entertaining people. It was wrong and racist, but most of the folks doing it didn’t necessarily see it that way. Mickey Rooney is not a racist. Neither was Judy Garland. But they did a number in black face. Ok. I can handle that. Different times, different culture.

Watching with a group in a theatre, though, is a very uncomfortable prospect. Suddenly you’ve got a bunch of people who may not be able to see it from this perspective. Suddenly you start thinking, “What if Spike Lee is in this joint?” Everyone starts to squirm a bit. If there is laughter it’s VERY nervous laughter. It’s a little harder to deal with even with a festival audience that is a little more cultured than your typical Michael Bay audience.

But, as I’ve said before, I don’t think it’s a good idea to ban these kinds of movies. It’s certainly a terrible idea to destroy them. If we can’t learn from history, what can we learn from? This is a fun movie with an unfortunate end. It’s ok to watch this kind of thing with your kids. But just discuss the ending with them. Let them know that it’s wrong to do this sort of thing, but people didn’t realize it back then. Don’t let the indiscretion of a few people 60 years ago ruin your enjoyment of a good flick.

That’s about it from the gay side of things. (Again, MICKEY ROONEY IS NOT GAY! It’s the Judy Garland connection here.) As I said, I didn’t get to see Brokeback Mountain, but I heard that it was pretty good and definitely beautifully shot. I’ll have to wait to see it. I’ll bring my own pudding.

So, no more gay stuff that I saw, but there certainly was no shortage of the ever popular tortured artist effect. Along with Capote there were these next two flicks.

WALK THE LINE (2005)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: James Mangold
Written by: Gill Dennis/James Mangold
Based on books by: Johnny Cash/Patrick Carr (uncredited)

Johnny Cash (VERY well played by Joaquin Phoenix) was not always the legend that we know him as now. Once he was just a guy who wanted to be a country singer.

Check that. He was once a guy in love who wanted to be a country singer.

The object of his affection from the time he was about 10 years old was June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), the second youngest of The Carter Family, a country/bluegrass/folk singing family that took the country by storm throughout the 30s and 40s. (Their influence is still felt in all of those genres and more.)

Johnny and June grew up, married other people, and, amazingly, ended up touring with the rest of the Sun Records crew. (This movie has some of the best portrayals of Elvis, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and the rest I have ever seen.) And, after June’s two marriages, Johnny’s marriage and three or four kids…well, you know how Johnny and June ended up.

But it wasn’t an easy fight. Johnny became addicted to amphetamines and almost killed himself with them a few times. He got to be so annoying to June (walking all the way from his apartment with Waylon Jennings (played by Waylon’s son, Shooter) to her place across town, constantly proposing to her, etc) that she finally decided that she and her family had to help him kick his habit and get him to live his life and be the amazing star that she knew he could be.

Tough love has never been tougher.

The story has been told before, of course, but that’s ok. This is Johnny we’re talking about. And he approved every bit of this movie, including the casting. In fact, it’s been said that Johnny and June both chose Joaquin and Reese to play them. Joaquin is really showing that he’s one of the best actors of his generation. He looks and sounds just like Johnny at times. He sang all of his own songs and did such an amazing job that there were times that I thought that they had switched to a real recording of Johnny singing. (There’s at least one time, when he’s wearing sunglasses, that Joaquin looks just like River, too. I’ve never thought that they looked too much alike, but this kind of showed that they did.)

Reese, who also did her own singing, may not have looked too much like June, but she was pretty amazing, too. Anyone who thought that she could only do silly romantic comedies has forgotten that she started out in tender dramas like The Man In The Moon. She’s strong, vulnerable and funny sometimes all at the same time. (June was, after all, a comedian, too.)

Robert Patrick is also quite good as Johnny’s nearly indifferent father.

James Mangold and Gill Dennis’ script (based on Johnny’s autobiographies The Man In Black and Cash: An Autobiography) showed Johnny as an almost tragic hero who pulls himself out of hell with a LOT of help from June. And Mangold’s direction keeps the pace going without sacrificing character or story.

I loved this movie. I think it was probably my favorite of the festival, actually. And that’s not just because I’m a fan of Johnny. It’s actually a genuinely great film and it gives us a good perspective on the beginnings of the legend of Johnny Cash.

I have one quibble with the facts of the film: Didn’t Johnny see his brother, Jack’s, accident take place? That’s what I had always heard. Maybe it’s more dramatic to have him off fishing instead of where he could actually help him. I dunno.

NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (2005)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

Now, from one legend to a legend that was heavily inspired by the first.

Bob Dylan is one of the biggest names in rock music. Even in the late 70s and throughout the 80s when he was putting out pretty subpar albums, no one ever wrote him off for being done. As he’s come back throughout the 90s to today we’ve seen an American original grow older gracefully and have a renaissance of artistic resonance.

But how did the man who became Dylan get his start? Well, that’s what Martin Scorsese set out to tell us with this new documentary. In nearly four hours he shows us pretty much ever aspect of Bob’s early life up through the motorcycle accident in 1966 that sidetracked his career for about a year.

With interviews with Dylan and some of his closest cohorts of the time (including Joan Beaz, Al Kooper (who looks like a wasted Tim Robbins) and Allen Ginsberg) we get a better portrait of the man and the myth than any documentary has ever dared to give us before. Even D.A. Pennebaker’s amazing Don’t Look Back (which lent some footage to this film) didn’t give us such a well-rounded portrayal. It’s a great film that any fan of Dylan or music should make themselves sit down and watch. It’s being released on DVD soon. They will see Dylan deny that he is a spokesman of a generation, a folk singer or a poet. (He’s a song and dance man.) They will see him embrace his audience and then do everything he can to piss them off. (“Play it fuckin’ loud!”) And they will see what made him learn to love folk music in the first place.

One question I have: since Dylan is planning a trilogy of autobiographies and there’s so much more ground to cover than what this film covers, is Marty planning two more docs? That would be pretty awesome. I would love to see what he has to say about his Christian years and the dark years of Blood On The Tracks, Desire and divorce. And then end it all up with his big comeback with Oh Mercy in 1989 and the Oscar win for “Things Have Changed” in 2001.

This is definitely one that I’m buying as soon as I see it. And the soundtrack is out now as Bootleg Series #7. Can’t wait to pick that up. There’s a lot of unreleased stuff including different versions of songs like “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry,” live versions and demos.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (2005)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Liev Schreiber
Written by: Liev Schreiber
Based on book by: Jonathan Safran Foer

This one isn’t so much about a tortured artist as it is about a tortured young man. But the narrator does fancy himself a writer, so there ya go.

Jonathan (Elijah Wood) is a collector. He collects things that his family leaves behind. His wall is full of these things preserved in Ziploc baggies under a giant family tree. He wants to make sure that his family is remembered and this is the only way he knows how to do it. Yeah, it seems crazy, but that’s just him. He’s an extremely anal nerd who likes everything to be in order.

But now that his grandmother has died he is searching for the woman who saved his beloved grandfather’s life back before World War II. He travels to the Ukraine where his grandfather was hiding from the Nazis and meets up with a wannabe gangsta translator, Alex (Eugene Hutz, front man for punk band Gogol Bordello), who really only speaks very broken English, and his grandfather (Boris Leskin) who thinks that he’s blind, but he drives very well.

Along the way, of course, all three learn a little bit about themselves and their roots.

The movie starts off as a pretty brilliant almost surreal comedy and ends up being a very touching and thought-provoking drama about young men and their relationships with the past, especially their grandfathers. It’s not a perfect film (many had a problem with the tonal shift—I didn’t—and Jonathan’s fear of dogs kind of disappears pretty easily for being such a deep-seated fear), but it is a very good film and one of my favorites of the festival. The performances (especially Elijah’s, who looks like he could have been perfect as Clark Kent) were great and, even if the movie hadn’t been all that good, it would be worth checking out just for that alone.

Making his writing and directing debut, Liev Schreiber isn’t necessarily flashy (except for the constant white-outs, which got a little annoying—but everything is illuminated!), but he’s certainly sensitive to the material and knows what he’s doing. It’s a very good debut film. And it makes me want to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel.

Although, it’s hard to hear about rings these days when Elijah is involved these days.

Now, let’s move on to the two Asian films I saw.

THE PRESIDENT’S LAST BANG (2005)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Sang-soo Im
Written by: Sang-soo Im

President Park Chun-hee (Jae-ho Song) was a tyrant. He killed people for no good reason, crushed opponents and, basically, made himself into a villain for future S. Korean filmmakers. But he also loved Japanese music and had a soft spot in his heart for women who sang those Japanese songs.

But that didn’t make him any less of a target of assassination plots. Not even from his own officials.

The President’s Last Bang is the story of the last days of his life. They were filled with the things he loved: violence and singing Japanese women. They were also filled with the ineptitude of his own bodyguards and army. (“We couldn’t find any bullets!”) It’s funny ‘cause it’s true!

This is the kind of story that Tarantino would make with Oliver Stone. In fact, Park’s assassination in 1979 shook the country like JFK’s assassination shook our country in 1963. And director Im Sang-soo was sued by Park’s son for defamation of character! They forced him to excise four minutes of documentary footage so that audiences wouldn’t be confused into thinking that this was not a fiction film.

It’s a really strange, funny, violent film with a lot of great political intrigue thrown in. The only problem I had with it was that it was kind of hard to follow at times. I’m sorry, but even other Asians have said it: all of these guys kind of look alike. It’s hard to keep up with who’s who and what’s going on. And I watch a lot of Asian films, so for me to be confused by something like that is really something special.

THREE TIMES

** (2/5)

Directed by: Hsiao-hsien Hou
Written by: T’ien-wen Chu/Hsiao-hsien Hou

Unfortunately, Three Times was not as good as The President’s Last Bang. In fact, it wasn’t even as good as Breakfast On Pluto.

It’s a nearly experimental film about three different love affairs in three different time periods. Each is acted by the same two actors (Chen Chang, and my main draw, Shu Qi) and none of them have a lot of dialogue. The second one, taking place in 1911, was actually shot as a silent film complete with title cards. Strangely, it has the most dialogue.

The first segment takes place in 1966 and involves a young man who is going off to the army and the girl at the hotel he is staying at who falls for him. When she goes to another hotel in another town, he goes to find her…so that he can play pool in front of her again for about 15 minutes.

The 1911 segment is about a couple who get to know each other better over the course of the film. Or something like that. I think at this point I was figuring out the rhythm of the film and realizing that I was in for a long, slow two hours. I missed a few title cards because I couldn’t keep my eyes open, not even to watch Shu.

The final segment (2005) was about artists and drugs. That’s about all I got out of it. It made no sense at all and was probably the worst of the bunch.

None of the stories really seem to go anywhere and the characters are about as interesting as watching a particularly slow bug crawling across a white floor.

Here’s the hell of this movie: I love Shu Qi. I could watch her reading the phone book. And she was actually very good in all three roles. In fact, it could be the best acting she’s ever done because it showed that she has a range. All three characters are very different. But watching this movie is like watching her reading the New York phone book to herself. And its entire plot has been stripped away. And the room she’s in is dark, so you can’t even watch the pretty paint dry around her.

The first segment, as I said, had 15 minute pool games. And these were shot in one take with only half of the table visible. The other half of the screen was a wall. So actors would disappear for minutes at a time and then you would hear the balls knock around. And Shu would giggle her cute little Asian girl giggle. AND THAT WAS IT!!! I’m all for movies with very little dialogue. Solaris was awesome. Kubrick was a master. But this is ridiculous.

And this is supposed to be Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou’s most accessible work. Wow. It makes me want to run out to the video store and look for his movies just so I can avoid them.

It also didn’t help that Shu was supposed to be at the festival and never showed up. DAMMIT!!!

CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN (2005)

not rated because I didn’t see all of it

Directed by: Hans Canosa
Written by: Gabrielle Zevin

Now for a slightly more successful experiment.

A man and a woman (Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter) meet at a wedding. They talk and decide to go back to her hotel room for a night of the old in-out, in-out. As they talk we learn more about their pasts and their current lives.

What makes this so interesting from a filmmaking standpoint is that it’s all shot what director Hans Canosa calls “dual frame.” It’s actually split screens that were shot simultaneously so that we always get the reaction of the other actor to whatever is being said to them at the moment it’s said. It must have really been like acting in a play on this set.

The screens don’t always show Aaron and Helena, though. Sometimes they show their memories of their younger selves (Nora Zehetner and Erik Eidem) or even other people at the reception. Sometimes it can be a little disorienting, especially when they look like they’re further apart than they actually are. But this sort of relationship is always a little disorienting, so it works in the film’s favor.

The performances were all very good, if nothing spectacular. The two younger actors look enough like their older counterparts (especially the beautiful Nora) that you could almost believe that they were actually younger Aaron and Helena. (Although I find it hard to believe that Aaron was ever as buff as Erik.)

Unfortunately, I was unable to see the final half hour of the movie because I had to work. (DAMMIT!!) But I do plan on finishing the movie when it comes out. It was enough fun to make me want to keep watching. I might wait until video, but I do plan on finishing it. I’ll try to let you know when I do.

And now, for the final festival film that I need to review. It wasn’t my last film, but it’s the last one for today.

EDMOND (2005)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Stuart Gordon
Written by: David Mamet
Based on play by: David Mamet

Imagine a world where David Mamet wrote Taxi Driver. Now, take Travis Bickle out of the film and put Jerry Lundegaard in there. Now you’re starting to get the idea behind Edmond.

Edmond (William H. Macy) is a loser. His wife (Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon) is a selfish bitch who wants nothing more than everything and his job is a dead-end. When he goes to a fortuneteller every card turns up bad. It’s time for him to change his life. So he leaves his wife and walks out into the mean streets of New York to find his way again. He runs into a man (Joe Mantegna) who has a pretty racist view of the world. But, to Edmond, it almost makes sense. Then he goes to hookers (Bai Ling, Mena Suvari and Denise Richards), but he’s too stingy to pay for their wares. In fact, his stinginess keeps him from a lot of pleasures of NYC.

Then he meets a young waitress, Glenna (Julia Stiles). She’s beautiful, young and attracted to him. Things only get worse for Edmond from there.

As Edmond becomes more fucked up and his worldview gets even more twisted, his world gets darker and darker. We just know that something is going to explode, and we think it’s probably going to be Edmond himself.

The craziest thing about this film is that it’s directed by Stuart Gordon, director of such awesome cult films as Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dagon. And this is, in fact, a David Mamet play. Not too high on the violence quotient, usually.

But Edmond does get violent. In fact, Gordon gets to spatter Macy with blood in one scene.

In a way, though, this kind of fits Gordon’s body of work. It’s certainly off-center. It’s also darkly comic, disturbing and shows a world that revels in it’s darkly comic disturbance. What more could Gordon want?! Besides, Gordon and Mamet have been friends for a long time. In fact, I think I remember him saying that he directed the first production of Sexual Perversity In Chicago, which made Mamet the playwriting behemoth that he is today.

It’s also a lot of fun to see Gordon and Mamet regulars co-mingle in one film. You’ve got Pidgeon, Macy and Mantegna on Mamet’s side and Jeffrey Combs, George Wendt, Mantegna and Debi Mazar on Gordon’s. And this still has Mamet’s rhythm to it. It really doesn’t matter who directs a film, if Mamet wrote it (especially as a play), you can tell.

The performances were all very good in that Mamet way, but Macy was pretty incredible. It’s hard for him to be bad, I know, but I thought he was really good here. He has a knack for playing losers.

Some people really didn’t like this movie at all. I know it’s not for all tastes, but I really liked it a lot. Not perfect by any means, but it’s a lot of fun in a really weird sort of way.

As we were walking away from the theatre I talked to Gordon and told him how much I’ve loved his films over the years. He says that he’s working on a fourth Re-Animator movie called House Of Re-Animator. It’s going to take place in the White House. That’s perfect. I can’t wait.

So that’s it for Telluride this year. I saw less movies than ever, but it was still a lot of fun. I left my little box canyon town on Tuesday afternoon and I already can’t wait for next year!

This was the first year that I got in and I think it had to be his best one. There wasn’t a single horrible movie (although one came close, but it was still fun to watch until the end) and a couple of HUGE special guests.

As my friends and I descended on the Alamo there was much conjecture about who was going to be there and what movies we were going to see. We knew that Return Of The King was going to play because Harry has always had those and he said on his site that he was going to watch it like he always does: with a bunch of his friends. But maybe Kill Bill, Vol. 2? Maybe Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind? Perhaps even that cinematic epic Cheaper By The Dozen? (Someone on his site kidded about that. I would have been pissed.)

But no one knew what was coming. None of us could know.

We got started about an hour late. Harry tried to get us settled, but we were all too excited. We knew that the conclusion to the greatest fantasy epic was coming at the close of the party (it’s NOT a festival!! Some of these movies have to play Cannes.) and we couldn’t wait. But there were plenty of other surprises that we really wanted to know about, too.

HAUNTED GOLD (1932)

*** (3/5)

Directed by: Mack V. Wright
Written by: Adele S. Buffington

Harry started us off with the only horror movie that John Wayne ever made.

Ok. Horror may be kind of a strong word. More horrific. It was 1932 and this wasn’t exactly the Duke that we all know and deify. In fact, his horse was named Duke. John was just a skinny kid (24 at the time) who was in a bunch of B-movies. This was his 35th movie (according to IMDb) and still no one knew his name.

Haunted Gold is about a young man who is called to the town he grew up in because of a mine that his father owned with a long dead partner. The partner’s daughter, Janet (Sheila Terry from…um…it doesn’t really matter), doesn’t know why she was called here because her dad lost his half of the mine in a bet…or something like that.

But now dey’s spooks around. And dey’s spookin’ the walkin’ talkin’ stereotype that’s-a hangin’ out wit Mistra Wayne. Blue Washington plays Clarence Washington Brown, one of the worst portrayals of a black man I have ever seen. (Then again, I haven’t seen just a whole lot of movies with this sort of thing in it.) He is overly scared of everything and just doesn’t know what to do without his massa. (I seriously believe that ol’ Clarence was the inspiration for Scooby-Doo.) Oh, he doesn’t call him that, but he may as well. I guess back in ’32 he gave a lot of laughter to the audience, but these days, well…it was nervous and guilty laughter. It was more funny because people actually put this sort of thing on film than because it was actually funny. At one point, Wayne is getting put up for the night in the local hotel. He points at Clarence and says, “Well, what about…?” Everyone booed. Clarence had to either sleep in the old abandoned house across the street or, as Wayne said, “You could wait outside.”

Booooo.

Speaking of Scooby-Doo, the plot was a direct ancestor of our favorite scaredy dog. (Watch out for spoilers, but I doubt you’re going to be looking for this flick.) The ghost ended up being Janet’s supposedly dead dad who was just trying to scare people away from the mine. But he was a good guy. And if it hadn’t been for that meddling Duke…

But the movie was fun in a rather cheesy way. And Duke, the horse, did some things that no horse could ever do (“Go back and get the boys, Duke!” “Throw the lever, Duke!”) and Wayne threw some girly-punches. Fun was had by all.

After that Harry told us about his experiences with serials. He wasn’t able to get his favorite one (I forget the name, but I’m sure it’s great.), but was able to get:

THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN MARVEL (1941)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: John English/William Witney
Written by: Ronald Davidson/Norman S. Hall/Arch Heath/Joseph F. Poland/Sol Shor
Based on characters created by: Bill Parker/C.C. Beck

Many consider this the greatest serial ever made. It concerns a boy, Billy (Frank Coghlan, Jr.) who is transformed into Captain Marvel (Tom Tyler from Stagecoach) by a wizard named Shazam. Every time he says “Shazam!” Billy suddenly develops pubes and becomes a middle-aged man with the strength of ten men. And he can fly. And he has all kinds of other super powers. Kinda like Superman, actually. That’s mainly because it was supposed to be Superman, but DC wouldn’t let Republic do it.

The show was gearing up to be good and everybody was into it, but the film stopped about 20-25 minutes into it. Just when Captain Marvel got ahold of a machine gun!

But all was forgiven when the New Line Cinemas title screen came up. The crowd went insane. We all knew it was:

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh/Philippa Boyens
Based on book by: JRR Tolkien

Harry knew he had to surprise us with it somehow, so he showed it to us early.

How do I review a movie like this? Seriously. It’s the culmination of everything that we’ve been seeing and dreaming of for the past three or four years. Ever since I heard that Peter Jackson was doing these films and I read the books I’ve been wondering how he was going to pull off some of these scenes. I’ve been waiting to see what the fires of Mount Doom look like and the Battle of Minas-Tirith and the Halls of Gondor and, and, and….

Well, this is how: he makes the absolute perfect ending to the greatest fantasy trilogy of all time. As great as everyone thought the Fellowship and Two Towers were, this one is twice as good. By about half way through there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The film would get quiet for a second and you could hear little nerdling sniffles all through the theatre. For three and a half hours we were right there with Aragorn and Frodo and all the rest. When Legolas said to Gimli, “How about dying with a friend?” and Gimli said, “I could do that.” we knew that things could be over for one of them. And we were afraid for them.

If this movie doesn’t absolutely sweep at Oscar time I am actually giving up on Oscar. No, really. This time I mean it. Come on, guys. SHUT UP!!

I can’t say enough good words about this movie. Everyone in it was awesome. The battles are fucking amazing. (You haven’t lived until you’ve seen walls of men and orcs hit each other at top speed. And they’re incredibly violent, too. I’m surprised it got a PG-13 rating.) And if you loved Legolas in the last two movies thinking he was the coolest character, you’ll want to suck his dick after this one. He does some pretty amazing shit here.

I don’t want to say too much about it because I wouldn’t dare ruin it for anyone. But it is the best movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. There really hasn’t been a better film this year. I’m happy to have seen this (happy isn’t even nearly the right word for it), but I’m sad that it’s over. There’s nothing else to wait for until New Line gets the rights to The Hobbit and offers it to Peter. So far, that hasn’t happened, but it could. Who knows? Peter and Ian McKellen have both said that they’re game.

I cannot wait to see what Peter does with King Kong.

After the movie was over you could tell that Harry was just filled with every emotion. He told us all to be patient and sit down because he had some very small guests coming out. My first thought was, “If he got all four of the Hobbits here I’m going to freakin’ explode.” He told us that we were going to watch The General as a thank you to the guests for making these movies. We all laughed at Harry for starting to cry while he said that. But a laughter of comrades. We all had the same feelings he did.

That’s when he brought Peter out.

Holy shit. Peter Jackson was there along with his writers Fran Walsh (Peter’s wife) and Philippa Boyens (a big fan of the books and the mouthpiece of the writing team). I had heard rumors that Peter and Elijah Wood were going to be there. I just knew that there was no way that Peter would be there because he’s too busy with the extended version of this film and getting ready for King Kong. But he wanted to be here in Austin so bad that he skipped out on a Q&A in LA that New Line really wanted him to do (they forbade him to come to Austin, pretty much) and hopped a flight as quickly as he could. He lied to his production company for us! I love him!! He was off to Berlin soon after The General, but he was a very cool guy.

Elijah wasn’t there.

After that big surprise and amazing piece of film there was no way that Harry could top himself. He had shot his wad (as I’m sure many members of the audience did during the movie and Q&A). But it was no longer about topping ROTK. It was just about having fun.

THE GENERAL (1926)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Clyde Bruckman/Buster Keaton
Written by: Clyde Bruckman/Buster Keaton/Al Boasberg/Charles Henry Smith/Paul Girard Smith
Based on books by: William Pittenger

I’m sure most of us have seen The General. Hell, it’s required viewing at UT and most film-ophiles check it out just because it’s got such a great reputation as one of the greatest silent films. But it’s one of Peter’s favorite movies and it IS a great film, so that was where we went next.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s about Johnnie Gray (Buster Keaton, one of the greatest silent comedians of all time and Jackie Chan’s main influence), a lowly train engineer in the Deep South during the Civil War. Johnnie’s girl, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), really wants him to enlist and fight off the Yankee menace. Unfortunately, the top brass figure he’s more useful as an engineer than a soldier, so the won’t take him. For some reason they wouldn’t tell him why. I guess there would have been no movie if they had. He goes home, dejected, but not before Annabelle’s brother and father tell him that her “good for nothin’” suitor didn’t even get in line to enlist. She tells him that he can’t talk to her anymore until he’s in a uniform.

Bitch.

A year later his beloved engine, The General, gets kidnapped by the North. This is where the movie truly begins. It’s non-stop sight gags that even a verbal comedy lover would love. They’re all classics, from the soaking of Annabelle to Johnnie using one railroad tie to get another one off of the tracks. There’s no calculating how much influence this movie had on comedy and film in general. Watching it today it’s hard to tell just how revolutionary it was at the time, but it’s still funny as hell and should be seen by anyone who likes to laugh even a little bit.

Was Buster better than Charlie as Peter says? I don’t know. I love both of them equally. They really are completely different kinds of comedy. As someone once said (I wish I could remember who), Buster is comedy of the mind, Charlie is comedy of the heart.

The new score by Guy Forsythe and his band was great. Very down-home country and lots of cool sound effects.

The only bad thing about this film is that it really glorifies the South. They are the heroes of the movie and Johnnie is a die-hard Dixie Man. There’s no mention of the reasons for the war at all, but I do seriously wonder if Spike Lee likes this movie. (Although I think it’s supposed to be a direct spoof of The Birth Of A Nation, so maybe that helps.)

From there we moved on to another country. There was a lot of that this year. Of the 11 movies we saw, 4 were subtitled and one other one was from another country. It’s apparently some kind of record. And most of the subtitled ones were between about 2am and 6am. Bastards.

OLDBOY (2003)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Chan-wook Park
Written by: Jo-yun Hwang/Chun-hyeong Lim/Garon Tsuchiya
Based on manga by: Nobuaki Minegishi

Chan-Wook Park is apparently building up quite a cult following lately. His last film, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, got a lot of applause this year and, when Harry said that he liked Oldboy better, everyone seemed shocked.

I’ve never heard of the guy or his other two movies. (The other one is Joint Security Area.) But I liked this one quite a bit.

Oh Dae-Su (Min-Sik Choi from Shiri-you may have seen that one on the shelves of video stores lately) has been imprisoned for the last 15 years. Funny thing is, he has no clue why or by whom. He was pulled into this hotel room and left there being fed and drugged occasionally. Now that he has escaped, he has vowed to find out the whos and the whys.

Along the way he meets Mido (Hye-Jeong Kang), a beautiful young sushi chef, and falls in love with her. He also finds out that the person who imprisoned him is still trying to torture him.

The story takes some very weird turns and has a pretty sickening twist ending, which makes me think that the boys at Miramax (or whoever it is who is buying the rights to this one–by the way, boys, this review was posted AFTER Dec. 8th, no matter what date it says on top.) are going to screw it all up when they do their remake. I haven’t seen a lot of Korean films (Tell Me Something and Lies are about it for me), but none of them would be made in America. The Koreans aren’t afraid of any subject and they show it all. Gotta love that.

This is a very good film with lots of darkness and, of course, violence. It’s the first film of the day that is just rife with violence and the second where someone’s hand/finger gets taken off. But I think it’s the tooth-pulling scene that gets everyone.

This is about the time that we saw a couple of new trailers.

HELLBOY TRAILER

I’ve been waiting for this one ever since I saw Blade II and Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman were talking about it so much. I don’t know anything about the comic, but I want to see this movie.

The preview, though, almost seems to leave something to be desired. Yeah, it’s cool to finally see it on the big screen, but everything looks VERY cartoony. Hellboy looks like a kid with sawed off horns. (A very tall and big kid to be sure, but still a kid.) I guess it’s just not as dark as I would have hoped.

But Selma Blair looks great.

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

Not so sure about this one, either. It’s about a reporter (Gwyneth Paltrow) in 1939 NYC. She and a couple of pilots (Jude Law and Angelina Jolie…waaaaaiiiiiit a minute…did they let women become pilots back then?) are the only ones who can save the scientists of the world and, in fact, the world. There are robots with lasers and big flying machines and stuff being destroyed.

What I like:

It looks like a movie made in the 30s about the World Of Tomorrow. That’s pretty damn cool. It’s very comic booky (but it works in this one) and even the trailer is done in a comic book style.

What I don’t like:

The whole movie was done on green screen. That means that it may very well suck because it’s sometimes hard to act with just a screen behind you. AND that also means that they’re going to pay more attention to special effects and background than story.

I’m afraid.

More violence? More subtitles? Ok. Here we go!

WASP’S NEST (NID DE GUEPES, AKA THE NEST, 2002)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Florent Emilio Siri
Written by: Florent Emilio Siri/Jean-François Tarnowski

Who remembers Assault On Precinct 13? Ok, who remembers The Nebraskan? Yeah. Not as many. I had never heard of it until Harry told us that it was the actual basis for Precinct 13.

Why am I talking about these movies? Because Wasp’s Nest (The Nest according to IMDb) is a direct remake of AOP13. (I’m sure Tarantino would LOVE this movie.) A group of cops are in charge of getting an evil killer/rapist/Albanian revolutionary to a maximum-security prison. A group of robbers are robbing a warehouse. Somehow the two get stuck in the same warehouse while a bunch of faceless (literally-they all have gas masks with night vision goggles covering their faces) Albanian mafia troops besiege them, picking them off one by one.

It’s been done many times, but never quite as confusedly. It took me a long time to figure out that the people shooting at the cops weren’t part of the thieves’ group and that the cops weren’t shooting at the thieves. When I finally understood what was going on I realized that the action was great. Yeah, the characters are pretty stock (although they’re cool, too) and the story is simplistic (once you figure it out), but it’s action packed and very violent. Director Florent Emilio Siri is next doing the Bruce Willis action flick, Hostage, and the new Splinter Cell video game. I can see Hollywood loving this guy. I hope Hostage has a better story.

Now let’s move on to a REAL horror movie.

GINGER SNAPS: UNLEASHED (2004)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Brett Sullivan
Written by: Megan Martin
Based on characters created by: Karen Walton

Yes, it’s time now to revisit Ginger’s little sister, Brigette (Emily Perkins). You remember them from the original Ginger Snaps back in 2000, right? Well, as we all know Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) and Brigette, erm, parted ways…of sorts. But not before B injected herself with some of Ginger’s tainted blood and started to become a werewolf herself. (All of this is sort of explained along the way in this new movie.) Now, with daily injections of wolfsbane, she is able to keep her inner beast under control to a degree. But that doesn’t mean that she’s cured. She still feels the hunger at times and it keeps getting stronger. It’s not helped any when she gets thrown into a rehab center for girls because someone thinks she’s hooked on heroin.

She meets a strange and unlikely ally in Ghost (Tatiana Maslany), a young girl who is in the center to take care of her grandmother, a burn victim who doesn’t seem too happy about Ghost being around. There’s also Tyler (Eric Johnson-not the guitarist), a nurse who trades drugs for sex.

The movie is sufficiently creepy in all the right places and kind of keeps the mood of dark comedy and horror that the first film had. The last half reminded me a bit of Alien because they were stuck in the basement of the center and then in Ghost’s grandma’s house running from a mostly unseen evil.

I also really like where they’ve taken Brigette. She’s not just another goth kid who has something actually wrong with her. Like Sarah Connor in the second Terminator film, she’s highly disturbed by what she’s becoming. She’s all alone in the world and knows it. There’s no going back to what she once was even if she does manage to find a cure, which she doesn’t have much hope of doing.

What I wasn’t all that happy with was the ending. It seemed like they just wanted to tack on a twist ending that would creep us out even more than just another werewolf. And, I guess it is creepy, but it almost seems out of nowhere.

It’s by no means as good as the first one, but I still thought it was better than a lot of the crap that has been called horror lately.

It’s coming out on DVD pretty soon and the prequel should be out soon after that. Too bad the first one didn’t get a theatrical release, because they both look great on the big screen and are much scarier in a dark room with a bunch of other horror fans.

How ’bout some more horror? This time with subtitles!

HIGH TENSION (aka SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE, HAUTE TENSION) (2003)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Alexandre Aja
Written by: Alexandre Aja/Grégory Levasseur

France has started making horror movies. Well, I guess they always have, but I’ve never seen one that I can remember. Most of what we get over here are the really pretentious French films that end in the death of a child or the diseasing of an entire city. You know: their comedies.

This one, however, is a pretty tense little slasher flick with a twist ending that nearly negates early scenes in the movie.

Ok, it completely negates them. But I didn’t really care. It was a fun ride.

Marie (Cecile de France) and Alex (Maiwenn le Besco…credited as just Maiwenn) are best friends in college. They’re going to Alex’s house for the summer (I think) and Marie couldn’t be happier. We kind of get the feeling that Marie may be a bit happier than Alex really wants her to be.

The first night, though, something horrible happens. An old man comes in a kills everyone in the family except for Alex. Marie sees what’s going on and hides, trying occasionally to save Alex to no avail. The man carries her off in his truck to some horrible destiny. Luckily Marie manages to get in the truck.

That’s the whole story until the twist at the end. Not much there, but it’s enough to show us some really cool gore effects and some horrible, horrible deaths. Director Alexandre Aja has a future in horror films, but he needs to work on plugging up those plot holes.

Now, on to a horror of a different kind.

TEENAGE MOTHER (1967)

[Rating:.5/5]

Directed by: Jerry Gross
Written by: Jerry Gross/Nicholas Demetroules

Jerry Gross made a lot of exploitation flicks in the 60s. Strangely, a lot of them were hits. His biggest deal was actually releasing Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadaaaassss Song. (Talk about exploitation. That one is blaxsploitation AND child porn!)

This is one of the more disturbing of Gross’ films. It’s about a young Swedish woman (with a slightly British accent) who is hired by a small-town high school to start teaching sex-ed. Of course, all of the parents are against it, but the kids love to laugh about it. As soon as the kids become more sexually active, the parents blame it on the teacher, not the hormones. (Apparently they were never teenagers themselves.)

There’s a lot of stuff that happens involving the bad kid, Fred Willard (yes, he’s in it…ask him about it the next time you see him) and the golden couple. But none of that really matters. By the end of it there were only about five minutes that anyone actually remembered.

The hot new teacher is talking to the school board and some parents (which consists of about five people) while they are attacking her. They scream about the books and films that she “makes” the kids read and watch. (It’s all actually voluntary.)

It’s all well and good until they decide to “take a look at that film.”

Oh my God, it’s probably the most horrible birth I have ever seen. It’s an actual birth, but it’s an actual birth circa 1968 when they used forceps and “blades” and salad spoons. There’s fucking blood everywhere and the baby looks dead. There’s no way that can be good. Afterwards I said, “It’s vagina, but it’s ALL WRONG!!” The screams were amazing. People were hiding their heads, but they couldn’t hide forever. We were all stuck watching this train wreck.

Then the movie returned to its normal badness, but by then no one was able to tell anymore. At least the torture had stopped. It was over.

What exactly did Gross (good name) hope to achieve with this movie? Yeah, it had hot babes in it and the tagline was “She was a motorcycle mama!” (No motorcycles, by the way.) But did he expect kids to go see it after their friends told them that there was a real birth in it?! I would have avoided that like a bad date with Estelle Getty! I mean, we all wanted to see pussy, BUT NOT BEING FORCED OPEN BY FORCEPS!!! NOT WITH A GIANT HEAD COMING OUT OF IT!!! NOT BEING CUT OPEN!!! After this we had breakfast.

Bastards.

After breakfast it was time for more horror. This time from New Zealand.

Yay!

UNDEAD (2003)

*** (3/5)

Directed by: Michael Spierig/Peter Spierig
Written by: Michael Spierig/Peter Spierig

What happens when you cross Peter Jackson’s early zombie flicks with…um…well…I dunno what else. This seems to be a direct homage to the master himself.

Rene (Felicity Mason) is the Fish Queen of her hometown. She won a beauty contest that she didn’t even want to enter and royally pissed off the reigning queen.

But none of that really matter since meteors are hitting the town and turning the townsfolk into brain-hungry zombies. The only person who seems to know what the fuck is going on is Marion (Mungo McKay), a farmboy with some pretty tricky gun stylin’s and a kick-ass multi-shotgun.

There are other survivors of the shower/feeding frenzy (my favorite is the cop who spews stuff like, “When I was a kid, we fuckin’ respected our parents, we didn’t fuckin’ eat ‘em!” and “I’ll fuckin’ finish you off faster than a fuckin’ birthday cake at a fat chick’s fuckin’ birthday party!”) but none of that matters. What matters is that this is one fun zombie flick with some great gore and pretty good special effects for a couple of guys sitting home alone with their computers. The Spierig boys (Peter and Michael) obviously know what they’re doing and they love it.

My main problem with the movie is the ending. It made NO sense at all. It was another twist ending that came out of nowhere and then they twisted it two more times. Didn’t work for me at all.

But the ride to that was a lot of fun. If you’re a fan of the genre, definitely seek it out. It’s at least as fun as Bubba Ho-Tep.

And last, but not least:

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004)

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Mel Gibson
Written by: Benedict Fitzgerald/Mel Gibson
Based on book by: A committee of Christians

Harry said that every year there’s a movie that he goes for that he knows he won’t get. This year it was this one. And, obviously, he got it. And that’s not all he got, but I’ll get to that later.

This is Mel Gibson’s dream project. The man is a very devout Catholic and has been trying to make this movie for a long time. Ever since he was a little boy he thought that it was a strange thing that ALL movies about Jesus were in English. It just didn’t work for him.

So, now that he has pretty unlimited clout in Hollywood, he has made the definitive Jesus movie. It is quite possibly the most realistic depiction of the days leading up to the crucifixion that has ever been put on film. And, in fact, the entire day of the crucifixion is amazing. The bearing of the cross, the nailing to the cross and finally the actual slow and torturous death. It was gory, bloody, disturbing and awe-inspiring.

What I didn’t think was so good was everything leading up to that. The characters didn’t seem to be very different and I couldn’t tell them apart even if they were. Everyone had big, bushy beards and even Jim Caviezel (who is the only known face besides Monica Bellucci who played Mary Magdalane) didn’t look like himself, so I was never sure if I was right that he was playing Jesus. It turns out that they put a very small prosthetic on his nose so that he didn’t look so pretty. But every time I figured that I had the right guy, it ended up being Jesus who betrayed himself. And that certainly doesn’t work right.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so damn tired I would have understood it a bit better. Maybe if I knew the story better. But, since I got most of my Bible knowledge from Jesus Christ Superstar, I’m a little lacking in that department.

This was a good film with great acting all around and when it’s actually projected on film it will look beautiful. (We saw a very rough cut with a few scenes and all of the special effects left to be added in.) But character development was a real problem for me. I’ll check it out again when it comes out for real, though. Hopefully it’ll be better.

Now for the controversy. Will it start a whole anti-Semitic movement in the Catholic church again? Well, I certainly hope not, but here’s the deal: the film does depict the Jews in a pretty disturbing light. They are portrayed as pretty blood-thirsty. They wanted this Jesus guy dead with a capital D. The Romans were actually starting to falter, but the Jews spurred them on.

But what can be done about that? That’s the way it’s portrayed in the Bible as far as I know. At that time and place in history that’s what happened. It’s not like we can change the Jews into a more hate-friendly group like Nazis or Arabs.

Kidding.

Bushes…how ’bout that? The Bushes killed Jesus.

I think that what we need to do is take a step back and say, “Ok, that’s the way that group of Jews was at that time. Of course they are no longer like that.” If people can’t do that then they shouldn’t be allowed to see ANY movie. Hell, they probably shouldn’t even be allowed to read the Bible because they won’t be able to tell that these stories are parables and probably didn’t actually happen.

Oh. Wait…That’s what most religion is based on: these stories being absolute T-R-U-T-H.

Since I don’t know very much about the Bible specifically I called a buddy of mine who knows it pretty well. According to him, this whole controversy of whether or not the Jews are horrible people because they “killed Jesus” should be null and void. Jesus’ death was prophesied to the Jews, so they knew that they were going to have a hand in it. AND, if they had not had that hand in it, there would be no Christianity! Jesus had to die in this specific way. In a way all Christians should be grateful to the Jews because they made Jesus the martyr that he was. They enabled the Christians to live with sin and still get into Heaven.

Besides, if they hadn’t done it (or even existed) someone else would have done it.

So, those are my thoughts on that whole stupid argument. What were Mel’s thoughts? He said that what he believes is not necessarily in this film. The film is completely separate from his religious agenda, so he only put what he saw in the Bible and many other scholarly tomes.

Yes, that’s right. Mel Gibson was at Harry’s birthday party.

Holy shit. I saw Mad Max. Riggs. William Wallace! Fuckin’ awesome! I’m still excited about him and Peter.

Anyway, Mel talked to us for about an hour about the film and where he’s going next. (He actually wouldn’t say what it was, but he “really wished that he could.” He said it was something really cool. Hopefully it’s not something like Waterworld or The Postman.) He will probably be directing again before he acts. Whatever he does, I can’t wait to see what it is.

So, thus endeth my first BNAT. I had a LOT of fun and I hope it happens again next year. It probably won’t be nearly as fun because Harry is starting to produce his film and doesn’t have time to program a party like this. But it’ll still be 24 hours of movies and I’m sure there will be something to crow about.

Until next time, fearless readers, keep watchin’ the movies.