After.Life(2009)
Directed By Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Is Christina Ricci dead or alive? Does Liam Neeson know the truth or does he not care? Will Justin Long smack a kid in the middle of an elementary school if he get's on his bad side?. The answers to these questions can only be found in "After.Life", a new film about the waiting room before the grave. 
Christina Ricci is a depressed and moody school teacher who after an argument with her boyfriend played by Long, blacks out on the slippery highway roads and wakes up in a morgue. She cannot move and she cannot feel, but she can see and she can speak. 
Liam Neeson is the mortician who runs the funeral parlor and informs her that she like so many others before her have died and are soon to be buried. She asks if him if she is dead, how it is possible she can speak and he can hear her. He explains that he can talk to the dead, always has, and that the dead always insist they are alive. That all she is experiencing is a part of the process of letting go of your life. "Denial is the hardest part". As Ricci and Neeson play cat and mouse and dr. and patient in the morgue, Long is plagued by memories/hallucinations/gut feelings that Ricci is not dead. 
One of Ricci' student a shy, Halle Joel Osmand-ish boy obsessed with death hangs around the funeral party, curious as to what happens at a funeral, and what happens after death. Neeson finding his inner Vincent Price is the main amusement of the film, "You people you shit and you piss and you eat and you think your alive?", though it does handle better than it sounds as mystery, leading us up many blind McGuffin filled alleys (sort of). 
I was caught up in the cleverness of the macabre set-up more than the execution of some of its hackneyed thriller conceits. Sometimes the scary violin music is cued up inorganically, when a withdrawn silence would have been more threatening. Some of the CGI in the dream sequences seemed a bit unnecessary too, when Ricci's stiff movements and exchanges with Neeson are more harrowing than any pop-up book apparition. 
The direction is crisp and clean, the only mis-step being when Long backhands the Halle Joel Osmond kid when he won't stop bugging him (and the roar of laughter that went up from the audience). Radiohead's "Exit Music For A Film" is a brilliant song to play over the credits as lines "Breath, keep breathing" capture the perfect mood, though I wished that kind of cleverness would have been more present in the film and not just over the credits. 
Director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo said very little at the screening I attended other than Liam Neeson couldn't make it, and that Long gave a surprising emotional performance (he was better in Jeepers Creepers). Though I was never bored with the film, there isn't very much more to say about other than it's a clever and competently performed. 
I imagine this will peak some interests for the amount of Christina Ricci nudity, and to see Liam Neeson try for scary in a Robin Williams "1 Hour Photo"/"Insomnia" kind of way. An entertaining and efficient thriller that sticks to its mystery/horror guns, but sadly After.Life proves to be little more than an after thought. 
Christina Ricci is a depressed and moody school teacher who after an argument with her boyfriend played by Long, blacks out on the slippery highway roads and wakes up in a morgue. She cannot move and she cannot feel, but she can see and she can speak. Liam Neeson is the mortician who runs the funeral parlor and informs her that she like so many others before her have died and are soon to be buried. She asks if him if she is dead, how it is possible she can speak and he can hear her. He explains that he can talk to the dead, always has, and that the dead always insist they are alive. That all she is experiencing is a part of the process of letting go of your life. "Denial is the hardest part". As Ricci and Neeson play cat and mouse and dr. and patient in the morgue, Long is plagued by memories/hallucinations/gut feelings that Ricci is not dead. One of Ricci' student a shy, Halle Joel Osmand-ish boy obsessed with death hangs around the funeral party, curious as to what happens at a funeral, and what happens after death. Neeson finding his inner Vincent Price is the main amusement of the film, "You people you shit and you piss and you eat and you think your alive?", though it does handle better than it sounds as mystery, leading us up many blind McGuffin filled alleys (sort of). I was caught up in the cleverness of the macabre set-up more than the execution of some of its hackneyed thriller conceits. Sometimes the scary violin music is cued up inorganically, when a withdrawn silence would have been more threatening. Some of the CGI in the dream sequences seemed a bit unnecessary too, when Ricci's stiff movements and exchanges with Neeson are more harrowing than any pop-up book apparition. The direction is crisp and clean, the only mis-step being when Long backhands the Halle Joel Osmond kid when he won't stop bugging him (and the roar of laughter that went up from the audience). Radiohead's "Exit Music For A Film" is a brilliant song to play over the credits as lines "Breath, keep breathing" capture the perfect mood, though I wished that kind of cleverness would have been more present in the film and not just over the credits. Director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo said very little at the screening I attended other than Liam Neeson couldn't make it, and that Long gave a surprising emotional performance (he was better in Jeepers Creepers). Though I was never bored with the film, there isn't very much more to say about other than it's a clever and competently performed. I imagine this will peak some interests for the amount of Christina Ricci nudity, and to see Liam Neeson try for scary in a Robin Williams "1 Hour Photo"/"Insomnia" kind of way. An entertaining and efficient thriller that sticks to its mystery/horror guns, but sadly After.Life proves to be little more than an after thought. 
Alan Moore wrote an essay about porn called "Bog Venus Vs. The Nazi Cock Ring" (which really deserves a complete post dedicated to itself 
Claims The White Ribbon seems to echo as it's only means of being viewed as important and socially relevant. 
Moore makes the point clear, informative, and funny. 
Humor did not exist at this point in German history apparently, only awkward social rituals and fierce punishments. 
Haneke has people say cruel Bergman-esque things to each other like literally ::spoiler::getting a handjob and then telling the person to stop because they are disgusting and smell and make you want to vomit::: 
The cutest children are the rays of hope, and the creepy children we are made to feel are probably young sociopaths waiting to storm trooper their way into history. 
Heneke says of the film "When strictness becomes an end in itself, and when an idea turns into ideology, it becomes perilous for anyone who doesn’t comply with this ideology. The film uses the example of German fascism to talk about the mental preconditions for every type of terrorism… whenever people are in hopeless, unhappy and humiliating situations, they will grasp at any straw that is handed to them". and "the film is about the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature." 
Everybody got that? The kids are terrorists and this is Zero De Condiut with eye gouging instead of feathers.
I'm sure lots of kids around the world and in Germany who were then and are today beaten more severely than those in "White Ribbon", but they didn't all later participate in mass genocide. 
Besides where does such simple arm chair psycho-analyzing get us, besides the easy platitude that violence is cyclical?(which is also explored more effectively in Cache).
I also think the analogy that terrorists are angry children revenging being over-disciplined is problematic one to say the least, but I'll sidestep that can of worms for the time being. 
The music digetic and otherwise is a nice touch, really filling the emptiness of the film. The narration which renders the film into a series of novel like episodes was always just as long as it needed to be.
Haneke has always had a fantastic sense for editing, and this film only finds his talents growing as a film maker, but as a story teller I still find him lacking. Trying, but lacking. Leonie Benesch was a nice touch as well (in a film, so obsessed with the bad kind).
I was interested up until the end, when the film basically just shrugs and goes home, when it could have tried to make some kind of connection between it's emotional and conceptual themes, outside of alluding to WW1. The full title is Das das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, the second half translating to something like the German Kindergarten. Which if this is Kindergarten we can guess which war will take place in adulthood.
I understand the kids, and the war, and even the Baron, and the farmers, but what about the doctor and his assistant? The strong dominating the weak...in a Micheal Haneke film, no I don't believe it. 
Here is the story, mysterious things happen in a small village in Germany in 1913 including accidents, deaths, tortures and attacks. We are lead to believe certain parties are responsible and much is left unexplained, but your pretty clearly left knowing your suspicions were probably true. The end, and cue the world's smallest credits.
The White Ribbon is a barely decent story wrapped in a skillful cinematic package from a director with a one track mind; that violence is bad. 
Both Moore and Haneke seem to think that if the kids had just been allowed to wank off more, perhaps global catastrophe's and genocides could have been avoided.
I am not so sure that Wilhelm Reich can fully excuse the Third Riech, but if it did I would still expect this movie to make that connection feel resonant and gripping and not just mysterious and morbid, but those are two things this director does best, or thinks he does best.
How many films before and after "Blue Velvet" need painstakingly remind us that behind idyllic settings, bad things are happening?
If violence is so terrible why not make a film, were it isn't at the center of everything, instead of a continued public self flagellation at what seems to be an obvious personal obsession running through his films (that Ive seen so far anyway, "Cache" I'm actually a big fan off).
"Nothing like a little self-hate is there?"-the doctor.
Perhaps if Haneke had done a little less self-stroking here, this could been something meaningful, and not just smugly allusive. 
It's a classic failed-message movie, though one well directed and acted, which only makes it more disappointing, because it does have potential.
It's like looking at a really expensive sleekly designed car, a true testament to German engineering that someone slapped a "No Fat Chicks" bumper sticker on, or "No Blood For Oil" in this case. 
When this happens, I think it should be from hence forth called Hanekeing-off. 
My first experience with Taksehi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi) as director as well as lead actor, and I say file away under first class WTF right next to Funky Forest and Night Dreams (review forthcomming).
My first experience with Kitano was the disquiet ting almost sympathetic teacher in "Battle Royale", but I knew right away he was an actor worth looking into, and I'm usually not very interested specific in actors. 
The beginning when Kitano and his matching dummy (who trade places throughout the film, whenever Kitano feels pressured or uncomfortable) think of new films to make Kitano a success. 
They try gangster movies, because they are what Kitano is best at, but he has done too many of them and wants to get away from being typecast. 
Then they try a "traditionally Japanese Ozu like film- the kind Wim Wenders would like", but it too falls through "who wants to waste a half hour on drinking liquor and tea?" 
Stories about the "common folk" aren't common anymore, and the black and white is now just alienating. 
They go through a few romances first where a woman is devoted to a man who is usually an artist or in some way disabled and these are called romantic comedies. 
Then they decide this is sexist so they try films where a man is devoted to a woman, and they call these tragedies.
Martial arts period films and horror films get their turns as well, since both do well in foreign markets and might even get remade, but horror gives way to comedy, and neither make nearly enough at the box office.
All of these failures are visually punctuated by the suicide/murders of the Kitano shaped doll.
Then providence strikes and Kitano knows what to do, he will make a big budget CGI sci-fi spectacle about meteors racing to earth, only the meteors will have faces and are supposed to become major characters in the film. 
After that reason abandons ship altogether and the last 45 minutes to an hour are the worlds longest Monty Python sketch involving Kitano as the assistant to a mad scientist/industrialist, and a mother and daughter trying to make cash the easy way, by putting roaches in their food at restaurants, getting hit by cars, and finally marrying Kitano. 
Trips to France, pro-wrestlers, villagers hopping like bunnies, robots, and generally inexplicable events follow one after the other until the credits. 
In Godard like fashion even the characters seem out of place in this slapdash world, asking about why certain earlier strange things happened, at which point Kitano transforms into the wooden doll version of himself (if only we could all do this to get out of tough questions.)
I laughed a few times, mostly out of surprise, but sometimes out of exhaustion. There's an early scene where Kitano tries to make a drama about the 50's, but fails once he realizes Japan in the 50's was the wrong place at the right time.
The nostalgic and innocent decade of American pop, was there a time of "discrimination, poverty, and domestic abuse". 
It was also when Kitano grew up, moments which begin with promise of sentiment or catharsis segue into reminders of social horror at every turn.
I don't think he necessarily intended this scene to be the "heart" of the film, and not just another spoof scenario, but it goes longer than most of the others, and after seeing it, and the conceptual loops, dead ends, and false starts. 
The film maker goes through for sake of "glory" it's easy to understand how it might be tempting to just turn into a block of wood, and let your Id make the decisions (the caricature is at least indestructible). 
Easier but not necessarily always entertaing to watch.
Kitano did in fairness get his start as a stand-up comedian in the Manzai style (think fast past Abbot and Costello back and forth banter, which in Japan goes back to the 700's.), and many sequences like the martial arts instructor and his master, or the exploits of the strange stuffed animal ladies do take on the format of a Manzai routine. 
With a little cultural perspective the madness does have a method.
Though considering the great ode to artistic impotence "8 1/2" has now become a star studded Hollywood musical in "Nine", it's easy to understand Kitano's frustrations with the cinematic redundancy and the bastardized genre permutations that they spawn. 
Directed By Elaine May
Henry Graham: Excuse me, you're not by any chance related to the Boston Hitlers? 
Mathau is a trust fund rich snob and gentlemen of leisure who has never aspired to be anything but wealthy much the way Max of "Rushmore" never aspires to be anything but a Rushmore student. Many have compared Elaine May's film with Anderson's later works, as both have a similar style of desert dry wit, soft color pallets, and darkly comic situations with a tinge or naivete or melancholy where suitable, and I would agree that the similarities are startling, though May has less finesse with music and mes-an-scene.
Mathau learns his trust fund has been exhausted and if he cannot come up with a few thousand dollars by the end of the week he will be worse than dead, worse than raped, worse than tortured...he will be poor. Certainly not poor by average accounts, he will still have money, but no country club, no servants, no tailored suits, and no gourmet meals...no sort of living at all really. With the advice of his Butler he decides to find a wealthy women and marry her straight away, which is harder than it looks for someone as easily contemptible as Mathua. Though only tip-toed around I got the feeling his character is supposed to be gay, "Never thought of you as the sort interested in ladies?" says one associate, and Mathua's horror as a possible bride tries to show him her breasts seems in line with this. 
What makes A New Leaf so radiant, clever, honest, and emotionally poignant is how it plays freely between near slapstick, dry subtlety, macabre musings, and sincere awkward romance. Walter Mathau is perfect in this role as a money hungry sourpuss desperately trying to look uninterested whilst plotting the murder of his wife, but this would become tedious as it almost threatens to do without the comic timing of Elaine May backing him up later in the film. Both characters are utterly helpless, he lacking any skills, training, or abilities aside disdain and she an absent minded, easily manipulated waif who only has eyes for plants and for him. He is repulsed by her of course, but in setting out to marry, murder, and take the money and run, he has for the first time in his life shown initiative and even talent. This makes for great amount of suspense and tension in the final scenes when at any moment he might poison her or wipe the crumbs of her shirt, which she is perpetually covered in. 
Odd moments of tenderness creep up between gags like weeds in May's garden. While ay other times when she would easy to kill, he's too distracted or disinterested to notice, in one scene he's reading a book about house hold poisons with his back turned to her, while she dangles over the edge of a cliff trying to reach a rare plant. I have delayed mentioning til now the characters names are Henry and Henrietta, because it makes very obvious the characters are two halves of the same whole, something not clear until the films approaches it's inevitable end.
Henrietta Lowell: "They say if you don't scratch, it itches less."
As much as I love the ending, there was a version of the film that was much longer that May originally turned in that she was told was too dark for audiences of the time, so it's just as possible the end was a studio mandated cop-out. I like to think, May was clever enough to imagine the scenario which ended up in the final product as a kind of middle ground, without betraying her original intent (but who knows what that was?). I can only speak for the film I saw, and not the one which has never been released. The only thing about this film which feels dated is the music, which is rarely used, but not distracting enough to lower my rating any; a jazzy milieu of sounds common to films of the era.
Henry Graham: "...Never have I seen one woman in whom every social grace was so lacking. Did I say she was primitive? I retract that. She's feral. I've never spent a more physically destructive evening in my life. I am nauseated. I limp. And I can feel my teeth rotting away from an excess of sugar that no amount of toothpaste can dislodge. I will taste those damn Milago coolers forever. That woman is a menace not only to health, but to western civilization as we know it."
Elaine May has crafted one of the most insightful and amusing comedies I've ever seen, one that goes straight into my top ten. Isn't it always great to find top 10 material, after long periods of "major movie" let downs? Do yourself a favor and track this one done. I couldn't recommend it enough if I had a bullhorn. "A New Leaf" is a well photographed (the beautiful almost non-sequiter shots of sunsets and landscapes), superbly acted very droll dark comedy about two overgrown children finding companionship, loyalty, and a reasonable measure of happiness in the most unlikely places possible. "Heavens!"
Uncle Harry: You are an aging youth!
Directed By Peter Greenaway
Drowning By Numbers is one of a very small group of perfect films I’ve seen. 
Not just 5, 10, and 100 point films, but flawless to the point where numerical systems fail to be valuable. 
Peter Greenaway’s third film is about three women a mother, daughter, and niece all named Cissie Colpitts, who one by one drown their husbands in a bath, in the sea, and in a pool. 
After the first drowning, the local coroner is asked to help cover up the crime, and he agrees believing this will give him carte blanche to have his way with the new widow. 
He is rebuked in the first of several such attempts. 
His name is Madgett and he orchestrates for the town a series of seemingly random, perhaps ancient (in fact completely made up) games, consisting of strange rules and regulations, like “Hangman’s Cricket” where half the game is spent learning the rules. 
Madgett’s son is named Smut (our narrator), and Smut is interested in a young girl dressed in a fancy gown ("whose [dresses] wide hips mock her immaturity according to Greenaway) who always claims to be on her way to a party, and who jumps rope counting from 1 to 100 in the films opening sequence. 
Numbers appear in every scene whether spoken aloud or written on a small or large object in the background. 
One could make the film itself into a game called “spot the numbers”, which count from the first scene to the last from 1 to 100. 
The film is full of small details some so obscure they are likely to please no one but Peter Greenaway or those willing to watch his behind the scenes blow-by blow “Fear Of Drowning” 
Why include such things? Because it makes the game for fun, that’s why.
As always Greenaway composes every single sequence to achieve a sense of balance, and painterly poise. 
As usual most scenes, including idle landscape shots are recreations of paintings.
Though the images are fantastic, the soundtrack by frequent collaborator Michael Nyman is stunning. 
I can’t think of a director and composer whose works fuse together with such iconoclastic fluid grace since Sergio Leone and Ennio Mariconne. 
Nyyman’s orchestral compositions are energetic, pulsating, lively, and captivating enough to be listened to and enjoyed apart from the film as its own music, and gives a sharp sense of irony and comic timing of its own to Greenaway’s visual tableaus. 
Greenaway is not what you would call a “humanist” director, he rarely shoots close ups, instead remains in wide screen, and letting his characters take up positions as figures in an image, not actors on a stage, or in a film. 
This can be difficult to deal with if identification with characters is a pre-requisite for enjoyment, because the film aims for visual awe, wafts of aural pleasure, and snatches of witty literate dialog that only doesn’t sound like dialog because of the casual delivery the lead actresses are able to give their macabre melodrama. 
Drowning By Numbers is a multi-layered film meant to be watched several times.
It is a monument to be marveled at, but one where all of the elements of the film medium contribute the structure and design of the piece as whole, where form and content perfectly integrated into each other. 
The women who drown their husbands, at first do it out of anger, then out of disappointment, and finally out of “solidarity”, or in other words for no real reason at all. 
The pattern of threes needs to be complete, three murders, three autopsies, and three funerals. 
The youngest Cisse even shows regret, but she too is helpless to stop the pattern of imitation. 
Poor Smut also faces the horror of imitation, when he is told innocently enough by the jumper girl (who he pines for as his father does the three widows) and who is only repeating her mother when she says, that men with “circumcisions are better”.
Smut: “The object of this game is to dare to fall with a noose around your neck from a place sufficiently high enough off the ground, such that the fall will hang you. 
The object of the game is to punish those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. 
This is the best game of all, because the winner is also the loser, and the judge's decision is always final.”
We know the husbands will die, they are as inexorably fated to their turns in the plot as all people are fated for death, as films are fated to end after a certain number of scenes. 
We are made hyper-aware of these numbers because they are flashed in a countdown on screen. 
Does anyone remember the death clock, 
You can watch your life flicker away by measurements. 
We are all drowning in numbers.
Cop: “Was it a natural death?”
Madgett: “Is any death natural?”
Yet it’s not all doom and gloom, because the coroner while being an eternal bachelor as fated to be rejected by the widows he assists as their husbands were to watery graves, he is also the master of games. 
Like his first film "the Draughtsmans’ Contract" the battle of the sexes consumes the characters, where in Draughtsman, an artist who believes he is having his way with a mother and daughter discovers all to late, he is in fact being used and disposed of. 
So too does Madgett find himself helpless in the face of “female solidarity”, leaving him to his only recourse of playing more games. 
Cissie Colpitts: “Could you get it up three times in an afternoon Madgett?
Madgett: “I’d like to try…depends whose asking”
Sure death is just around the corner at all times, but there are so many marvelous, silly, frivolous distractions to amuse ourselves with in the meantime; life and all of its contents. 
“No Country For Old Men” and "Blow-Up" have both made this same point about death’s inevitability and life as a game of chance, but where both those films suffered a self-serious somberness "Drowning By Numbers" remembers to be a tragic-comedy and not just a tragedy.
Life is absurd, of course of course, but the absurd can be very funny, and humor after all is happiness’ cheeky cousin, sometimes inappropriate, but nearly always welcome. 
When is it too early to have a new all time favorite?
Some say wait a year before you go saying your in love with a new band, author, artist that makes you re-appraise what it is you really look for in a work of art.
I understand the reservation; one should be picky and patient about these things.
Then again why bother waiting when joy presents itself, after all time is not on our side.
Smut: “The full flavor of the game Hangman’s Cricket is best appreciated after the game has been played for several hours, by then every player has an understanding of the many rules and knows which character they want to play permanently.
Finally an outright loser is found and is obliged to present himself to the Hangman who is always merciless”.
Directed By Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar
"A Town Called Panic” does not invite any moments of calm or temprance, or respite from the chaos of the world, instead in revels in its absurd animated mania that would not feel out of place on Adult Swim or Saturday mornings. 
It is defiantly ridiculous, and never offensive, mean, or crude. In a dayglo town, we see old toys moving of their own accord. Toys from a time before action figures, when plastic figures stood on mounted bases and lacked bendable limbs.
A town called “the town”, houses a postman, a policemen, a musical school, a farmer, his wife, and their animals (who attend the musical school), and a horse, an Indian, and a cowboy. The later are the films heroes here making their big screen debut from Belgium produced animated series with the same name as the film.
The trio forms a strange family, with the Horse heading the household, driving, the car, handling the finances, etc, with Cowboy and Indian as the two young impish tricksters getting into various shenanigans.
The action begins when the boys realize they have forgotten Horse’s birthday, and decide at the last minute to build him a barbecue. The boys make a slight snafu when instead of ordering 50 bricks they have delivered 500,000 bricks. 
The best scene a drunken party takes place early on, but where I expected the film to dip after the 20 minute mark, it kept delivering taking us into the center of the earth, into a Penguin shaped mobile Artic…"research”…station, and an undersea kingdom located directly beneath the town. 
Horse in love with the school’s music teacher only wants to get back to his lesson in time, but instead they chase a merman through a series of wacky encounters. 
This was one of the few films that was screened twice during AFI fest and I only caught the 2nd screening on the last day of the festival. The director wasn’t there, but in place there was someone from the Belgium consulate who said that though he had not seen the film he had been assured by everyone who had that it followed in Belgium’s unique tradition of cartoons, comics, and sense of humor. 
He spoke with a vague craftiness more like a producer than a diplomat, but perhaps there is not much difference in the two. In fairness all of the characters did seem to survive of a daily diet of fresh waffles (even the mermen).
The show has been on since 2003 in 5 minute segments, and given their previously limited time, it’s impressive they can develop a full feature that never sags once. 
Though many have referred to the film as stop-motion, it is actually a process called puppetoon, where instead of a single figure photographed and repositioned and photographed again, according to wiki,"…the puppets are rigid and static pieces; each is typically used in a single frame and then switched with a separate, near-duplicate puppet for the next frame. 
Thus puppetoon animation requires many separate figures. 
It is thus more analogous in a certain sense to cell animation than is traditional stop-motion: the characters are created from scratch for each frame…”. Though the effect is light, the production seems painstaking.
“A Town Called Panic” is delightful lo-fi animated film, that doesn’t aim to impart any kind of moral or lesson, but recreate “Looney Toons” like free range explosion built of escalating absurdity and stacking gags on top of gags in a Tower Of Babel to cartoon comedy heaven. 
It doesn’t quite reach these epic levels, but it’s a fun film that I could imagine watching episodically week to week, late on a foggy night or over breakfast cereal the day after (or breakfast cereal later that night).
Enjoyable for the uninitiated (like myself), and probably more of a treat for fans. At 75 minutes it’s a breezy watch, rewarding in easy cheer and quirky charm. 
Along with the more visually pleasurable “Ponyo” this is one of my favorite animated films of the year, and makes clear the point that there are still open avenues available to animators who want to work outside the CG universe.
At a time in Germany when everyone wanted to be the next Wim Wender's, Emmerich confesses he wanted to be the next Spielberg; "lil Spielberg" they called him. 
Though he has had many offers from his idol to work on his projects, Emmerich has turned them all down, because he prefers to work on his own projects, which he retains control over final cut, choice of actors, and even distribution date. 
I had always assumed Roland Emmerich was the name of some nameless committee of producer androids programmed with this year's latest demographic statistics and working in secret in some Hollywood bunker. 
In the end of times, all that will survive will be scripts for disaster movies and roaches. 
2012 is the story of the earth literally crumbling into itself and the continents, the crusts, and the oceans rearranging themselves shrugging of human and animal civilization like dust.
There are so many "Excuse me, Mr. President's" and "But that's a suicide mission's", the script might have been a mad lib, where the other actors invented their dialog around those two phrases. 
The president, one of his top adviser's, the first daughter, two lounge singers on a cruise ship, a failed science fiction writer, his family, their step father, a Russian billionaire, his kids, and his mistress, a Chinese monk, his family, and a geologist take us through the end of times. 
Emmerich does not focus on creating characters but "character moments" to insert between the action that allows the audience to identify with the most general stereotypes, and immerse themselves in the action; "it's more exciting that way." 
There is excitement to be had in 2012, owing the special effects teams who probably spent more time on the film than anyone else. 
I did enjoy watching Los Angeles collapse in on itself and be swallowed by the ocean, humming along to myself Youth Brigade's "Sink With California". 
But that was the first collapse, near miss, roller coaster/simulator theme park ride of escape, by the third time the same scene replays itself, it's not enough funny by virtue of it's audacity, but just tedious. 
John Cusak twice first in a limo, then in a camper, makes a leap over gaping chasms opening in the road beneath him. 
No less than three times, are he and his family, taking off in a plane while the ground disappears just behind them licking their heels. 
The ground also seems to wait if they have to run back and get something important they forgot.
Once "the end" begins, not a ten minutes goes by without some new unforeseen catastrophe, ratcheting up the tension, as the final countdown hurls forward faster and faster.
All of the characters have about 5 minutes in any given scene to escape from whatever they thought was at least 5 minutes away. 
The characters on the Cruise Ship seem completely useless, except for Emmerich to recreate a scene from one his favorite films "The Poseidon Adventure". 
"The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno" are two of his favorites films, and their influence is palpable in his oeuvre as a whole; a bunch of people caught in a crisis, and surrounded by huge budgets. 
Like Spielberg, when you strip away the science fiction event your left with a story of Cusak trying to win back his family, with his son who prefers his very useful stepfather (he's had a few flight lessons, but goes on to fly a commercial airliner to China) a plastic surgeon (because it's an easily identifiable Southern California job, all of LA is just actors and surgeons). 
Like "Independence Day", "The Day After Tomorrow", and every single Spielberg film besides "The Color Purple" and "The Terminal", the story shows us a wayward man/husband/father, fighting adversity to reclaim his role as head of the patriarchy. 
Though the step-dad seems nice enough, and is definitely handy, he is 
The president, who dies, likewise, becomes a Mufasa-like ghost-dad of the whole planet when the first daughter chimes in that "my father would have opened the gates" and the other members of the G8 solemnly nod. The same man who messianically and pointlessly sacrificed himself earlier, leaving the fate of the rest of humanity to his advisor who has "necessary evil" tattooed across his forehead is suddenly evoked as a higher power.
Then there's more "Poseidon Adventure", which resembles the classic camping trip gone wrong scenario of a a boat going over a waterfall, only Emmerich's water fall is on Mount Everest. 
Many of the scenes are smaller, are just simpler action sequences blown up to "epic" proportions. 
The constantly eroding ground is similar to many action/adventure films final moments after the big bad; demon/dragon/super-villain is defeated and his palace/fortress/cave comes crumbling down with only seconds for our heroes to escape, only Emmerich skips the bad guy and goes straight to the falling house. 
The film is a roller coaster ride, with many of the loops and twists we've ridden before, just faster and bigger (which is fun from time to time). 
There are no real character's just character moments. 
I personally don't think these "character moments" are as necessary as Emmerich and contemporary Michael Bay believes, just annoying gristle and fat, in the high calorie, low content, action beef they love to serve. 
Perhaps if they just supervised the special effects of episodes of "Life after People", and gave up on storytelling altogether they would find a better niche for their well oiled apocalypses. 
In the end, the effects are good and the movie bad; probably what you expected and a little less.
I enjoyed all the shinny things, but this don't hold a candle to Poseidon Adventure or other classic disasters. 
When you do the same sequences again and again, it's hard to be thrilled or exhilarated. 
Though I was in awe quite a few times. Maybe the end is nigh...
Directed By Albert Zugsmith
The only similarity this bears to Thomas De Quincy's "Confessions Of An English Opium Eater" is that both characters have the name Thomas De Quincy. 
The novel is an autobiography of the effects on opium on one man's life, while the film is a Vincent Price lead "Lady From Shanghai" like twisting film noir.
Price's De Quincy is a sailor, whose voice over is a Raymond Chandler meets De Quincy poetry, come to San Francisco after a long stay in "the orient", where he involves himself in the dubious world of human trafficking, particularly brides in China Town during the 1800's Tong Gang Wars. 
The film opens with a brutal scene involving screaming women thrown in a net like freshly caught tuna, and then a violent battle between two gangs on the beach as they try to deliver the kidnapped women to their fate. 
Albert Zugsmith produced classics like "The Incredible Shrinking Man", "Written On The Wind", and "Touch Of Evil", along with directing many exploitation flicks, which this film veers into from time to time. 
The film is more in the Siejun Suzuki brand of wildly inventive, free wheeling pulpy expressionism, than Ed Wood kitschy ineptness. 
Despite the title the only scene involving opium is when Price takes some in order to get close to the women trafficking ring, and has a particularly impressive Lynchian circa Elephant-Man era hallucination scene (which is worth price of admission alone). 
However the best scene comes when Price wakes up surrounded by guards and has to make a slow motion (cus he's high on opium) dash out of the den, and to the rooftops of china town. 
The scene is also completely silent, and trully marvelous in it's execution. 
I know slow motion action sequences where Greogiran chanting plays over sweat glistened A-listers shooting each other in mid air are common place now, but in Zugsmith's hands your reminded of excting an action sequence can be when it's done right. 
The plot is not particularly strong. Why De Quincy is saving the girl, or what he is doing in China town at all, has many twists and turns, and leaves some gaps to be filled? But the direction, the suspense, and especially Price's performance make lines that would sound preposterous and almost Terrance Malick like in their stream of consciousness like "You wear as many masks as their are stars reflected in a gutter", sound as if he says them everyday.
Such are the gifts of Price.
I was very pleased with this movie, that can be found easily on Youtube, though you might want to get a good copy to take in the fullness of Zugsmith's frames.
There is a dreaminess and nightmarishness to all of the scenes, like opium was poured over a script to a lesser film, and this movie stumbled out of a smoke ridden room, rambling of dancing girls emerging from cages, crashes through windows, being swept to sea from sewer drains, and teetering on the edge of rooftops with vertigo at a snails pace, and feeling "the abbacus of fate has your number". 
Good times.
"Were there socialists...I don't remember?"-Witness
A beguiling mix of contradictions; real life testimonies and Hollywood melodramatic recreation. 
Turning early 20th century romantic notions of the radical citizen journalist into modern romantic notions of bourgeoisie relationship drama. 
The tension between "the authentic revolutionary spirit" and American middle class adventurism runs pronounced through the characters, their marriage, and the structure of the film itself, where real life "witnesses" to the events chime in every half hour or so to complicate things with their messy memories, anecdotes, and opinions.
Beatty opts for the most conventional versions of events, and some history get's lost completely. 
You would have no idea watching this that Louise Bryant was known for her "feminist" writings as well as her Journalism, or that both her and Jack Reed had numerous love affairs more proponents of "free love" than the film gives them credit for (in the movie they are constantly struggling with monogamy). 
As Oniel says "...for a radical you've got some very middle class dreams".
One witness attests, "rumor was the two of the them and Eugene O'Niel had a menage à trois", but I imagine it's easier for 1981 (Cold War audience) to take a romantic triangle. When given the option between the truth and the legend, go with the test audience.
Also to allude to Reed's death Beatty cut's to a Russian woman praying, hardly the image that would encapsulate a die in the wool Socialist, but one which would resonate easily with an American audience.
The performances are a joy to watch though, Keaton and Beatty and then Nicholson's verbal sparring is invigorating. 
The only other Beatty film Ive ever seen is his 90's comedy "Bullworth", also about a "political radical" if a fictionalized and intentionally zany one. 
Though the romance is Hollywood incarnate, as Slavoj Zizek points out, it was just as common for soviet films under Stalin to make their own versions of epic Hollywood romances (often with Iron Joe himself stepping into give his blessing on a marriage or a romantic dispute; Stalin as sex symbol).
The irony of the montage of the lovers in Russia during the Revolution where "The Internationale" plays in the background, is one I have to imagine Beatty is aware of.
The camera focuses in on two individuals, marching, having sex, frolicking, and marching some more, in a song about collective resistance and worker's solidarity. 
Rather like a commercial extolling individuality, freedom, and creativity featuring sexy teens dancing and smiling, only to end as an add for Mayonnaise. 
Also the pronounced difference between the collegiate fun of pre-revolutionary life and the great party of the revolution itself, is opposite the hangover and disillusionment, romantic separation, illness and despair of the beginnings of the Soviet government proper.
So for all it's slant why is the film so worth watching? 
Despite it's problems it's works excellently as a love story which revolves around romantic intellectualism; one of passion, sex, contradictions, and debate.
Beatty's awareness of his historical limitations, makes a post modern game of them, as the initially random comments of the "witnesses" begin to comment on the events of the film later.
The heart of the movie is the story of the couple negotiating career and a sense of place in history, with their private passions and personal feelings, "We were too embarrassed to tell anyone we got married...". 
Regardless of Henry Miller and Eugene O'Niel's reproaches, there is sincerity and dedication in the characters to their belief's and ideals, that is rarely found in Hollywood films and much of modern life. 
We become a part of the character's passions both personal and political, without being asked to suspend our sense of history or doubts as to the efficacy of their projects.
One of the most thoughtful gifts Ive ever received was an Emma Goldman (who I was once intensely fascinated with) button from a girlfriend, reading her popular maxim "If I can't dance I don't want to be a part of your revolution!" which Goldman is claimed to have said to a young socialist who reproached her for enjoying an American dance hall (and it's "decadent" pop music).
What was the point of revolution without sex, music, and joy? Most people who noticed it (usually after a few drinks) assumed I was very pro-
Buttons always eventually fall off anyway, and it became one I didn't want to loose or even share. 
It's value as a sentimental romantic keep-sake came to outweigh the political message I had initially been more attracted to.
The point is love and politics is tricky business and also that I got excited when Emma Goldman was on screen in this movie (hopefully she can one day get a bio-pic of her own).
"Reds" at three hours was never boring, often beautiful, fascinating, and frustrating in the same scene. 
This is the Jack Reed story first and foremost, it ends with his death and we have no idea what happens to Bryant afterward (another of the films foibles), but still I had a wonderful time watching this, struggling through it's strange brew of emotions, intellect, flat out lies, and legends.
Semen stains the mountain tops
Cars careening from the clouds
She moves herself about her fist
Semen stains the mountain tops
In reversal of Ming Liang Tsai's "Wayward Cloud" where a city was caught in a debilitating drought, now the rain will just not stop falling. 
To make matters worse a strange disease is infecting the city which causes those afflicted to seek dark, moist corners, crawl around on all fours and show aversion to sunlight (basically they take on cock roach behavior; a Gregor Samsa stress disorder). 
The city has been evacuated aside from a few who can't/won't leave, but the water is soon to be cut off (water plays a vital role in WC as well). 
A slow, minimalist, and largely silent deadpan comedy of alienation ensues. 
The dilapidated apartments and ruined hallways double as the sights of garish musical numbers of Taiwanese pop songs from the 60's (though not as garish and stylized as those in The Wayward Cloud). 
The post-apocalyptic setting of the film is ironic counter part to the oneiric romance silently occurring between the two neighbors. 
The structure of the film flows back and forth between images of the banal daily activities of the "survivors" left in their apartments waiting to turn into insects, and the bright romantic songs that affirm life, love, and naivete amidst disaster. 
The Wayward Cloud had three types of scenes, adding in sex and meta-porn which is absent from "The Hole". 
Ming Liang Tsai was asked to make a film about the end of the millennium, and this is what he produced. 
A dryly funny, surreal, spared down, romance in a form that only he could make.
Anyone who claims modern cinema is dead, has not been watching enough movies from Taiwan.
The final scene is one of the most hopeful and poetic in recent film history illustrating human contact as the only remedy against 21st century blues; a helping hand to those in darkness.
There are some interesting points here and there, chief among them that nothing really happens for the first hour, but even after things "kick off'" it's so underwhelming, that any suspsense, tension, or mood becomes mute. 
The "satanic ritual" sequence featuring a poor man's Golum, was too short, to be shocking or horrifying.
"The House Of The Devil" knows how to create it's 80s authenticity well without sacrificing its own brand of blink and you'll miss it subtle creepiness, and uses its actors Tom Noonan (Caden's shadow self from SY New York), and prototypical "final girl" Joceline Donahue to about as good effect as could be expected of them, but all this does not a good movie make. 
The film feels commanding in it's slow Roman Polanski build up, recalling "Rosemary's Baby" and "Repulsion", (not to mention a slew of 80's slasher flicks) but once director Ti West get's to the point, it's already grown tedious and uninspired. 
His next two films are both sequels "Cabin Fever 2" and "A Haunting In Georgia" (in case Conneticut isnt scary enough), for further evidence of his repetitive middle of the road style (the credits are even the same font and color Tarantino uses). 
Ritual satanic abuse was only scary in "Session 9" and then only because it was on audio tape and not shown and functioned as a Mcguffin, not the heart of the action. 
The best thing about this film is the poster art; it's probably some of the best movie art of the decade. 
Though it aims to be the first well executed post-Grindhouse, Grindhouse movie, it doesn't have the love, creativity, or audacity of Tarantino/Rodriguez project. It might have made a good trailer to go in between those better films. 
If you love suspense, this may be the movie for you, but if you except that suspense to amount to something worthy of being afraid of, this is nothing to rush out for. 
"The House Of The Devil" is ultimately not that exciting of a place, I'd rather spend "A Weekend At Bernies". 
Directed By Spike Jonze
When looking at Children's literature it's important to realize three things; one you can as an adult look at and for metaphorical and thematic content, two that you must understand that even if you find these things the story is not intended for adult understanding, three kids are not as dumb/innocent as we make them out to be (
This is a task so difficult for some that Children's stories must be relegated to either a trivial entertainment or a didactic lesson, and though many a classic bedtime tale or storybook might contain both, it's no greater a criticism than could be lodged at any other form of narrative. 
I've been trying to fathom the responses surrounding
Sendak's original book is only ten sentences long, and in what I can only imagine is an attempt at clever homage, those who don't like the film, can't be bothered to write more than 10 sentences venting their disappointment.
I was impressed with novelist 
In place of an enemy, we get a story of a boy put in the place of being an adult and coming to realize the grass is not always greener on the other side. King for a day, until the sun dies.
Max is a rambunctious child who is not given the standard psychological treatment/excuse of wicked mother, intrusive step-dads, or new town, new life, etc. He's a hyper-active, easily excitable kid who wants attention and is willing to throw whatever tantrums he needs to get it..jpg)
He then runs out of the house and into a park and finds himself alone a small sail boat in a stormy sea. The imagery here is Jones and Eggers design and poetically pits the small vessel in the tumult he can't control; life itself and getting older. 
Max doesn't have a wardrobe or a 
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If the characters don't always make sense, perhaps that's because childhood and being a child doesn't always make sense. I certainly don't remember why I felt so strongly about climbing on everything that was climbable, it just made sense at the time. 
Carol is jealous and selfish and so is Max, neither is able to comprehend fully why, but they are old enough to eventually recognize a difference between not wanting people to be mad at them, and not wanting to hurt anyone else. .jpg)
The Kid (the goat man of the group) is also poetically the one no one listens too and ends up pegged multiple times during a simple game, picked on to the point that he quits. It was funny when for Carol and Max to peg the Kid, but not so funny when KW steps on Carol's
Though rare it's nice when mainstream films can escape being made engineered for the 15 to 25 year old males (like me) who dominate the cinematic market; any flight of fantasy that dodges the all too convenient cynicism and good versus evil binary, with wit, grace, loveliness is always a welcome change of pace, and for myself, and I 
If the movie ends with whimper and not a joyous bang, perhaps it has a right too. Real life past your bed time is no place for "uplifting" bells and whistles (which dozens of Disney films have crammed down our throats so long we can't process anything else) but for small gestures of kindness, smiles of recognition, and an intimate family bond which doesn't require exposition..jpg)
Does Max have to announce the lesson he learns, for us to understand he learned one? Have we become so dense and bloated with instant gratification, that anything not shouted from the mountaintops ceases to exist?
Compared to other films of it's genre, what is there to complain about? And how dumb do we think kids today really are? Maurice Sendak who enjoys the film, said his book and the trilogy around it, "
He learns that the world can and will change in strange, sad, and frightening ways but with people you love, even if you can't keep them piled around you as insulation at all times, is still worth exploring. 
In other words maybe we can all learn to play nice.
It begins with a couple kissing.
Next we see a women approach a truck at the side of the road, next we see a man in a field discovering a mutilated corpse and then a women nearby covered in blood. 
The man walks up to the women and embraces her, and we realize they are the couple from the first scene, they are played by 
Next we see 
Something is wrong with Gallo though and I don't just mean his awkward performance which after all are keeping with his character, if still distracting. 
Over the course of an hour and half we are slowly told through odd flashbacks, conversations without undisclosed individuals about unexplained research into mysterious subjects.
Gallo is on his honeymoon with Vessey, but they don't seem to be doing very much besides caressing each other in bed, between episodes of Gallo searching the city trying to track down Descas and Dalle who he worked with years before. 
Descas is a doctor and young genius who wrote a paper that gave him fame and simultaneously put him at odds with the mainstream scientific community. 
The clinic Descas was working at worked in brain chemistry, mental defect, and problems with libido and we see similar chemistry sets set up in his basement. 
Above the basement Dalle is kept locked in her room during the day, but keeps escaping, sometimes by breaking through the door itself. 
The strings to this mystery tie together in what I can only describe as artfully and obscurely set up of sex vampires
A bizarre condition that makes it's victims almost irresistible to the opposite sex, incredibly aroused, and toward the point of climax inhumanly strong and cannibalistic. 
They literally and rapturously eat their partners alive. 
It's a slow simmering horror film, that sadly drags out a bit too long it's obvious conclusion, and omits too many details to be anything but puzzling. 
How does the fire start, who is the women Gallo speaks to in the lab, and why are the neighbor boys obsessed with breaking into Descas' house, why does Vessey never ask her husband directly about their lack of sex during their Honeymoon though it obviously bothers her, are all questions that go unanswered.
They not exactly central plot points though and it could argued we know exactly what we need to, no more, no less. 
There are many beautiful sequences and Denis editing provides much of the mystery. 
In one self-referential moment of (
The relationships between the two couples also refract each other at times, in both one person is diseased, while in Gallo's he distances himself from his wife to preserve her innocence (getting her a puppy), Descas cleans up after his wife's murderous rampages and hides her away. 
There is also a hotel maid who resembles Dalle, and is attracted to Gallo who is mutually fascinated with her. 
The film leers after her in several prolonged scenes closing up on her neck and nudity turning the POV to Gallo's desires. 
The soundtrack by 
The music also inspired scenes in the film as Claire Denis discusses in an interview "You know, in Trouble Every Day there is this scene where Vincent Gallo is looking at his wife taking a bath, and you can see pubic hair moving in the water. 
That's one of Stuart's (of The Tindersticks) songs. On his second CD there is a song called "Sea Weeds" and the story is just that. I truly wrote the scene because of that song." 
The actual death/sex scenes are genuinely horrific and go along way especially in our modern days of the vegetarian/decaffeinated vampires of 
Denis' creatures whether deranged or inhuman still at least have their teeth intact, and all the gore and pain that comes with it. 
I wasn't ever bored, but in a few scenes a little annoyed and confused. An above average horror film, full of the mystique and atmosphere of 
Similar themes of repression, rage outgrown from sexual frustration, and "the beast within", but handled better (
All and all the most enduring thing about the film is that it's earned 
A good Halloween film, if enjoy puzzles, atmosphere, and mad scientist or vampire horror flicks.
Directed By Lars Von Trier
Almost everything that can be said about Anti-Christ has been said by Karl Leschinsky at Movies Are My Religion, in a blow by cringe inducing blow of each chapter of the film, and the voluminous critical responses as well the opinions of the actors and director. 
Otherwise to begin at the beginning we observe a couple have slow motion sex in black and white (a scene which violates every Dogma 95 rule in one fowl swoop), in the shower, in the bed, from the wall to the windows. 
It’s from such a window their newborn falls out of like the apple from the Tree of Knowledge mentioned in the Book Of Genesis.
Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play said couple, though the genitals on display during this scene are porn actors from Von Trier’s old defunct porn production company. Gainsbourg is so depressed after the death of their son she has to be hospitalized. 
Dafoe is a therapist who believes the younger psychiatrist assisting his wife is inexperienced, and since certainly no one knows his wife better than he does, he should handle her treatment. 
Though it’s widely said that you should never psycho-analyze anyone your intimate with, well Dafoe knows best. 
These early scenes are shot in an inky blackness, where most of the screen and reality itself is obscured by shadows in their apartment. 
They are in darkness as soon as the “healing” begins, and once they come out into the light of day things get worse. 
Gainsbourg wants sex to feel anything besides the nothingness of her depression, but Dafoe plays hard to get because as he says and later conveniently forgets “you shouldn’t have sex with your therapist”. 
They decide to take the healing process to the next level, when Gainsbourg confesses to being terrified of the forest she vacationed in with their son the summer before Dafoe decides it’s the perfect place for a picnic. 
On the way to the woods, after dumping her medication in the toilet, he gives her a post-hypnotic suggestion, that she should become “one with the green” she was afraid of, an act which seals both their fates.
Though it’s implied later that she may have been disintegrating mentally well before her son’s death, for my money, it’s the moment on the train that most firmly roots her in madness, asking her to identify with what she considers absolute evil, pain, and torment. 
What follows is more “therapy” were blades of grass become like a psychological iron maiden, the falling leaves turn to symbols of all encompassing death and decay, and that’s not to mention the half aborted deer, undying crows, and the now legendary talking foxes. 
Lars Von Trier said he watched and enjoyed “The Ring” and “Saw” before attempting to make his own modern horror film. The inky surrealism in “The Ring” and the “torture-porn” of “Saw” are both major influences for what follows. 
Von Trier’s signature theme of an idealist undone by his own hubris also remains intact and perhaps what is most horrifying about the films is that Defoe really is only trying to help.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. 
The title itself is a play on words of an earlier Dafoe film “The Last Temptation Of Christ” were he played another guy who was just trying to help. 
Von Trier initially wanted to make a movie where in the end we would learn the Devil not God had created the Earth, but a producer spilled the beans early so VT had to go back to the drawing board, and decided to present us with this allegory for the psycho-analytic process, mixing in his interest in Catholicism with his much disclosed “fear of women” and “fear of everything except cinema”. 
The director also admits he identifies personally with Gainsbourg more than Dafoe, but this and many other reviews not withstanding, I don’t think the film is as anti-psychology as we’ve been told. 
After a particularly symbolic dream Dafoe tells his wife about, she responds “but I thought dreams had no significance to modern psychology. Freud is dead remember?” What follows is ironically some Freudian castration and very literal battle of the sexes. 
The imagery is muddled but it’s apparent that Dafoe is ultimately “to blame” for the episodes at Eden. However, what went on there the summer before, where Gainsborug was hearing the voice of a mysterious child, tied her sons shoes on backwards (to the point of deformity), and started a collage of female torture and mutilation, points to far deeper problems than Defoe can be held accountable for.
There's just something about Charlotte.
Jim Emerson (who is not a fan of the film) argues a major flaw in the film is the sound, that when Gainsbourg hears this strange voice it’s too prominent in the sound mix when it should be like a whisper barely audible from somewhere far off. 
I feel the sound so close because it is not coming from far off or from outside, but coming from within the character, so obnoxiously loud it couldn’t be from anywhere else. 
Some people believe there is nothing at all intentionally comical in the film, but am I the only one who picked on Defoe’s particular tortured predicament; “the old ball and chain?” 
Not to mention the undying crow, who squawks louder the more you more punish it.
The crow is a good metaphor for repression; buried underground, and the more you try to smother it the louder it gets. 
Nonetheless any time a man is fighting an animal, especially one far smaller than himself, you can expect chuckles. 
It’s one of the unwavering laws of the comedy universe examplified in Monty Python And The Holy Grail’s “Rabbit of Caerbannog”. 
“Look at the bones man! Look at he bones!”
Its very easy to call a film misogynistic when it does most of the work for you, having the character titled in the credits as "She" writing a book called “Gynocide” about the oppression of women over the centuries (the burning of witches, dowry death, honor killings, murder by husband etc.), who comes to believe women are evil because nature is evil and women are nature (“become the green"), and subsequently mutilates her own vagina. 
The movie is about the fear of women and the symbolic transference of women as symbols of nature, the unfathomable unconscious, and the irrational "creative" impulse, taken to a caricatured extreme. 
It explicitly shines a light at itself and the gender pre-occupations that many other films treat as the "natural" way of things.
All this after her husband treats as her a hysterical prop in his greatest moment of therapeutic accomplishment. 
He deals with his grief by attempting to smother out his wife’s grief; controlling her emotions is controlling his own, and naturally he can't. 
There has not been a psychological horror film of this caliber (at least not in America) since Stanley Kubrik’s “The Shinning”. Like Kubrik’s film Anti-Chirst flirts with the supernatural, but uses it mainly to unmask a crumbling patriarchy. 
Also like Kubrik’s film the non-sequiturs are most haunting; a talking fox in the bush is worth two mangled labia’s in the hand. 
Anti-Christ is not Von Trier’s best film, nor is it my favorite work of his, or my favorite horror film even of the decade. It’s a very good horror film though, one of the most interesting I’ve seen in years, but over-hyped to say the least.
Another of it’s seeming non-sequiturs is the film being dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky. Though Von Trier doesn’t mimic Tarkovsky directly his trademarks of a stylistically daring, spiritually fascinated, and personal cinema is evident in the film as well as most his work thus far so it's more fair than the enfant terrible middle finger to the "high art" film establishment as it's been claimed.
A startling visually captivating and intensely performed film worth seeing, arguing about, and quoting (why "chaos reigns" may end up being this years "Hot"), yet neither the masterpiece nor the abomination is it is bieng built up to be. 
On my way to watching the film I crossed a dead cat in the center of the sidewalk, not to off to the side but in the walkway, and not a fresh corpse either, but with exposed organs and bone and teeming with insect life. 
I wondered how long it must have been there (it had to have been days if not weeks) and why no one had bothered to at least move it to the side of the path. It was a good omen of the experiences to follow, as well as central image for what watching the film was like. 
Anti-Christ does not show the devil creating the world, instead it shows people making a Hell of each other lives. 
A Hell I imagine for the director and many others is much more horrifying prospect than anything the devil could dream up.
Directed By Kore-eda Hirokazu 
What is the happiest moment of your life? If you had to pick one moment, one memory to keep with you and the rest were going to be erased what would it be? This is the central question of Afterlife a film about life, memory, happiness, movie making, and only in tangent, death.
A group of dead people arrive at a dilapidated building where they are told to select a single memory that they will dwell in for all eternity. Heaven as it turns out is only a memory. 
The film is mostly these people talking directly into the camera documentary style reflecting on what was most important to them. I recently told a friend about this movie, who told me it sounded “corny”, and if the film had only been about these people I, might agree. 
I told my friend that I liked the film because while watching it I reflected on my entire life, and what happiness had meant to me during it. I was almost shocked and a little saddened by how quickly I came to realize what my moment was, like the movie as a whole it leaves a bittersweet taste. 
My friend told me they didn’t think about their life that way, and that it would be too depressing to do so. I told her that someone in the movie says that too, and what made the movie as a whole so good and not just a clever concept was how honest it was about the complications between notions of a meaningful life, nostalgia, and personal happiness. 
The dead have a half a week to choose which memory they want and the rest of the week is spent filming the memories in a sound studio. The screening at the end of the week is to be their moment of “ascension”. Though silent at first the “counselors” shooting these memory-movies are not separate from the process, they too are dead. Takashi and his trainee Shiori we see handle most of the cases. 
It becomes clear that Shiori is infatuated with Takashi, but in a bureaucratic purgatory with dozens of films to make what time is there for love? And what would love possibly entail in such a place. 
Takashi is only concerned with his duties as counselor and helping people to clearly define their eternity.
Everyone is ostensibly dead, but otherwise they are completely normal; eating, bathing, shaving, feeling warm, cold, anxious, and uncertain. Afterlife despite its title is not a film about death, but about memory and self-reflection. 
Two characters become problematic early on, one an old man who says he cant remember his life clearly enough to choose a specific moment, and the other a young man who refuses to chose a moment, insisting it would be “avoiding responsibility for his life” and a surrender to empty nostalgia. 
Takashi becomes interested in the old man’s case (for personal reasons we discover later), and has the man’s life sent to him on videotape so that he may observe and report, in a quieter variation on Albert Brook’s “Defending Your Life” (a conceptual cousin to Afterlife). 
I’ve never really been interested in seeing the greatest films ever made. I like to tell myself that one day I will get around to seeing all of the classics, but at the moment what makes me love cinema are viewing moments that do not just impress me for technical reasons, but that connect to me personally. 
Sometimes these connections are tangible and explainable with experiences that mirror my own, but with others they are intangible where I glimpse things I could never fully express but feel deeply as if I’ve known them forever. I think this is why many people watch films, at times to identify and at others to connect with what is unidentifiable.
Afterlife is about producing films that capture only a single moment and that only have meaning to single person; films that will only be screened once, but will be remembered literally forever. They are so personal as to be inconsequential to anyone but their intended viewer, but I couldn’t think of a more meaningful type of film to make both for an audience and their creators.
Russian silent film director Aleksandr Medvedkin used to travel the USSR on a train stopping at random villages and asking the people what their problems, issues, and concerns were and then asked for their assistance in making a film about just that. Doing this Medvedkin wanted to give cinema to the masses. The world of Afterlife likewise gives cinema to the individual.
Visually I’ve heard the film compared to Yasijiru Ozu, and since most of the film consists of static shots, I can understand the comparison, but I haven’t seen enough of his work to comment one way or the other. I can say it is simple, sparse, documentary like, and non-obtrusive. 
Its style is intimate, serene, and quiet, in opposition to the romantic comic zaniness of Brook’s “Defending Your Life”; which I also enjoyed, for vastly different reasons. It would have been understandable if this film was absorbed by the fantasy it springs from, but it remains so rooted in the interactions of its characters and the nuanced performances of its actors, that it feels effortlessly natural.
There are sprinklings of melodrama in the film towards the end, but they allow the characters to actually reach important conclusions that the film wouldn’t have been able to connect together otherwise. Even if you can’t remember your own moment, isn’t it possible that you are an extra or a main character in someone else’s? 
I dont mean anything as dramatic as some old flame pining over you, but maybe a moment spent with a friend or a family member. Maybe your parent’s happiest moment was when you were born. It’s only from an imaginary position like an Afterlife that we have the distance to reflect on such grand feelings intimately and sincerely.
Since were not dead, this question can be written off as sophomoric or corny, our best days may in fact still be ahead. But I wonder if without some prior sense of what is truly beautiful, meaningful, and warm fuzziness incarnate whether we can know true bliss when we finally see it.
This is assuming it’s something you can even know when you see it, and not something that only occurs with memory. I was once told in a Sunday Sermon, happiness is predicated on happenings and events, but joy was something internal that had little relation to the outside world. Personally I think real happiness is created when memories generate joy that later events cannot soil or touch.
In one scene Shiori speaks to a young girl who chose Disneyland and a ride on Splash Mountain as her moment, and tells her she is the 40th person to pick that same episode. Later the young girl reconsiders and chooses a moment with her mother doing laundry; a less exciting event, and not one that would come to mind quickly, but one closer to heart. 
Ultimately Afterlife is a beatific trip down memory lane that asks us questions that most people spend their lives asking themselves; am I happy, am I satisfied, and what are perfection, peace, and bliss? It handles these questions with minimal pretenses, conversationally and without judgment and reminds me of why I watch movies, and why I like sharing the things I love with others. 
At the end I just wanted to give this film a big hug. I can’t think of any flaws in this or anything I wanted to see but didn’t. Nor anything I felt was out of place, distracting, or insincere. 
The only objections I could reasonably see are often spoken by the characters themselves, particularly the young man, who thinks the entire system is flawed; what do they do if a baby dies for instance? My own moment (and no I will not tell you nor anyone else) was actually quite “corny”, in fact it was the first time in my life I realized why a certain kind of sentimentality existed. 
This movie is sentimental for sure, but it’s definitely sincere. 
If we get lucky in this universe and there is an Afterlife, we would all be very fortunate to find ourselves in movie theaters like these with kind hearted counselors to help us grieve for and accept our lives, and if there isn’t well at least there’s still movies like Afterlife; things worth seeing, things worth talking about, and things worth sharing with each other. 
Directed By Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine, and Shinichiro Miki 
I hear the phrase “weirdest movie I’
After all what is strange to one, may become dull as dishwater to another. 
Few times have I understood or cared to understand what I was watching less than during Funky Forest: The First Contact. 
I looked into this movie after having had my heart warmed by The Taste of Tea, and its blend of the quirky and surreal images with saccharine sentimentality. 
Funky Forest has no sentiments, it is a series of free associative episodes, the flow like the sketches in Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different, and only where the Pythons were compiling a best of FF is creating a TV show from another universe far beyond ours. 
Some of the episodes are deadpan and some just awkward, a few last only a matter of seconds while others seem like repeat characters you would find on 
Then there’s the equally dull if less annoying “Unpopular With Women Brothers” also known as Guitar Brother, where a man with long hair sings to a fat little white boy of around 10 (referred to as his brother) and asks him what he thinks to which he’s usually insulted. 
The film does pick up at about the 35 minute mark when we are introduced all too briefly to The Babbling Health Spa Vixens, three women at a health spa discussing topics like UFO’s and shy men, giggling, and enjoying a hot tub. 
The other highlights include two teenage platonic friends fantasizing of each other in elaborate dream sequences that combine some of the strangest electronic sound collage music to ever be emitted from a car covered in seaweed on a beach by alien children with some dance numbers that brought the theatricality of 
The film is divided into an A side and a B side, with a three minute intermission and later a ten second intermission dividing them like a mix tape you might play in your own sea weed car. 
Side B is much stronger than side A because it introduced “Homeroom” (perhaps my favorite segment), as well as several more involving alien creatures straight off the set from some David 
Alien creatures used as musical props, used as training in some kind of lactating tennis game, or to generate miniature parasitical blood sucking men for purposes the rational mind was not meant to fathom.
I could tell you why but as we see in one scene when a young girl meets a man in a furry yellow suit with a long tail protruding from his crotch, it would take 3 hours and 10 minutes to fully explain what was going on, and even then we might still be lost. 
Broken into pieces I could see this film scattered across some kind of “Adult Swim” like Japanese late night show, or making the viral rounds as artful YouTube clips. 
Altogether as one entity it’s a chimera of sketches half-clever, half-hilarious, half-repulsive, half-dull, and half-refreshing. 
I know that’s 5 half’s but a film like Funky Forrest, can pull a five 
Frustrating but ultimately worthwhile viewing (if your in the right mood), this might have made it into my immediate favorites if not for the lackluster gags in “The Mole Brothers” and “Guitar Brother’s” segments. 
Intergalactic Girl DJ Group of the Dream-world known as “The Volume” were almost enough to save the poorer parts, as they collectively hold the power over all sounds of living beings, sounds of nature, and sounds of human technology, and use them to lay down what else, but a funky beat in the forest. 
Similar to vignette driven films by Roy Anderson and Luis Bunuel, Funky Forest distinguishes itself from being neither lyrical and poetic as the former nor as 
The fault still remains here, in the fragmented and emotionally vacant episodes (with the exception of the first dance number which is as close to sentiment and logic as the film is willing to flirt with). 
Directed by 
If you like strange sci-
Funky Forrest is like watching a late night surrealist (completely illogical) Japanese variety made in a future when aliens (
Roland Emmerich could do a “They Short Horses Don’t They?” remake where she has to keep dancing or else the world explodes, and every time she takes a water break, another continent can sink into the ocean, he could even purchase the name from Richard 
Such is the allure of the only S & M that interests me on screen today, which at one point does involves some bondage, but I swear it’s the most purely romantic, almost metaphysical, bondage ever. 
Aside from my obvious personal gushing, I have no problem calling Code 46 one the best science fiction of the films of the decade. 
The only other contenders whose quality comes close to it are Alfonso 
Like those two though, it 
We never get too much back-story about what kind of specific kind of 
The planet seems to be sectioned into two kinds of area and two kinds of people; those who have health insurance and those who don’t. This insurance is often just called, “Coverage” (don’t leave home without it). The Code 46 itself, we are told in the opening credits, is a law which forbids genetically similar couples from reproducing.
“The relations of one are the relations of all” the titles say, and the first rule of genetics after all is to spread the genes around to increase variation. Reproducing with more genetically similar people increases the chance of preserving the same “bad” genes, inherited diseases, deficiencies, etc. 
Apparently, these genetic quirks are enough not only to be deemed 
There is an “Outside” largely in the Middle East, where these new laws are not applicable, and the corporations less sway. Language has now become a more pronounced multi-lingual affair than it is today, where all citizens speak a Pidgin dialect of mostly English but also Spanish, French, Arabic, Italian, Farsi and Mandarin.
This new language is an especially clever creation, in relation to the post-modern melancholy of films like Babel (which I liked) and 
Many sci-
Its essentially a tale of romance gone sour, told in a world less futuristic than it is “more modern”, a soft sci-
Robbins is on an “empathy virus” which allows him to “feel” what others around him are thinking provided they tell him something about themselves first. This makes him an excellent agent for sniffing out moles and corporate smugglers. 
His interrogations are at turns banal, fascinating and in one of my favorite moments in the film both hilarious and personally edifying, where after a day of these discussions, Robbins asks a woman to tell him something interesting and she confesses a sexual fetish for people with freckles. 
She wonders why there is pornography dedicated to women’s breasts and their legs, even feet, but none dedicated to freckles. Woman: There is no freckles pornography. William: Well, there is "Anne of Green Gables". Woman: I consider "Anne of Green Gables" to be an erotic masterpiece.
Then Robbins meets Samantha Morton, and he is instantly smitten. So smitten in fact even though he knows she is the counter-fitter he blames someone else, to let her off the hook, and then follows her after work. 
She notices him and the two go out for a drink, where she tells him openly how and why she is stealing, even meeting her client, a naturalist who wants to go to New Delhi to study bats, in front of him. Robbins is more than a little uncomfortable being this close to the very criminal world he was sent to uncover, but is too allured by Morton to leave. 
They have perhaps the sexiest club scene I have ever seen recorded, set to 
Long story short, they have an affair and the next day Robbins returns home to his wife and son in America. When he goes back to work the next day, he is told that the leak he was sent to plug still exists. A naturalist was found dead in New Delhi dead because he was especially susceptible to a rare disease the citizens of the city have grown immunity too; a particularly slow and painful death. Robbins is told he has to return to China. 
Though he excuses his lapse in conduct, as the result of the empathy virus malfunctioning. He can’t get a hold of Morton on the phone either, who seems to have disappeared.
Some people have complained that we are not told enough about the “laws of the universe” at the beginning of the film, and that the plot just interjects a 
Personally I think the omission of these details makes the film much closer to real life experience, where technology is ever present and very much deterministic of how we live our lives, but largely not discussed and taken for granted. 
The nickname given to a character in a sci-
By the third act, the film does become an almost direct allegory of Oedipus (the corporation Robbins and Morton work for is called “Sphinx”), but to return to the global village idea for a moment, in village life where communities are smaller, arranged marriages make more sense than in urban life. 
If most of the people in the village can easily become cousins, a third party (a village elder with some memory of the family trees that comprise the ancestral forest) might become necessary to assist in ensuring the genes get spread, so the “health” and prosperity of the village may continue. 
Many cultures ancient and modern consider birth defects as evidence of some kind of curse. “Changelings” were creatures who fairies would place in a crib after they stole a baby, and are now considered a way of explaining children born deformed or mentally abnormal, “That’s not my real baby, it’s some monster they replaced him with, etc.” 
There are variations of the myth throughout Europe, West Africa, and the Philippines. The fear of the imperfect or genetically impure child appears in other soft sci-
:::
Perhaps this split between the quirky Wong 
Emotions are abstract things, and what to me feels right might to another smack of bullshit, which is why I try to refrain (sometimes) from talking about how movies “feel”, but forgetting for a second the implication that Robbins is looking for a mother/savior surrogate to save him from his humdrum dystopian life like Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”.
The movie is about a couple who have a one night stand, resulting in unexpected sexual consequences (something besides incest, a subject more ticklish in fact, and much closer to real life) who take a romantic risk to have one moment together in impossible and doomed-from-the start conditions. Why doesn’t Robbin’s stop her from using the phone, for example?
Code 46 is about a relationship that defies laws, languages, and borders both genetic and national. Where “Babel” saw separation, Code 46 sees the potential for new tangential encounters, even in an over-regulated world where everything is kept in it’s place and monitored (many times the camera becomes Big Brother POV of leering security cameras).
It’s also interesting that Robbin’s has an “empathy virus”, an implication at least semantically, that sensitivity to the feelings of other human beings is a disease. After Robbins is captured he is absolved of any guilt on the basis that his empathy was out of wack and clouding his judgment.
One question the film asks is whether love is only a pre-determined biological response, a disease of hyper-sensetive empathy, a Fruedian orroboros, a hypnotic suggestion, fate, memory, or chance? It's short of answers, as the psychic rugs are constantly pulled out from under the lovers. Memories are stored, erased, and reformed throughout the film with a shocking casualness (which lesser films would build an entire plot around).
If memories can be manipulated by government/corporate groups, it would be a dystopia more horrifying than anything in Orwell. You can’t commit crime if you can’t remember what you did. Transgressions or rebellion would simply be deleated. More interesting still, remembering is used as a form of punishment to those who would rather forget. A fate in some ways an even crueler than mandatory forgetfullness.
Basically the small details of Code 46 could amount to entire film franchises (ex: the people of Shanghais only come out at night, because of implied ozone problems), but thankfully that’s not what Winterbottom is interested in. It’s a simple story about a complex world, both strange and sincere, and strange again.
As a modern rendition of an ancient Greek classic, updated with much of “Until The End Of The World’s” romantic globe spanning cyberpunk ambitions, and what Duncan Jone’s called the “I-pod chic” of Steven Soderberg’s “Solaris”, Code 46 is full of the kind of surprises, ideas, sounds, styles, and images I go the movies for. 
Sad to think I ignored this when it was first released as it could have only been improved on the big screen. I never thought any film could end with a Coldplay song and evoke anything in me but utter contempt, but God help me I was moved, and Morton wasn’t even dancing at the time.
Roger Ebert is one of the only professional film critics I read regularly, so this was quite an ego boost, for me and my project here. I do use allot of stills, it does take a lot of time, and I do try to match each picture with each sentence or body of words that 
I try to use the blog medium as just that a blog; full of pictures, links, etc, and not just a place to post words I've written. I like writing, I like movies, and I like sharing "neat" things with my friends and with anyone who will listen, because that's how I found out about so many of my favorite things, and because Pay It Forward is a movie I took to heart. 
Anyway I was very pleased to read both Karl and Ebert's kind words; it's not everyday you 
Directed By Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro
Alternate Soundtrack by Xiu Xiu
This 1911 silent film were it to be made today would be decried as offensive, disturbing, gorey, inaccessible, miserablist, and sensationalized, which are all valid criticisms that would be rendered meaningless after watching the exquisite images for only a few moments. 
If cartoons depicting Islam can get fatwa's declared on their artists, what would the response be to a film which depicts the prophet Mohammad with his intestines hanging out in the special hell for those "heathens" who lead people away from the faith? Nothing this disturbing could be made today, imagine it for a moment with modern effects and you understand why.
The film follows poet Dante (inspired by the death of his beloved Beatrice) and his guide Virgil through the abyss and several of Hell's rings passing such landmarks as the River Styx and the forest of trees that gush blood because they are souls who've committed suicide and are sentenced to grow from the earth forever bleeding and bound in place. 
The film occasionally gives us a flashback to how a specific sinner that Dante or Virgil might recognize from their own lives or the history books, wound up in their particular spot; like the man found buried up to his waist eating the severed head of the man who locked his family in a dungeon where he was forced to watch them starve to death before killing himself by bashing his skull into a wall.
Because of artistic and technological reasons these acts are not depicted in ways we would today call graphic, but considering this was the first Italian film ever made, the violence must have been a thousand times more shocking than today, and today it's still pretty unrelentingly bleak.
The set designs are really what drive the film, using Gustave Dore's (one of my favorite artists) illustrations of the Inferno, as story boards and drawing from them with the same attention to visual detail that Zach Snyder gave to his Watchmen and 300 adaptations, but since Dore's work is better than either of those the effects are dazzling. 
Giant devils swallowing sinners whole, floating and flying swarms of angels, and landscapes littered with naked bodies writhing on the landscape like a carpet like of limbs (which are identical to some seen in Lars Von Trier recent Anti-Christ) help materialize Dore's hell, in vivid detail of a painting come to life. 
Personally I have trouble connecting emotionally with silent films, mostly because of the lack of music and sound in general, a central element I respond to in movies. 
Good music can make a mediocre film great, and whats more challenging about silent films is that they often come with what seem like arbitrary classical scores, or in the case of this film, a terrible soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. 
Though I appreciate Tangerine Dream's efforts to capture something of the film in their score, I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to use very much of their music. 
Not wanting to listen to TD and not wanting to listen to actual "silence", I decided to choose my own soundtrack, and chose the music I had most recently put on my computer, Seattle experimental band Xiu Xiu (named after a Chinese film they deemed "the saddest movie ever made").
I chose my favorite songs of theirs and ordered them at random, and bizarrely the songs synced up perfectly. 
I really mean perfectly, like when the word "angel" would be sang, an angel would appear, when "kill yourself" was whispered, a character would be killing themselves on screen, not to mention numerous instances of the music cueing to the action, in divine serendipity. 
I felt as the first hippie must have felt when they decided to listen to Dark Side Of The Moon while watching Wizard Of Oz. I hadn't thought about it beforehand, but Xiu Xiu's songs which are almost always about characters wallowing in despair, disappointment, sexual and emotional abuse, or self loathing, was a perfect compliment to a film about traversing a netherworld where everyone is recounting their own tortured and obscene personal tales. 
Xiu Xiu's music which fuses goth pop, industrial, Asian percussion and Gamelan music, folk and prolonged silences made eerie and haunting the sorrowful black and white images that Tangerine Dream steamrolls over in each scene of soupy synths and classical muzak. 
I'm taking an editing class at the moment, and since I'm pretty sure the film is out of copyright (it can be found online here: 
The soundtrack worked out so well, I would feel completely confident in showing it to anyone who would listen. 
Of course if you don't have access to this music, don't want to wait for my copy, or just don't like the band in particular, add a soundtrack of your own, preferably something dark and ominous.
I'll be doing more of these silent film mash-ups in the future, and I recommend everyone to experiment and try the same and let's see what works and what doesn't. The lack of soundtrack is an opportunity to re-create these films for ourselves, and since this first experiment was such a success I'm really looking forward to all the future possibilities. 
Whatever sounds you use or don't, L'inferno is a visually audacious and marvelous adaptation of a great literary classic. 
A "challenging" work to say the least, I first tried to read to impress a girl I liked (who loved the book), and never finished, but a tale worthy of being told. 
In 1989 director Raul Ruiz and Peter Greenaway made the first 2 parts in what was to be a four part miniseries of the entire Inferno (other directors who were to complete the series were Terry Gilliam, Zbig Ribzynski, and Nagisa Oshima, but unfortunately the money ran out for the project just before Gilliam's turn; the Gilliam curse in action!). 
There was also a 2007 animated version done with paper cut outs, using modern celebrities and historical figures as its sinners that Ive seen some of and also never finished. 
I haven't seen many silent films, but this is definitely one of the most striking, and it belongs amongst the great early works of fantasy like Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", "Nosferatu" and a "A Trip To The Moon". Gustave Dore, The Divine Comedy, and Xiu Xiu are a nightmarish trinity of epic proportions, and combine to create a truly classic film which deserves to be seen. 
"Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
