Belongs to that Asian genre where everything is staged in a glimmer of pure originality, but lapses into a terrifically convoluted - not to mention greviously underwhelming - narrative, in this case concerning a wrong done too long ago to be remembered by our fearless main character. After being imprisoned for twoscore and a year, an understandably peeved family man sets out to unravel the who and why of his lockup, finding himself paired with a curious waiteress and a lust for revenge that echoes, constantly, that of Beatrix Kiddo (therefore, it was no coincidence, you'll indulge me, that a cluster of peers headed by the QT himself, chose Oldboy to receive the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival) . The consistent knack Chanwook displays for wowing us is the film's almighty strength; Never better illustrated than in the infamous scene wherein our hero (and his hammer) must navigate a long corridor, conveniently packed to the gills with a dozen or so baddies. Shot in horizontal profile (over three days), this clumsy ballet of the single-take sequence is beautifully aligned with a restless camera at odds with itself: "Dominate the left side or right side?", it ponders, indecisively bouncing him between one or the other at the director's whim. Invested with a dynamic measure of the character's go-for-broke spirit and an equally potent dose of the director's vulnerable, I-get-knocked-down/But-I-get-up-again realism, it not only encapsulates the themes of the film, but clearly asserts itself as the best fight sequence I've seen since the aforementioned Bill killin' saga. And if the film makes reference to that film, it certainly doesn't stop there, recalling Pulp Fiction's animated square with a dotted-line trajectory from hammer to forehead as well as an elevator nod to Being John Malkovich's 7 and 1/2 floor (and later, Oldboy's main character finds himself  in shoes very similar to the emotionally crippled Leonard's in Memento, a fact I point out - aside from its cinema subreferencing - merely to underline Oldboy's seemming lack of poignancy, despite its best efforts on such a front. The moment the film settles into explanation groove - despite the behavior of our hero that follows - everything about it suddenly seems too familiar to forgive: Up to that point, it was a straight up A-; Do with that information what you will).

Has balls, repeatedly swings them, occasionally coasts for long periods of time without taking a breath and, though it's been touted that Matthew Vaughn carries the Guy Richie mantle (pre-Swept Away) into a territory fit for the smooth countertop rather than the coke being snorted off of it, I'd argue that this upscale (by comparison), by-the-numbers twister of Brit gangster proportions winds up having more in common with the studies of manipulation filtered through the privelidged bruises of the male experience seen in the recent films of Mike Hodges. Misfired as a character study, but otherwise proficiently told, the best moments are those that defy convention, and there are a great number of them. (What jumps to mind? The sex scene that never happens, Sniper follies, the curious, brain-splattering flashback.) Also: I repeat: Daniel Craig can carry a movie (Layer Cake is strictly an ensemble undertaking, so he's not tasked with this burden, exactly).

The kooky political hue (not to mention the past-future insinuation) only serves to annoy you when the whiny little girl isn't onscreen, giving everyone ear cancer as she pops mad eardrums with her moral inquisitions; Visually stunning in spots, particularly the bravura ending (that almost saves the movie), wherin a gigantic, steam-propelled mountain is dissected via the violent plights of its piloting team, a group of careless investors and the title character, a pure-hearted boy so chummy-cute you may want to try to adopt him after the feature (which is impossible, since he's animated, by the way). Hurdling headfirst through the undending mazes of machinery within the steam mountain, our hero - Mr. Steamboy - evokes Anakin's Episode II leaps from pod to pod, a feat that almost seems like a lateral move. (Said the world's biggest geek.)

Who do they make these films for anyway? Insanely insulting all the way through; So carefully was the race card engineered to be played every other scene, Haggis seemingly forgot to direct the dang movie, leaving every character the same dynamic: They flip over an ironic moment of goodwill that helps them forget their inherently racist tendencies. Cut to a shot two scenes later, when Haggis feels the need to show us the blanks, just in case we missed the subtle lack of a bullet wound/death of a character whose particular death - even if we only think this for a few seconds - gives any director acres of emotional participation, the ultimate smokescreen for a fairly simple, fairly safe Magnolia with an agenda. People arguing after they see it might want to consider the following first: Crash's worldview is so concentrated, it couldn't possibly be mistaken for reality. Imagine Million Dollar Baby's coup de grâce repeated ten times. Particularly appalling was the way Haggis plays us, telling us how bad the Racist White Guy (in this case Matt Dillon) is right before showing him Angelically rescuing the Stubborn Black Lady (Thandie Newton) before emasculating the Angry Black Man (Terence Howard, taking another crack at hypnotizing us with his dreamy eyes) for the White Man to Save (Ryan Phillipe must be the only actor whose last name describes his acting style despite not being an actual word). It actually appears to aggrandize this perception sorta by accident: The depiction of the rich, white people is the most cartoonish of the bunch; It's as if Haggis is simultaneously preaching the same hate he's decrying. Now, I know he's doing this to evoke a reaction in my parents. What he doesn't realize is how much it annoys people who consider film the greatest of all religions when he caters to those of you with a mere passing interest in the medium.

[And let me get this straight: Persians are upset that people in America mistake them for Arabs. C'mon. We elected Bush. Twice. We have no idea how to distinguish between brown people.]

It alternates between the fumbling, horribly rushed direction of the Brothers Farrelly and good ol' accessible pop filmmaking at its lowest common denominator. The latter is a clear byproduct of the former, making it all the more astounding that the moments of the most sappiness and manipulation often transcend their nature and, gulp, excite me (the can't-even-see-the-top-anymore ending, for example). I'm easy, though; You'll probably find it plenty difficult to overlook how loopy Fever Pitch feels, feeding on the repetitive ironies of Jimmy Fallon's deadpan delivery and Drew Barrymore's permanent cool girl smile. It's cruel of the Farrelly's to leave the pair out there with far too few takes (in my opinion), which goes against that whole goodwill and empathy crap they're usually so subtle about. However: This is still a film where the Boston Red Sox break the curse of the bambino while a lifelong fan falls in love with a girl that's pretty far out of his league (yes, I said league). Hornby's skeleton is strong enough to support the flimsy weight of its American  (read: commercial) translation, but uniquely unsatisfying.

The best way to show how haywire Nobody Knows goes, by close, is to examine its three perfect closing shots, and mapping their connection to Kore-eda's missteps. The first one depicts the exhausted slump of Akira, oldest of a foursome of neglected children. He and a rich, misunderstood girl - the one who conveniently seems to befriend the dirty, desperate leader of the pack type in films like these - finish a long night's digging. This is the way to end a film: Dovetail the vague-by-design opening shot and leave the kids in turmoil. Kore-eda makes such a big deal of their long, steady ascent into trouble, most of the film is without the urgency that might give us an emotional portal to these characters. Instead of the third (or, actual) closing shot - a freeze-frame crescendo of the remaining three kids, still seeming innocent and happy a mere day after their sister dies - Nobody Knows would have done better epiphanizing with the grief and realization of closing shot number one, allowing an audience who has just absorbed the guilt of the blind eye for two hours and change and be sent off really feeling the burn of Akira's panic-stricken loss of all confidence. And for pity's sake, the reflective second to last shot - a languid landscaper of a train passing from the left side of the frame to the right - could just as easily have opened the picture as closed it, forcibly illuminating the idea that perhaps it would have worked better as an opening shot left at the same end of its chronology. In other words, Nobody Knows gets the most interesting right before it ends. Unfortunately.

Most of the film is Paul clearly acting for the camera, putting himself at the forefront of everything, exposing no real connection between his ranting, raving existence and the kids learning their instruments; It could be called Rock Guidance (or, Rock Abuse). The whole thing is such a vile piece of exploitation that, underneath, is nothing more than a commercial for Paul's success and Paul's school and it's by no means a well-made documentary but, it seems to know its place: Watching people get enthusiastic about rock music is so intoxicating - especially in a scant 93 minutes.>

Scorsese clearly makes the effort to give the thing some form outside of talking heads and photo zooms, intercutting throughout to the infamous 1966 Royal Albert Hall performance where Dylan was booed and called Judas for betraying the folk movement by plugging in his instruments. In the film, this era looms over Dylan finding his roots, as the man himself says one thing (present day), the facts speak another and the Dylan of the time continues to avoid giving a straight answer to any question; He is the very picture of a man so impenetrable he charmed the world into the challenge. The press conferences are particularly telling. Press, fans and detractors alike all try to read into him and he so clearly gets off on dismissing their interest that you're almost shocked (that they'd continue trying) and impressed (that he can deflect people so damn well) at the same time. And when the film isn't revealing Dylan with more clarity than previously imaginable (the recent interviews dwarf that godawful Q & A he slept through for "60 Minutes" about nine months ago), it's allowing people who were marginally close to him to confirm the enigma. Scorsese comes the closest to busting Dylan wide open: He already knows the music speaks for itself, but he can't help but indulge his own interpretive curiosity as he lets tracks rip over the thing as if tiny, reflective bursts of crystal clear exposition; You get the sense he [Scorsese] believes the music is so autobiographical as to tell the whole story, in a few cases, without much context. (What's amazing is that he's right, by gum, and that the music, in No Direction Home, takes on a more concise mood than it does on the albums).

Initially impressed that he managed to market a kids movie with a title containing that word (that lovely word), I've settled in the two weeks since I've seen it: The marriage of ornately grotesque details (harsh Victorian nuptuals, exclusive grayscale for the world of the living, a piano bearing the nameplate "Harryhausen") and uncannily twee fits of woeful equitability don't quite swim in the instant holiday classic vein of Burton's previously ushered stop animation extravaganza, The Nightmare Before Christmas (currently being mined for every red cent as a soft cult hit in Disney stores everywhere). Doubling as a musical, Corpse Bride hits and misses: The laments fall pretty flat but the Cajun cabaret numbers ("Remains of the Day" and "New Arrival") trade their flashy locale for abstraction, giving the film a momentary, manic energy; These sequences are so wild, and so alive, that they underscore the film's lacking in full: Its characters never really inhabit their world with any vitality, so we never really feel comfortable with their places (or lack thereof) within it.

I think I'm still in the process of digesting it, but The Wayward Cloud - despite my initial emotional reaction to it - is a road burner of a departure: The kind of follow-up where a director loudly declares his former phases history. One major problem (though an obvious point): Where the frick to go from here? Allow me to explain: In The Wayward Cloud, Tsai Ming-liang seems to bitterly squeeze the last of his protracted, awe aspiring master shots while simultaneously: a) moving the camera; b) cutting often and c) staging musical numbers so bombastic as to call to the mat every single frame he has ever shot. (As in: Where has the animal in this man been hiding?) HOWEVER. The question remains: Why does he seem to delight so in curdling the innocent quirk of his What Time Is It There? characters by smudging their very trajectory with unapologetic sequences of joyless, hard-core sex? I'm past his allusions as I'm asking these questions (the film is set during a drought where the sticky nectar of watermelon threatens to replace water: In vitality's absence, decadent pleasure will do just fine), and hoping desperately to understand why Ming-liang might embark upon such a cynical journey. His commentary on alienation next to brushes with tenderness in the main characters is well taken (pornography as a byproduct, i.e. - making The Real Thing, while it's happening, seem like the passive intake it will become when viewed later versus the careful styling of slow, steady romances rather than a more conventional, straightforward appeal); In part, it feels like he's laughing at his former self, especially when, later on, he plummets from the deep end, busting off a symbol laced caricature of necrophilia that seems to decry subtlety as if it were fascism. New meaning to breaking the fourth wall. Bad joke.

I spent a chunk of it wishing the story itself (up and comers in the world of trick skateboarding), it's details (the carburator story you knew would be included - - is) and its limitless dramatic potential hadn't been laid out in all its two dimensional glory three years prior as Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary that only seemed cool because Sean Penn was narrating it. During the remaining chunk, I was cursing Hardwicke (not quite as doggedly as Randy, whose minute-long tirade against her made me wonder if she'd thwarted him somehow in a past life), wishing she'd been a touch less liberal with the sentimentalist floodgates (I should've known: I mean, I subjected myself to the guilt trip that was Thirteen of my own volition). What Lords of Dogtown has the power to capture that Z-Boys did not (I'm not writing a comparative essay - allow just this point and I'll clam up) is the rebellious, take-no-prisoners attitude spitting like sparks off of everyone's sense of predetermined failure: It may be a surf ghetto, but it's still a ghetto. Watching the characters navigate like stoned, privelidged pirates through the meticulously recreated landscape of trashcan alleys and cement jungles is infectious - and nearly powerful enough to squash thee constant lurch towards forced melodrama that Hardwicke's clumsy direction seems to take. I suspect, also, that their will be two camps: One who tolerates (or not) Heath Ledger's open channel of Val Kilmer and those who imagine an alternate universe where the Academy Awards reward him with the heavy trophy.

Consistently pleasing coming-of-age tale marred by bookend madness. Ironic, isn't it, that a film so deft at sidestepping the obvious pratfall of Robin Williams playing a mentally handicapped forty-one year old would, instead, drop the ball by overmanipulating us with a mountain lookin' molehill. Told in retrospect, the film presupposes that we'll be bowled over by the mere fact that Duchovny the elder finally (gulp) reveals the story of when he was thirteen to his wife. Simply because it takes the time to point out that he never got around to telling her the story before. Which is the dumbest thing I think I've ever heard. Luckily, most of the film follows Anton Yelchin (playing Duchovny the younger) as the dramatized version of sed story, which, while servicable to the last, is often witty, sometimes clever and, without question, harmless.

A mediocre thriller, neither exceeding or deepsixing our expectations (unless you were hoping for The Firm or Three Days of the Condor, in which case, it falls significantly below the mark); As Summer points out in the Too-Much-Coffee-To-Sleep Pillow Talk Sessions, the movie is host to almost nothing if not far too much exposition, with characters constantly saying things that would likely been better shown. She's right - to an extent. Everyone does talk a whole lot, but The Interpreter is a movie about people who peddle diplomacy for a living (an interpreter who maintains that wars have been fought when words were misinterpreted, a cop trying to be fair minded to all sides, and a dictator attempting to sway a suspicious U.N. with connotation). Diplomacy, especially as read in this context, is all about talking a good game, so, rightly, there should be a helluva a lot of yakkin'. Perhaps what Summer meant to imply, or, what she uncovered (or both), is that The Interpreter is supposed to be a riveting volley of words (aside from the political thriller staples: Car chases through crowded streets, exploding buses, third world executions), and by all rights, should be (cast includes: Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Keener), but inevitably, isn't. Part of the problem, it seems, is that Penn and Kidman's gradual paradigm shift from nervy tête à  tête to late night phone tryst takes place in a head space neither of them seem to be reaching too hard to achieve. Both pull off distracted quite efficiently, but neither seem to echo any sort of deep wound. And the thing is: They should. Not only should they project something more profound than meager self-pity, but neither seems to want to take us behind-the-scenes to examine their personal afflictions and the why of their obvious charades (namely: overworking themselves and, in passing, mentioning their lost loved ones and crushing situations). You're left with a sense that their topicality-sealed bond was never properly engineered to show the audience any sort of electric charge or confused wanting. Which, I believe, by definition, renders the bond annulled. (Interpret that.)
 

Probably once a month I tell a film - out loud - that if it were to end where I saay it should end, it would be much better off than where the writer and (or) director chooses to end it. Broken Flowers ends at precisely the correct spot. The rest of it, a rather pleasant jumble of episodic Jarmuschian oddities, misdirecting road signs (every scene keeps leaning in to you, as if to say: "Here's the big piece of this puzzle") and, finally, inconsequential anticlimaxes (nothing of value really stacks up, save for your interpretation of Murray's mindset at close: Does he turn a corner? It's in your court). I found much of it to be too light to compete with the somewhat looming tonal elephant in the room; Now Jeffrey Wright is playing screwball detective, now Murray is contemplating a wasted life, now Jarmusch is making a little Neil Young reference in a throwaway scene in a flower shop, now Murray is leaping to life affirming conclusions as if he's read the script, et cetera, et cetera. It's clearly the best flick The Independent One has churned out since Dead Man and Murray defies our expectations by simply not re-playing his Rushmore/Lost in Translation/The Life Aquatic character, but Broken Flowers never really takes off like it should. Even with what will undoubtably be the best ending this year (or, in recent memory).

There's this fine theory that they made her a man because male writers couldn't possible understand the inner sexual tensions of a woman: That horseshit doesn't explain why they go to quite so much trouble to reverse a perfectly good piece of method horror. I'm tempted to end the review right here, especially given that my time has become sort of limited and this movie isn't worth a speck of it, but observe: Suspenseful chase after a savage rampage makes High Tension seem all the more brilliant (skillfully handled, it manages to keep us on our toes right up to...); The changeover, which makes the one in Fight Club seem easy to swallow, takes everything High Tension has earned, spends it on a gift horse and proceeds into a twenty minute close up of said gift horse's mouth. There's no moment after we're through the looking glass where you're not adding up the cost and feeling patently ripped off. It. Flat-out. Does. Not. Work. Which is a shame. Pent-up sexuality equated with psychotic murder actually sounds interesting when framed as unrequited lesbian love. Oh well.

Alternates between being the positive reversal of the "quintessential" indie film and being too cutesy to latch on to. It's not quite a complete idea, with the father of two subplot upstaged by the "two" and their antics just as the failed artist in search of companionship is so blatantly underdeveloped that it clearly should have been its own film. Big points for laughs, especially, with the greatest IM exchange on film now finally recorded (<>O<>) and, in a completely unrelated subplot, a guy who writes dirty messages on his window for local teens to gawk at. A scene with a goldfish being tossed between the tops of cars reaches the likely quasi-epiphany pitch July was attempting to sustain through the whole film (and it's inclusion, alone, is worthwhile in a BIG way), but she never really gives us too much reason to buy the unlikely pairing of a off-kilter shoe salesman with a really obvious symbol-wound and a performance artist who drives old people around and seems to gaze, constantly, as if the world has just been through a big car wash.

It works a great deal better in your head, much later on; The John Ford western edge burns into the sheer curiosity of telling a story of a seemingly good man whose well-buried, vicious past is unraveled by a good deed. Mortensen is given full compassion by Cronenberg, who asks an unending stack of interesting questions by creating suggesting the rift in this moral imperative: Violence begats violence, never mind the intention. In thwarting a cafe stick-up, violence saves lives. The same violence, twenty years earlier, puts lives in jeopardy now (as one-eyed Ed Harris and his cronies tighten their circle). Violence, later, solves the whole problem. As subversive a film as is likley to come down the pike, A History of Violence finds Cronenberg making no apology for violence and its many uses, clearly painting the Rockwellian small town Mortensen and his family inhabit as something rare and lovely, the kind of place where you not only know the local sheriff by name, but he comes to your house to make sure you and your family are okay. And the wife and kids are so key here, giving Mortensen a means to navigate his tortured landscape, with Bello in every possible mode (sexy wife, selfless mother, weathered partner), children in moppet and teenager mode and sex used in multiple ways. Nothing here smacks of particular shortcoming, save the film's final third, with a likable - however unnecessarily silly - cameo by William Hurt and tightly tied-up cincher that feels ultimately too rich in sentiment to jive with the rest of the film's articulate portraiture of motive and instinct. And, because I didn't say so before: Mortensen: Owns the film.

No surprises here. Romero lays on the usual social commentary (this one much more blatantly allegorical than the other three films), shoots himself in the foot by giving his actors (seemingly) no direction or guidance while great, superior special effects bang into our consciousness ad nauseum. For some reason, this is one of those instances where Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo and Asia Argento's inclusion gives this a very unwelcome STV flavor.

Far from perfect - for no real good reason, Solondz is still being sympathetic to pedophiles as if it were his mission in life; Here, it does little to serve the film - but its evocation of pro-life and pro-choice worldviews both being inherently hypocritical is well felt. Though I'm going to be examining just why he chose to point out how static identity can be in someone who is still forming by using seven different actresses/actors, I was not averse to it. Far from it. Film ticks into a lulling stasis of grim realizations (Aviva is 13, Aviva gets pregant, mom makes Aviva get abortion, Aviva shacks up sweaty truck driver) until Aviva wakes up played by Sharon Wilkins and wanders into the uber-Christian den of good intentions that is Mama Sunshine's house. Collecting a group of disabled children - one of whom can take you to the dump where clinics discard aborted foetuses - as feel-good singers is just part of her MO: She supports her husband who, in conjunction with a Doctor Dan (a hilarious performance by character actor Richard Riehle) pays the aforementioned sweaty truck driver to off abortion doctors. The point, as it swirls around in this melting pot of contradictive ideals, is even more troubling than its portrait: Solondz finds no conclusive evidence that either side is anything but confused. Interesting as it is - and funny, too, in the same way Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness were funny - there never seems to be anything taking place right up in the present. Which brings me to the dilemna: My biggest problem with Solondz is how dated his films are starting to feel. He's progressive, but far less progressive than he imagines himself to be. If he had made his films in the 1980s and everyone had just discovered him now, that would make much more sense to me.

[I've got a whole comparison contrast between his treatment of existing Welcome to the Dollhouse characters and Tsai Ming-Liang's treatment of his stock characters in The Wayward Cloud. Less said the better.]

Mike Newell, originally set to direct, would have turned out something of smooth savoir-faire, easy to categorize (and, likely, easy to forget). Fernando Meirelles was brought in - we gather - to lend something of spark, of resonance and, let's face it, he's a ringer: Proven expertise in evocation of a guilty world conscience. So it is, then, to my own astonishment, that The Constant Gardener manages to come off far more mature than City of God, but not a fraction as effective as that film, full on lacking any hint of its raw, lyrical didacticism. Meirelles adapts his own scattershot rock n' roll style into a full on eye massage, painting a wild excess of caught on the fly snapshots (most of the action seems to take place in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, leaving bright, beautiful colors to take hold of a majority of the canvas). Any shred, however, of this beauty's strong connection to the vagaries of its content are left almost completely out of the picture. Nasty politicians make it possible for evil drug companies to test dangerous medicines on poor Africans; Country-hopping intrigue ensues, as well as a deeply half-baked love triangle involving a duplicitous, feather-ruffling diplomat's wife (Weisz, quite good, but too attractive for this role), said diplomat and his back-crushing double burden of naiveté and doubt (Fiennes, playing the nice twin to his Almásy in The English Patient) and a member of the British High Commission (Danny Huston in full-on Danny Huston mode). The most grievous error, and the most disappointing, seems to be the film's stubborn penchant for attacking the broadest possible viewpoint with a gusto of self-righteousness that would usually accompany something lost in its own details or technical jargon. Instead, The Constant Gardener shifts its concentration, constantly, keeping the focus of the picture at bay as long as it can, delaying our inevitable realization that nothing of real interest or immediacy is ever going to happen. Peppered with sequence after sequence of remarkably stock thriller set-ups, it echoes a less pleasing, less useful familiarity than, say, the tapestry of theft (which worked gangbusters) found in City of God. Meirelles tries time shifting techniques, a couple of grand dramatic stances (turns out he's a terrific director of actors) and a great deal of showcasing (location, camerawork, music), but he never really avoids the sophomore kiss of death: The admirable failure.

Van Sant envisions his Blake (the not-really-all-that-veiled Kurdt Cobain character) as a mumbling, introverted manboy who can't seem to find enough hiding places from his bumbling, narrow-minded friends, occasionally living in the woods, spending his last few days on earth plotting his own permanent escape, wandering mostly, sitting down to compose brilliant songs off the cuff and, it is inferred, doing a great deal of heroin. Giving the very simply anti-narrative the same deja-vu treatment he gave the Columbine Massacre in Elephant, the (still) Bela Tarr-obsessed director dismisses the master's objective eye-view that carried that film to such transcendent flows, opting for a viewpoint that - however deeply compassionate - wisely leaves the director's intentions less specifically lost in a place of hopelessly sincere tributes. It seems to be what I was really hoping it might be, namely, a capper to the death trilogy (if Gerry = the nature of death: so unsubstantial it becomes substantial [environment crushes man] and Elephant = the duality in death's freedom: anyone can cause it, no one can be be spared [man kills man]), that examines the missing piece, that is, the personal nature of death: it can be embraced or feared, but every man experiences it alone [man kills himself]. The master shots in Last Days are instrumental in giving it a character study bent, leaving Blake (an uncanny - at least from afar - Michael Pitt) to be blurred into our consciousness through camera trance. The contextual nature of this one, with far more details to latch onto - the wife screaming on the phone for Blake to get back to rehab, the private investigator (Ricky Jay, spewing monologues), the definitely recognizable/ever rotating wardrobe - allows it yet another dimension, one thaat just sorta sits there, fumbling around, not really serving much purpose (ditto on the barrage of unrecognizable actors: More distracting than anything). Last Days, as I imagine is obvious here, makes Gerry seem more and more like the odd man out and, through repeat half-viewings on the Sundance Channel, I've come to find that film the most valuable, despite my undying adoration for Elephant's impossibly consistent objectivity. An impressive and noble artistic side glance that holds all the more resonance, I must submit, for someone less interested in the mysterious nature of Cobain's death than in the I Hate Myself and I Want to Die genius of his self destructive music.