Much like General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, Schroeder is all about flipping intentions: At the outset, it looks like Koko's grad student trainer is trying to pluck more data in attempt to satisfy the fabled missing link question. As things progress, it becomes more and more impossible to ignore the fact that she's gradually turning Koko into a human - or at the very least, she's massaging child psychology theorums into Koko's matted brown fur. Either way, the documentary seems aimed to purport the latter and, as is the way of things, ends up making a far better point simply by having a camera around to capture the unexpected turn. There's also a great number of people talking really intelligently about, um, monkeys.

Screwball by premise definition - and it threatens to be brilliant at one point (when Monty runs on the "none of the above" ticket) - but decidedly 80s in a very representative way without necessarily being pleasing or otherwise delightfully nostalgic. 

Screwball and exceptionally literate (and very, very watchable); I remember enjoying it when I was much younger and find that it not only holds up, but plays genuinely funny and, really, just smoothly in my slightly older ages. Great Kevin Nealon cameo.

Porn for people watchers. Entrancing.

Overcaffeinated, fragmented to no end; Has a relic feel, as if it not only could never have been made post 9/11, but would likely have come late enough - were it made today - to qualify as a parody of the creepy-loner-rights-injustices-done-him genre that had been saturated to no end by 2000. (I have no evidence, but I'm right and that's that.) Where B.S. Johnson's novel effortlessly conveys the indifference with which accounting techniques parallel cataclysm; In the novel, it's chilling how unfeeling Malry's antics are, in the film, they're beamed through endless montages, giving them a manufactured energy that lacks the - dare I say - dryness to seem any brand of face valuue. Peaking only in how great its Luke Haines' soundtrack is and how delightful it is to see the gal from Shaun of the Dead totally unencumbered by clothing, CMODE doesn't have the balls to lack a soul: A rare flaw, but a crucial one.

Inarticulate: Everything seen in labels until the viewfinder can no longer detect subtlety, which is part of its problem. Pretty Persuasion has an unconvincing nudge of summation at close that really veers close to cop-out, but amounts to something closer to disappointment at the film's failure to live up to its excessively-built theses. Pretty Persuasion ponders on, as Theo puts it, a worldview built entirely on "self gratification" until the main character can't help but cry happy tears at being assimilated into the whole "media labryinth". But you have to be told.

Though its Indie-regular Father and Son Teach Each Other Lessons dynamic seems poised on its heels, constantly priming (and even false-starting) a terminal state of unfortunate preciousness, for the most part, Angelopoulos kindly and exceptionally sticks to modeling his film - its pacing, its flavor, its worldview - after the reverance of poems shown by the film's subject and its subtext. It flows crisply, harnessing a symbiotic past and present with such aplomb, with such a convincing transition, its almost admirable simply for its craftwork. Alas, though, sequences where an anonymous person answers in kind a musical recording from a unseeable apartment building adjacent to that of the main character echo a policy of fragmented little moments with equally anonymous benefactors: That of the political commentary of Greece and Albania that only kinda sorta works outside its mechanism to futher the narrative, itself rarely daring us to enjoy it for itself. He's the short story version of Terence Malick.

Sounds to me like a controversial, borderline insensitive remark, but one I think I danced around the first time I saw it: To an alien race with no possible context (as a human, by the way, not as a fucking American), this could be one of the finest thrillers to date. One cannot sit around, forever, and wonder if films can have implications. Who has time for that carrying on? Who has the time or patience to wonder if this is still a fresh wound or merely a purposefully doted-upon fresh wound? A film states something and you either agree or disagree. United 93 states that human tragedy need not be cause for stomping out liberties or a reasoning to go to war. How in God's name does it do this as an apolitical film? Like Elephant, it points out how loathesome involving politics can be by sucking the film dry of such, thereby forcing the viewer to see the tragedy of species as it happens, without time to assign blame, slant or angle.

It's a perfectly good movie. And it was when I saw it four years ago as Chloe in the Afternoon, a fact I reminded myself of about (yikes!) thirty minutes in. The voice over captures precisely the universal observations that occur naturally to married folk (I myself have had many of these thoughts verbatim). I get now why Chloe is a bit funny-looking and why Rohmer's camera is so obsessed with her. Our main character spends a lot of time looking, but so little time looking deeper. Very perceptively, it seems to suggest that he remains faithful to his wife because they've taken the time to get to know each other and genuinely care for each other. Time and time again in these Moral Tales, Rohmer argues fervently for love as if its existence alone were being questioned.

[Note: I had nothing of value to say about this film, so I babbled instead. Hope no one minds.]

Its cover art, displaying the exaggerated cartoon shadows of Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss, seems to indicate that its producers (or, at the very least, its marketing gurus) have no illusions about how many Chuck Jones' cartoons were inhaled by screenwriter Tom Schulman in coming up with such a farce. By the time Dreyfuss is channeling Elmer Fudd and Wile E. Coyote at the same time, as Bill Murray does his best Daffy Duck, we're simply riffing on the audacity of something entitled "Death Therapy" in a harmless, mass market comedy. It's the same reason I love Tom & Jerry: To watch the characters get back up again, as if they were immortal. A great example of Murray in the 90s: Showcasing his looney genius, but confined by lacksadasical and unremarkable filmmaking. We love him even more now that he acts, but I still enjoy leafing through the many seasons of Bill. Let's call this one a bonafied member of the "A slew for them" period.