It's hard to appreciate it as the much loved lesson in honor, duty and making lemonade out of life's lemons when that bridge metaphor keeps overshadowing everything. Guinness is astounding (natch), while Holden seems adrift in a haze of matinee idoldom. In contrast with Lawrence of Arabia, Kwai is a thoroughly ugly film, filmed with the scope and ambition of David Lean but with the intimacy of a one act play. The setting, however (a secluded valley prison camp), never feels big or little but, rather, usurps the characteristics of both as necessary. Needless to say, this approach continually misleads the audience (it doesn't help that we cut away to Holden's trip from escape to crusader). Still, The Bridge on the River Kwai is effortlessly digestible entertainment, culminating - despite its misgivings - in a magnificently sober ending not unlike the one in The Great Escape, a film that appears to have built upon this one to better results.

Less a film than a mile long mural which doubles as a character study; It never left my mind for a moment that 8 1/2 could have been interchangeable with this film, nor did it escape me that Fellini is best seen in the theater (my best experience to date was seeing Nights of Cabiria on the big screen without interruption). Nevertheless, as a piece of ever progressing cinema, La Dolce Vita has the great distinction of defying it's very makeup: Though connected by Mastroianni's indelible good looks and magnetic presence, the item that is front and center is the filmmaking. While Fellini indulges himself almost to choking with a tale of corrupted humanity obviously meant to mirror himself, he's busy upstaging his alter ego at every turn with his camera. It's as if the movie itself is an intervention between Fellini's honest side and his fictional side, displaying the results without stopping to analyze them. And therein lies the rub. La Dolce Vita doesn't seem the least bit cathartic until it's over, doing significantly better in our bowels than in our mouth.

If the cortex of Herzog - with his capricious metaphors and starved-for-images promises - could be boiled down to one really vital statement, it would probably be "the chicken won't stop dancing", maybe the most disposable bizarre thing uttered in Stroszek, a film where a great number of profound and nonsensical (depending on interpretation) things are said. The casual, autobiographical line readings of Bruno S. come out like great poetry being initiated in the presence of all the wrong people, which is, in a sense, what I think Herzog is saying here: It's not a matter of putting the wrong people together, it's a matter of recognizing that, since no one is compatible, really, actually being the wrong people is the closest thing to being the right people  that we can possibly be (or some shit like that). I use terms like "I think" and "interpretation" because Stroszek is one of those categorically offbeat films where, though related things add up to a broad idea of a narrative (instead of an explicit then-this-happened structure), the joy of the medium is really expressed in the mood of watching a seventy year old lecture two hunters about animal magnetism in German while they scratch their heads, followed by Bruno S. explaining to his hooker girlfriend Eva - using a crude stick diagram - how she's shutting doors in his world. And when everything seems to be utterly laid out for milieu rather than clarity, the film ends with the amazing image of a dancing chicken.

Not quite the scorching skitter of cinema verite it's maker clearly intended (rarely has it been so obvious of a director to choose hand-held in order to distance himself from his previous films than here; although, to his credit, it pays off: Tigerland never feels like a Joel Schumacher movie). Ferrell's character, in that he's so likeably not like the other characters; he's a dicotomy all his own - a born leader who understands that the whole debacle (the military, American involvement in 'nam, nay - even life itself, the film would have us believe) is just a cruel game necessary for advancement; This he barely speculates on as he remains cooly rebellious: He's a selfless Cool Hand Luke.

Since my idiot brother and I can't for the life of us remember the line we nearly had to pause the film over (for laughing so much), it just goes to show: I don't know what, but it definitely goes to show something. (Seriously, at one point, I think I said something in my head to the tune of "This is the greatest satire of American family ever made". At another point, I had this strange craving for ice cream. And pretzels. And anything that didn't have legs.)

Further following my beautiful theorum (that I stole in part from Easy Rider): Watching certain films in the morning can define your day in the most wonderful of ways. I'm more than ready to give up on the world of men and live in a floating monastery deep in the mountains of Korea (even though part of it was filmed in Germany). One of those pesky posters on the imdb calls it Kim Ki-Duk's The Straight Story. As if that could be a bad thing. Comparisons to Lynch's pastoral on a tractor are warranted (the minimalism of simple lessons learned by adults, the beauty of a landscape as a character in the film, a journey to enlightenment, etc.). Comparisons to The Big Lebowski are much more complicated but, in my opinion, far more valuable than the previous contrast. EM Prigge says "...The Big Lebowski is as much of a lifestyle as it is a movie..."; He could easily be talking about Kim's film. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring plays more like
something we're supposed to be seeping into our veins as opposed to deciphering or, you know, watching. Best of all, I'm not using the word "Fall" in the title. Which makes me pretentious and a braggart.

It's odd, but Carpenter's evocation of the actual cultural event that is Halloween - as well as his visually mesmerizing take on Illinois vise a vie Pasadena - was the really exciting thing about watching the annual indie scare flick this time around; Odd, because there's so much visceral exercise, so much thumping filmmaking, so much besides the look of the thing for me to harp on (the score for instance, which is at least 50% of what's so darn scary about it, anyhow). Halloween is anything but perfect, but as I tuck another viewing beneath my belt, I've begun to realize that the whole thing is starting to ring up as nostalgia, an otherwise pleasing vindication that I watched it at exactly the right time (the first time): As a seventh grader, faking sick, taped from television the night before. (Further proof lodged in Summer seeing it for the first time today and not finding it nearly as frightening as she'd built up in her mind lo' these many, many years.)

We (okay, I) throw the term Kapraesque around far too little. I'd like to see the terminally positive and peppy (and thereby suited almost tightly for my needs) Dave remade in the 1940s by Frank Capra. In usual me fashion, I'm at complete odds with whether I can swallow such dumbed down political humor or whether the crux of things - an everyman impersonating the President and using his elbow grease idealism to do a helluva better job - is plenty to satiate me. Given the grade, I'm sure you can guess which end I chose to entertain (no pun intended); I'm also a sucker for anything that takes place in Washington, D.C. - no matter how popular or generic it turns out to be (although I still love the ending, despite the excess saccharine).

Difficult to get away from all the terrific, modern things happening in Murnau's 1927 masterpiece Sunrise and simply be moved by the content. On both sides of the event, though, it's easy to see why so many critics - for so long - considered this film to be the best of all time. The way it so effortlessly plays ahead of its time is breathtaking. It's not so much a genre hopper as it is a redefinition of itself, opening as the bid to win back a wandering heart, dissolving into a near science fiction piece (as the couple experience the glittering newness and gadgetry of The City) and ends, in its most ambitious move, as a ironically moving search and rescue. Fitting the pieces together isn't herky jerky or otherwise out of sync, though. The natural progression of things: The husband losing interest in that which is old until he finds himself cornered into either discarding the old altogether, or finding a new angle. This pushes him into a reversal: The newness of things is not only fleeting, but entirely what one makes of it (as the couple repeatedly proves: In his jealous standoff with the man in the salon, his bid to catch the pig, her paying for him at the restaurant, etc.). The couple's interpretation usually allows for their own trust antics and, in the case of the pig, their bumpkinness shows the city folk something of the same vanity experienced by the couple. From here, the husband's selfless bid to save his wife gives him an ultimately satisfying power (the power to begin accepting her death) before revealing to him that she is alive. Proving his loyalty by attempting to kill his former mistress - only to be interrupted by the news that his wife is alive - shows the starkness of Murnau's vision: Though it ends rosy, it still finds room to portray man as the being he is: Vengeful and uncaring when things don't go his way and compassionate and loving when they do. Five years after the simple, direct pleasures of Nosferatu, Murnau takes the medium into a place that forever proves its strengths (in visual terms) and far exceeds nearly every silent film experience I've had to date (with the possible exception of Dreyer's equally visual The Passion of Joan of Arc). I expect to watch Sunrise again very, very soon. (i.e. - Please don't tell my wife I've begun bidding on it on ebay).

If he could have, I think Pakula would have filmed an introduction for himself, ticking off hints for viewers. I know the big issue for most folks is how the film divulges information without any sort of anchor for an audience, but I think it helps if you're the kind of viewer who enjoys being dropped into a completely foreign atmosphere (like investigative journalism circa five years before you were born), left only to glean what you can about the process and the substance it unearths. Tons of facts and figures are being tossed out, but never in a polished, expository manner (Goldman's script ought to be minted; Though I haven't read the book, I doubt it veers too far from the general ambience of it: How could it?). Pakula's insistence on keeping things consistent pays off: He's big on lived-in atmospheres
filmed through carefully composed frames (ideally, to show how the mess is being seen in terms we can understand and, therefore, hope to repair it with), contrast of focus (rack focus within a frame shows, typically, an obvious foreground and an ambivalent background) and most of all, general clarity (there aren't many complicated mise-en-scene tricks, most of the filmmaking is rather straightforward). There's nary a bad performance in the film: Hoffman and Redford are as good as, say, Robards and Warden - - although Holbrook, playing the infamouus Deep Throat, nearly threatens to steal the show in his three scenes. And I was reading Ebert's review the other day on the toilet - where we keep his 1989 Video Guide (pause for hilarity) - and he seems to infer that Kissinger was Deep Throat. Just
wanted to go on record to say that I thoroughly doubt it.

First viewed the day after Christmas (circa 1994), Paths of Glory is typically thrust into that clique of the best anti-war films of all time (a hard label to argue with, I'll submit). What excites me about it, particularly while in (so-called) "war time", is the trial itself: The men are all being tried for cowardice in the face of the enemy. What I never realized before, was the very core of what's on trial is more or less abstract in nature: It's more about a concept being explored than a literal retelling of the novel, it seems. The idea that the army is purging from itself those who would acknowledge their natural instincts (fear of death) by confronting them with it (the men are all sentenced to death), almost tells us that the very sense of being human is a condition for examination and evaluation (or, to be blunt, if you're human, you have no place in the army; That is: No one has any place in an army, fighting wars, hurting one another, etc.) It's been accused of over dramatizing. Kirk Douglas pounding on the table at the end of the picture, telling a higher ranking officer to go to hell matches to a T the precise, heartbreaking moments of war and of trial, and especially, the passion of the execution. There's nothing melodramatic about this thing, people.

Inspired bits aside (basically any scene that doesn't remind you of the haphazard ass plot; i.e. - any scene that doesn't feature Fester, his mother, Mr. Tully and his wife, etc.), The Addams Family is a drab affair, scoring few laughs and fewer cohesively Addams thrills (the most wickedly cruel bit has the filmmakers randomly inserting Thing doing a Fed Ex commercial). The warm and fuzzy appreciation for all things nighttime and macbre would be much more my speed in 1993's similarly themed Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. (I don't care if that comparison seems left-fieldish. In my mind, the films straddle the same fence.)

Interesting to watch Jimmy Stewart's idealistic values transformed into gun-toting recklessness, but the lengthy expansion sideplot - while interesting - never seems to jive completely with the title actions. The relationship between Stewart and Wayne is an airtight example of why John Ford is so revered: Developed as a love-hate dependence, it evolves into an in awe-respectfully accept co-dependence, ultimately finding itself the framing device for Stewart to recount the tale behind the title action before burying Wayne. Though it produced the famous quote "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend", it doesn't actually demonstrate this within a palpable context until the final moments of the film, leaving a really strong summation of the emotional weight at just the right juncture for this film (fresh in your mind as you leave, that is). Ford sometimes seems like an unceremoniously brilliant director - seamless but not obvious or flashy - but there's always air pockets of genius lurking in and around the stability (case in point: Lee Marvin's evocation of the title character as a political machine as well as a self-serving villain, and Stewart's terrifically selfless note: Washing dishes at night for the folks who save his life and put him up).

By the time that epilogue began trying to brace us with sorrowful statements barely supported by the film's foundation, I was able to unequivocably state that, yes, I feel like I've seen a great number of films like this. Few of them, however, contained as much incestous lesbian sex, though. Sylvie Testud is a magnificent actress, giving easily one of those great-ish performances you wish were saved for a better film. The order of these lives of servitude and the suppressed social reigns - a class structure thriller? - is suitablly meticulous, but often sort of dull and frequently acts as blatant provacation for Testud and her mother to butt horns. A fine static, numb-y atmosphere, though.