More like a meditation than a film. Ozu's concern with spatial dimension - while it rocked the Western world (the film sat on Sight & Sound's Top Ten of All Time list for decades) - isn't the sole breakthrough that makes Tokyo Story seem so compelling. It's also his use of contrast between a modernized lifestyle (of the grown children in Tokyo) and that of the aging rents (whose travel is a day by train), all of it most wondrous because it doesn't necessarily draw from anything more than human nature. (Okay, obviously Ozu is pointing out the way war has affected people and their relationships, etc. - but he's not necessarily comparing the old way lifestyle to the new fangled busy of things). There's a great deal of quiet - and some of the editing is revolutionary (the way he builds these cutaways, keeping them so abstract - but instinctually fitting - is breathtaking); Mostly, it's the vein of universality Ozu taps that makes Tokyo Story the bonafied masterwork that it is. (Hey - for once, a movie isn't overrated! How ''bout that!)

Dirty Pretty Things has several very interesting characters, and it has plenty for these characters to do - but it's marred, so often, by the lack of dimension in its storytelling. We're totally involved because the elements - and, likely, the themes - are played up for the audience; Unfortunately, the side effect is that Frears' panders to us, almost the whole time, because he seems afraid we'll get lost. It's too complicated to be called a simple story of love or intrigue (comparisons to Hitchcock are outrageous at best), but it is also too simplistic - everything drawn in broad strokes, assumed (often) and very far-fetched. Auckley is a clever doctor balancing survivalist nature with gooey, sentimental secrets; His friend - the Turkish woman - is erratic and idealistic. The movie seems to dangle a love story so carefully, but in the end, we see that we're being duped. (It's. All. So. Deceptive.) Entertaining? Yes. Sergi Lopez as a hotel manager who sells organs on the side? Hell yes. Moving portrayal of refugee compassion and connections which transcend something more (yes, something more) than love? No.

A very dated film (though a harrowing one, none the less), Parker's Midnight Express - the title  is a reference to an escapee's train that never comes - is a terrific station of an American worldview, still very legitimate today. Though all the Turks are painted as faceless villains (yes, Matt, even his lawyer, even the judge), the idea that Americans can get away with whatever they want and that (what we would call) "underdeveloped" countries are barbaric if they don't accomodate our violations and such is perhaps even timelier today than it was during the Nixon administration.

Mae West may have been one of the worst actresses of her time (most of these shots are merely close-ups of her bedroom eyes, each line pitched as if its merely a commercial for sex), but the lame brain story - which is less wierd than simply dull - is what waters down this W.C. Fields romp and keeps us in only a light buzz of the comedian's slapstick goofisms and afterthought speech pattern.

What struck me most was the way it seems - as old movies often do - to keep the focus square on the story. As melodramatic as it was, Wharton's masterwork was still an electrifying (did I just use that word and Wharton in the same sentence?) social commentary. Scorcese's might be easier to watch as a modern audience, but for a dry run of the book's damnations, Moeller's version is much easier to read.

Coming soon, The Matrix Reiterated, The Matrix Regurgitated and The Matrix Recycled. The movie almost makes sense - as an symbolic trip through the complex network within a computer - until the oracle shows up and makes everything all foggy again; Her dialogues with Neo aren't much more captivating or coherent than two crazy homeless people talking to each other through a Thunderbird haze in an alleyway ("What's the price?" she asks. "Fifty twice," he smirks. She's got one more question: "What's the action?" Deadpan, he says, "Satisfaction"). Is it just me, or does the very idea that everyone in the film worships this character who walks around perpetually confused make the everyone seem really, really dim? Is it a movie about dumb people to make slightly less dumb people feel smart and to make those of us who fancy ourselves cinema-saavy look puggish and shallow for thinking these films impossibly absurd? Worse still, where are the redeeming qualities for those of us still likely hold a place in our heart for the ever rare action movie that - while brainless - at the very least doessn't completely embarrass itself by forgetting to bring its redeeming qualities with it to the table. Far as I'm concerned, they're one big - fucking lousy - movie.

[This movie might have received a higher grade if a) all the characters from The Matrix Reloaded came by and personally apologized to viewers while Revolutions was playing. You know, just drop the sound completely for a minute or so and say things like: "We'd just like to say we're sorry to Jasper from Austin, Texas - and even though we can't refund those two hours to you, there's an apology check in the mail as we speak, on its way to your house." Oh well.]

's gotta be the first set of vignettes that all work in my opinion. While I like the incredibly heady, intelligent pieces where celebrities name the sexual perversities of random strangers on a game show and the human body is envisioned as mission control-esque habitat where people inside you run the whole shebang - - I also dig the goofy, very Woody Allen pieces: The horny queen at the top of the order, the man who dresses in his dinner host's wife's clothes and tries to sneak out the window, the grotesque horror movie send up with the giant boob and, of course, Gene Wilder's romp in the love garden with a sheep. Yeah, it's just a collection of short films - but it's a collection of really awesome short films.

I can't get enough of the veneer. So much that I almost don't notice how often I'm forgiving the film on a regular basis for its moments of silliness or painful conventionality.

So rare that a film is so charged with realism, and so observant and doesn't blow its wad (by intervening) before the end.

Along with Citizen Kane and Goodfellas, pretty much the closest thing to a perfect film we're likely to witness.

The style is great: Using historical narrative-style voice over to oversee the quest for a girlfriend; Unfortunately, McElwee's film seems to be working on its own accord (else, how do you explain Ross getting involved with at least the last three "women"?). Eventually, it seems to twaddle in the realm of parallel (the title character, William Tecumseh Sherman, sort of determines the path Ross takes and every opportunity seems to be taken to keep their personality similiarities in the forefront); Finally, it lands somewhere between being a portrait of Southern women and being an epic documentary about its maker and the way his bitter lovelife reflected Sherman's bitterness towards the South (and, in the end, the North - which seems to suggest alienation, which I think McElwee is trying to make into his main point; He's rarely clear about it). Whereas the brevity of his follow-up - the briliant Time Indefinite - was the soul of its wit, Sherman's March overstays its welcome even before you get the chance to realize that - at 155 minutes - it's way too long.

Lady, you better watch out; It's dark out here and there's some sharp metal stuff - - - Omigod! Lady, are you alright, you've got a huge gash in your leg! Oh, okay, it's not that bad. Oh, Jesus, lady, why are you using another sharp metal thing to make it - - - oh, dear, that's just awful! It's worse! Yes, perhaps you should rest at this motel. Oh, holy ghost, lady! You're pulling at your wounds and eating them? You're drinking your own blood?! Aww! Oh, no! Golly...

[Or, Cronenberg for the French movie obsessed art crowd. (Then, how come you didn't like it, Ben?) Um, because I spent most of it looking the other way or covering my eyes. (I think we found my limit). The dinner table sequence - apart from the film - would have made a fascinating short film, were there a way to squeeze the goofy, stupid-ass context into it without spoiling the overall aesthetic. I won't ruin it. I wish no one had told me about it. (Like you're kinda sorta doing here, dumbass?)]

I pegged it when it came out late last summer, knowing full-well that it would be a cliches'-and-charm indie special, with a side of magical realism. It's pretty much just that, and nothing more. Bello trying to play an aging cocktail waitress is kind of stretching things, but she and Macy are a terrifically offbeat couple (I especially like how realistic the sex scenes felt, by the way; Best since Late Marriage). Baldwin - who received an Academy Award nomination for some reason - plays a surprisingly complex character as if he's merely an aging version of his pep talk prince of the real estate world in Glengarry Glen Ross. The whole theme of the movie is a sort of a changing of the guard - which it will tell you and underline and restate again and again and again in its stupid little soliloquies ("I gave up my son for adoption when he was one"), the imploding casinos, the pushy consultant the mob brings in to replace Baldwin (Ron Livingston, playing the hell out of his Office Space gravitas), et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It has enough charm to coast on - to be sure - but, and this is shallow (and unprofessional, I know), it feels like about four other movies I can think of rolled into one.

[A less grim Casino. A less depressing Leaving Las Vegas. A vaguer, less stricly by-the-rules Intacto. A less realism-laced Owning Mahowney. In other words, a whole lot of less.]

It takes place in the future - and the sets are vaguely Kubrickian in their sterile, practical appeal; The Movie, though, ploys practically the same formula all of the slapstick-era films had wherein Woody's big dilemna inevitably turns into him pulling off some elaborate deception and, eventually, treating himself to his version of a Bond Girl. Oh, right, and it's frequently hilarious.

[For some reason, I wrote two versions of this (the second, in my forgetfulness, being written as if I hadn't actually addressed the film before). Also, for some reason, neither really says diddly fuck.]

It seems like it will never stop melding Allen's hilarity into wacky 1970s sci-fi predictions but, late in the film, it nearly does; The sequences wherein Diane Keaton and Woody Allen are running around, posing as doctors, trying to get the real doctors to believe their experiment, falls so flat, it almost cripples the film. Nevertheless, most of it is purely uproarious. (Okay, I barely remember most of the film. This is why I shouldn't have let nearly two months go by...Fare thee well.)