It's a whole bunch of fun to get caught up in its twists and gags, even though the central quirk of the story - the love interest debacle of a slick con artist - isn't really all that, uh, believable.

There isn't necessarily anything wrong with the relationship between the boy and the steamroller operator, and the cinematography/editing/other experiments of film school are very smooth and arty, but I can't help feeling like the whole thing is almost certainly some sort of really, really far-fetched allegory. (I won't bother to research the point, though; I'd rather sound dumb and goofy).

Johanssen's deadpan and Murray's double deadpan make them such an entertaining pair that you almost have to remind yourself that the film is somewhat moving at close. For me, it's definitely a comedy first.

Tarantino's commentary sounds as if it were recorded while he was driving around (and he's mostly telling stories anyhow). It's clear that everyone respects Tarantino and that these are very cool film people. (Case in point: In both this commentary and the one directly below - Gangs of New York - Marcel Carnee's Children of Paradise is mentioned. The context, in this case, is off-screen murder. I don't have to spell out the rest, I suppose).

He's like a human history book, folks. A mile-a-minute talkin' human history book, at that.

Giamatti's performance is one of those transforming shows that makes you feel like you are the character for the next few hours. I'm also a big fan of films where people are in any way passionate about art. If I ever stop bitching about my disdain for comic books on the Kevin Smith end of the spectrum, this is as close as I'm likely to get to digging comics (that is, in the Harvey Pekar/R. Crumb end of the spectrum). Clever as it may be, American Splendor still feels a little bit underwhelming as a whole piece of work - it still carries itself like a biopic, but I can't seem to make the joints connect in my brain to call it a great life story. Sorry.

Found the second half a bit less intriguing this time around. Still, you're unlikely to find a film as close to the cerebral cortex as this funny and beautifully bizarre slice of Soderbergh's creative drive.

A completely entertaining bumbling gumshoe tale. Both Bruce Dern and William Devane make wonderfully trashy characters. A fitting end to the master's career: Family Plot is a playful exercise with all the bizarre humor and hairpin twists that we demand of the master of suspense.

Immensely cool cubist editing and wildly over-the-top performances make this one of Soderbergh's - along with The Underneath - my favorite of his films.

It's the classical Altman patchwork: Dialogue on the edges of the screen, more characters than we could possibly keep track of, a statement somewhere beneath about people (nevermind what walk of life they're inhabiting). I think that's the genius of Altman, too. He switches locales, always appearing to be exposing the nuts and bolts of an industry or culture but, instead, dissecting the nature of people in general (it's a formula - think about it). He succeeds big time in Nashville, and had I seen it in 1975 (before he used this structure so much more efficiently, in my opinion, in Short Cuts), I probably would have been gaga of a Pauline Kael scope over it ("I've never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way...Nashville is the funniest epic vision of America ever to hit the screen"). Standing in my present vantage point, I'm taking exception to the scores and scores of country songs that I could barely tolerate (sue me). As a film, though, Nashville is uniquely representative of its author: You could tell who made it inside thirty seconds. The trick will be getting myself to watch it again.

Noe seems to be delighting in pummeling his audience - but not much more. There's some amazingg stuff here - the gunshot camera leaps, the countdown for the faint of heart to leave the theater before the gore starts, the running monologue of questions the main character burdens himself with after committing a murder - but there's also, really, no conclusive statement about the character or his situation that doesn't somehow incorporate the great big accomplishment Noe seems to be touting: "I fucked with my audience. But good."

If not for some of the silly dialogue, Frenzy could easily have passed for an update of any of Hitch's best films from the forties or fifties (see, it includes semi-graphic rape, staggering violence and nudity, things never contemplated in mid-century). Hard not to be completely engrossed by it, or, in fact, impressed: The wrong man scheme (as nervewracking and loathsome as I usually find them), is undercut by a terrific sense that the wrong man is a pretty scummy anti-hero (though it's hard, for those of us familiar, not to separate the actor - Jon Finch - from his most famous role as the title character in Polanski's Macbeth). The potato truck sequence - where the necktie killer must fumble about with a corpse hidden in a sack on a moving lorry - is a marvelously loose bit of filmmaking that, while suspenseful, has a wonderful anti-destination air as if even Hitchcock isn't quite sure where it's going - or why (but if feels so right).

Speed meets Titanic. Only set in Great Britain in the 1970s. And cool.

Why am I (seemingly) the only one who finds the transplant of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai to the western genre to be preposterous at best, laughable at worst? Is Yul Brynner always this friggin' goofy?

It's a lazy soap opera where everyone is required to dredge their closeted skeletons at appropriate (and sometimes less so) times; the kicker is rife with anti-climatic steam: The nursemaid who is keeping the lady of the house drunk (and scared - of a shrunken head!) All the interesting sleaze and quirky character traits just seem kind of bland when the movie takes so long to get to the damn point already.

I usually weep like a blubbering lil' sissy girl at this film (this is viewing #5 or #6, I've lost count). I love the sense of background nostalgia - although I didn't miss some of the more obvious bits ("he's got this new thing called silicone - it's a semi conductor"), as well as the annoyingly forthright parallels between the Hoods and the Fantastic Four (because, you see, uh, they're, um, a family). Nevertheless, I still love this movie. It's one of the great mysteries of life why it moves me so much - but I love it. (I hereby apologize for this review).

Wow - the changeover ACTUALLY HOLDS UP. I think the lion's share of my admiration for this film is in it's very existence: It's a film about really, really bad parenting and not only does it never apologize for it - Paxton's fathering seems to get worse as it goes on. Also, bizarre religious obsessions seem to work really well when they're utterly contradictive (i.e. - God telling Paxton to kill "demons" - God telling anyone to kill, period.) All this and Powers Boothe.