Creeping nostalgia underlines everything I feel like I should take with a grain of salt about this picture (namely, that each scene is more absurd than the last), but not to the point of warming it over: It's obviously aware of its camp value (hence, the rapid succession of songs and Judd Nelson's high-pitched girly screeches). There's moments of genuine pathos in Unicron's wake - Orson Welles' disaffected, final performance as the planet is actually pretty terrific - and moments of extreme deja vu (it rapes Star Wars for plot points); It's 80s, America-rich Japanamation at its most treacly and, also, at its most fondly remembered.

The upgrade bears dual explanation. The first part is easy: I was awake during the sequence where Nicholas finds the town ensconced in their Village Green Preservation Cult attire only to attack him and force him underground, where he bumps into the remnants of their un-quaint cleansing (and, hilariously, the living statue is still in the same, stiff pose). But another reason forced my hand a smidge: It was the realization that Wright's parody is almost soley unique as an all-out, inconceivably complicit multi-layering of lampoon mocking the style, texture, context, actual text and, certainly, specifics of the action film genre. It's an awful lot of balls to juggle (certainly, multiple viewings are the key to unearthing some of its subtler, in-betweener bits) and they're not all in the air all the time - the companionship of Danny and Nicholas grates, despite its satirical immunity to critique - but that he bothered to try is welcome enough to win me over.

Rip-roaring exhiliration! But exhiliration at experiencing a Tarantino film and getting caught up in that groove where everything seems so right and everything seems to live to make you appreciate the medium as well as the craftsmanship. Nihlistic without boundary - and hilariously profane without apology - Death Proof approximates the object of its homage even more succintly and carefully than Jackie Brown or Kill Bill, breathing almost palpable life into Q's favorite bargain basement, nailed-coffin film genre: 70s exploitation cinema. This film doesn't work any better or worse than its shorter, Grindhouse-experience version, but it does manage to while in Tarantinospeak a bit longer, linger on a color change mindfuck (!) in some beautiful filmic left field and, without question, stand firmly on its own two feet. Russell is the film's great star, but all of its female actresses left a larger impression on me this time. Before, I felt as if they were all sort of apiece to the recreation. This time I found myself feeling like they were all out of my league. I was practically intimidated by them. Which I love.

Whimsical and free-flowing, Forman's third film is barely about anything, but its episodes have a terrific relationship with one another, as if they were like dissimilarly colored puzzle pieces fitting together. Its two major setpieces - the clashing trios during the party and Andula's visit to the domestic oppression of her would-be boyfriend's mother in Prague - more than carry it, but the New Wave-y scene between Andula and the drummer she sleeps with is also terrific. That it is told in retrospect makes the film more of a meditation on the mood of each encounter; As we know it is being skewed, we take its truth as a contrasted flashback in Andula's mind, giving it all the more uumph in the truth department. It's a genuine art film, and a really good one at that.

Fetishizing tear-jerking takes skill and balls and Deep Impact - for all its loony and cliched corridors - seems to revel in its ability to produce the E.T. lump in our throats. Things that occured to me while watching this film: 1) Tea Leoni loves to play these types of characters - which I find transparent, 2) Leelee Sobieski doesn't maintain a consistent character from scene to scene - which I find annoying, 3) Robert Duvall could play this character in his sleep - which I find, repeatedly, in films he appears in nowadays, 4) Morgan Freeman as President feels so right - which I like, and 5) Mary McCormack is hotter here than in any film I've seen her in to date.

[ We inherited a 13 inch TV and an old VCP when Summer's paternal grandfather passed some years ago and, caving, have placed them in Victoria's room. This film marks the first of several bonding ventures designed to watch films I suggest as "fun" that are only owned on "videocassette".]

Dreyer's stab at the conceit of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance works primarily for its intentions, as the four connected storylines are all markedly mundane in their orchestration. The first one - which posits the tale of Judas working undder the hand of Satan - is actually a whole lot more interesting for its classically Danish Jesus (complete with the strict, dark beard) who is, above all things, pretty snide. Moving into the Spanish Inquisition (where a love triangle just gets sillier and sillier as it fumbles along), on to the French Revolution and modern times (both stories are shamelessly similar to the Spanish Inquisition bit), Dreyer is still nearly a decade from his masterpiece (The Passion of Joan of Arc) - and it shows. He does - in three don't-blink moments - move the camera.

Where Loves of a Blonde tinkers with a free-floating narrative, able to bend with with will of its characters (we suppose), The Fireman's Ball is far more reigned in, a technique that intensifies the effect of the farce. And farce it does - juggling three terrifically silly plotlines with ease and wit (a botched lottery where the prizes keep vanishing, a botched beauty pageant of which there seems to have been no preparation and a fire that seems far less important than either the lottery or the pageant). The stark, timestamped look gives Forman a credibly warm place to set these antics; We watch the wood-paneled world, its white tableclothes and foamy beers harking back to something simple enough to be this madcap. It's the kind of film you want to suggest to others.