It starts slow, and proceeds very episodically, but the singular pleasures of Kaspar Hauser - aside from Herzog's pre-Heart of Glass pastoral montages (set to Pachabel and Mozart here) - lie in the title character himself, embodied by Bruno S. with the same detached Manboy qualities he used to slightly different effect in Stroszek (also: there's another chicken hypnotizer). After being raised in a barn with no outside contact for the first part of his life, Kaspar is sent out into the world of adults without proper vocal or motor skills. He is left in town, where he is studied, then exploited, then rescued by a teacher of music. After the two year lapse, the movie becomes enthralling, with Kaspar dispensing the kind of simpleton wisdom we'd hear Forrest Gump spew many years later - only less lame; Like a dim Yoda, Kasper lives up to promise and disappointment embodied in the film's other title: Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

Why are these three better than the prequels? Having less to work with, Lucas became more creative: Environments take precedence over tangibles and characters interact more realistically with each other (not staring into a green screen helps).

Yet another Tod Browning movie where characters commit horrible atrocities and get away with it, all the while scheming in drag (Lionel Barrymore plays a kindly old woman to divert the police from his revenge plot against three crooked bankers who got him locked up). It shifts gears as the knife turns, pandering hardcore and reveling quite shamelessly in its middling special effects (even for the time, I suspect), but what makes The Devil Doll special is that somehow, amidst all the weirdness, Browning comes out of left field with a very strong, central relationship between Barrymore and his estranged daughter (played by peaking hottie Maureen O'Sullivan). A kinder, gentler, much less sadistic version of Browning's The Unholy Three.

I found myself wholeheartedly disappointed with nearly everything in the film: I didn't buy Clooney in the role, Tarantino is such a lousy actor, Keitel and Lewis just seem blatantly miscast and Rodriguez - despite his rousing success several years later in SPY Kids and Sin City - is not a very tight director. I found my current self actively annoyed at my former self for even entertaining the idea of holding this film on high. Can't believe it's been almost ten years...

As much as Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady excites me, Noon reminded me of a student film version of Tarkovsky's The Mirror: Part documentary, part tone poem, part re-enactment of a narrative. With cheap film stock in tow and a flabbergasting and impenetrable range of interpretation (the story is staged, told on stage, told through children busting out plot points off the cuff, and told through title cards), what should be a creative powerhouse is only a marginally interesting experiment and a rarely compelling film.

Probably not a great idea to watch this film just a few weeks after Dressed to Kill (it's a spin, I think, on the same kind of mystery - only with, it felt to me, MORE exposition and less thrill); As usual, the film is intact to a DePalma extent: Dreams within dreams, voice-over inserted almost randomly, cardboard-thin characters used effectively as pawns in the game of style, long tracking shots, jump-out-and-scare-you frames; It just seemed to me to be somewhat less entertaining than my favorite DePalma films.

Snappy British humor all but breathing with Guinness' dry genius, also told in a bookended retrospect whose very jab (at close) feels like something the character might have suggested to the filmmakers. While maintaining his life's work (pretending to be a neurotically dull bank security agent), Alec is hell-bent upon smuggling stolen gold out of the country (a retirement, he imagines). Dispensing with the overconfident eccentricity of The Ladykillers, Ealing Studios goes for the leanest possible construction, opting to let story unfold rather than upstaging it with Guinness' wit. Works marvels.

I recently copped to Burden of Dreams being better than Fitzcarraldo, but I take it back; I think Burden of Dreams, for all the interesting lore it captures (the movie is half-finished when main actors suddenly need to be replaced, Herzog struggles horribly while his team drags a ship across a huge tract of land, a tribal war forces the crew out of a location where they've already begun shooting), it's a sluggish film from top to toe. Herzog, while interesting because he's a real person, is so intensely intense, eventually we start shutting him out (around the eightieth time he starts veering towards "this could be the end of cinema" territory). He's much more entertaining in small doses like Little Dieter Can Fly and My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski. Or, even better, in Blank's short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, also included on the Criterion pressing.

This is the most annoying of the special editions for two very big reasons. It has the most visibly unnecessary additions - Jabba's palace is the prime offender, bbut the extended ending, which I initially liked a great deal, now feels like it would benefit from the unpredictable nature of George Lucas (i.e. - that damn Ewok chant) - and it was probably my most watched as a kid, so it has the distinction of being the only one whose original shape I can still sort of remember. (Obviously, it still warrants the almighty A. After all, I am a deeply forgiving person.)

Bizarre Nun-ly sexual repression, promptly followed with horror movie schizophrenia. And made in 1947. And likely one of the most picture-perfect gorgeous films I have - or, even likelier, will - ever see. I was deliriously happy that my wife slept through it, which usually means she'll watch the rest the next day. I was all but in line to watch the thing again. (Okay, I'm lying. It takes a peg to get going and sags between acts. I was sort of relieved that I wouldn't have to take another pass around the thing. Some classics are a hoot, and live better in our imagination. Tell anyone I said that last thing and it's your ass.)

What I'm following up here is a marathon two-day lunchtime reading of the comic book in Border's. Turns out, after reading Clowes' recent Ice Haven, I was so pumped to dig into his catalogue, I was even willing spend roughly two hours in a four chair set-up with some deeply strange people, not unlike those in Clowes' book. I pondered long and hard on whether it was just a coincidence or if his voice was actually able to influence my worldview, the way films sometimes inhabit your space for a few hours after viewing them. All that psycho babble horseshit, however, doesn't cut quite to the bone: Ghost World, an expansion of Zwigoff's underground tales of Becky and Enid, Super-misanthropics, is a bit too liberal with how tame and emotionless it makes our twin grumps, leading to an extremely jarrying scene where we know we're supposed to worship the arc Enid's weepy breakdown scene implies but, in keeping with the worldview influencing talk, the film has already sold us on how completely these two characters embrace their alienation, leaving us to change perspectives without a cue. I liked it better than I did the first two times. I'm not big on being surprised when a film flips on command, perhaps because I'm such an admirer of realistic, gradual changes. It also contains, among its great performances, some of the most absurdly funny moments in recent memory.

This one has always been one of my secret crushes. Easily overrated at the time of its glory, more easily underrated over time and, after three viewings, one of my favorite forays into Shakespeare. Because it's a play on Romeo & Juliet, but a historical epic as well, great care is taken to downplay the Shakespeare most people fear (remember, I'm the abnormal one who idolizes the man) for probably the most literate film Miramax ever hypnotized the world into watching. I think it's an impeccably acted, ingeniously written work of greatness.