Far more talky and less epic-y than its predecessor, Part Two explores almost exclusively (there are the conspirators still talking endlessly between scenes, discussing how to best remove the Tsar) how the toils and trials and tribulations and decisions of being a leader can just about reduce your life to a rubble of loneliness and paranoia. Uplifting stuff. Again going straight on to morning with the emoting, a brilliant half-mad/half-genius verve teems from Nikolai Cherkassov. As Ivan, we see him doing many things, some of them crafty, others just clumsy and odd - - - Eisenstein always, even more than iin Part One, seems to be interested in how his point-of-view changes from moment to moment, visitor to visitor. The sequences in color which proceed one of the most creepy processions not in a Fellini movie ever put on film (the journey to the church to crown Vladimir (Ivan's cousin) Tsar, shows that though Eisenstein may not have fully grasped the sound era - as I stated when reviewing Part One - he understands the palette of colors. The party leading up to the aforementioned eerie moments is bathed in Russian red, almost to the point where it feels like a candy coating. Changing then to dollar bill green and ending in a tint of blurry yellow, Eisenstein prompts the question: are we hallucinating with Ivan (who was known to have mood swings and narcotic effects due to the level of mercury in an arthritis medication)? Is this the colorful world Eisenstein wants to show us? Are we seeing that which is real and true (in color) to Ivan? In the talky, almost entirely drama-laden (i.e. - there's no battle sequences and collision editing is all but gone by the wayside) Part Two, a broad spectrum of darkness creeps in and creates one of the great - and heady - studies of power's corruption I've seen.

Though strictly a by-the-numbers anti-communist noir affair, what makes Fuller's energetic film stand out is the way he places his camera in ways that defy the previous, conservative noir look of most crime dramas with B scripts. The dialogue is almost as much of a departure from common noir as the look of the film (with its zooms and framed, rotted city scapes gaping in beauty, it complements the hipster doubletalk spewed by great B actors of their time like Richard Kiley and Richard Widmark). The low point is certainly the late actress Jean Peters, the bucksome lady Widmark pickpockets (in the vein of femme fatale, a necessity in any noir, this film is sagging). Making up in no small part, though, is Thelma Ritter's desperate, confidant portrayal of a stool pigeon whose character is allowed a moral loophole in that she's just trying to eat like everyone else (as she constantly reminds us). That's, of course, as complex as it gets. Certainly not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination, but a gas to watch just the same.

Not to be coy - or unoriginal - but must of what I like about Blowup, easily one of the best films I've ever seen (another citation dusty with overstatement), is just how little actually happens onscreen and just how much actually occurs in the mind of the David Hemmings character. I could drone on and on about what I liked, why I liked it and how bloody much I was knocked out by the film. Let's face it, though, I'm going to end up seeing the damn thing several more times before I kick the preverbial bucket. I'll save the strong, in-depth commentary for another time. This time around, I'd like to refute the (rare) appalling quote from Pauline Kael:

"When the film came out, Michelangelo Antonioni's mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seemed to have a numbing fascination for some people which they associated with art and intellectuality...The best part of the movie is an ingeniously edited sequence in which the fashion-photographer hero blows up a series of photographs and discovers that he has inadvertently photographed a murder."

"It's such a satisfying movie," my wife says, coining the overall feeling I never wanted to simplify and articulate. On this, my fifth viewing of this modern masterpiece, a film that creates an atmosphere of historical fiction so close to our current epoch and attitude, I feel even more connected to Spinotti's evocative photography. Perhaps it is the influence of swallowing three Antonioni films in the last week, films which wear the use of cinematography as an all encompassing machine for creating character, setting, motivation, ambiance, desperation and subtlety - all like a badge on the cinema crazed sleeve that seems to weave from these passionate filmmakers into my viewing eye (an eye of obsession, I think some days). Pacino and Crowe, turning in performances that wreak of method acting in the volley of quiet, seethe with the anguish and vulgarity of being a professional actor in moments when they are asked to come to blows and crackle and spark as they lock horns with authority like a overbearing lynch mob come face to face with a riot squad. As a culture of the media and a sequential deconstruction of how outward lies and robbery surface in sed media, (and how covering them up is an art form) Michael Mann once and for all establishes himself as both a major filmmaker and an important American artist. Though I still fear hyperbole - as I must, I think - I've compared him to Kubrick in his attention to detail, shaping of end-all emotional tones and direction that brings forth performances that stay with you like garlic. His films, to put it another way, are hopelessly addictive.

In need of a one hundred eighty degree perspective turn? "Imagine Fight Club with no people/actors/characters, only the respective shots of location/results of action and voice over of every character in this film.What if in reality, none of us are here, no other people are here, just eternal voices chattering away into our visual receivers? Tyler is created by advertising to be the force of subversive mischief in any reality or logic line of thinking - we are owned by advertising (I call it advertising, but it could be anything, right?), which has created another person in all of us to buy their product. It is a disease which affects/infects even them (they didn't know it when they created Tyler). It will fight to control us every chance. The only way out is self-destruction. Hurt yourself to starve him out, deprive yourself to beat him out. Death is a pure you once again. Having advertising is all or nothing - what is life without representation (of advertising) selling us a fantasy as life. We blow it out of proportion as insurance." (Or maybe you shouldn't bring me every piece of trash you find.) Whoa.

To be sure - Antonioni's The Passenger is exceptional filmmaking. I have a blasphemous remark to make in a second, but first, to register my awe at the style (of "nothing") that Antonioni employs. A film about a guy who switches identities - a guy played by Jack Nicholson, in one of his mild-mannered acts of subdued glaze that befit him in the seventies but he has all but sold for raucous, wild-eyed mayhem of full volume scenery chewing these days. I feel for The Passenger, the fourth and weakest film I've seen of Antonioni's, about the way I feel about Gladiator: There is plenty here to distract us from the frank ordinary we are watching, but not enough to keep us from consciously calling out that the film is, indeed, not very interesting. The cinematography is dead-on and says the bountiful heaps usually stated in Antonioni's films, but it is precisely that virtuoso six minute closing shot that gives the film away. Just as we're tired of watching the unintentional trek of Drake/Robertson into a world of distance, escape and ambiguity, the film perks up with the random act of cinematic genius. Like the inspiring, almost life-affirming musical interlude that closes the wishy-washy Gladiator, so The Passenger goes into its eternity with the untrue ring of having hoodwinked us into watching something less than the standard set by the previous L'Avventura, Blowup and Red Desert, and, instead of owning up to the slump, fires off a last, bursting round of intelligent observation to help us forget the dreaded "straightforward" of the first 113 minutes. Nevertheless, The Passenger is solid - just not the kind of mind-blowing solid offered in the past, or the kind of filmmaking Antonioni is capable of. The closing vision is the proof.

Story, story, story! Who told the IMAX people that anyone was interested in a story (much less this half-baked one about a girl whose repressed desire to assist her archaelogist father on a dig results in hallucinations after hours in the museum she volunteers at) - - - I mean, really? There are some greaat, suspenseful moments where the furiously loud sound terrifies and the dino-teeth gnash in our general direction, but for the most part, all we're watching is melodrama blown up to be four stories tall. Interesting sidenote, though: Liz Stauber, who appears as the teenage girl in this film, turned up last year as Billy Crudup's girlfriend in Almost Famous, the next film to appear in this chronicle, in fact. Needless to say, she looked familiar as we watched T-Rex and did some far better acting in Almost Famous.

Quite simply put, the most entertaining, invigorating, engaging, engrossing, tantalizing, funny, exciting, moving, lose-yourself-in-the-moment, intelligent, brilliant, beautiful, warm, respectable, fun, absolute fucking masterpiece you'll see in 2000. The Virgin Suicides may be a better film, but Almost Famous is easily the most enjoyable and immediate film released in the hex sign of cinema epochs.

"FH looks dough-eyed and moronic. The narrative voice is sacrificed and the historical context lost (the 'why' in 'Why do people get high'?). Space is wasted in the film. There is a sense of trying to do the book, but fiction is fast and works fast and cinema cannot work as fast. This needs to be self-contained to work. It's hard to buy that they're stoned. We aren't in on the party. In the book, the stories rise and fall. A  filmed adaptation should not have mountains and valleys."

- paraphrasing the words of Professor. William Van Wert

Mostly because Dan Bannion is the good cop protagonist (played by roughneck Glenn Ford), which was the real pole sticking up in this film noir flag waving contest. A wonderfully moral-driven story that bewilders at start and makes satisfying sense at close; a senior detective's suicide trickles events all the way down the path to the hero cop's promotion, which he pays dearly for. Fortunately lacks the pungent "message" of films like 'The Asphalt Jungle', even slyly attempts a satirical film noir tone in early family breakfast scenes as Bannion flirts with his wife and plays the good father (dumbass grin and fifties confidence builder poster in hand). The domestic scenes play out emotionally overt as the rest of the film stays oddly ambiguous, keeping revelatory levels of Bannion's many moods nicely veiled. Police corruption, idealistic lonerdom and Lang's commitment to clarity (as more entertaining films like 'The Big Sleep' and 'The Maltese Falcon' leave to the perspective of the viewer) weave a tale that runs second complex cousin - or at least the closest living relative to - 'L.A. Confidential'. 'The Big Heat' crackles with all the classic noir elements, perhaps making them known to us in a more copy-ready, more definitive way than we know. (Lest we leave out femme fatale Gloria Grahame, who looks ravishing before and after a face-altering scald by Lee Marvin's cup o' joe),

One some Sunday afternoon, I'm sure I sat down on the couch, gloomy day coming through the windows, and watched the original cut of Ridley Scott's futuristic cyborg hunter saga, 'Blade Runner'. And I'm sure that more than once, I tried desperately to get through his 1982 re-issue of the film (which happened to bear the name 'Director's Cut', as it leaves out the tacky, noirish voice over and any of the images that play after the elevator door to Deckard's (Harrison Ford) apartment closes tight). And every time, I can remember falling asleep. This time was no different, but unlike my last tries at the 'Director's Cut', I managed to finish the film. If it weren't for Ridley's preoccupation with images and apparent lack of interest in storytelling, there would be a more lively and interesting pace to 'Blade Runner'. As is, it is a murky, (even on DVD) sometimes unintelligibly lit, often sloppily edited snore of a movie. And we'd turn it off if it weren't such a ka-blam of eye candy. As the matte paintings and effects, sets and props, costumes and camera angles pile up, 'Blade Runner' is revealed to be of shiny futuristic majesty; another of director Scott's beautiful, imagined landscapes, free flowing from the reality of our cynical fears and boundless projections for a technologically enhanced future. Harrison Ford leads Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Brion James and Daryl Hannah as a cast of actors who went on to never do a role even remotely similar to the one they play in 'Blade Runner'. I always find myself impressed when I watch early Harrison Ford performances at how effortlessly he looks like a responsible, lived-in middle-aged man, maybe the quintessential one. As a science-fiction film, it has that (sadly) fatal flaw that most of the genre suffers from: the film is so interested in how hypothetical it is that it becomes hypothetical itself and after thirty minutes, too much of its slow-burn fiction topples the weight of being a considered reality that it becomes nothing more than a rhetorically cruel trick.

Closest cinematic cousin to Schindler's List, in fact, John Frankenheimer's The Train looks, breathes and renders cinematic its wartime era almost identically to Spielberg's film; right down to the level of contrast in the blacks and whites and the dicotomy of viewpoints one man's actions could fall scrutiny under. Ending with a most pointless-but-that's-the-point death on one of those high adventure yet strangely humbling drama notes, The Train finds art in gruffness and leaves the edges jagged on its portrait of wartime loyalty existing within wartime defiance.

As Grady Tripp, Michael Douglas dispels the roles he immersed himself in, the dark men of intellect he played in 'The Game', in 'A Perfect Murder' and in 'Wall Street'. He does it by slapping us in the face with charm. Tobey McGuire may earn our smile, but Douglas is there, delighting us with how he jingle jangles from frame one. And Downey, Jr., goofy as always, takes another opportunity to fit in among eccentric artists - - - by being the most exposed of those artists, comically. Lovely to laugh at and sympathize with (plot elements seem to be piled up as everyday moments for a variety of the populus to connect to directly). Lovelier still is the way everything centers around a world where not knowing how to express genius in a way accepted as genius costs our characters a great deal of their ordinary qualities. Good thing. Everyone here feels like an old friend from one of the many Bob Dylan songs which set the pitch perfect mood for 'Wonder Boys'.

When I was fourteen, my older brother took me to see Robert Altman's Short Cuts when it showed as part of the now defunct Fox Theaters' art cinema program. It was a week night and it played at the Fox Boscov's East theater in Reading. Seeing the film, which was more mature and a different kind of funny than I'd encountered at my young age (though I'd seen The Player), was the kind of treat that you don't forget. Even the details, like the blanket I slept under that night and the position we chose to sit in the theater, these things haven't faded. Watching these twenty-two characters again (and this is probably the fifth or sixth time I've seen it), I always go back to Carver. Not only do I take a newfound active interest in the writer and begin to re-read his work again every damn time I see Short Cuts, but I start to play around with how the stories which weren't filmed would play out had they harnessed the hybrid of Altman's visual chops and Carver's terrific tonal source material. In fact, re-reading the story "Where I'm Calling From", about an alcoholic's second stint in detox (you start to see that nearly every story has an alcoholic or contains characters who make reference to a drunk), I could easily see Jack Lemmon (who plays Paul Finnegan in Short Cuts) falling right into that role in earlier life (playing the protagonist while Walter Matthau could easily play J.P., the drunken chimney sweep). Tim Robbins still kills me in the oft quoted line "Don't you get environmental on me, Sherry!"; but wouldn't have been just as grand as Lloyd, the recovering alcoholic/guy with wax in his ear in "Careful"? And reading "Boxes", I could see Altman zooming in on the boxes as the narrator's impatient wife, Jill, puffed on a cigarette. In a world where 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' didn't exist, 'Short Cuts' would be the best Altman movie. But never mind that. Tell the women we're going.

Avoid distraction:
Masturbate before viewing;
(It’s uproarious).

Clever fable re:
squirming male-bug on a sharp
Fidelity pin.

D.A. Sabich’s
nickname covers the film’s twist:
Rusty when viewed now.

"Movies, now, more than ever". I'm going to L.A. to join this jungle crew. Wish me luck, godspeed and anything else you think I could use to fend off the Griffin Mills of the world.

Yeah, a moody, short but long winded, deeply haunting Hungarian film nails the same exact concept (about nostalgia and memory being an alterable, almost malleable substance) as in 'The Virgin Suicides'. With Mari Torocsik in the lead role, the story is loosely based upon Shirley Jackson's "The Bus" - - - but director Alkony has so many other places to go with it. In an old boarding house, the idea of hallucination and geriatric confusion come beautifully into a light that forms at the end of a tunnel that began with long, swooping shots of a bus tackling the horizon, gliding across endless fields and giving the film that biblical River Styx verve that makes it so profound. If I had a complaint, it would have to be that occasionally, it feels like the whole thing has too much of a yellow and brown color scheme to work as any kind of story about the looping of memory (which is decidedly colorful, at least mine is) and time's indefinite space in one's chattering subconscious. But it packs a punch that's flat out undeniable.

PT is funny
but, frankly, I can’t bear this
cheerless film again.

Eerie first person
perspective so close we can
almost feel Rock’s pulse.