You could sit and stare at the chiaroscuro composition all day, but the unending contrasts are what make the film brilliant: Brutish, sweaty wrestlers as pawns in games engineered by well-to-do, pin-striped hoodlums, Widmark's undeniably strong play for our sympathy as he repeatedly discards his scruples, the clarity with which Dassin is able to tell the story versus the inevitably confusion of loyalties brewing in the content. Did I mention how beautiful it looks? Maybe one of the five best-looking film noirs I've seen...(withold snickering - I realize this is a bold statement).

Genuinly frightening film I really, really, really wish I'd seen in a theater.

Certainly twisty and square (and relegating its heist to an afterthought seems a pretty big deal for '52), but lacking in anything unique or visual to set it apart. Was surprised how interested I became in the main character's fate after being initially very annoyed with the turn it took at start.

The action feels so cartoonish, and I think it's engineered to (the head of Wrestling LLC., Vince McMahon, was an executive producer); The mechanics of the storyline feel like they've been settled for rather than worked out, never attempting to mask that the film was written by a former Xena: The Warrior Princess scribe (i.e. - it's all exposition, action scene, exposition, action scene, etc.) The Rock feels more at home as an over-humbled bounty hunter than he did in either of Stephen Sommers' Mummy sequels - almost seeming a likable matinee hero (but nothing truly revelatory comes of it, I'm afraid). Sean William Scott and Rosario Dawson seem out of place, leaving one of the great caveats of modern B-movies to remain true: Christopher Walken's scenery chewing is almost enough of a spoonful of sugar to swallow this breezily rendered, convoluted-to-no-end medicine.

It riffs on Becker's usual themes (loyalty, the relentless cruelty of man, the corruption of human nature, et al. - they add up to the same thing, basically: Bleak outset); It's rarely more than a melodramatic twister, set in a forgotten time period 'round the turn of last century for no particular reason. Though her bombshell demeanor serves its purpose, Simone Signoret's distracting turn as the gang's whore - she's rendered in a sea of a thousand cllose-ups, like Mae West au lait - turns out to be such a focal point that you pretty much have to be on board with her to buy into the film's credibility. I was on the fence...

Finally revealing an advantage to the slightly soft projection of the Carmike Cinemas 8, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is, ironically, a film that works better when stripped of its clarity. The DVD gives us the crisp, clean edges that betray the foreground and background's marriage of dreamy animated fantasy and modern actors flitting about within a 1940s future of the past. The best part about seeing it again was probably the digestion of Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse - the film Conran's is clearly modeled after. As much as I enjoyed the thing's audacious crash-and-burn existence (so expensive, so wasteful, so decadent), on DVD everything's about truth. The truth is: Sky Captain craves the cinema of attractions verve to make it work; On a television set, it feels flat and airless.

Note to self: Never watch Napoleon Dynamite alone. Not only does Hess' film play better with an audience, but if you're lucky - and I am - you've handpicked that audience from those who actually get this thing (probably fewer than we think: the film plays to a Mormon sensibility but flirts very explicitly with overt mischief, despite its PG rating). Nevertheless, the endless quotation - both during the film and long after its over - has taken far more of my time than I'd expected. The extremely concise character sketching isn't nearly as exciting to me as the fact that this thing seems to make a point about this world: It's a modern era stuck in a 1980s progressive. To put it another way: It takes place in an alternate universe.

Just missing a B+ this time around, The Aviator demonstrates the classic Awards' fever lapse and relapse theory: By the time I got to it the first time, I was expecting too much; On second go 'round, the pressure is gone and I realize that it's pretty much just pure entertainment from start to finish. I think - and brace yourself - I actually like the way it flows, now.

For sure, these things are starting to run together. This one has more in common with Another Thin Man (the bizarre aspects: slow and fast motion photography of the dog, Nick's strange encounter with a merry-go-round, Nick, Jr.'s forceful insistence that his father drink milk, a clear parody in the bar fight that goes riotously out of control), but still follows the template to the letter: Nick wishes not to be involved in a string of gambling related murders and winds up gathering all the suspects in one room (A Dashiel Hammett trait, as he does it in Red Harvest, too) and letting them spill their beans until the least suspected character steps forward and loses his (or her) cool. By a small margin, this is probably the best one after the original.

Unlike Sunshine State, where thematic social issue was coherently fused to environment, Casa de Los Babys feels like it could have taken place almost anywhere (it's set in an unnamed South American country, which turns out to be hardly the point). The relevant thesis is broad and unfocused: The futility of the adoption screening process when everyone actually starts with a blank slate versus the uselessness of justifying what is, by and large, a natural instinct (nearest I can figure). The general template Sayles has recycled through his last three pictures (Limbo being the only bonafied success) has the least success here, leaving the trademark local color subplots in the underdeveloped expository range of the three golfers in Sunshine State. So, because it lacks a burning idea to charge its speech-prone symbols (the five generally wasted actresses waiting to adopt), Casa de Los Babys feels adrift in a place where allegory ought to set in - but doesn't. Imagine Robert Altman remaking a Ken Loach movie, but paring it down for airline viewing and you're close.

A dreamy hybrid of passionate obsessive idol worship and Bully-goes-East trappings, All About Lily Chou-Chou contains a slew of great instances of cinema, but too often it's in need of an editor: It sprawls arbitrarily, choosing to underline passages that distract us as specific pieces of a largely differnt whole. The music, its hold on the images, and the general sense that more successful noodling is taking place than unsuccessful noodling, keeps the often relentlessly cruel, loopy clique violence from turning, all at once, into exploitation. In other words, the push towards looking cool as a filmmaker outweighs Shunji's preoccupation with making and remaking the same point about the nature of bullies. I'm also a sucker for movies with this many un-self conscious frames of soft sunlight pouring into classrooms.

Why did I not notice that this was hilarious before?

Hawks' Dialogue is in full effect, spicing up a near lethal dose of patriotism; The banter doesn't compensate completely - the ending is noisy and overzealous - buut it certainly works.

Since this was the peak to my recent bout of hysterical misprioritizing (blind indulgence in overvaluing "having an opinion" rather "reacting honestly to a film") and snobbish, purposeful point missing, I thought - after the inkling hit me during second viewings of The Aviator and I Heart Huckabees - I should revisit this thing. As in Payne's previous dramedy, About Schmidt, performances seemed stronger and I felt looser this time around (post hype viewings are more healthy, anyhow): Generally, everything seems much tighter and more meaningful than before. It's still a veiled male pornographic fantasy. Even if Miles and Jack are, ostensibly, losers, the whole movie feels more to me like it wants you to emulate them rather than simply pondering on their misfortunes. I found myself believing I connected more with Miles (and really, why would you want to?), but realized that I was actually Jack; Self haters take note: Because you want to be Miles, it's not good enough that you realize you only rate a Jack. A double-edged sword? Yep. A downer? Sure. A nice realization that the deeply flawed Miles is one of the most lived-in characters to come down the pike in a long while? Yeah, probably.1I'm also pretty proud that it's a nonjudgmental look at an alcoholic without seeming to be a portrait of an alcoholic. Suppressing true nature doesn't hold for all of it and I still found it over saturated with head scratchers: Miles getting what he wants (sex with Mya and, later, forgiveness from Mya) seems almost too far out of the realm of plausibility not to erect a large red flag (come to think of it, why was it so hard for Sandra Oh to imagine that Jack was nothing more than a sex crazed little boy?) Also, I should mention, I laughed heartily throughout most of it. At some new stuff, too.

[1 - I like how he tries to fool himself into believing he's somehow right or, um, better than Jack. What's grand about Sideways is that Miles' moral compass operates almost solely on his sporadic whims. This, of course, was how I realized I fall under the Jack umbrella: I usually know when I'm being a loathsome bastard. Arguments could be made for the opposite, I suspect. It's pretty subjective.]