The best of the three because by the end, it's: a) no longer a documentary, but a transforming essay and commentary on uneven modern existence; b) it's powerful without being intrusive; c) because Reggio seems so recklessly ambitious and so completely controlled (i.e. - it appears to be excess until you realizze that, well, that's the point).

I can no longer write about this film. I will say that I still, even though I complain that it holds very little meaning now (as numb as its become), derive a great deal of genuine pleasure from viewing it.

I know how silly the obvious sentiments of the model's deconstruction are (not to mention the goofy Cain and Abel throwaway that stands to distract us from the finale's weepy moment of daughter's long lost father proportions). What gets me - again - is how magnificent Inarritu is at telling a story. Amores Perros plays its weaved, edgy panic to full volume again and again, never seeming anything but unique or thrilling. The content may threaten to nosedive a few too many times for my comfort but, as cinema, the style is full-on rejuvenating.

About one double-back to the relationship dissection table too many for my taste, but how could Rohmer possibly be faulted when the rest is so goddamn entertaining? Three interwoven stories about an aging winemaker's search for love, a young student's pledge for freedom from an older professor's advances and a meddling friend's strange place in both predicaments. I completely disagree with the logic that Rohmer's films are merely variations on a single sort of style (okay, they are, but...) and that telling them apart can only be done if one trains one's eye on the prettiest star (so to speak). In short: I like the necessity of his films and their talky absorption; I'm not in it for the ladies. (Call me queer if you must.)

The initial trepidation of "will it suck?" competely melted away (having seen it before), leaving the experience of Kill Bill: Vol 1 a second time to stone us like seeing any of Tarantino's films on the flipside: Everything seems so right and works so marvlously; the dialogue is remembered just enough to still be funny but, is also the (good lord) comforting embrace of an old friend. I can't wait to wear this one out. I can't wait to suck down the whole three hours in one eye-gougingly sweet sitting.

Yeah, I realize the movie pretty much assumes all the cons to be innocent (even the ones who confess to their crimes on film), but there's still something wonderfully open - unlike other prison films - about prisoners whose lives are all but set in the grooves of a single building, and still can intelligently, and reasonably qualify their lives as worth living. Something sad about the way the system still allows the murder of men to be legal as long as it is carried out by the state, too. Let's start the argument up again, shall we? Who's up for a fight?

A scathing and nearly flawless vision of the mechanics of racism and the tragic realities of human nature. An widow marries a young Arab whose world is already very sad and alienated. When they marry, they are incredibly happy with each other - but are received by nearly every represented walk of life with horrible cruelty. The spin, after the cruelty washes in a chilling display of accepted manipulation (people who want something from the widow resign their racism for their own needs), is Fassbinder's finger, pointing without judgement - merely a statement of fact - squarely at mankind, who is unable (even after being subjected to bigotry), to resist harming, in similar ways, those around him. Shot in a very geometric, almost simplistically spatial manner (this word "spatial" reoccurs throughout Fassbinder's films, I've found), everyone seems be programmed to suggest the very essence of themselves without any complication or depth. It's a surprisingly easy movie to read - and, for that, an incredibly potent one.

Is it just me, or is this movie less funny to me than nearly everyone who comes in contact with it seems to believe it to be? I mean, it's hilarious (very fucking hilarious), but it's not uproarious or, you know, exasperatingly comedic. Am I asking too much? Do I expect more than I should? I've seen the damn thing three times, shouldn't I just resign to the fact that it's funny - but not gut busting? Who asked me, anyway?

Seemingly the picture of nothing specific and everything symbolic, the initial connection I made was to Antonioni (Tarkovsky, I decided, was a little more of an author). Having watched it again - and despite the knowledge that Van Sant's connection was to Bela Tarr, a filmmaker I'm not familiar with - I believe Gerry to be a most extraordinary motion picture in possession of a number of the same overpowering meditative traits as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, as in Kubrick's magnum opus (I'm using it cuz I mean it, people), the viewer is very carefully assumed into the spectrum (obviously, as the poetry seems to flow as if constructed for a viewer, rather than displayed through a solely important context or narrative); what we watch is only a projection of how it causes us to reflect. A great deal of the film is spent watching the main characters navigate the landscape in search of what appears to be escape. It was only upon seeing it again that I realized the film wasn't really about their escape or about their situation - but the contrasting existence between them and nature. For a film that appears to be so simple to be this successful, the blatant had to be dispelled immediately (Therefore, man versus nature and man versus man were definately out). Gerry is a movie about man's struggle amidst nature's perserverance (taken independently), as a vision of how an endless wide open is still (and will always) continue to overshadow any sort of petty struggle man has - even if that struggle is life and death...

Braun's story gets more obtuse as it goes, but when it comes into focus - minutes before its close - the sensational journey of delusion she has taken becomes more sad than it implied as it unfolded. The unwavering believer at first, Maria accepts the news that her husband is dead as relief - until he turns up at her house as she and an American GI prepare to get, you know, busy. What follows is a series of sacrifices - by both Maria and her husband - that turrn the pair into practical strangers. Told as a character study, Fassbinder seems completely fascinated by Maria's simulataneous descent into sin and ascent into wealth and notoriety. When the final moments come - as she and her husband finally find themselves able to continue their "marriage" - the alienation is so strong, Fassbinder chooses to represent it with a devastating finale that suggests at once the instability of male/female relation as well as the hazard of consequence.

Starts out as a dissection of corruption as the rebuilding of Germany after WWII is being completed and becomes a fascinating study of manipulation. The title character - a whore - is owned by a powerful businessman hell-bent on gaining building approval from the recently appointed, hard-nosed building commissioner. As the commissioner falls secretly for Lola, Fassbinder cleverly keeps the strings all but lifeless until very late in the game, when he finally tightens the lines, exposing everyone's actual position and slowly revealing how easy it is to become corrupted by good intentions. Barbara Sukowski, playing Lola, has a hellcat demeanor that she can turn into graceful flirtation on a dime. Watching her casually dismiss her mother, stand up her lover and eventually, erupt into a drunken expression of song and rage in her bordello, gives us a potent parallel for the sort of distraction that allows men to control other men and profit from the rubble of a former generation. Or something. Shot conservatively with sleaze sax-accompanied fades between scenes, Lola is peppered with unnaturally bright and colorful filters to unite the office locale with the night time pleasure trade. Fassbinder never explicitly suggests that the two are more than coincidentally alike - instead, he seems to insinuate that the sort of personalities that populate both worlds are instinctually connected by the unwavering rules of symbiosis.

Aping the stylistic limitations of what appear to be a more classical age of films (the forties and fifties, for example), Veronika Voss is a kind of warped take on the already rather twisted Sunset Boulevard set. By chance a reporter happens upon a faded marquee queen from another era. He becomes obsessed with her, and finds out that she is confied to a strange mental institution that keeps the disallusioned and downtrodden in supply of Morphine until their money runs out. Then they cut off the supply and present them with sleeping pills. Fassbinder's second to last film is a tirelessly desperate picture, with all of the characters on the very edge of absolute meltdown, perhaps in direct reflection of the director's own demons (and impending suicide). Flashbacks all twinkle with bright spots, as if to suggest that the past may not have necessarily been better, but that it was obscured by its own sense of illusion and short-lived success. The cinematography is particularly grabbing; Where the other two films in Fassbiners BRD Trilogy (The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola) were mannered and somewhat formally composed, Veronika Voss is intensely arty and often stunningly true to its recreation: It absolutely looks like it could have been made in the 1940's or the 1950's. Also keeping with the other films in the trilogy, its an incredibly depressing expose of the corruption of postwar Germany and the particularly cruel way women tended to suffer in this world.

The true meaning of Thanksgiving. And pain. I found it almost shocking the way the film divided the room this year: Half were completely amused by it, half found the pain of Candy riding Martin like a cheap hooker almost unbearable (and impossible to derive humor from). Of course, the people who didn't like it were people I don't find particularly, um, cool. (Losers.)

A good portion of the film isn't much more than the title character talking diva disasters with a friend and later, a lover. As its elapses, though, the film becomes a meditation - and finally, a rather tepid catharsis - on the frailties of one's ego. The savage breakdown of von Kant on her birthday is a truly powerful spectacle, but the emotional tiers of the film are just a small part of it. Fassbinder hired Michael Ballhaus (he shot Goodfellas, by the way) to shoot the film in three weeks in one location. The result is a marvelously claustrophobic vision of space and texture. (Full disclosure: I get a kick out of the cool German arty look to the house). Petra's white shag rug, for example, gives her unconventional - almost ski lodge-esque - home a oddly unnatural look (akin to sick grass). As everyone frolics on it, Ballhaus gets his Kubrick groove on, shooting everything from a track that demands that plastic models, shelves, railings and other characters are in the way. The clutter works astoundingly as a complement to the Petra's inability to escape herself - but he photography is sometimes just gorrgeous in itself (especially during those long stretches in the beginning, when the characters are whining endlessly about their married lives). Joining a short list of the expect-to-see-frames-for-sale-in-the-lobby films. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is one of the most wonderfully overshot and picturesque melodramas I've seen.

I think I would have just found it slightly boring and terribly dull if it weren't so base and, to be sure, anti-American (and anti-cinema, when you come right down to it). In the end, though, my older brother and I are right: The title is gay, the filmmaker is completely over the fucking hill and no where does it say that I'm not a complete sucker for watching this stinker.

I'll be completely honest: I fast-forwarded (with malice) through Brian singing his best songs in 1994. Dude, read the title again - you weren't made for these times. The documentary snippets were informative - but no more so than the liner notes of Pet Sounds or, perhaps, the AMG summary of The Beach Boys. On the other hand, it was 69 minutes and I zipped through at least a third of it. No harm done (I suppose).

If you haven't done so, please feel free to kick yourself for not having seen this absolutely stirring stunt, perhaps the most sickeningly rewarding multi-dimensional movie ever to feature dubbed dialogue, random Russian historical re-enactments and High Definition digital video (three things that rarely work on their own - or at all, in some cases). Making it one shot and all but dedicating it as a love letter to the Hermitage (thereby rooting it in nostalgia, one of the larger of my staggering - and growing - number of weaknesses) seals the deal completely. Seeing it on the big screen was better - but this film is amazing either way, really.