Allowing the simple truths of class gaps to speak for themselves as the white people loaf around and go to country clubs and the black folks cut the grass and cook the food, Backyard sets the tone for the voice-over narration style McElwee would employ through his entire career (Charleen lacks the sound of god's voice on the soundtrack and it's almost jarring at this point): How he continues to get away with making his real life into the most compelling character saga of the non fiction scene, I'll never know. The initial trappings of Charleen present a character we've followed through decades at the outset of her looniness, even venturing into the tiff between her soon-to-set-fire-to-himself boyfriend that erupts into the awkward stylings of a 1980s poetry concert. As the years elapsed, she became less and less the performer, calming into comfort. Herein, Ross pinpoints - without realizing he's done it - the first chapter in her thawing process.

Like the recent Dr. Suess adaptations (and, I suppose, even Jumanji), what you're willing to tolerate from The Polar Express may have already been determined by you (i.e. - How much of a betrayal is it to pad the brevity of a children's book with a subplot about standing up for the meek, dirty kid who lives across the tracks? Or to jam it with songs reeking of the usual first-draft familiarity typically associated with marketing a film to the family crowd?) The animation has a Christmas-of-old complex I liked, despite suffering from Dinosaur syndrome (i.e. - to no particular purpose, the line between photo realistic and clearly animated is blurred, repeatedly) and, though it's quickly-paced, innately pleasing story core remains very faithfully intact (even the imagery is, at the very least, evoked), the fleshing out of characters - old and new - leaves the focus of its lesson about belief to compete with a slew of other, much less profound "caring and sharing" lessons.

Though I still think the science-fiction section is so much its own entity and bounces so sourly off of the main stage (it's such a gorgeously pointless pinprick of diversion), 2046 hit me far more solidly this time, the images washing over me without my close attention to the mechanics of its many, many ruminations of the loyalties of the heart and those sorts of things. It made me really want to see In the Mood For Love again; I saw it once in the theater and (keep under hat) dozed once or twice during.

It's a great performance in a bad movie. And this is the last time I'm subjecting myself to it's mediocre, broad-but-assertive commentary on Reagan era yuppiedom.

Brandishing an near eyebrow-raising lightness, Jean Renoir demonstrates the twofold gorge between classes as the boisterous and unpolished title vagrant (with signature fluffy beard of curls) is rescued from certain self-murder by a high-on-culture bookshop owner in Paris. Everyone from the bookkeep's maid (slash mistress) and his wife (slash burden) to the flute playing neighbor (who, instead of lulling everyone, acts as an annoyance) is called to the caricature mat, overcooking its self-important humanism but, miraculously, still bothering to suggest that the bookkeeper doesn't necessarily care if anyone believes him a hero or a louse for saving Boudu, but that his precious culture might not be appreciated by his newfound charge. Renoir is putting the bourgeoisie in the position of the elitist father who hates that his son prefers sports to books. Because this is such an exaggerated claim (and, because it pushes the whole thing into allegorical territory), one wonders if the point Renoir is making at close (as the curmudgeon finds himself back in his element, content to the last) suggests that he dismisses the entire establishment of artists he calls peers. No matter: Boudu Saved From Drowning, even if you actively ignore its message mongering is a terrifically grand, awfully funny watch.

Last time I saw this sucker, AMC still showed nothing but old movies and did so without commercial interruption. I was likely thirteen at the time and, though I have much more experiential knowledge of alcoholism (from seeing people in the throes of it, from acknowledging general, non-alcohol addictions in myself), my reaction to the movie is similarly strong, but for different reasons. In scouring my memory, I doubt it took more than the intelligent entertainment of Billy Wilder to bowl me over back then; This time, I'm reeling from how frank it is for 1945, how shocking that it was even made (even in 1945) and acknowledges itself as part horror movie and from how multifaceted it feels (at one point, its linear track of Don Bernim's delusional evasion of a weekend getaway (10 days in recovery) is interrupted for a good stint by a flashback to the birth of Don's boozing ways). His landing in the detox ward of a hospital (where an orderly suggests that Prohibition was the cause of such a widespread "illness") followed by a grim hallucination leads to the most go-for-broke sequence where girlfriend Helen must talk him out of blowing his brains out. And aside from that, it's intelligent entertainment from Billy Wilder.

Originally, I wasn't too keen on it [So far, I'm finding 'The Lady in the Lake' to be severly lacking. The first person gimmick lends such a different figurative voice to Marlowe that its almost disorienting to experience his voice when you see him (in mirror reflections, et al). In other words, the hook flat-out doesn't work.]: Montgomery appears to be giving three distinctly different performances (one too sincere direct address that serves to unspool Chandler's vast graphs of exposition, one that's so hard-boiled, it sounds as if it were recorded without the other actors present to normalize it (because, likely, it was), and one that only comes out when he passes by a mirror (this one seems to be the middle ground). What works about it: Chandler translates well (it's more on par with 'Murder, My Sweet' in the tangled web that *actually* untangles department) and, because it is all POV, there's a number of great, extended scenes with no dialogue that are quite eerie and suspenseful. The movie is so inundated with dialogue that whenever anyone stops talking, we're on the edge of our seat.

[Two e-mails spliced together badly, I know. If you think that's bad, sample the below review of Broken Flowers.]

Why is Broken Flowers so good? It's using Murray's finally-fighting-complacency film streak in the same way Wes Anderson used it in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: Just wanted to see how it looked through the various, very defined styles of different filmmakers. Light in spots (Jeffrey Wright is a genius) and pretty cold in others (Is that Toni Collette? And Larry Fessenden? And a broken nose?), it refuses to revert back to anything but the Jarmusch world.

Just gets better and better.

Awfully matter-of-fact and unsparing in depiction of the selfish core of man, stating more about Japanese traditional society than it probably means to. It rides the zinger pretty hard on both counts, dumping the garbage on both of Mizoguchi's women - one is forced into prostitution by her husband's fanatical ambition, the other forced to survive while awaiting her myopically greedy, philandering better half - and punishing their men with a future lifetime of moral echoes. Because they have no control over the civil war that engulfs their village, the film seems to carry an even weightier agenda in suggesting that fate control is not man's to possess. A very disquieting contrast: Even if you're decisions are good, you are still a slave to the inhumanity of human nature.