I still think it's patently preposterous. I still leap at the colors, the ballet, the joyous celebration of image over intellect.

Murnau must've blown his visually creative wad on the same year's Nosferatu. The bookends don't seem to go with the film. Murnau is usually terrific at pacing. His strategy usually includes stalling the story for a great deal of time and speeding past the boring bits. Here, he's doing just the reverse.

It's a good thing Tootsie is a deja vu movie. This could be the only thing that forgives the accidental (and nightmarish) dated quality its score belies. What do I mean by deja vu movie? It's comfortable. It takes place in the warm glow and safety of the well written Hollywood comedy, something reminiscent of Wilder or Hawks, but more commercialized (i.e. - cheaper). As we already love Dustin Hoffman as a great actor, its easy to buy him as an actor playing a woman (and therefore, less problematic when the obvious problem of plausibility occurs to us. Repeatedly.) I think its mainstay is keeping to the surface, sinking that feeling that this is too far fetched even for broad comedy (which is dressed up real smart in a screenplay that entered legend when arbitration was enacted to sort out credit). The sexual politics are never pandering or offensive but, rather, perform merely to advance the story (i.e. - there's no real message or lesson to be learned). Wraps up way too easily.

Lang clearly chomping at the bit to do a sound film. Nevertheless, his obvious interest in the intrigue genre makes this feel all the more studied and passionate. Now, if only I could follow it...

I know very few are able to connect the dynamite premise with the actual execution, BUT - - - I'm a really big fan of both the pace and the lightness laced with all that gory man-eating. I also find it hysterical watching Ed Exley try to fight off natural urges while Begbie repeatedly mocks him. All while Ed Rooney looks on, slurping his man-stew. Seriously, who out there doesn't get it?

The third outing proves, once and for all, that while watching great acting never gets tiring, letting a zing-bang ending you already know dictate a collapse in any suspense whatsoever seems to make it all look like it was for naught. I need to put some more time between myself and the next viewing. Also, Brando rules.

Flat and drawn-out, but endlessly bizarre and somehow, simulataneous doses of straight-faced madness and diabolique funhouse touches (nurtured, obviously, by Jarre's off-the-wall score) make the solemn ending all the more disturbing. I'm probably underrating it.

Probably the most succint blueprint for Poetic Fatalism (though Port of Shadows came first), Le Jour Se Leve contains one of the most innovative uses of flashback in cinema history, made all the more trailblazing by its insistence on shifting its sympathy between characters at what feels like the drop of a hat.

Harold Lloyd has a strange, desperate quality to him in The Freshman. His existence is solely to succeed, the definition of which he bases almost entirely on a trend setting film he sees. Cracking the mold of impressionable youth with the hardly new (even for the silent era) message of being yourself, despite the reality of your situation, doesn't spoil the crazed dash for a punch line Lloyd spins. He's more likable than outright hilarious, and one pictures him climbing from Keaton's shadow in the sound era, turning his persona - which, I'm hypothesizing, might have translated more seamlessly into the talkies - from the underdog to the hero. All fancy words for describing Lloyd's somewhat less artful, somewhat still charming antics as a college dork who interprets a cinematic fantasy, gruelingly, into another cinematic fantasy. My favorite thing about it is how resilient he seems, even after you've seen Chaplin and Keaton get their spirits obliterated over and over and over again. I'm dragging this out. Lloyd is a wonderful comedian.

Not simply a staple of the season (despite TBS's insistence on showing it for twenty-four hours straight on X-mas Eve), Clark's film provides a vision so thick with Rockwellesque visuals and John Hughes nostalgia, its practically impossible not to find absolute and pure wonderment in it.

So potent, I think, is Sirk's claim to fame - bitter subtexts that so upstage melodramatic story lines, you can barely follow them - that it seems almost impossible that his films were allowed to be made. As exciting a piece of social critique as it is an audaciously un-studio studio release, Sirk's collection of metaphoric color saturation and gratuitously satiric crane shots* feels bracingly fresh today (as most great films do). It's the way with consistently relevant films about social custom (this has the same smack of definitive proof that Wharton wrote about; all the more vivid when seen through a filter that magnifies the camp that gathers to rebel against it). Wyman's intelligent but confused widow seems, simultaneously, worthy or our sympathy and our disdain. Sirk rides our reaction right to the bank, milking our internal dialogue. His heroes are all flawed, and Sirk gracefully points things out by using misdirection: He makes telling the story of a woman's battle with cruelty and loneliness stand in for tact, as he jabs at you with moments like Wyman's friend, Sarah, closing the door on a maid, cleaning the house too loudly or Wyman's daughter's teary confessional that she cares so much about what people think. But perhaps the most telling moment of all - and a perfect example of Sirk's doublespeak mise-en-scene - is when Wyman watches a group of carolers sing 'Joy to the World' as she remains unmoved, crying about her own choice to embrace misery. (Since he pillaged this one most of all, I'll mention that) All that Heaven Allows confirms the brilliance of Todd Haynes' recreation, Far From Heaven - - if for no other reason, than becaause Haynes was able to so accurately and remarkably duplicate it.

[* - How exactly is a crane shot "gratuitously satiric"? I think because it so clearly communicates the era, as an introduction to the proceedings, it makes us aware - through the overtly string heavy score, the attention to symmetry, and the obviously unnecessary trouble it goes to - that what we are about to see is meant to exist beyond its pristine surface.]

Most of it feels more like co-director Flaherty at the reigns than Murnau, which means tons of showboating and very little atmosphere (sad for a movie that wears its locale like a badge on its sleeve); Once the main character resigns to dive for the forbidden pearl, Tabu gets dark and seems to leave its travelogue trappings behind. Impressive lack of intertitles (the story is very clear, too) is a big plus - - shame they seem less interested in telling a story than in exploiting a culture. (Flaherty? Exploit someone? Surely you jest.)

Here's a guy who is genuinely obsessed with Hitchcock. Simple to the point of stream-of-consciousness at the start, it evolves from black and white (as most of Hitch's films do) to very complicated shades of gray as one bizarre, stylish twist heaps upon the last with such building interest, the thing is over before you realize how amazing it really is.