God, if only Mamet knew how to end it. (It doesn't so much end, as it derails. And when it derails, I mean it stops the snazzy twists of less-than-competent con artists by doing the practical thing). I bet there's a camp of you out there who'd like to argue that ending it on the obvious note - the "things are what they seem" note - is the point. To that camp, I respectfully extend a handshake of carbon monoxide.

The false scope of the picture (it looks big, but plays cozy), along with some odd processions and decadent setpieces, may leave a Felliniesque taste in the mouth, but the first major thing that strikes you is the avante garde of it - the long shots, the obvious focus on sound, the flashback editing; It almost recalls some sort of bizarre American version of one of Jean Luc-Godard's stream-of-consciousness commentaries (only coherent). And much like Godard's films, Catch-22 stylizes itself beyond the need to entertain. I think the obvious fear here is that the film will polarize Joseph Heller's brilliant work of literary madness by gruelingly displaying - verbatim - the events therein. Instead of indulging this concern, Mike Nichols crafts a film that ambitiously shoots to ape the book's sporadic structure and evoke its madcap spirit. He succeeds - to a point - yet manages to make the addaptation discernably unique through what appears to be a less obvious, rather worthy new perspective: The art film. Though Nichols (who set out ot make an anti-war film) seems at odds with writer Buck Henry (who set out to write a farce), the two have made a film very much in the same mindset and wise as their previous collaboration, The Graduate. (I point this out because The Graduate is one of the ten best films ever made, and surely one of the very best comedies every attempted). As chaotically absurd as the book, the film gets awfully funny, at times merely because the casting is so dead-on. Bob Newhart as the speed-talking Major Major. Orson Welles as the cold, deadpan General Dreedle. Jon Voight as the shrewd and oblivious Milo Minderbender. Anthony Perkins as The Chaplain. The list goes ridiculously on, with each casting choice as singularly inspired as the last. And strangely, Alan Arkin's Yossarian - a clearer and more distinct main character than he was Heller's novel - falls flat. The performance has a one-note smack to it, this much is true - but it's also that Henry writes Yossarian as the perpetual straight guy, a pigeonhole that doesn't necessarily benefit the work as a whole, causing it to lapse, quite often, into Abbott & Costello by way of Samuel Beckett. Nevertheless, because he's always running against the grain, Yossarian better underlines a brilliant strategy (one that supercedes the book's dissection of reoccuring imagery): The circular storytelling. Opening and closing with the same events - as if they only begat and followed other events, but began and ended all things (i.e. - had left a mark on the affected party) - seems to open the door for both interpretations, thereby creating a skillful balancing act of mood: Yossarian's plight could be the stuff of grave, sentimental anti-war heroics and it could also be the stuff of sharp, bracing parody. Somehow the suggestion that everything is both the result and the cause of everything allows the opposing tones to comfortably co-exist (a Catch-22 in itself, to be sure). Both book and movie seem to thrive on the contradiction that a series of events begging a narrative (but denied one) will produce. They seem to be in love with the theory they're suggesting rather than the story they're telling.

The very nice compliment (and very fine point) made about A Streetcar Named Desire comes from my wife who met my statement that the film was "oppressive and exhausting" thusly: "They're more like real people. It's not like most films. They get on our nerves." This kind of bold critique makes most of what I was going to come up with seem boorish and stale (to wit: not my favorite play, Brando is so good he distracts you from the story, you have to tell people Vivien Leigh is terrific because she really grates on you). She's right - and it makes the film a test of fucking endurance.

There'd be quite a essay to be write about John Hughes, whose career tightropes both teenage and children's comedy-dramas, each with a overtly caring aplomb. This one falls closer to the latter (it's big gags are all meant to impress ten year olds), but even the sappy depiction of teenage romance is held with the utmost delicacy and importance. Then there's Ackroyd. His overblown Roman Craig is a highpoint and his chemistry with John Candy seals the deal, but Dan Ackroyd's painful lament over having to "wear a blue runner's jacket and fetch coffee" is a touching, cautionary nod to the greed of the 80s. He probably was fired from the very Stock Exchange Ferris, Sloan and Cameron peer into as their day off begins.

Exquisite and saturated in technicolor, Renoir's fable about the line between acting on the stage and acting in reality never seems to find a remarkable tone. The care taken to frame and stage the film clearly supercedes any attention to tightening the characters and their motives. In essence, it has on its mind the complexity and energy of a screwball comedy, but comes out sorta lumpy, nearly piercing itself with a cumbersome metaphor (the golden coach as a symbol of (groan) hope). Oduardo Spadaro's Viceroy is easily the best part of the film (an odd but pleasing choice given how forthright about his amoral nature he is). Anna Magnani's performance is often the focus - and she's quite good - but her character is dampened by the teerminal sense of her suffering (even though she spends a good deal of the picture laughing). This produces, in the closing minutes, a very unwelcome confrontation between her bittersweet final monologue and the fact that, seconds before, every single thing was wrapped up in a big box of happy. It's an ending that feels tacked on in order to feed Renoir's general signature: In real life, there are no happy endings. It's a bizarre thing, too. Renoir's films - the three I've seen, anyhow - have something of a rare quality: They're brilliant and entertaining, but they're also far too concerned with preparing you for that walk out of the theater.

The best of Hughes' trio of greats (rounded out by The Breakfast Club and Planes, Trains & Automobiles); The genius lies in the complexity of his humor, but also the worldview: Authority figures are callous and self-important and can easily be manipulated. Jeffrey Jones and Paul Gleason (from The Breakfast Club) have a great deal in common and in both films - but especially here - Hughes delights in observing their downfall at the hands of youth. It's probably a fair toss-up whether he was milking a formula designed to appeal to teenagers (in a sense, giving the people what they want) or firing off shots left over from his own unreconciled high school days. There's also something warm about the comfortable world he creates in the midwest. The suburbs of Chicago mix well with deliberately overreaching songs that aren't subtle about their emotional climaxes. I was getting ready to take the word "magical" out of my bag of vocabulary tricks - - but I'll spare everyone.

Because this is a Jimmy Stewart movie, all the pressure is so immediately off (could he really lose?) and your mind begins to grasp the noble, bigger picture of Preminger's real argument, namely: The legal system is about which lawyer is more clever, not about revealing the truth. By the time its Stewart versus George C. Scott (in a performance as thrilling and actor-specific as Stewart's), it sneaks up on us: Truth may have been waysided, but revelation still turns out to be one of the film's most generous features (and its strongest point, in my opinon): The thing unfolds with such attention to interest, it's almost always riveting. Watching the opposing characterizations (from nearly every witness) of Gazzara overlayed into an absolute blur is quite something, also; He's the most successful version of this brand of anti-hero, with Arthur O'Connell's drunken prosecutor (who tags along with Stewart) echoing a similar attempt, but falling miserably into the (already painfully bloated) Crazy Old Coot category. Bebop jazz legend Duke Ellington's score is terrific (though bebop is less exciting to me than the smooth ambience of Miles - - but that's neither here nor there).

There's plenty of the long, dialogue scenes we anticipate (with joy or trepidation, depending on your Rohmer stance), but it's a toss-up whether their existance in their own, separate (from the central narrative) realm is a blessing or not; A blessing because the main character borders on genuinely annoying, never eliciting sympathy or achieving transcendence (as the film might have you believe). By the time she's finally stopped repelling men on general principle (I doubt very highly that my gender makes me bias), we're close to five minutes from reading her name in the credits and reeling, shocked that we've seen her in at least three other Rohmer films (and didn't find her that grating!)

An unstable and motionless love triangle keeps distracting the picture from its most interesting evocation of Gorky's play: Namely the thief and the gambler's budding friendship. It's brimming with choice moments - - although the gambler's semi-famous, nervously impotent try at lighting a cigarette just after losing oodles of rubles remains the keystone image of the film: talk versus action (a theme of a simliar strand to Carne's Port of Shadows, also starring Jean Gabin (i.e. - the French Bogart) as a morally ambiguoous leading man). The trouble with lobbing too much praise the way of the gambler/thief paldom is that it leads to a climactic murder whose culmination - while easily predicted from the opening reel - doesn't much match the tone of the rest of the picture. Never has sleeping in grass seemed more like the ultimate in simple pleasures.

With me, the dated stuff skips the camp phase and gets filed right the nostalgia bin, allowing no separation between the viewpoint of the child inside of us and of the critic who hasn't overlooked the somewhat "relaxed" attitude Hughes takes in painting Uncle Buck a genuinely contradicting moral character (he smokes cigars and cheats on horse races, but safeguards - to the last breath - his niece's chastity).  An especially jolting figure-standing-for-reality for those of us with a fear as specifically common as the Fear of Starting a Family (I say jolting only because it's so timely and I had forgotten all about the emphasis of that particular notion; it's definately a glowing advertisement for that level of commitment; the anti-The Family Man, perhaps?) Hughes seems especially preoccupted with stacking the deck with vindication: Pal, a hired clown and the nefarious Bug all get their overtly gratifying comeuppance. Possible geek connections: Strife in the comfortable suburbs of Chicago may be nothing new  - - Although perhaps Buck aged really well (or adopted) and grew up to become Chet in The Great Outdoors? Perhaps supreme-bitch Tia is nothing more than an alternatation of Jennifer Grey's supreme-bitch Janey in Ferris Bueller's Day Off?

I retract most of what I said upon first viewing. The artistry so outweighs the story (fine tuned for Disney's superior Aladdin) that it almost becomes too tragic to behold: Williams' labor of love nearly 20 years in the making appears as single-mindedly visual as it is perplexingly anachronistic. It's the same conundrum, sadly, that befalls the great special effects bonanzas (Namely: Beauty at the expense of brains).

Obviously a time frozen allegory (but a good one, I think) organizing the cluttered trap of existence for women of the era and the disturbing psychological effects of isolation men of the era squared off with in the face of their own shortcomings (namely, being left out of the hero-fest that started with a W and a W). Richard Ryan and Ida Lupino are terrific sports and give tidy performances, even though most of the film is all about its subtext.

The slavery of entertainers is a running theme, but you'd never know it: The film pretty much dismisses anything interesting it might have to say in favor of music infused close-ups of basketball mayhem and second-rate versions of Looney Tunes and their crackpot joksterism.

Nifty and worldly when it wants to be, but often too preachy and (absurdly) plot driven. Too obvious a flaw to point out: A subplot involving a aunt's greedy hopes of custody for a parent less child (who happens to be the beneficiary) takes the front seat for a good two thirds of a film whose underlying premise involves an old geezer who has Death trapped in a tree. Lionel Barrymore plays the wheelchair bound old man in a less vicious variation of his role in It's a Wonderful Life. The great moments are in people's acceptance of Death (AKA Mr. Brink, and played with the driest of English charm by Sir Cedric Hardwicke). But you know me - I've got a morbid fascination with the mystery of the afterlife, being the death phobic non-believer I am...

Renoir acts as if no one has ever seen the cancan performed before, giving us long take after long take of characters indulging in said demonic skirt lifting ritual-posing-as-hoofing. When Jean Gabin is casually watching everything come together around him as if it were simply a matter of time (among the fusing is the birth of the Moulin Rouge) - - the delight of the time period and thhe free-n'-easy lifestyles carry the picture. When we enter our eighth consecutive minute of a line of ladies bouncing and revealing to "Complainte de la Butte" (for the second time), it's hard to sustain the sloppy grin of French decadence on our faces.

Clearly more loyal to the source work than the French version, Kurosawa's take on Gorky's play soaks up the atmosphere of the tenement where it takes place, giving us many pleasurable, light moments (wherein aging drunks wax poetic and sing booze soaked tunes). There's more clarity, though; In fact, the slumlord's wife asks her lover (Toshiro Mifune) to kill her husband (a note wisely left ambiguous in Renoir's vastly superior take) and the events of these low-caste lives seem to unfold more smoothly, as if they were in a more precise order. In short - though I've not read the play - it's hard not to become distracted by Kurosawa's loyalty to the theater (and to the work itself): There's one setting (occasionally glimpsed outside, but nevertheless...) and all the action seems to occupy less dimensions. He doesn't seem interested in deviating, so much as transferring the events to Japan. I could hardly fault the film for not taking the same turn as the '36 version (wherein the thief's intended prey befriends him before shacking up at the tenement), but the only charm in this one seems to come from the positive nature of an old man passing through for a few days. This is a problem, you see, because the personality no film could hold (Mifune), though he tries his damnedest, keeps coming up overarched and cartoonish. (And you suffer through his shortcoming as an actor, I assure you).

The first half-hour is bombastic, absolutely A-material; Not just a surreal, splash-of-cold-water world clearly pillaged by The Simpsons, but a sarcastic, uber-clever sense of humor that also clearly inspired Mr. Groening (I've broadened the scope to include the author as he dedicated an entire episode of his follow-up, Futurama, to the Willy Wonka premise). Ironically, once everyone enters the chocolate factory (specifically, after Wilder sings "Pure Imagination"), the movie no longer seems to have any surprises up its sleeve, only the what-comes-around jabs to greedy, spoiled youths and their 'rents). Even without an element of that nature, the calculating, almost cruel disposal of these brats falls somewhere between the dark morality tales of Grimm or Aesop and just downright wicked (I particularly like the trip into Natural Born Killers territory where eerie images are projected on a wall while everyone is rushed from one room to another). By the end, everything seems to fit almost too perfectly (the utter absurdity of it seems to lapse into a purely textual (rather than conceptual) delivery); Dahl's stories wrap up much more nicely on the page (see also James and the Giant Peach, another breathless visual feast without the gumption to end without showing its' seams). Nevertheless, I must plead unfair bias: I think its hard to imagine the film striking an adult (if that's what we're calling me these days) the same way it strikes a child. I've traded, it seems, the pleasures of being warped and enthralled by something so Dystopian yet family geared for the smoothly sardonic perspective of camp. C'est la vie.

Had it been anyone other than Harrison Ford traipsing about a hostile environment (an ugly, seedy looking Paris) searching for his kidnapped wife, Polanski's Frantic would be so much easier to dismiss. It's obviously about twenty minutes too long. There's a confusing, wing-and-a-prayer thin lead that Ford follows as if it were airtight (a sequence that's so distracting, I nearly backed up to see if I'd missed something). Polanski's obsession with suspense and detail drowns out the already worn Hitchcockian narrative so early on, I fear it would be impossible to sit through the film if you hadn't something more than a passing interest in the director. But Ford, luckily, demonstrates definitively that his uncanny knack with everyman panic, his tremendous here-goes-nothing charm and unprecedented quick wits make him something more than a great action hero. (He's one of the great leading men of all time, in my opinion). What makes Frantic somewhat special is the way it, like most of Polanski's oeuvre, seems to have its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, even as its trying to convince you otherwise. Since Ford has pretty much made a career of doing just that, the sometimes faulty mechanics of the story - and the obvious grounds for Miss Seigner's participation - don't seem all that important while you're watching the film. (Just what am I inferring here? You guessed it: Polanski should make Indiana Jones IV.)

I believe this to be the most watched film in Cinemaben history.

Comprehensively, it's one of the rare modern examples of why directors are the film. Pappy formula script (serial killer taunts police while performing bizarre, seven deadly sin-related murders) operating as the base for: Complicated haze of a brooding, pessimistic film noir milieu; Borderline grotesque, universal critique of social breakdown and (or) urban decay; A repowered, reimagined shock within the modern thriller (not to mention the standard by which nearly every police procedural would be judged for the next decade and running); Performances by Pitt and Freeman that pretty much define their post-Se7en personas (neither has topped these performances since); and, finally, it's a wonderfully deceptive surprise - - it is anything but ordinary, but appeears to be just that. (I remember being quite terrified after seeing it for the first time. I was relatively uninterested, but Randy dragged me to the theater, where I would hit my head on the seat jumping back when the Sloth victim jolted awake. After that - it was all downhill.) The first of Fincher's three great films, followed by the elaborate (to say the least) con The Game and the parody of machismo/valentine to universal consumption Fight Club.