This one seemed like it had a lot of things I should like. It's Hungarian. I like Hungarian films. It's animated. I like animation. But somehow this turned out not to be an inriguingly Eastern-European attempt at animation with meat on its bones, but an ultimately forgettable cartoon.

I have nothing against cartoons, as such: I certainly watch a bunch of them, but they need a certain something. Humor, perhaps. Macskafogó is reminiscent of early American animation, as if the mere act of animating anthropomorphic animals is inherantly funny. Part of this may be the American release: it's full, I'm given to understand, of culturally-signficant wordplay, and the American release unwisely chose to include an English dub only (hey, at least it's a new rape of Hungarian cinema). But even the non-linguistic elements seemed ill-chosen: rave reviews indicate it's meant to be a spoof, and apparently of, among other things, the James Bond archetype, but the lead mouse agent really doesn't resemble Bond in any way: he dresses casually, has bionic limbs, and only connects closely with one woman.

So, uh, yeah, I got nothing particular to say. It really didn't inspire comment in any way; it was just a mediocre low-tech animation.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

Damn, I'm gonna need some help with this one.

I watched bits of the Utena series and bits of the movie back as an undergrad. I also got the vague impression the movie was a lot worse than the series. I can only hope so, because I couldn't figure much of anything out here. I remembered a lot of people pulling swords out of this girl's cleavage and trying to knock flowers off of each other while impeded by bizarre scenery. I remembered a girl who wore a cowbell as a fashion accessory and turned into a cow. I remembered some guy with a stopwatch. Some of these elements show up in the movie, but they don't seem particularly relevant or important, except the dueling bits.

The only real positive feature I saw in the movie was the art (and to a lesser extent the music). Scenery is lovely, and people are well-drawn if a bit wonky. There's something disturbing about the faces: they seem out-of-proportion to the body and distressingly pointed. Human figures were OK, but closeups on faces were kind of freaky, for me at least.

Anyways, move beyond the visuals, and you're looking at characterization and plot, which is where I blink and say "what the fuck?" On characterization I'm tempted to beleive the series does a better job, because the story's full of characters, and nobody except Utena, Anthy, and Touga feels remotely fleshed out. And even those three I'm not sure what's up with. Anthy's down for some hott lesbian lovin', and Utena's still got it for Touga, and Touga is, er, some guy or prince, or something. The rest of the characters are conspirators with funky hair who natter on about roses and princes and revolution and are all screwing each other off screen (and flirting shamelessly on-screen). When watching the series, I found myself assuming everyone was an androgynous polyamorous bisexual just to simplify my interpretation of all the flirting/sleeping around which everyone seemed involved in.

And I still can't figure out what the hell actually happened at the end of the film. Utena turns into a car, OK, they escape the wiles of their classmates, and "revolutionize the world" by escaping into the "outside world". I'd applaud the destruction of the fourth wall, except it's really damn clumsy and it doesn't seem accurate anyways, since the "real world" they escape into doesn't seem to resemble what I'd call the "real world".

I can't figure out why my peer group is so very excited by Utena. My guess is it's all the genderbending. Everyone loves genderbenders. Well, everyone I hung out with as an undergrad, anyways.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia, Anime News Network, AniDB.

I've fallen way behind, so my memories of this one are more fragmentary than I'd like. Things I particularly liked were the characterization of Max, getting to see a young pre-Dragnet Jack Webb, and of course the absolutely brutal pathos of the final scene. I was remined, not entirely surprisingly, of a similar scene in A Streetcar Named Desire: the pathos works here too. But Sunset Blvd. isn't tonally the same throughout: there's a bleakness and a superficiality throughout, and a sense of impending doom (somewhat bolstered by the fact that we know from the first scene that William Holden is going to end up dead in the pool). It's well-done, bleakly humorous and hitting the right ewmotional notes. And, surprisingly for a Hollywood film about Hollywood films, it doesn't come across as self-indulgent.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

Minority Report is actually a pretty good film. I haven't read the original short story, so I don't know how faithful it actually is to the source material, but it at least feels Dickesque. Thematically and plotwise it's strong enough, so I'll focus my attention on the setting.

Near-future sci-fi suffers from a problem I call "unnecessary whooshiness". This is when things just go "whoosh" or do other futuristic things to emphasize their futuristicness. There are a lot of short-term changes it's pretty easy to give a pass to because they will plausibly change: for instance, in my lifetime alone, the primary removable computer medium has changed appearance 3 times (three different sizes of floppies and optical discs). But a lot of the technology used in Minority Report is just plain silly: not just not within our present grasp, but in fact downright impractical. Most of this technology is the Precrime computer systems. We get an awful lot of footage of Tom Cruise whipping windows around a screen with a glove, which looks damn cool but is kind of ridiculous from an iterface-design perspective. Most real successful devices are based on some sort of tactile feedback to the user and an onscreen display. They've tried the direct route with detection of movement in open fields, and the result's terrible. It's like hooking a theremin up to your computer's mouse input. The other ridiculousness is the damn wooden balls. They sort of tried to explain this one with some folderol about the wood's unique grain corresponding to the names, but, eh, kind of pointless, and pure whooshiness. I guess it gets something of a pass since the entire functioning of the precognitives is inexplicable, but, really, it's not something which should need to be explained away as such. Oh, and the jetpacks. Jetpacks are kind of stupid. Especially for police. On a costumed hero, sure. But if you're providing mobility solutions for a policeman, why not a hoverbike or something? Having them strapped to your back is generally a bad idea.

I harp on these issues only because, in many respects, the near-future image is pretty good, and I have to find something to bitch about. The world has changed, but in ways which are for the most part gradual: the nonlethal devices the police use in various situations correspond roughly to present-day nonlethal police armaments. People live in ordinary, sometimes squalid houses and apartments: there aren't sweeperbots zipping around, and they aren't in arcologies of glass and steel. The brand names are the same as the present day too, which is actually pretty offputting, since the advertising in the film is already irritatingly enough presented without being irritating shilling for real-world products: it reminded me perversely of the persistent presence of Taco Bell in Demolition Man, which was fine on its own but really not something you want to evoke in an ostensibly serious film. But, generally, I actually found the near-future a reasonable place. But the plot and themes were better than the setting.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

Arsenic and Old Lace is a fine, delightful old romp of a film. It's been a while since I saw Cary Grant in a comic role. I think the last time was His Girl Friday, which I was honestly somewhat underwhelmed by. The acting's a bit hammy, with pop-eyed double-takes and all, but it's good fun. Also, I absolutely adore Peter Lorre. Every film he's in he's a credit to. Maybe it's the accent, maybe it's the general weaseliness, but there is a definite role Peter Lorre does and he does it well. Speaking of playing roles, this is one of the least hokily metaleptic films I've seen: it's far too easy to take self-referentiality and turn it into the focus of the film. But the references to Boris Karloff are merely passing; I'll admit the whole scene about how stupid people act in plays went on perhaps a bit too long.

Anyways, it's been 3 days since I saw this (I caught it on TCM on Sunday) so I've forgotten perhaps some clever things I meant to say. Except that I kept expecting someone to actually drink the wine.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

The tagline for this film challenges us to believe that the Funk Brothers were responsible for more hits than any other person or groups of people. With all due respect to the group, I'm wondering if this isn't technically inaccurate: Hal Blaine was one of the most ubiquitous people in the LA music scene in the 60s (and into the 70s), so he might have them beat. I'm not brining up Hal Blaine frivolously:the Funk Brothers and the Wrecking Crew, separated by most of a continent, present two sides of a coin.

It's an article of faith among indie-rock geeks and other folks on the fringes of modern music that factory-produced music by stars-of-the-week are essentially negligible. This is (among other reasons) why people continued to sneer at Britney even after she put on some damn pants. I'll agree that the modern music star-of-the-week scene is sick, but not that factory-produced music is inherently uncreative: a great deal of the most groundbreaking music of the 60s was factory-produced, by either Tamla-Motown or Phil Spector. Which brings us back to the mechanics toiling in those factories, which is what this film's really about.

Motown developed a distinct sound, and produced a bajillion records exploring every facet of that sound. They did this with good production, good A & R, and one hell of a studio band. This documentary tries very hard to play up the tragedy of non-recognition of thier importance to the process. "Tragedy" is, in my mind, a bit strong, except inasmuch as it killed James Jamerson, but it is indeed a shame how little-known the Funk Brothers are, because those backing tracks are rich and imaginative, and apparently a lot of the credit for that goes to the Funk Brothers.

This is where, once again, I draw a dichotomy between the LA and Motown sounds. Some of the difference is racial, but I think a lot of it's just plain cultural: LA was all about polish and veneer and still is. I haven't heard or read about Phil Spector in the studio, but I've heard the Wrecking Crew reporting on working with Brian Wilson, and Spector must have been far, far harder on them. That scene was very controlling, very specific about what they wanted, very focused on production, whereas the Funk Brothers, talking about their role in the creative process, draw a picture of a scene where by day they basically wrap whatever sort of jam they threw down in a club the night before around someone else's song. The scene sounds very extemporaneous and improvisational, and somehow it came out right.

Those are basically my thoughts on the film's primary message, which I suppose was supposed to raise awareness of the studio band as an entity deserving of respect in its own right, but I was sort of aware of that already (although not much of the Funk Brothers, so I'm grateful to learn more there. Considering the film's delivery of that message, however, I was generally pretty pleased with the interview portions and narrative, but I could have done with more original performance footage. The Funk Brothers did tour with Motown performers occasionally, so it's not like the footage doesn't exist. The new stuff is decent in a not-really-what-I-expected kind of way: these reunion gigs are always a bit bittersweet, and some of the vocal talent was decidedly odd: Joan Osborn was a treat (both auditorily and visually, ahem) on "Heat Wave", but she seems to have stepped into completely the wrong song for "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted"; even Colin Blunstone's voice is more suited for it. I was also underwhelmed by Chaka Khan on "What's Goin' On", but although her Marvin's not too hot, she's got a decent Tammi, since "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" was well-done.

In summary, it was a nice look at different people from a different scene. 60's retrospectives are all about California, and even when they mention Detroit it's all about the vocal talent. Nice to see the underdogs finally getting the respect they deserve.

Well, I actually watched this one on Tuesday, and I'm only writing it up now. Problem with the timestamps is that now everyone knows what a slacker I am.

I liked a great deal about this film, and can't think of anything in particular I dislike. The entire interaction with George Sanders seemed to a certain extent like an unnecessary plot cul-de-sac, but I guess it's the lever with which Captain Gregg's disappearance is facilitated. I can't actually complain, because George Sanders gave a deliciously oily performance, almost but not quite as good as his scoundrelliness in Rebecca. It's really very much a character-driven story, and the characters are well-executed. Rex Harrison (who I'm not sure I've ever seen before) was effective as well, although his role is sufficiently cliche-ridden that it doesn't seem like it takes much to make it solid. Gene Tierney is a hell of a lot better than the sort of nonentity she was in Laura, to say the very least.

One thing that bugged me a bit, in retrospect, is the character of Anna Muir. We see her in the first scene, and we expect her to be around and part of this unconventional household through the whole film, but she for the most part just vanishes except when she is absolutely necessary to the plot, which seems downright artificial.

And it's got bathing-machines. Bathing-machines! That's one of those delightfully quaint Britishisms which can make me almost forget Gene Tierney's fairly obvious American accent.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

Magnolia has a couple of good ideas trying to escape from poor direction. It starts of on a pretentious note, bringing up things unrelated to the following story, and then goes on to attempt to impress us with how clever it is by juggling a number of stories. We know how movies work, and that the stories will link up. Some of them do; some of them don't, and I suppose it's meant to challenge our preconceptions but ends up just being sort of unsatisfying. Each of the stories has some good meat on it, and doing a few of the interrelated stories rather than trying to juggle them all would give a more cohesive story. See, a lot of films do this sort of "reverse tree" structure, where seemingly unreleted events coalesce in the end. They usually stop at four on the outside. Juggle this many, and you start to see the problems with the structure.

A big problem is pacing. Now, I won't go into the fact that this is a really damn long movie, except inasmuch as that's symptomtic of the pacing problems that plague this film. It idd not occur to me it had pacing problems until about halfway through, when it was approaching the First Climax, the point where everyone reaches a primary moment of crisis or decision or action which they'll spend the rest of the film responding to. I'm not deeply into moviecraft, so I don't know the technical term for it, but you know it because it gets all tense and dramatic music plays for a while. This works OK most of the time. The problem here was that they tried to bring all these stories to a head at once, so they had to keep the dramatic tension and the dramatic music and all that dramatic shit going a long time. You can only keep an audience on the edge of their seat for so long, and I kind of lost interest when I saw that each of the plots was advancing at a snail's pace to the crisis.

Also, film this complex, things get lost in the shuffle. Everything which goes on with Marcie at the beginning? Disappears. Linda's suicide attempt? Unresolved. Stanley's father being a prick and told not to? Unfinished. The actual history between Jim and his daughter? Unilluminated. Bit of a letdown after sitting through so much to see a what seemed like relevant plots just get shuffled off. Also, what the fuck was up with the frogs? I'm not saying that sort of absurdity doesn't have a place in a film, and even in a serious film. But you do something fairly grittily realistic, without even dry humor, and then you throw in a surreal element, then go back to life as normal, and it makes one wonder why you bother with realism if you're going to dispense with it for the sake of an incomprehensible plot point.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

This one had its high points, but most of it came out sort of limp to me. The singing was pretty good, and the tap routines were OK, but tap's never really been my thing. The setting was good, hit all the obligatory post-war Paris concepts, but the characters never came alive to any real degree. Mostly, I wish there was a lot more good dancing. The final dance number was quite fantastic; if there'd been more of that sort, along with the brilliantly Gershwinian Gershwin backing it up, then we'd be talking. Honestly, it would have been a better movie if they'd lopped off, or at least condensed, the first hour, or broken it up with a good ensemble dance number or something.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

For a long time, I could only name two creators associated with anime. One of them is Hayao Miyazaki, and I'm not going to tell who the other one is, but he doesn't exactly make the short list of true visionaries. But now both lists get a bit longer, because Satoshi Kon has become a household name, at least in my household.

His name first came up in connection to Paranoia Agent, which I was and still am watching; it was only looknig at creators associated with that that I noticed I'd seen two of his films before: the flawed psychological thriller Perfect Blue and the warm, delightful feel-good Tokyo Godfathers. So I actually had a fair amount of respect for him even before I knew it. inklesspen enthused about Millennium Actress, so when I say a used copy at a good price, I had to pick it up.

It's quite staggering. Start with the animation, which employs several distinct styles to match the genre shifts, and which is just generally beautiful. Then there are the thematic and plot elements: it's undeniably Satoshi Kon's work, utilizing the reality-blurring effect also seen in Perfect Blue, and the injection of bystanders into the fantasy as participants as in Episode 5 of Paranoia Agent. It was compelling and riveting even though I had a pretty good idea of where the McGuffin was going from the beginning. There's a lot floating around there: an awful lot of ideas are stuffed into a surprisingly small space here: I'm always amazed at how much character-development good anime-creators imbue their characters with. And change is a central theme here, change and time. There are a lot of parallels and symmetries easily observed, and probably more lurking under the surface. I can see why this film's so well-loved.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia, Anime News Network, AniDB.

This one's actually quite brilliant. It's humorous on several levels, from the quasi-slapsticky to poking fun at the real-world political situation. The only other film I know of to accomplish such effectively multifaceted political humor is Dr. Strangelove. Of course, Dr. Strangelove had the good fortune to come from a nation where freedom of speech was valued (some times more than others, but generally we have an OK record in that regard), and where the political situation was dark and needed lightening. A Tanú's misfortune is that it was censored pretty much immediately on release (even in the tolerant atmosphere of the reformed Kádár government, it struck a bit close to home), but it makes up for that by finding such brilliant humor. '60's America was looking threatening and dire; Hungary passed through threatening and dire and come out the other side as farce. There's a reason almost every Hungarian film is a dark comedy, and this one shines as an example of the genre.

So much for the good, which is the film itself. The bad is almost all this particular release of the film. I hate to slag DreamQuest films, because they honestly seem to care about Hungarian film preservation, but their design needs a little work. Two big suggestions: make a combined bilingual menu, instead of having the top-level menu be a language suggestion, and for God's sake make sure you get the subtitles working. On films being sold to an audience that speaks the film's native language, subtitles are an appreciated bonus; on foreign films they're raised to the level of an absolute necessity, which means you really have to get it right. The idiom translation is workmanlike, but I can roll with that (and I wouldn't know the right idioms from the wrong ones anyways), but the consistent misspellings show a lack of attention to detail, and the real dealbreaker's the subtitles which are either unterminated (so they remain on the screen obscuring others) or terminated immediately (so they only remain on the screen for a single frame). I don't know the technical specifications of a subtitle track, so I don't know the particular errors here, but they're ones which should be avoidable.

See also: IMDB, DreamQuest films.

I'm a not-rabid sort of Talking Heads fan. I always saw David Byrne as more a songcrafter than a singer, an inspired Dadaist geek with an actually rather irritating voice. Sort of like Bob Dylan, except for the Dada part. Stop Making Sense pretty much reinforces this perception, although I've also learned that he has a lot of manic energy on stage, which manifests itself in really twitchy dancing. Anyways, I usually cut concert recordings a bit of slack, but this is a rather unusual concert recording, because it was apparently cinematically coceived, and because the Talking Heads can't do anything normally.

The music is... well, it's Talking Heads music. All the really well-known ones are there and a bunch of the better obscure ones. That aspect is pretty good in the way the Talking Heads are, so you probably already know if you'd like it. The visual elements are the highlight of the film, which, as I mentioned, tries to be cinematic. It's hard to do cinema live, even if you splice different shows together (instead of one take per scene, you get three. Somehow, that fails to lead to cinematic perfection). So one has to forgive the occasional gaffe, such as David Byrne's face being in the shadow of his microphone for a whole song. Or maybe that was intentional. The advantage of having a reputation for wackiness is that there's very little you can't claim you meant to do. I'd imagine that'd be the excuse for the half-assed choreography: this was planned — storyboarded, for God's sake — so couldn't they come up with some slightly less ghastly dance moves? Flailing your arms and jogging in place will only get you so far. I felt bad for the backup singers: at least the band had instruments which basically worked as body-motion props; the singers had to do their godawful steps without anything to hide behind, and to add insult to injury, in baggy clothes in totalitarian-state-prison-camp-jumpsuit grey. The rest of the band seemed reasonably dressed (with the infamous "Big Suit" making its obligatory appearance for "Girlfriend is Better").

The visual spectacle is generally actually pretty good, except for the band themselves. The stage is stark, the visual images projected onto the backdrop have high contrast and a weird illogical appropriateness, and the audience is cleverly avoided with the camera until the very end. If only the band was worth putting in such a scene.

Final note: after writing this, I went to IMDB and looked at what other people said. Some of the comments have spoiler warnings. How can you spoil a concert? Is "At the end, they play 'Crosseyed and Painless'" a spoiler?

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

Sci-fi from the 70s is interesting if for no other reason than the increased, or at least more overt, social consciousness. Logan's Run presented the age-gap and a radical response to the perceived burden of an aging population; Soylent Green described a world revaged by poor environmental policy; Rollerball was about, um, the dangers of megacorporations (I'm making this up as I go along, of course). The Man Who Fell to Earth has at its core, essentially, the destructive nature of human acquisitiveness and fear. Layer that with an awful lot of moderately disturbing sex scenes, and you've got this film, more or less, although they don't exactly spoonfeed it to the audience. It jumps around in time and place, between the real and the envisioned, fluidly if confusingly.

And, of course, there's David Bowie. He's a striking choice for the alien: he kind of is alien, with an otherworldly sort of emotive flatness, which fades gradually over the course of the film as Newton himself becomes more humanlike. It's hard to describe, but he's an intriguing actor, carrying over a lot of the more inhuman aspects of his glam-rock persona. We don't see that so much in, say, Labyrinth.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

A surprise addition to the schedule! This was on PBS tonight, and it's not the well-known recent film with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, but a far older version starring Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave. Had I seen it in complete ignorance, I might think of it as a half-decent thriller with wooden acting (Audie Murphy, in particular, fails to exude any particular traits; Brendan Fraser captured Pyle's naïveté and earnestness far better). But I'm not completely ignorant: I've read the novel on which it's based and assess it on those grounds. It's far more literalist than the 2002 film, lifting most of the dialogue and situations directly from the book instead of utilizing pastiche to compress them, but the literalism is shown to be something they only do when convenient, since about 75 minutes into the film the script deviates alarmingly from the Greene stance. Pyle's a private citizen involved in absolutely nothing shady, Fowler's a dupe of the Communists, and the entire fucking theme of the original story goes out the window. This one pissed Graham Greene off mightily, and I can see why.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

What fascinates me about this film is how very quasi-Western it is. It's no wonder Kurosawa's films kept getting turned into Clint Eastwood westerns; They've got that positive vibe already, what with the lawlessness (of a tumultous period of history, rather than a new land), the definitions of honor, and the archetype of the proud, defiant, and righteous fighter. I haven't seen A Fistful of Dollars, so I have no real basis for comparison, but there are at least a few scenes which I could see transplanted pretty much identically with a change in costumes only. Speaking of costumes, one thing which struck me in this (and did not strike me in previous Kurosawa films, so I don't know if I'm unobservant or whether this was a peculiarity of the acting here) is ho often, on the verge of action, people's arms seem to be tucked into their kimonos. Wouldn't that make sudden movements sort of awkward? Of course, that's not nearly as weird to my eye as how the gunfighter holds his weapon with his hands coming out of the neckhole/slit. That too seems rather awkward, because it really doesn't look like he has much range of motion. Is that actually an effective way to hold a pistol?

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia

My perennial complaint about noir: too many women and too many corpses. At least we know there's a common source for all the dead bodies. The MacGuffin's a bit less compelling than, say, the eponymous statuette of The Maltese Falcon, simply because it's so vaguely described it could be anything. I have an inkling it'll be retrieved later and end up in the trunk of a 1964 Chevy Malibu, or in a briefcase carried by Samuel L. Jackson. It's got some compelling acting, characters good and comfortable in their roles, but, my, the plot's a mess, perhaps almost as much as The Big Sleep.

Oh, two striking visual elements: first, those backwards-scrolling credits are really jarring, since they're also printed bottom-to-top. And that answering-machine is great. I didn't know there were machine-type answering services in the fifties.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.