It feels - I'll submit - like a slightly better than average, commissioned for German television documentary Herzog both waves off and embraces (in his own self-fulfilling, casually confessional way, of course). It's loaded with great details (here's a thought: it plays like the ultimate Werner Herzog party film), as Herzog intimating that he and Kinski both hatched plots to kill each other; his opening My Best Fiend with a sequence wherein Kinski performs for an arena (performs is a loose interpretation, he more or less raves); Herzog's use of footage from Les Blank's already scandalous and revealing Burden of Dreams (a "making-of" feature on Fitzcarraldo). Yep, it's a jungle out there. (I swear)

You might not think it was manipulative (it certainly wasn't discussed in the press), but I could make a good case for the Spider-Man marketing campaign's cash-in on 9/11. Trouble with my theory - that Sony execs plastered the American flag on poster art, TV ads and trailers as the symbol for our hero's eradication of urban terror - is that it could have easily been a coincidence. The film was finished before the sad, life affirming events took place last fall. (This was evinced in Sony's original decision to re-cut the trailer and, I expect, the sequence it mirrored in the film of a helicopter crashing into one of the twin towers). Nevertheless, every time I was faced with an advertising source reminding me that I should - nay, needed to - see Spider-Man I had trouble separating the whole soft mesh of image-as-business from another situation where heroism in the city was immediate and universally gratifying. Aside from this festering gripe, the film doesn't hold up on the small screen quite as snap-crackle-pop as it did in the 'plex, the major contributing factor of which is how tiresome and ironically stale the action sequences feel when cooped up in a four square box. Knockaround sequences, especially those laced with digital effects, feel so pithy, and put such an unnecessary strain on the audience's attention from a ravishing barrage of characters - all of them far more compelling than they've any right to be in a big budget summer movie based upon a comic book. As ever, the most substantial reason to see the film is Maguire who, in a rare instance, shows as much range playing a wildly fictitious, already well established character as he has in any of his more vanguard displays (see The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys, The Cider House Rules and Pleasantville) (I'm not kidding - see em!). You've probably barely had a chance to think about it (how often do you spend time thinking about Willem), but DeFoe turns in one of his most diverse performances to date. The real trick is how awkward he looks when he's The Green Goblin and how effortlessly his vulnerable, rich Norman Osbourne is (not to mention the bravura sequence wherein he portrays both men as they play off of each other in a mirror). Its world is certainly skies above the average comic book adaptations (Talk amongst yourselves: X-Men had potential, but lost itself to effects even more rigorously than this film - but will the sequel fall victim to the same misallocation of resources? Which suit will The Hulk and Daredevil follow?). In the end, what I revere most is how conscious Spider-Man seems to be of its comic book roots. In filmmaking, screenwriting, acting, and most of all, in its rhythm, the film is inches from escaping my usual verbal flogging unscathed. Unfortunately, it's loyalty to it's source explains in full why it still leaves me a little bit cold: It's still based on a comic book - a medium I'm just not all that fond oof. And "how can it be bullshit to state a preference?" (see below)

(Continued from above) It is "...bullshit to state a preference" when you prefer to be a rabid tightwad. High Fidelity, as ever, is packed wall-to-wall with music I just...want. I guess its back to spending my money on tunes again. Darn. I had a good plan there for a while (e.g. - mooching off of several people I know, each of them growing more suspicious which each passing incident).

What's striking and especially refreshing about A Summer's Tale is that Rohmer throwns the idealistic American "root for love" notion right in our face with his penchant for telling an interesting tale of life with gorgeous actors playing characters who don't two-step their principles the way movie characters tend to, (by compromising, then justifying them). With this in tow, the great French director is free; His outcomes aren't the most pleasing for the audience, but remain the most symmetrical, the most moral and the most categorically and realistically obvious. It feels bright and playful like Pauline at the Beach, but it is still about people tinkering with change and manipulation, so, as ever, the main characters are outward about their motives. All too often, A Summer's Tale underlines the interior war Gaspard fights with his bright-blinking loner/loyalist credo and its assumed (and often very deceiving) subtext: He's a ladies' man. The three very different female characters take varied stances to his dating routine: Lena is tired of boys and their advances, and in her own, especially pompous way, pushes her hair back, sighing, "Some days I'd like to be stupid and ugly". Meanwhile, Margot sees right through Gaspard - but is nevertheless intrigued by him - summing up his intricate romantic schhedule in one shot: "Substitute for a substitute," she says before pausing to assess the situation. "You're organized." The third girl, Solene, who is never really in the running (she's the so-called pawn), actually drags the movie down. By the third act, the complication of Gaspard's little brush with feast makes us wish for a concise famine-brand love story. When we realize that's precisely what we're spoon-fed by a majority of American filmmakers, it's almost a double jab: The movie is flawed, and the flaw stakes a valuable purpose.

I watch it for reassurance: There may still be some good science fiction and horror films on the way. For now, we can hark back to Ridley Scott's triumph of the two, a world of such believable technology (because it's all dirty and broken) - and revolutionary editing. And, let's face it, the scariest goddamn creature known to man.

Let you know when I do. Gonna take as much time to figure out as it took to watch the damn thing. Striking, absolutely profound way to tell a story. Anti-climaxes are telling, almost deliciously maddening. Binoche is particularly aces, although, as I said, I'm not quite sure all the pieces are going to fit after only having seen it once. More to come...

I've gone over the events of the film in my head a number of times and the fact that they don't connect and that eventually explained phenomenon and random changes of heart which occur without meaning, leave me - to be honest - cold. The world is imagined with terrific colors, an earthy 1970s era film stock accentuates the browns and the reds - but the people who inhabit the world are as uninteresting and flat as the wallpaper. The idea of independence - a woman who fends for herself even when she, herself, cannot explain the source of her quandary (a virgin birth) - is so hopelessly lost on the audience. There are competing narrative strands that muffle each other: The woman struggling to cope with being cast out of her family, who doesn't believe her version of the pregnancy and the Count who rescued this woman during wartime and decides to put his life on hold until she agrees to marry him (and who may be feeling guilty for an act of violence). These plotlines seem to be competing with each other, rather than working together - which leaves the film in a muddied state: It never seems clear exactly what the end is to these semi-fascinating means. A huge disappointment, to say the least.

Just about everything that happens in Andersson's masterwork, also takes place on the same plane of the timely and uninhabitable thanklessness we face in a universal line-up of drone tasks experienced by, let's say, most of the population of the world. Its just that close in proximity, in terms of exaggerated pictures of our own, hurtful trends - and yet  it's so beautifully illlogical (which is, I believe, where we meet up with, uh, the point). Songs From the Second Floor is a contained, physical manifestation of abstract commentary that names hypocrisy as the cruel, unavoidable side effect of being human. Magnified in its vision, it is short and segmented - yet wholly epic in ambition. At once an absurdist perception and a scathing critique, one finds in it equally rewarding and disturbing portions of both solace and doom. A remarkable work of symbolic significance - it's an important, one-of-a-kind film that is both defining and removed, funny and scary, haunting and tragic, beautiful and moving. (I flat-out expect to be watching this again before the end of the year - this vague review doesn't exactly serve much more purpose than to purge my admiration and excitement).

Prep work for Far From Heaven. Memorably over-the-top, choice characters. The oil baron lifestyle - and it's tragic results - can seem a mite excessive at times, but it so rarely pushes past the boundaries of the (admittedly) outspoken social message that, and if I've read it once I've read it a thousand times - is lurking just beneath the surface. Who are these people kidding? This stuff isn't dressed up nearly as much as Todd Haynes' film is. These are more straightforward, as if he had seen what Sirk was doing and chose to double the effort. Haynes certainly nailed the tone and the mood of this world, but Sirk's world wasn't all the duplicitious rage it's cracked up to be.

What AOTC boasts that Episode I did not is a plot that's complicated enough that it can be argued - even through this, my fourth viewing - that it doesn't make perfect sense. Unfortunately, I've finally come to terms with how painfully flat - outside the realm of the Lucas wooden style - the exchanges between Anakin and Padme really are. There's a huge number of great scenes - way more than most modern films, and AOTC is decidedly more ambitious than Episode I and, in spots, the rewards come bang-bang-bang, connecting the saga so thoroughly as to add another dimension of enjoyment - almost making the film seem like a piece to a significantly larger puzzle movie. It's clunky in spots, sure - and for God's sake, it just doesn't flow as well as the other four films - but, reckon with it, you must: It's a masterfully consistent and beautifully seamless world of fantasy that no other franchise has yet to even dare to match. I'm still its champion, if slightly less so.

So terribly violent and, at the time, it probably seemed like a breath of fresh air (a subtle not-too-distant future satire, is that what they look like?) It may have spawned a pair of sequels, but the original film really shoots itself in the foot. It opens, seeming to be a possibly intelligent gaze at a more criminally heavy world and the new tactics employed by the cops who face this; the idea that a greedy private company, who once worked for the government in a defense capacity, could be sold a share of control over the citizens; the very notion that man is part machine, and that his primal goal dictates domination? (Facitious, to say the least; the hornswaggled rigamarole of the film's supposed "commentary" never even comes close to gelling, especially when it becomes less and less important with each subsequent gun battle. Weller is a hoot in the role, though. His machismo mask of a supremely sensitive core gives the man inside the machine an imperative boost.

A movie of sheer dialogue-driven pleasures. Quotable like His Girl Friday, exciting ensemble like 12 Angry Men. An immensely brilliant film.

A terrific commentary because it selects the most interesting comment on whichever beat it focuses on and treats the viewer to said comment (instead of boring us with one person's mindset from start to finish, we get a broad view of what went into every aspect of creating this masterwork).

Because the bickering is so natural, the dialogue is so unlike other films, and because it just happens to tap the emotional vibe steaming off of the Thanksgiving holiday. We make so many Christmas films? Why don't we make more films about other holidays? (Planes, Trains and Automobiles and what else, I ask?!)