My Favorite Movies

Man wakes up in a dream, and then into another, and then another, etc. One of the few movies, I have watched, then sat for 10 minutes, then watched immediately again. The narrative is made up of conversations and lectures from real people(often actors playing actors and professors playing professors, etc), who were then animated over, in technology developed specifically for this film(now being seen advertisements).

The subject of these dream discussions include identity, free will, evolution, language, rebelliion, apathy, conversation, sex, film, God, death, dreams, memories, etc. Some vignettes are funny, some disturbing, some pretentious, some relaxed engaging, some didactic, some inquisitive, and others more like poems aborted mid-stream. This is not a plot driven film, it's a series of vignettes not unlike an earlier Linklater film "Slacker"(if you liked this movie, Slacker is the 90's no-budget equivalent).

If you enjoy thinking for thinking's sake, putting ideas together and then taking them apart like building blocks, you will enjoy this movie. Few films have had quite the impact on me that this did the first time around, I showed it to just about everyone I knew, and while a few gave me the standard "What the fuck is this, shit's wierd", more than a few were left just as blown away as I was. Cynics will of course associate this film with a coffee shop, no attention span culture, jittering pretentious ideas bieng typed a mile a minute by spectacled hipsters, etc. However this is an unfortunate reduction of a film, that has generated more interesting ideas in it's first 15 minutes alone than most film's do after years of academic discussion.
Watching this movie made me feel aware for the first time, that I was no longer living in the 20th century, that things were and could be different, and that new langauges and systems would have to be made to describe and implement new experiences and new ways of doing things, this movie was the beginning... perhaps I was getting a bit ahead of myself, but that's what I liked about this movie, it's own granduer, ridiculousness, and ambition are infectious and life affirming, where often films of this artistic caliber can be obstuse or de-humanizing.

There are no characters to empathize here with, just ideas and beautiful visuals(from dozens of animators with varrying styles), so if your not to interested in the discussion you can always just tune out and watch the colors dance, it's as much a treat for the eyes as it is a delight for the brain, as well as ears, the "Tosca Tango Orchestra" perform the music, which keeps everythingh swirling at a nice pace. I could go on like this forever, it's a good movie see it, if not see something else.

Like reading a great novel. The words which pour out of these kids mouths, are at times completely natural and others poetic and rich. This is not your typical independent film, dealing with "life amongst the poor", in fact though destitute the setting is kinda magical and Utopian. (George doesn't get harassed, assaulted, while patrolling the neighborhood with a cape? Adults and children, speak to each other with no recognition of age, etc.) But none of this distracts from the "realism" of the story or characters, well realism is the wrong word...naturalism seems more fitting.

A group of friends in North Carolina (all played by real people, no actors) deal with boredom, crushes, and growing up, until tragedy strikes, and changes them all, some attempt to escape, others take to lofty (super-heroesque) heroism.

May seem a bit slow to some, but it's sincerely one of the best movies I've ever seen, it has a life and uniqueness all it's own which is difficult to put into words. I'd heard whispers of this movie for years, and now that I've finally seen it, I understand exactly the reasons for the hushed admiration and awe.

A moving and inspiring masterpiece, I wish there were more like this...for one it's a film with non-middle class black characters, which doesn't immediately fall into clichés of race, class, etc, allowing the characters to grow into actual 3 dimensional human forms, and not just sacrificial lambs for heavy handed social tragedy (Okay I'm getting a bit off point, and maybe personalizing this, but it did make a difference in my appreciation, and perhaps Gordon's directing. In the Charlie Rose Interview (for those of you with the DVD), Gordon mentions for instance using ambient and string music as opposed to traditionally expected "hip hop" or "urban music". It's small details like this which help establish the films tone apart from it's environment, and to show how tranquil and mystical even junkyards and vacant lots can seem to fresh eyes and minds.)....Anywho it's a great film.

"I just wish I had my own tropical island, I wish... I wish I was... I could go to China, I wish I could go out of The States... I wish I had my own planet, I wish I... I wish there were 200 of me, man... I wish I could just sit around with computers and technology and just brainstorm all day man. I wish I was born again... I wish I could get saved and give my life to Christ... then maybe he can forgive me for what I did... I wish there was just one belief... my belief."

This is the Alejandro Jodorowsky film not the old silent one about mountain climbing, anyway this film had pretty much everything I wanted out of a movie. Every frame is visually engaging, it's easily one of the most visually dense films I've ever seen, but not in an eliptic David Lynch way, these are symbols, not emblems, and they represent ideas not included in the film as opposed to representing ideas in the film, simple right? It's a pinnacle merger of surrealism, satire, philosophy, and science fiction. The sets, the images and the story itself blow me away, and the ideas though chaotic at first flow together not seemlessly, but in a New Orelans Mardi Gras Parade kind of way, confused, drunk, and many limbed, but all ambling in the same general direction, a conclusion which breaks "the fourth wall" in more ways than one.

The story and I will it keep as simple as possible, is about a wondering thief, who meets an alchemist and joins with this group of the 9 wealthiest people on Earth(the lords of Industry who secretly control the material earth, each named after a different planet in the Solar System, like the Pantheon Roman Gods), who want to become Immortal by stealing the Immortalty from the 9 Immortal Men who sit on the Holy Mountain and trully rule the world in secret. What follows is a spiritual, psychologial, and if you had'nt guessed it yet, surreal journey of enlightentment.

This is not a druggie film with no plot and a bunch of crazy stuff, it might appear that way if you view it on drugs which completely incapacitate thought, or with no attempt to think and deliberate (which understandably is not everyones cup of tea) about what appears on the screen after it's gone, but the film is actually quite complex, if anything too complex. Jodorowsky is weaving together a lot of escoteric threads and symbols (the first scene is the Japanse Tea Ceremony, but you wouldnt know it unless you knew, someone else pointed it out to me, after about my fifth viewing) together to tell a quite simple story about the various ways we( and the contemporary audience of the 70's) attempt to escape death. If you interested in watching a gifted film maker at the height of his game paint a truly unique portrait of the world, look no further. If you want something truly bizarre and different because you've seen everything, see it. If you don't care much for symbolism, allegory, or metaphor, avoid this at all costs, there is no realsim here, but there is brilliance, and I don't use that word lightly.

This is Wes Anderson's greatest departure from realism and into the realm of the fantastic. From the "crayon ponyfish", the Jaque Costeau outfits, the Mark Mothersbaugh(of Devo) pop song selection, the David Bowie songs in Portuguese, to the literally yellow submarine, we are granted a trip with a bygone hero on his last mission of revenge, love, family, and tragedy. The tone here is much more dayglo and childlike, but the characters maintain their trademark Anderson deadpan sensibilities and sharp/awkward wit.
What dissapoints so many about this film, is that there is'nt an easy resolution. Paradoxically more than any other Anderson film this is his most fantastical and fatalistic. Steve Zissou learns all of his most important lessons far too late to do anything about them, theres a kind of division between the character and his life(the title after all is "The Life Aquatic...with Steve Zissou), where like so many Henry James characters Steve just can't get himself together, can't catch the fish, can't get the girl, can't make the movie, and even as his long lost son is returned to him, his wife abondons him, and his financers all but cut him off, he still can't get out of "why me?". For all it's raindow claymation fish, and clever musical samplings the end is straight outta "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzia(an 80's film about superhero who was kind of the ultimate man), it's kind of a depressing film. Or at least the ironic tensions between the comedy and tragedy kind of flatten each other out. Still if given the option of spending two hours watching the Bellafontaine and it's crew, or in the lives of some of Wes Andersons other characters I'd take the red cap and the jumpsuit, anyday.

Movie walks a razor thin line between, cute, disturbing, and annoying, but all with the grace of a ballerina. Ive heard mixed reviews of Miranda July's fiction, but there is no denying her prowess as a film maker. This romantic comedy and ensemble peice, is one of those unnexpectedly funny, moving, awkward, human, and complex indie films that comes around once every years, and gets imitated to death ever after. Fortunately "Me And You And Everyone We Know" has not begun to loose it's freshness just yet. July, uses her characters as vessels for musings on love, death, technology, sexuality, and lonliness. None of the characters in the story are one dimensional, everyone is entangled, and everyone is leading lifes of qiuet desperation. Through chance encounters, diverse yet familiar characters are brought together. In some of the, indeed, most adorable, and at times extremely discorfmiting scenes your likely to see(if your touchy about children and sexuality you might want to steer clear), but all are treated with the same sense of honesty that keeps the film from feeling cheap or melodramatic. It's a movie about the things which hold us together in the modern world, and those things which keep us apart, childhood mysteries, and adult magic. It's a romantic comedy, that doesnt feel in any way cleche(a very rare thing). I didnt love it the first time I saw it, but after repeat viewings I love it more and more. As good as "Punch Drunk Love", "High Fidelity", "Closer", "Before Sunsirse", and those literate hip romantic dramedies, which have come before it. Also just as enjoyable, and bolstered by its ensemble cast, instead of focusing on just one couple, or couples in general. Anyway I love it, its an easy film to love, July is going to be a film maker to watch in the future.

"Be pleased then, you the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot" -Goethe

That's the opening title card from "You The Living". Like Roy Andersson's earlier "Songs From The Second Floor" each scene in "You, The Living" is composed with a static non moving camera, giving each vignette the detailed composition of a photograph or a painting. Some vignettes last minute or two, some a matter of seconds, as previous. Though Anderson plays the same stylistic instrument, he manges to get more than a few fresh notes.

One of the most stunning openings in a film anywhere, a woman complains about the woes of the world and her life, repeatedly insulting her boyfriend and dog to leave, as a New Orleans Style Brass band bubbles beneath the conversation, until the boyfriend exits and the woman repeats that he lies, but that she may be along latter for dinner... then she breaks into a song about escaping from her life on a motorcycle. Then cut to a group of Chefs standing in a row and staring in silent awe out of a window at something off screen, while the Brass band plays on, making the scene resemble an eerie french cartoon. Eventually the Chefs go back to work, and an old man hobbles into frame moving at snails pace, and dragging ten feet behind him on a leash a small puppy yelping on it's back, as the band plays on.

Songs From The Second Floor began with a quote, "Blessed Be The Ones Who Sit Down", and where that film built it's jokes and visual poems from consumer culture, this film takes a broader view of the world, where all suffering and misery, fantasies, and hopes are all to be appreciated, because they're better than the alternative; death or "Lethe's ice cold lick" as Goethe puts it in opening quote. And besides all the humiliations and loneliness are funny enough if you look at them from the right perspective, as this film perpetually does.

A thin old man has sex with a large breasted woman wearing a band leaders helmet, as she moans on top of him and get's closer to climax, he somberly recounts losing his pension, having served in the brass band for years and now having nothing, as she orgasms, he mutters "Isn't it Tragic".

It's brilliantly and beautifully put together, and hilarious sometimes in very dry and others very absurd ways, the scenarios here instead of feeling stark and tragicomic have a warm bittersweet feeling to them. The greys of Ingmar Bergman have abandoned for brighter, softer tones, the colors in the class room and the park look like crayon and watercolor alternately, and there's a building on train tracks, that's as amazing as anything Terry Gilliam or Michel Gondry ever dreamed up. The ending, ties all the themes of appreciating whatever of life we have together perfectly.

Though I liked the feelings and sensations this invoked in me more than "Songs From The Second Floor", it is slightly less effective. Still though, amazing follow up film, and something anyone interested in movies needs to see, actually makes for a much better introduction than "Songs". Dry humor, dreamy images and structure, vivid colors and bittersweet harmonies of brass bands, guitar heroes, and loud lone drummers in empty rooms.

One of the most vibrant and fun art house films you are ever likely to see. Vera Chytilova was merging feminism, nihilism, psychedlic color filters, collage aesthetic, and silent film slapstick into a one of a kind film about two young girls named Ma...(read more)rie who decide to self destruct, and be just as wicked as the world. They con men into buying them lunch and ditch them at train stations, get drunk in posh nightclubs, set their beds on fire, and lay siege to whole banquets(this latter bit got the film and the director into alot of trouble with the Soviet Czech government for "wasting food"). Anyway this is an energetic and vibrant film as youre likely to find anywhere, and unlike so many great euro art films, this is as fun to watch as it is think about afterwards. Ive shown this movie to alot of people and Ive never had a complaint, it clocks in at just over an hour, so if youve got the time, go for it. It's a one of kind experience(in fact the worst part of this movie is the cover).

Amazing, great performances, great script, great directing, great concept, I normally stay away from Biopics because they tend to either demonize or hero worship, especially when it comes to musicians. Tood Haynes uses fragmentation as a device to show us parts and asepects of a personality empahsizing that there is no one "real" person ever really present within anyone, just lots of idealizations, frailties, passions, dreams, fears, and projections, a series of persona. He demonstrates this by using six different actors(of various races, genders, and ages) to play various aspects of Bob Dylan's personality, career, and life.

The soundtrack which uses alot of original Dylan songs as well as covers, adds to the confusion of identity. Now normally with a film of this scope, it's easy for it to become swallowed by it's own audacity, but "Im Not There" doesn't miss a beat. My favorite film of 07, and instantyly one of my top ten all time favorites. About as smart, literate, and enjoyable as films get.

A lot people get hung up on this films tag as a "children's film", and that it certainly is, though it is one made for adults. Takashi Miike uses the fantasy genre, particularly, the children's fantasy genre, as a springboard into the wild territory ...(read more)that is the Great Yokai War.

The setup is simple a boy is selected to play the "hero" in this years annual festival, only to discover his role is much more real than he could have imagined. What follows is a hallucinatory, grotesque, whimsical, and often funny journey through the world of Japanese folklore, but wait there's also an evil Villain on the lose who wants to destroy the world. However, the villain here, is not a mere demon, it is the demon-spirit of the accumulated resentment of those things which humans "use" and "discard". Usuing a chamber made out of pure liquid hate/resentment, the villain transforms the vibrant colorful Yokai spirits into soulless ten foot tall makeshift robots which chainsaw for arms and eyes like burning coals(those whove played the video game, Sonic The Hedghog, might remember a certain Dr. Robotnik performing similar procedures to the cute and cuddly's who Sonic had to then "liberate").

The hero in this film is actually the least interesting character, essentially playing the straight man, in a world gone suddenly mad. Though he does go through the typical heroes trials he more often than not cowers, as do many of the Yokia themselves, who seem truly defenseless against the murderous robots, some spirits being umbrellas with eyes, talking walls, or creatures whose soul purpose in life is to count beans...of course in this magical world of Miike's Yokai war even beans take a magical power when one believes in them.

In several ways this film subverts the normal conventions of children's fantasy, as few, if any, of the characters are heroic, their victory being a combination of happenstance, almost arbitrary faith, and a desire to party. The Yokai spirits, only rally together and lay siege the villains hideout, after they mistake the end of the world invasion of Earth for a great Yokai festival, and even then only to dance and party. Also the film ends not with the usual celebratory all's well that ends well fantasy ending, but with a final scene, showing our hero years older, with an adult job, now unable to see the Yokai spirits of his youth, who then despondently turn to the villain, who being a spirit can never really die. This ending, with it's Yokai spirit who is the spitting image of Pokemon's Pikachu, warns us not just of leaving behind our childhood selves, but of the horrors of over-consumption. The villain is resentment caused when humans no longer have reverence for the world and the objects around them(in Japanese folklore nearly every object has some kind of spirit), and so when they are used and discarded as we in consumer societies do without reverence, they become soulless vengeful machines, not unlike those seen in modern video games, suggesting that though our imaginations and myths do not ever really die, they can become deformed.

This is one of the first scripts Miike has contributed to, and I believe it shows, as there's a tightness conceptually that sometimes gets swept under the rug by his exuberance for visual playfulness. Though I've focused mostly on the story (since lots of users here seem to write it off), I do want to say that visually it's a kaleidescope of CGI, stop animation, costume, and live puppetry, that works remarkably well. There's a dreamlike quality to a lot of the film, and the Miyazaki comparisons are warranted, as are the NeverEnding Story and Labrynth comparisons, though this film is sharper and more adult than either. The Yokai are beaten, brutalized, and turned into machines of living hate, who I believe even kill a few humans, a deformed aborted calf with a mans face is born and dies in the films grotesque opening, while a sexual undercurrent, the women with the long neck licking the face of our boy hero, or another characters persistent memory of touching the thigh of a young scantily clad water spirit as a boy, seem to linger a bit too long for most western tastes, especially when considering this is a "children's film". However these are slight enough to catch adult attentions while minor enough, not to traumatize any children to bad. Grims fairy tales, before revisions, did much worse, far more often.

All and all this is one of Miikes most accessible and engaging ventures yet, with enough visual drama and great performances(the Yokai spirits have a humanism and an absurd humor to them, thats laugh out loud funny at times) to appeal to audiences of all ages, and a steady conceptual undercurrent strong enough to draw in an adult audience who have presumably brought their children or else come out of a sense of nostalgia for the long lost fantasy films of their youth. The latter group the film seems to address the most fervently asking that they not just continue passive consumption of the world around them, but show reverence to those spirits within them which seemed so much closer to reality in childhood. Another beautiful, funny, and truly original film from a thrilling director who hasn't come close to his apex. Instant classic.

This is the most criminally underseen movie of all time. Its a rare thing to find a movie which uses bats on visible strings and makes allusions to paintings by Rene Margritte(the kiss in the crypt resembles Margritte's "The Lovers"), and have talkin...(read more)g zomibe heads, but here it is-and in English.
Rupert Everertt delivers a great performance as the caretaker for a cemetary in a small Italian village, where the dead once buried there come back to life, and every evening without fail, he kills them and buries them again. Of course no one will listen to him, and killing the zombies becomes more a matter of maintnance than survival. Against this backdrop of casual zombie killing, comes a love interest, into our protagonists life, a beuatiful woman who will appear and then die, and then appear again, rising like the dead from cemetary. And speaking of things which rise from the grave, our hero is completely impotent, a fact everyone in town knows and taunts him about. The film goes on to subtly discuss, death, love, sex, buerocracy, divisions of labour, obsession, reality, and the literal ends of the earth. Theres also plenty of zombie gore, sex, vomit, and decapitated heads. This movie is too smart for most of the zombie crowd, and has too much projectile vomit for much of the art house fans, but then there are those for whome this film wil be just right. Not to mention Micheal Savoi's direction, which is as good as Gilliam or Ridley Scott in his techincal Blade Runner days. Every shot is framed to give it a sense of visual flourish, and it's a shame Savoi never made anything nearly this ambitious again. The story is based on an Italian comic book called Dylan Dogg(which hasnt been translated, into English yet, but of which Ive heard great things.), and "Cemetary Man" is it's American release title, orignally it was "Dellamorte Dellamore" which means roughly "Of Love, Of Death" and is a play on words as our heroe's fathers last name Dellamorte, while his mothers was Dellamore. A fascinating, funny, gory, smart, mindf*&k of a film, that should be seen by all fans of zombie movies, tricky cinematography, art films, and movies in general. Up there with "Dawn Of The Dead", and "Dead Alive", this stands as on an essential, if unknown part of the Zombie cannon, this is about as close it's come to literature.

There are alot of films about kids in 3rd world conditions going down violent paths, but rarely are these accounts as first hand, expansive, and compelling as City Of God.
Theres a vibrance, urgency, compassion, and scope that makes this movie so hard to pull away from. The story of a boy named Rocket trying to escape and being pulled back into the violent conditions around him, as well as the local history that created this enviornment. We see generations of slumlords few old enough to drive, come and go, in ages and empires, of drugs and fashions from the 60's to the 70's. Most of the performers here are not actors but children from the infamous slum, including Brazilian pop star Sue Jorge(seen in the Life Aquatic seeing David Bowie songs) who also grew up there.
Theres an immediacy, honesty, and energy to this film that 90 percent of films about gangsters, street life, and the 3rd world miss. No glorifications of excess, just poverty, desire, hope, and ignorance, put in a blender and set to fuck all. Anyway, excellent from start to finish. One of my favorite films of all time.

Great everything, all hype true. Love, life, and memory captured with imaginative genuis and poetic and honest sensibilites. The 70's had "Annie Hall" and the 90's had "High Fidelity", in the 200's there is Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and though I love the other two, this one casts a pretty big shadow of it's own. An example of why you should still go the movies.

This movie doesn't need much support or discussion, with comedies either you laugh or you don't. Even during those scenes where I wasn't laughing I was at least smiling as the absurd antics of camp Firewood, become more and more irreverant. Ive seen alot of mixed reactions to people Ive shown this film too, Ive had girlfreinds whove hated and loved it, family and freinds whove alternately thanked me or asked me why I was into "shit like this", and once had it playing in the background on a tv during a party, until nearly the whole room was gathered round to watch all laughing in unison, so it's hard to gauge because there's no single predictable brand of humor hear. Like "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun", this film is foaming at the mouth with absurd slapstick gags and non-sequiters. However the humor is remarkably sharp, hip, when not being completely off the wall. Micheal Showalter and co., who would go on to make the more subdued yet still very funny, "The Baxter", which parodies the Romantic Comedy the way this film parodies the summer camp comedy. Whether it's the gay or refregerator sex scenes, the copious drug binge which inexplicably lasts an hour, or campers bieng left in the wilds to cover up the negligent drowing death of yet other campers, to the talent show, or the meteor that is going to crash there and destroy them all, there's something here to offend and delight just about anyone. This is not a film that laughs with the characters it laughs at them and at itself openly, and if you can get "in" on the joke, it's as good as a beer around a warm campfire on a summer night.

The story of the first man in history killed for having low ratings.

One of the best film scripts ever written, and a film which is more relevant now than when it was written, and increases in relevance with every passing year. Amazing performances, actually based on a book about the newspaper industry, but adapted to here television. Every scene is perfect

One of those heartwarming and amazing films, that it's almost impossible not to enjoy. This movie kicked off the 21st century. The writing, direction, music, performances, costumes, colors, everything is flawless. A film for everyone.

An absurdist film, with a sense of humor, that's actually as laugh out loud funny as it is conceptually amusing. A lampooning of scientology, relationships, the difficulties of communication, the film making buisness, the nightly news, corporate life, and just about everything it touches.

Steven Soderberg has made one of the vanniest comedies, in recent memory(I cant think of the last time I used the word zanny in conversation).

This is the film which restored Soderberg's creative powers after a series of slumps and a collapsing marriage, after which he would go on to Oceans 11 and infamy. These two quotes might better let you know what your in for.

"Dear attractive woman number 2, only once in my life have I responded to a person the way I've responded to you, but I've forgotten when it was or even if it was in fact me that responded. I may not know much, but I know that the wind sings your name endlessly, although with a slight lisp that makes it difficult to understand if I'm standing near an air conditioner. I know that your hair sits atop your head as though it could sit nowhere else. I know that your figure would make a sculptor cast aside his tools, injuring his assistant who was looking out the window instead of paying attention. I know that your lips are as full as that sexy french model's that I desperately want to fuck. I know that if for an instant I could have you lie next to me, or on top of me, or sit on me, or stand over me and shake, then I would be the happiest man in my pants. I know all of this, and yet you do not know me. Change your life; accept my love. Or, at least let me pay you to accept it."

"Fletcher Munson: [sunnily, on homecoming] Generic greeting!

Mrs. Munson: [warmly] Generic greeting returned!

[they kiss and chuckle at each other]
Fletcher Munson: Imminent sustenance.

Mrs. Munson: Overly dramatic statement regarding upcoming meal.

Fletcher Munson: Oooh! False reaction indicating hunger and excitement!

Fletcher Munson: [wife snuggles up amorously] Ooh! *Really* well-rehearsed speech about workload and stress.
[pause]

Fletcher Munson: Genuine sorrow. Um... truthful-sounding promises of future satisfaction? Enticement to agree?

Mrs. Munson: [pause] Accepted.

Fletcher Munson: Gratitude."

"A New Mexico woman was named Final Arbiter of Taste & Justice today, ending God's lengthy search for someone to straighten this country out. Eileen Harriet Palglace will have final say on every known subject, including who should be put to death, what clothes everyone should wear, what movies suck, and whether bald men who grow ponytails should still get laid."

In my opinion, and as objectively as possible, the best film ever made. It's technical prowess alone, has fiilled books, and its scope is as wide as any in film history, showing human evolution and it's possible future development as three chapters going from the dawn of man to (at the time it was made) far future, and beyound. Changed the way I looked at movies forever.

A beautiful and amazing film. Like Jean Luc Godard's "Alphaville" which transformed 60's Paris into a dystopian sc-fi planet without the use of special effects, Tarsem's "The Fall" shoots in 18 different countries and transforms some of the most beautiful locations on earth into a surreal fantasia of orange deserts, blue cities, and underwater photography of elephants swimming in the open ocean.

The story is deceptively simple tale of a stuntman named Roy, whose taken an emotional and physical fall, meeting a 5 year old Persian girl named Alexandria, who fell and broke her arm working the California Orange grooves,meeting in a hospital in 1920's Los Angeles. Alexandria has lost her father, Roy's lost his girl and is suicidal, and Roy begins telling an epic tale of revenge, staring characters based on hopsital staff and historical characters. Five heroes an Italian explosives expert, an Indian Prince, an African self-freed slave, Charles Darwin as young british naturalist who speaks to animals, and a mysterious masked Zorroesque bandit who is at turns Alexandria's father and Roy himself, set out to kill their mutual enemy Governor Odious(The leading man from the film Roy was working on, who stole his girl and drove him to his stunt/suicide?) in the story Roy tells Alexandria, provided she fetch things for him.

Like so many oneiric fantasies, this story is about innocence and romaticism vs. the big bad world, in Don Quixote it was romanticism and fantasy vs reality and deception, "Pans Labrnth" romanticism against facism, "Brazil' romanticism against buerocracy, and "The Fall" likewise is romanticism against despair.

The film is as grand in it's themes as it is in it's visuals, touching on love, death, despair, story-telling, manipulation, the early days of film making, innocence, cross cultural relationships(when Roy says wigwams describing the Indian's back-story, Alexandria imagines Hindu Palaces.), and reconstructing your life after a trauma, picking up the pieces after the fall.
I was glad I saw this in theaters on a big screen, one of the most vibrant and beautiful things Ive ever seen anywhere and at anytime. If youve seen Tarsem's first film "The Cell", youve got an idea of this directors abilities to work with both visuals and performers(he mad J-Lo passable). Alxandria is played by one the best child actress Ive seen in a very long time, a 5 year old who speaks like a 5 year old, which injects a good helping of humor into the story. Instant classic, If you get a chance, see it.

Picture perfect unsentimental Romantic comedy, about nuerosis, growing up, obsession, fetish, fantasy, memory, music, and top 5's. This book takes place in London, but the universal appeal of music makes it's transfer to Chicago seemlessly natual (we are all united by pop songs). The characters are deeply flawed, honest, and funny. This is one of best examples of voice over narrative and breaking the fourth wall for direct audience adresses working perfectly, without drawing too much attention to itself. It's excellent, got a great soundtrack, some jokes that are likely to go over a few non music-heads heads, but for the most apart it's a film almost anyone can relate to in some aspect, be it relationships, music, or obsessive listing. But enough has been written and said about this movie, just see it. Good times.

Some of the best animated films ever made, Svankmajer combines claymation, stop motion, puppetry both classical and with found objects like shadows, sand, foods, meats, and live actors. It's almost impossible to describe these little features some bieng fairly straight forward while others are as abstract as cinema can get. Pervasive themes are food and consumption, oppression, the mechanistic puppetlike apsects of life, and those mysterious experiences which transorm mundane objects into something more. Theres a few Edgar Allen Poe adaptations here too, of "The Pit And The Pendullum",all shot from the first person pov, and "The Fall Of The House Of Usher", told with sand and footage of abondoned casteles. There's definitely an aesthetic here an entire generation of music video directors lifted wholesale, but few push themselves into as many directions as Svankmajer. Working under the Soviet Czech government, it was difficult to find grounds to censor more abstract material, Svankmajer along with Milos Freeman ("One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest" "Man On The Moon") and Vera Chytilova("Daisies"), was a key part of the Czech New Wave, known for it's wild anarchic and visually surreal films(which more often then not got banned anyway).
Still I think it helps to know this kind of work evolved out of a necissity as well as a desire to be creative and original.
These short films pack more punch than any of Svankmajer's full length films, which remarkable as they often are can get tedious. Ive never met a person who wasn't impressed and at least momentarily hypnotized by the images in these films. An amazing marriage of animation and storytelling. Must see!

David Cronenberg films the unfilmable. Though almost nothing like the book the title get's it's name from it's nonetheless an excellent film about the life and works of author William S. Burroughs. Like "I'm Not There", "Naked Lunch" takes a fragmented persona and mixes autobiography into fiction, and cuts them together. So it helps to know a few things about William S. Burroughs before going on.

Things like he "accidentally", shot and killed his wife in mexico while tryng drunkenly to perform this films William Tell Routine, an event which would start Burroughs in his writing career(William and "Tell" being a strange coincidence for a writer named William), he was addicted to various drugs until his death in his 80's, heroin longer than any, did once work as an exterminator, spent a good deal of time in Tangiers and North Africa, was monotone voiced and always sharply dressed, though the film shows him as more bi-sexual than gay(he did have children), but was overwhelmingly gay(read a few of his books and you will get the overwhelming part). Was also an expret marksman, a gun entusiast, and afraid/obsessed of centipedes. His freinds in the film(who help get his book published) are supposed to be young versions of beat writers Jack Kerouc and Alan Ginsberg. If you look closely you can see that several different places are built out of the same sets, as the protagonist Bill Lee, doesnt really go anywhere, but into his head. (Oh the murder aspect of the Burroughs story is also basis of another film from 2000 with Kiefer Southerland as Burroughs, called "Beat", but it's not so great.)

But does any of that really explain why the type writers are insects who speak out of their assholes? Well the asshole story in the car ride, is a "routine' he used to do at dinner parties, as well as the asshole in general being both for Burroughs as a gay man a place of desire(or desires not spoken) and a social symbol of everything in life we avoid or would rather not say. As for what the title "Naked Lunch" means,
it's the point during a meal when one looks down theire fork and realizes what it is they've been consuming and eating all this time, where the true nature of the meal is revealed(not that this get's discussed in the movie)

Without any of that information and before I started reading Burroughs, I had no idea what was going on, in this movie save something about drug addiction, sexual identiy confusion, and paranoi (which it is too) afterwards though I was amazed at how much David Cronenberg was able to bring together. It's not really an adaptation of "Naled Lunch" the book, but a Burroughs inspired film about Burroughs, that uses the techniques, preocupations, and ideas of the author and his life to tell a Burroughs story. Because any type of literal adaptation of the book would probably be banned in every country on Earth...well maybe not Japan where incidentally you can buy the insect/asshole type writer (Who can say Christmas wish?)

So yeah if you like "wierd movies" you'll like this, if you like William S. Burroughs or David Cronenberg you should like it, everyone esle though, approach with caution, even for "drug" cinema, there really isn't anything like this.

This is one of the most brutal Tragicomedies ever made. For a long time I would appologize to people before showing them this. I watched it(not knowing what I was getting into) for the first time with my mother...and it was awkward to say the least.
However, for the adventerous, not easily offended this is one of the most incredible films I have ever seen. The pursuit of happiness was never more horrifically uncomfortable than it has been here. All perormances are amazing, the script as good they get, the music, cinemtography flawless. Todd Solondz knows every button to push and he does so like a master puppeteer. This film is why he is one of America's current pre-eminent film makers.
A film as hilarious as it is disturbing, completely one of a kind ensemble peice about sex, love, perversion, and the depths to which human beings can sink in the pursuit of pleasure of contentment. (John Lovit's scene at the beginning is one of my favorite in all of moviedom).

The story and performances in this film, are some of B-horrors worst, the cinematography, set design, death sequences, and music however are as unique and inspired as horror films get.



Dario Argento films have thin plots which allow his sinister imagination to stage elobrate "Giallo" death scenes. Giallo is a genre orignating out of Italiy, part pulpy mystery, part fantastic horror and crime stories, part erotic thriller, and always ridiculous amounts of violence. The pulps, are "yellow books" basically, Gaillo means yellow in Italian, which for some reason was cheaper than white paper and used in alot of pop novels and magazines at the time. This genre has been Dario Argento's modus operendi for nearly thirty years, and though for the most part, his filmography is full of really, not even amusingly, bad films, this is the one that made him famous enough to make people interested in all the others.



For me it's the best, the bizzare and operatic soundtrack by "The Goblins" alone make it worthwhile viewing. The story is about a girl attending a haunted Ballet school in Germany, arriving the same day of a tragic and grissly murder, and uncovering the dark and ancient secret behind it all. A little slow at times, the story is a loose excuse to run wild with macarbe ideas that don't need too much explanation. It's also the beginning of a trilogy continuing with Inferno (the less said the better), and ending with last years "The Mother Of Tears".



Featuring a mix of slashers, killer dogs, witches, bats, and maggots, "Suspiria" is a horror funhouse and a masterpiece of genre, but a film mostly for fans and horror enthusiasts, those looking for a movie that's actually scary, might want to look elsewhere, those in for a wild operatic pulp horror have found their golden ticket.

The goriest film ever made. And the greatest Zombie slapstick there has ever been or ever may be. It's hard to imagine this is the same Peter Jackson of "Heavenly Creatures" and "Lord Of The Rings" but that's versatility for you (actually this film's infected demon monkey is also from "Skull Ilsand", the native home of another Jackson monster "King Kong"). This is not for the weak of stomach, the last half hour is as blooddrenched a slaughter as your likely to ever on screen. An penultimate horror experience; zombie fans eat your brains out.

It's been one of my favorite horror films since the first time I saw it, when I was too young to know what I was getting into. Sam Raimi aint the best director in the world, but he did invent the Raimi-Rush here, a technique which no one besides him has ever really used to as great effect.

Anyway, this is Bruce Campbell, in a small shack in the woods, with a few freinds who accidentally summon the demon spririts of the woods, and are one by one possessed and transformed.

There's severed human hands crawling of their own accords, a woman raped by a forest, and more blood, gore, and hilarity intentional or not, than you will find in the thousands of films which immitate this one. A horror classic, that's more inventive and raccous than scary. Also the beggining of a trilogy in the saga of Bruce Campbell's Ash character in the horror slapstick "Evil Dead 2", and the full on epic midevil parody of "Army Of Darkness" both fun films, too but it all starts here. And it was never trully as good. "We can't bury Linda...she's our freind!"

Don't let the lack of sets throw you, this is not a play. This is a greulling and brutal film, superbly written, performed, and directed.

Lars Von Treir is the master of making you question why the hell you are wasting your time watching one of his movies, until the closing minutes, when things don't so much as "twist" as come to a head, the films real message, real emotional peak is finally reached, giving the rest of the film, a new light to stand in.

The satire of American culture , and human nature in general, is as contentious and engenious as any commited to celluloid or print. This movie is the beginning of the "Land Of Oppurtunties Trilogy" started here and continued with more adventure of Grace in "Manderlay" a story about a Plantation where slavery never ceased to exist, after the civil war.
In any event, Dogville is easily, without a doubt or any sense of hesitation, one of the great films of the decade. See it.

At first I was a little disappointed, I came out of the theater after what felt like forever and I couldn't really make out what I had seen. The performances are as good as you are likely to see anywhere, visually it's stunning with moments of beauty(the fire), but for me the music is really what carried this movie, which opens sounding like "2001" and ends sounding like "Clockwork Orange", Kubrik seems like a driving influence here, and for the most part it works seamlessly and really propells the film through some of it's slower moments. However, he story does takes a bit too long to unfold, there could have been a cut or two here and there, but nothing major. That being said, it's one of those movies which I couldn't grasp the first time around, ("Babel was another of these, which I love now), but whose scenes end up playing themselves out over and over days later. It's a less technical and less sentimental Citizen Cane, which though technically set before that film, is much more topical, showing oil, ambition, and fundamentalist Christianity at a unique juncture in history that ends up, if not mirroring our own modern time, than definitely refracting it. Better than No Country For Old Men, in verisimilitude of performances, it's ability to mix humor and repulsion, and it's construction, which is less formulaic than No Country, and more satisfying. So yeah it's worthy of it's hype, if only for it's last ten minutes, which contain one of those instant "classic" scenes that comes around rarely. "I drink YOUR MILKSHAKE! I drink it up!"

If youve seen this movie, enjoyed it, but strached your head at the end wondering what Jarmusch was getting at. It's something that hes been getting at since "Mystery Train", that is people who have interests in cultures outside their own.
In Myste...(read more)ry Train, a japanese couple obsessed with american rock and roll of the 50's come to visit Memphis, in "Dead Man" an Indian is taken an educated in England, til he reads William Blake and is inspired to escape, only to meet a man in American named William Blake, who he educates in the Indian way of life(this actor appears in Ghost Dog as well in deliberate homage"Stupid fucking white man!"), so theres alot of cross cultural trading going on Jarmusch,...alright now Ghost Dog.
Ghost Dog features a black assasin, who lives by the Samuria code, Italian Mafioso who only like watching cartoons, a Hatian icecream driver, an old man building a large wooden ship on the roof of a tenement, a little girl reading "Frankenstien" and "Night Nurse", a mobster listening to "Flava Flav," etc. The characters of Ghost Dog have interests that you would not initially prescribe to them. This is a film about culture wars and how they are not always chronological, the old vs. the new, here we have the old vs. the ancient. Ancient samurai code or no, Ghost Dog still listens to Wu-Tang Clan (hardcore rappers obsessed with Kung Fu films and Asian culture), suggesting a pick and choose culture, as opposed to one which is just handed down on high from cultural elders, he doesnt cut himself off completely from the world, just chosess to live in his own version of it. The lead mafioso's daughter(if youve seen the film she's the one who starts all the trouble), is in this position of cultural malaise with her aging mobsters, turning similarly to Japanese literature and cartoons for escape.
The performances are all dead pan, some quite funny. This is my favorite Jarmusch film, for a few reasons some personal(bieng a black kid who liked alot of shit black kids arent expected to be interested in I relate...I like Wu-Tang too.), and some aesthetic, this is after "Night On Earth"(just remembered the european cabbie trying to immerse himself in New York culture in that movie, for more evidence of Jarmusch as cultural trader) is his most acessible film. It's also one of the best films about samurai hitmen and mobsters you're likely to find, working from a place of bizzare genre(Blacksploitation/Action/Kung-Fu), Jarmucsch is able to create a moody, atmospheric, urban samurai noir, that actually tells us something about the shrinking and overlapping modern world in the wake of Globalization, not to an easy feat.
But that's what it's about, what it is, is a great mix of intensity and humor, action and reflection, a juncture of both the old and the new, which actions fans and Jarmusch indie fans can enjoy.

Songs From The Second Floor, is the second feature from director Roy Andersson, whose spent his career making according to fellow swedish director and legend Ingmar Bergman, "The best commercials in the world"(Youtube his name for proff of this). And...(read more)erson takes an advertisers eye to this film and inverts it, into around 40 or 50 short vignettes, some with recurring characters, like the man seen on the cover who has burned down his buisness to collect the insurance but bumbled the job, while most include walkons, and many characters drift in an out of scenes before the movie ends. These short vignettes are nearly all deadpan and absurdist tragi-comic advertisments for peoples lives broken or on the verge of breaking. The antagonist, if there must be one, is capitalism(a subject which the commercial making Anderson is very much aware), and it's de-humaizing effects on all its touches. As bleak as all this sounds, the material is played more often than not for laughs. There's a traffic jam which has clogged the city as if everyone were leaving at the same time, a girl who is blindfolded and lead of a cliff by her village elders, a man accidentally sawed in half by poor magician, men and women in buisness suits walk down streets in paradees flailing themselves as an act of pennance to God so he will prevent the further falling of stocks, and a man followed around by ghosts of freinds and strangers. If that werent enough each scene is composed with a static non moving camera, giving each vignette the detailed composition of a photograph or a painting. The movie could be considered a tragi-comic funeral song for western capitalism and modernity(the film takes place just before the new millenium I think), but a tag like that really doesn't communicate how humane, clever, funny, and acessible this movie really is. It's like a lyrical Monty Python film, or a an absurdist Ingmar Bergman, and yet again it's a film all it's own, structurally, conceptually, and aesthetically, if your interested in where film-making may be going in the future and right now, Songs From The Second floor, is the movie to see, and one of the best of the new millenuim

What is "The Proposition" a lawmen new to Australia(which was settled first by English convicts and prisoners), sets out ot avenge the horrible and violent death of a pregnant woman and her family(of whome his wife was a close personal freind). His plan is simple he will capture two brothers from the famous Burns gang and will ask one Charles(Guy Pierce), to kill his older brother the savage Arthur(who commited the murders), or else the lawman will kill his younger brother the mentallly handicapped Micheal. What follows is Charles quest to find his brother, and the lawman's quest to civilize the new country.

Since it's set in Australia it's technically not a "Western", though aside from that detail, and the replacement of Indians with Aboriganals, you'd hardly notice. However the distinction is important, because The Proposition is a deceptively clever film. The proposition in question is whether you should kill your brother to save your brother. The inherint drawback in chosing civilization over the wilds is it puts one instantly at odds with the wilds, in binary us vs. them, civilization vs. non-civilzation. Civilazation is the town, the law, it's fashions and fears, the wilds are the country itself, it's natives and non-whites, it's criminals, it's desolate terrain and animals. In choosing to kill his brother, Charlie Burns, takes up the proposition of civlization, to kill the strong and the other, in order to spare the meek and familiar. Had screen-writer Nick Cave, left the story there it would have been a midly interesting new western, what makes it great however is it complicates further.


The sherriffs wife wants revenge for her freind and demands the younger Burns boy be punished, as does the town and his superiors who don't understand why he released Charles in the first place. If the sheriff punishes the boy(a public wipping he will likely not survive), the pact will be broken, and he himself will have to face the Burns brothers should they return.

In the wilds there are angry natives, roaming criminals and mercenaries, and a pregrant woman can be raped and murdered in her own home. While in the civilized town a young handicapped boy can be beaten to death publically for something he did not do and by rights does not understand. The proposition, or choice between the new nation or anarchy, is not one that can be easily made, and this is the subltle brilliance of this movie. Arthur burns at one point says when asked by another member of his gang wheter or not they are misanthropes; people who hate the world and everyone in it, to which he replies "Were not misanthropes were family".

On one level it's just a very gritty western with lush cinematography and amazing music, and on another level it's a story about the founding of a country like Emir Kusturica's "Underground" was to Yugoslavia, and on yet another it's an weighing of the pros and cons of all civilizations(as many people pointed out Australia around this period resembles the wild American west to a T).
You don't have to think about all this during the film to enjoy the story, but in it's at times thin or slow patches it might help to know that there are greater forces at work in this film than meet the eye(consider John Hurt's wonderfull speech early on the film, about why they are in Australia).
I don't particularly care for Westerns, it's rare when I fall for one, along with "3:10 To Yuma" another film which can go over peoples heads, this was a film that breathed great life into a genre I would not normally look at. It's difficult stuff in this film, but with a little thought and patience it rewards, where many similar movies just cram in extra gun fights.

German direcor Wolfgang Peterson best known for his realist WW2 submarine drama "Das Boot" did the ultimate 180 and then directed "The Neverending Story", in a wild adaptation of the German fantasy novel.
The result is one of mine, and many's most treasured childhood classic. A fantasy film about, what else the imagination, and in particular reading and literacy. Great set and designs, and some of the most original characters to ever grace the fantasy genre. A film whose visual excess had a big impact on how and why I watch movies.

This isn't a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it did manage to completely capture my childhood mind. Dracula, The Wolf-Man, Frankenstien, The Mummy, and a swamp creature (ala Creature From The Black Lagoon), all converge on a small suburban town some time in the 80's. Dracula is attempting to bring about the end of the world(never mind why or how), and it involves Frankenstien, the stroke of midnight, and a magical amuelet. Thankfully some junior high kids find a book by Van Hlelsing, and since they already have a horror themed monster club, they decide they are best suited to save the town.
Bieng a boy who watched an innapropraite amount of horror films for his age, I ate this film up, devoured the frames repeateadly for years, and though I am clearly biased, I think alot of it still holds up very well. I can't imagine a time when "Wolfman's got nards!", or "...they call me...(shotgun cocking sound)...Horace!", wouldn't bring an easy smile to my face. All and all it's an imaginative and witty little children's horror film, from the director of "Night Of The Creeps" a hilarously bad 80's throwback to 50's drive in zombie/alien movies. Anyway, it's good kids adventure stuff, with a little more sex/voilence than your average childrens film (or maybe it's just 80's children's film's in general, Artex dying in NeverEnding Story, etc), but still fairly acceptable for all ages. So if your babysitting an eccentric child or feeling that synthesized dayglo 80's nostalgia, Monster Sqaud is good way to kill some time

I love Terry Gilliam, because even before I gave two shits about directors, I loved his movies, "Time Bandits" and "The Adventures Of Baron Munchaussen".

This film is an epic childrens fantasy about getting old and dying, and the role of the imagination there in. As always illusions and dreams go hand in hand with minipulation and lies, and the story that can give you a baloon ride to the moon, can just as simply keep you enslaved in your community huddled together in fear of invading and ever present barbarians.

What I like about this film, is the fantastic set designs, and the creative zeal that oozes out of every frame. Not as funny as "Brazil" or "Fear And Loathing", but not as childlish as "Time Bandits", either.

It's just one of those great 80's fantasy films that has a texture CGI can't touch, as well as a genuine sense of humor, history, and a director who cares (maybe too much) about the images he is putting on screen. A classic fantasy story told by one of fantasy and cinema's great directors and visionaries.

A film about just how hard it is to balance, an active fantasy life, an active creative life, an and active sexual life. Fellini' turns his own life into a circus, and reminds us of the thrills and chills, of all the aspects of our lives, our failures and fantasies composing a far greater chunk, than most people would like to admit. From the music to the cinematography, the dialogue, to the many wonderfull and infamous scenes, (the imaginary harem and the bullwhip, I think just about every human being can relate to). It's essential viewing for anyone who likes movies, it's long and it has it's slow parts, but it's merging of oeneric fantasy and auto-biography was and is revolutionary to film making and story telling in general. If only to understand what people mean when they say "Felliniesqe" see this movie.

I you liked the sprawling narrative of "Waking Life", you will love "Slacker" which takes mid 20's early 90's Texas collegiate aimlessness and makes it into minimalist cinematic poetry. Some vignettes don't work as well as other's, but taken all together it's a phenomenal film.

However I bought the Criterion Collection version of this because it came with Linklater's first unreleased film "You Can't Learn To Plow By Reading Books", which is without a doubt the most boring thing I have ever seen. It's pretty much just the director staring out of some windows as he takes a trip around Texas. Do not watch it, and do not pay the extra price for it. Rent it, not worth it.

That being said "Slacker" is one of my favorite films, and one which helped start the "indie" film revolution of the 90's. Great smart, hip, poetic, funny stuff, that was and is emblematic of a generation. "Wanna see something cool....it's like...a... Madonna Pap Smear...man the real thing....the real Madonna!"

Brief, surreal, enigmatic British film from the late 60's. It opens with a man killing another in a car for seamingly no reason(think Albert Camus existential murder tale "The Stranger"), only to then sew it back on, to find the man is appalled but o...(read more)therwise fine. The second half of the film involves, people from all over the country bieng summoned to spend a weekend as part of a "committee", where the man who decapated his fellow traveler earlier, is also summoned. Everyone wonders, but no one bothers to question the committee, after all it's a free weekend getaway, and they are told they will make very important decisions. Our hero is lead away from the party which features performances by psychedilic wildman Arthur Brown of (The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, seen on cover here), by an even more enigmatic stranger who proceeds to explain to him, in a 20 minute conversation, the nature of individuality and community, freedom and order, impulse and the nature of the committee. The conversation is really the cornerstone of the film (the screen-writer who became an economist after the lack of sucess with this film, likens it to The Matrix in reverse, and he's not far off. The coversation scene is also paradoied in the climax of Grant Morisson's "Animal Man").

Anyway it's a mysterious film for fans of mysterious, philosophically dense movies(it's hour time line keeps the movie from treading into boredom). The most dissapointing aspect of this film is actually the Pink Floyd soundtrack, which is good, but not nearly as good as fans of the original band(Syd Barret days) will imagine it must be. A good movie, all but lost to the common man before the days of Netflix. If you like political, psychological, and phisophically challengeing films, and "wierd tales", than this is not to be missed.

The only weird thing David Lynch had left to do was make this movie, and it's amazing.

An old man sets out across the country riding his lawn mower, in order to visit a brother he hasn't seen in years. He's too old to legally and drive and doesn't have the money to pay for travel. The trip of only a matter of states will take him almost a year by mower, and he will meet a myriad of characters along the way.

Lynch's absurd and dark humor works gently here, but still rears it's head at the right moments (the woman who always hit's deer). Still though, it's worlds away from Eraser Head and Blue Velvet, but feels like an artist expanding his horizons, than trying to make a "traditional film". The movie has a unique perspective and natural beauty and earnestness, that's stirring and never sappy. It's a straight forward, emotionally engaging movie about the absurd, miraculous, and honest in life. Beautiful

Suprising, is the best word to describe "Shortbus", part romantic comedy, part sex and relationship drama, and part porn. All the sex is real (not simulated), but each scene (they don't all contain sex), no matter how graphic (explicit gay & straight...(read more) ), they all have "suprising" emotional variety and content, and do push forth both our understandings of the characters and the story itself, and for a film about being "comfortable' with your own sexuality, it might be considred almost a cheat to fake or go timid, when it came to portraying the subject itself.

James Cameron Mithcell has improved as a writer here as well, the kitsch of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" has been replaced with a greater eye and care for human relationships and development.

"New York is the place people come to be forgiven", says an 80 year old man, in the fantastical downtown New York sex club "The Short Bus". It is here we are intoduced to an ensemble of characters from a miserable hipster dominatrix, to a sex therapist whose never orgasmed, to an emotionally distant gay couple considering bringing a third party into the relationship.

Short from John Cameron Mitchell sugesting we all start going to mysterious improbably eccentric sex clubs and re-start the free love revolution one used condom at a time, I think "Shortbus" is a film about negotiating your own sexual politics, there contradictions and insistences. "New York is where people come to be fogiven" and if this is to be taken as anything other a greeting card platitude, perhaps it suggests that kind of "reconstruction", in sexual terms, for the post 9/11 generation, "9/11 was the only real thing that's ever happened to most of [them]"(young people and those who came to the city after the attacks), is another line, from the same 80 year old man in the club.

So were all confused freightened, paranoid, tense, and alone in the dark (a literal city wide power outage in the films finale), and Mitchell's solution, and it's as elegant one as Ive ever heard, which is to do what humans have always done under cover of darkness...and to use the anonymity to explore new possibilites in honesy, intimacy, and pysicality, of course.

Very, very graphic, but emotionally complex, funny, smart, great music, one of the most uncomfortable opening scenes I have ever sat through, and one of the most "feel-good" endings I can remeber, great musical performances as well.

"Hedwig And The Angry Inch" kinda revitalized "Queer Cinema", as Ive heard the atrocious term thrown about, and maybe pushed it a little closer to acceptability with it's campiness, fun musical numbers, and wit, this because of it's genre not just "gay" but "pornographic", which almost cost lead actress "Sook Yin-Lee" her job at Canadian Public Television. But like I said before the sex doesn't really evoke arousal, as often as it does comedy, sadness, release, and despair.

Obviosuly not for everyone, but if you give it a shot, and maybe step outside your comfort zone, you might be suprised.

I remember where I was and the time of night when I started and finished this movie, it left that deep an impression.

"No Country For Old Men", ends with questions this film tackles and dipsenses with, in far more humerous, insightful, and interest...(read more) ing ways.

A knight comes home from the Crusades, only to find the black plague, religious fanatics flailing themselves in contrition, and Death himself who he challanges to a chess game, where if he wins he may live, and if he looses....

Bergman created the perfect visual metaphors, for death, man's limitations and hopes, faith, skepticism, and weaved them all together into a sumptous philosophical feast, that anyone could watch (provide they don't mind sub-titles and black and white).

In my opinion Bergman's most solid film, and successful film, none of the visual flash of "Persona" or the raw emotion which encapsulates his later work, but indespensible for people interested in movies.

Life affirming in a strange way...

Maybe one of the best movies ever made!

I think I could watch Kalatozishvili (say it three times fast) film grass grow and be spellbound. The camera literally dances, and is a character in it's own right.

Four stories about the Cuban life bef...(read more) ore, during, and ending with the revolution. We see the Havana nightclub prosititute (the films most dazzling moments, like comming to Cuba for the firs time), a farmer whose loosing his land to US Fruit(the films most spiritual moment), a student activist poised to be a terrorist or a matryr, and a family man and pacifist driven to war...but who cares!

This is not an effective propahganda film because by the end of the movie, your not so much mad at the big bad West, as you are just dissapointed there isn't more. You care about the characters certainly, but you care about them as individuals, beset by the troubles of "life", and not as a faceless nation, engaging in a "fight". Propahganda to work needs a "them" for "us" to turn our attention towards, look at Micheal Moore's films, for examples of this. "I Am Cuba" has foreign and internal devils, but each story is told so well, you feel for the characters, and not some abstract notion of the "the cuban people".

The sheer cinematic strength of the film, it's composition, AMAZING tracking shots(ripped off by Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorcesse, and Tartovsky, to name a few...they each steal scenes, and even then that's not half of the amazing images.), music, and performances are so good they transform and transcend the story. What Sergio Leone did for the Western in "Once Upon A Time In The West", and Stanley Kubrick did for science fiction in "2001: A Space Odyssey", is equivalent to what this film does for propahganda.

Cuban public at the time though it was too stereotypical (a fair critique, the director and crew are mostly Russian), Soviets thought it was too soft on capitalism and the west, film makers everywhere I imagine wet themselves.

Quite possibly one of the best films ever, never seen in the US, til the mid 90's. The portrayls of Americans are amusing to say the least (think of all those furry hated evil Russians in cold war movies to be fair. Think "Red Dawn" for chris sakes) Anyway if you like "great films" see this, its exhilerating and beautiful, and as a whole it more than makes up for the sum of its parts. Incredible.

What's most amazing about this film is how easily you forget you are watching a movie, and not just two friends having dinner. An eccentric theater director and old friend (whose been avoiding the dinner for years) a struggling playwright, have dinne...(read more) r and discuss...well just about everything. Roger Ebert called this 'the only movie without clichés", and while it's not completely true(what really could be), it does manage to invert any expectations of characterization or plot.

The conversation is NOT random either, all ideas explored here get re-integrated into the film later on, what begins with the "director" telling the details of his breakdown and bizarre attempts at spiritual and artistic fulfillment, in a cross between the most pretentious theater professor you have ever seen and the most interesting man in the world from those "Dos Euis"commercials. The play-write....don't know why I keep calling them by these titles, the characters names are their names in real life Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn (who it's nice to see in a serious role after his mad scientist Southland Tales bit)...anyway Shawn mostly listens to Andre who obviously loves attention and hearing himself speak, but later interrogates, contradicts, and adds much needed balance to Andre's new age excesses and paranoia. Not that it comes out as clearly or as neatly as Andre's monologue, Shawn is a writer, more comfortable on paper than in real life(there's an Ingmar Bergman quote about this idea early on), and you can literally see the thoughts and reactions building behind his eyes, even as he can't fully express them. Also little details about Andre abound, liberal guilt mostly (listen for how many times he compares himself to Nazi's)....but I could go on like this forever. The point is the characters are genuine and lyrical even as they trip over their words.

If you want to see some of where Richard Linklater got his sprawling conversational wit, "My Dinner With Andre" is absolutely necessary. It's rare to get a real intellectual and emotional charge out of a movie, "Before Sunris/Sunset" and "Waking Life" did it, Spalding Grey's "The Monster", comes close, but this movie explodes with life, at it's most fascinating and most banal. This is the thrilling conversation you've been waiting for.

Horror film about the "Buddhist Hells"(an important distinction from Christian Hell. 1. You don't go to Buddhist Hell because of any kind of God, you go because of past Karma, and you stay just as long as is necessary, for the pound of flesh to be re...(read more) ndered so to speak. "Naraka" the Buddhist word for Hell, we are told when the film opens means roughly "abdonimal" or "excrusiating", and though it's concept is more abstract than the Wests, it's torture's are much more specific, and would make Eli Roth blush.

The story, begins with young man, who get's in the wrong car with the wrong guy(Tamura, who just appears out of nowhere, and then usually just to cause trouble or point out others sins), who has a hit and run, with a drunken Yakuza. The two drive off, though our hero wants to go back, and from them on, everything in his life goes wrong. Girlfreind dies, mother becomes terminally ill, father revealed as an unrepentent adulterer and reprobate, a doppleganger of his girlfreind re-apears, and the girlfreind and mother of the man he killed are on his tail too, which all come together in one hellish night of murder, revenge, and accidental death that takes them all.

The next half hour to fourty minutes takes place in Hell. We watch a series of spectacles from the outer depths of purgatory to the inner rings of the vortext of torment, where our Hero after meeting his wife again (who may have been his sister, it's revealed, at least one of the dopplegangers was), goes on a quest to find the soul of his brother/son, who is shown on screen as a baby riding a leaf down a river of blood.

Severed heads, flailings, a field of faces half burried (images I recognize from "What Dreams May Come" Hell sequence), and much, much, more.

Jigoku, is one of the few horror movies I've seen, that has no pre-cursors, nothing has ever looked this, though plenty have tried since. There's elements of theater, b-movie conventions, theology, sharp editing and directing, and some of the best set design Ive ever seen.

Though over 60 years old, it feels suprisingly not too dated, and though bleak as any film about "Hell" could be, it's important to note that Buddhist Hell is more like a place for shedding psychic skin, than an eternal prison, as the last frame of our hero and his child on opposite ends of the wheel of torment, followed by a distant light shimmering in the darkness, would suggest.

So...not to scary, but Brilliant. One of the best horror movies ever.

Not so much about the comics of R. Crumb, so much as the very, very, personal life of the man. Few documentaries get this deep under a subjects skin, even for Crumb, who always drew and wrote with his "Id" completely exposed anyway.

The film neve...(read more) r let's your feeling's about Crumb settle or congeal into an easy interpretation, at times he's just a normal guy, others a sex addict, a misogynist, a crotchety old man, an absent and loving father, an abused son, and a younger brother living in the shadow of an even more disturbed older brother. Not to mention the younger Charles who panhandles meditating on a board of nails, or his two sisters who wont speak to him because of his work.

Crumb's work is disturbing, funny, grotesque, pornographic, and surreal, and it completely imitates and represents the man and his life, it's not always enjoyable, intelligible, or decent (how does Crumb respond to "White-Man" arguably his most "racist" comic, "It's about my father I think....", and after watching this, I will give the guy his daddy issues, and take him at his word.)

This isn't a good movie, because Crumb is such a great artist, he's a hugely important and prolific figure in the world of comics and graphic arts, but this movie is good, because it's a great documentary, it asks all the right questions, and it's arranged as compellingly as any "fiction" movie", and it has at it's heart something sadly lacking in many of Crumbs best works, "empathy". Terry Zwigoff who would later direct the Dan Clowes comic "Ghost World", to similar success, of humanizing the absurd and morose.

Even in the parades of his sexual fetishes (R. Crumb was the champion of the big butt and "thick powerful thighs", years before Sir Mix A lot), political and social disgust, arrogance and neurosis...a real human being manages comes through out of a man who worked his life into a caricature.

How come it rains daddy?" "Cus the devil is beating his wife."

I like the soundtrack, and the laid-back pace and structure of the narrative. There's some themes, but they never invade the film, just play out and rub up against the images. The re...(read more) occurring images of the sheep being lead to slaughter, gives the movie some bleak and harsh sub-text, listen for Paul Robeson's "America" after one such scene.

The music is the movies greatest strength, because it really transforms some scenes, the dance in the living room, "as the phrase, this bitter earth" comes up over and over in refrain, (the movie ends with this song too. And was intended as a thesis in African American music).

But there's some other scenes, whose images I'd experienced, but never really seen reflected on screen before. The opening where a young boy is berated for not assisting his brother in a fight (which the younger brother may have started and deserved), to the "climactic" trip to country, at the end, there's an honesty and a naturalism (NOT realism), that makes this movie easy to watch, even at two a.m., as I did. Also "The Devil Is Beating His Wife" is one of my favorite Pedro The Lion songs(whether or not it has anything to do with this film...I haven't the foggiest.)

Anyway this is probably the best student film ever made, at least, as far as I know, it's the only one, to be added to the Library Of Congress. So dream big kids.

I watched this, and it wasn't available on flixter, so I had them add it...but since there are two reviews already (on facebook filxter anyway), I'm going to assume this was here at one time, but was deleted...odd....

Anyway the "movie info" section is stuff I compiled from wikipedia and amg all movie guide, and does a pretty good job of describing the movie in general.

Because "Wax" isn't really like anything else Ive seen it's very, very, difficult to describe. It's post modern-film which owes it's greatest debt to William S. Burroughs, who appears in stock footage as our hero's grandfather, cementing the idea of literary lineage. The narrative voice over, plays over almost all of the movie, Blair's monoton, has a spoken word quality to it, similar to Sonic Youth's Lee Renaldo, and it helps and complicates the images on screen, tremendously. It's not for everyone, not much here in the way of dialogue, characterization, or catharsis, it's a film, experiment to be sure, but one better in it's execution than in just reading it's concept.

Calling this movie "overwrought" is the understatement of the century, but a simpler way to look it at might be... what would happen if weapons could be haunted by the people that they kill? In order to do that you have to make the weapons into living things, which is a big part of where the movie's weirdness comes from, but at the same time it asks us to think about the way we wage war, which is shown on t.v. so that it seems not to have a cost in human lives, when in fact, of course, the toll in human life of wars like desert storm is extraordinary.

So far the most accurate review Ive read, has been from an anonymous person from the U.S., this past April on IMDB , and though the author is obviously enjoying name checking his favorite books, it's not to far off. Anyway here it is, "

"Wax" is very likely the oddest film I've ever seen. Marvelously, beautifully, lyrically, and profoundly intellectually stimulating in all respects. Breathtaking in its scope and achievement. But very odd.

I have read medical reports containing sodium pentathol interviews and transcripts of schizophrenics' monologues. I have read memoirs and fiction by schizophrenics and hard drug users. I have read Surrealist and Beat Movement literature. I have read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. I have read the visionary poetry of Charles Williams and H.D.

I have watched films by Kenneth Anger and David Lynch and Maya Daren. I have read Yoruba ethnic literature from West Africa and studied Aleister Crowley's skryings on the Enochian aethyrs. I have read H. P. Lovecraft and also Kenneth Grant's post-Crowleyan magickal writings describing journeys behind the Tree of Life which would have preempted H.P.L.'s usual nightmares had he but known of them.

"Wax" stands tall in that company. A hypnotic, hallucinatory, purely poetic fusion of words, images, political ideas, and mystical transformations, nothing quite resembles it. "Pi" (1998) tried for something as distinctive, but that film gave us a glowering, paranoid, tortured vision shot in deliberately painful close-ups. "Wax" makes a complete contrast in its joyful freedom of eloquence in narration and visuals.

"Wax" enhances life while critiquing it. The film employs early, simple computer graphics. It juggles idiosyncratic desert architecture, prosaic photography, and absurd juxtapositions of common images.

It tells a story of Middle Eastern honey bees along with offering a hard view of the original U.S. military actions against Iraq in 1991 (a time so simple in retrospect as to seem the good old days). It links Los Alamos with transformations in consciousness. "Wax" leaps beyond the merely political in its luminous metaphors for human existence.

You can find stronger films, more beautiful films, more linguistically spry films, but you will probably never find anything quite like this fireworks display of language and image. Think "2001: A Space Odyssey" on a home movie budget. Your grasp of reality (and cinema) may never feel the same."

Anyway that's my patchwork review, If you like "Naked Lunch", "The Wild Blue Yonder", "Specters Of The Spectrum", experimental cinema with a punch, or are just looking for something, really, really, really, different. You may want to consider, the world of teleivion among the bees.

Great writing, jarring and at times inspired camer work and editing. Great soundtrack. Stories of love, lonliness, and interconnection, simple when taken on their own, and more complex when taken as whole.

At least from what Ive seen of War Kong ...(read more) Wai' films they defy easy categorization, they are effective and genuine, but also eliptical and odd. I enjoyed it emotionally, and ended stracthing my head, but that wasn't a bad thing, was Chunking Express a reference to the drug trade or the restuarant around which everything revolved, whose the blonde in the wig?, but then "The Cranberries" "Only In Dreams" get's played in Japanese who cares, why can't their be Amelieesque pixie like women with cropped haircuts, who magically re-arrange your house when your not around? Where everyone uses Richard Brautigan like personifications to describe all of the objects of isolation? Well I dont mind, anyway.

1 story a man falls in love with a woman who doesnt love him, and who he only knows for a few hours, the 2nd story is of two people who obviouslly desire each other, but opt for cat and mouse, for years as opposed to making a move. Love is not linear on the Chunking Express

All one GIANT SET! Mind boggling, slapstick comedy about how human biengs relate to their enviornment. The difference between a world which looks like an endless waiting room and one which looks like carousel, is a matter of how you look a it.

Ha...(read more) rd to follow, at first (kind of the point, it's like a maze), but once you get to the restuarant scene and the social and technological machines break down, everything comes to life in a big way.

If anyone has seen "Last Year At Marienbad", imagine those shifting figures in the garden, crowding through a labyrinth qausi-futuristic Paris (lookout for the Hal 3000 parody), and getting into all kinds of gentle comedic mishaps.

The world in minature, and still a world unto itself. Brilliant, colorful, and completely unique. Reminds me how you amazing movies can be.

Bear in mind, any film (let alone documentary) which asserts any kind of truth, will generate an adverse and proportional amount of cynicism, from those to whom any suggestion of and or search for truths is already meaningless, those of you who are already Masters of psychology, film, and captains of the soul, will no doubt find this movie redundant, after all, you already know everything there is to know. Congrats.

For those of us in the minority like myself, I found "The Perverts Guide To Cinmea"....mostly brilliant, and worth watching for those interested in movies, psychology, and modern philosophy.

A little like Scott Mclouds' "Understanding Comics", director Sophie Fiennes, inter-grates Slovene philosopher, psychologist, and social critic Slavoj Zizek right into many of the films and specif scenes he discusses. The cover is an image from "The Birds"(Zizek takes a boat out to re-create the shot).

Lacanian Psycho-analysis, does not necessarily scream, an evening of great fun...but it is! If you like movies that is.... Having some knowledge of Lacanian psycho-analysis helps (Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary) are terms which get thrown around a little loosely at first, but the scenes which Zizek selects and analyze make remarkably clear what was always for me, a very abstract subject. In fact, it's probably better to have a familiarity with the films he's discussing than with the terminology he uses, which becomes clearer as the film goes on.

Why I love, this film isn't because it picks great films to analyze or reveals great truths about Lacan, but shows in a very practical and clever manner, where film and psychology (and by default philosophy) meet.

Why is "The Sound Of Music" kinda fascistic, why is "Short Cuts" about more than just class and alienation, why do the birds attack in "The Birds", what is there to learn about the mind from "Alien Resurrection", what does the planet of "Solaris" want, what does "Psycho" and "The Marx Brothers" have to do with each other, and what the hell is David Lynch getting across in movie after movie...well Zizek has some ideas.

The role of the voice in both "The Excorcist" and "Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith", is maybe the movies strongest and most lucid moment, when he gets into feminine sexual subjectivity I begin to wonder...at one point Zizek admits offhand his personal feeling that flowers are a kind of decorative vagina dentatta, that they are disgusting and should be hidden from children (jokingly, it seems but...).

Anyway, it's a fascinating documentary, which anyone who has ever seen a movie, and thought it meant something more than was literally stated, should make an attempt to see.

And anyone interested in Slavoj Zizek, this is a must as well, much less dry than "Reality Of The Virtual", and more direct than "Zizek!", two other pseudo-docs, about "the Elvis of cultural criticism", as he is being dubbed.

"The Perverts Guide To Cinema" is NOT about the role of sex in cinema. Zizek claims cinema is the ultimate pervert art, because it teaches "how to desire, and not what to desire", and that it is the only contemporary art form that can allow for these desires to be articulated. This is not a film about finding the reality in cinema, it's about finding the cinema in reality, and how important and exciting that can be. Hard to find, and a bit long, but well worth

"It's all true kid, God's an astronaught, Oz IS over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monster's go..."

One of my true regrets in life, was giving away my Nightbreed t-shirt in highschool.

If you ask to go to Midian before you kill yourself...(read more) , you can be reborn in a underground city located beneath an obscure Canadian graveyard, full of demons, monsters, shapeshifters; the Nightbreed, for short.

Unless of course the evil David Cronenberg (he actuaully is kinda creepy, isn't he?) happens to be your psychologist and a defacto serial killer of families...who will set out to kill the "family" of the shadows, unless the chosen one can come forth...and so forth and so on.

Not great. But imaginative, bizzare, fun, and completely unique. It's "Little Monsters" all grown up, actually watching this again, i'm pretty positive that Guillermo Del Torro, was watching this, in preperation for the market scene in "Hellboy 2"(people mention the Star Wars cantina, as the point of reference, and it' is but it's at least 60 percent "Night Breed").

Also a great score by Danny Elfman. Clive Barker, was never happy with this, and supposedly has lots of extra footage, and hopefully one day we will get a director's cut.

Until then tear off your skin, get a leather jacket, and be reborn to the tribes of the moon.

The best action movie since I can't remember when. A story told as much in it's background details, tv's, nespapers, radio transmissions, music, references to to other works of art, and peripheral images as it is in pulse pounding excitement. A beautiful and simple story of hope, existing in the worst possible conditions.

Like all great sci-fi Children of Men is less a film about the future as an exagerration of the present, excessive military force, immigration policy, climate control, and denial scrawled into every scene whether it's driving into a Pink Floyd album cover, quoting from TS. Elliot's "The Wasteland" or positioning the now infamous Abu Ghraib Black Hooded christ just behind a detanee cage, this film is so full of information and so briskly told and paced, it's phenomenal to believe it came and went in theaters like it did. One of the decades best. See it

Franz Kafka's "A Report To An Academy" is the story of an ape testifying before an academy the story of how he learned to speak and think like a human and why. Though he comes to love music and eventually accepts his fate, he admits that he only began learning from his human teachers as a way to espcape from his cage.
Michel Gondry's "Human Nature", is one of the earliest Charlie Kaufman(Bieng John Malkovich, Adaptation) scripts , and it takes Kafka's story and modernizes it in unexpected ways.
A woman with a rare condition which causes her to grow hair all over her body in vast amounts, forsakes the world and becomes a nature writer, who leaves her isolation only to find a mate. Tom Robbins plays this mate, a fastidious, obsessive compulsive, scientist obsessed with teaching table manners to mice. The two then meet a man who was raised as an ape by his father who went insane after the Kennedy assasination, and the scientist and his now shaved assistant decide to make an example of the ape-man by civilizing him. If this sounds a bit ridiculous I should also add that there are three different versions of the story being narrated by Tim Robbins from the afterlife to whatever powers that be, Patricia Arquette to the police in an interrogation room, and Rhys Ifans (our ape man) testifying before congress.

A funny, egeniusly smart, wonderfully stylized film, from a writer director team who would go on to "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind". All performances are also top notch, in this crinimally underseen, and fascinating film.

My favorite Hitchcock movie. It's about voyuerism, love, death, desire, the human mind, spectatorship, and cinema itself. Also a great thriller, where all the action revolves around a man in a wheel chair staring out a window.

"Disturbia" and "The S...(read more) impsons" episode where Bart suspects Flanders murdered Maude (and spies on them through a telescope), are both parodies of this, only "The Simpsons" is funnier than "Disturbia".

One of the "classics", that lives up to it's rep.

I dont like westerns, not really sure why, like musicals, they represent a genre that was kind of on it's last legs, if not all but extinct, when I growing up. I mention this because I really, realy, did not want to watch this, when I eventually gave...(read more) in and let my roomate put it on.

It's probably the best "western" ever made, and definitely the best of the "Sphaghetti Westerns", it's beautiful, intense, and marvelously composed. The music is incredible and infamouse, the performances sub-dued and brooding, (just watched Peter Fonda last night in "Toute Va Bien", which is apples and car batteries to this film). Anyway it's a "classic" that delivers the goods.

No anaylsis necessary (Railroads, cowboys, revenge, etc), but like "Psycho" it's not the story, or the characters,really, it's just mesmerizing movie making.

Two children are left to fend for themselves in the Austraillian wilderness where they meet an aboriginal boy on a Walkabout, an initiation ritual. The story itself is unremarkable, but the film making particularly the editing is what tells this film...(read more)s story which is far grander in scope than it would initially lead you to believe. Civilization, technology, innocence, sex, communication, death, rebirth, the cyclical nature of time, are all illuminated in this film through visual and auditory juxtapositions, so many mirror images and sounds end up in this film that it almost overwhelms the story, thankfully it walks that razors edge with a grace, daring, and sense of purpose you just don't see today, at least not at such a technical level.

Underground is a fable about a country that no longer exists, it's breakdown, and fragmentation literally illustrated in the films final moments when the characters gathered together on a beach find the ground breaking off like a glacier, and sailing out into the ocean. That's just one the many amazing images thrown into the flamming bonfire of this movie, a bombing where all the animals escape from the zoo, drunken tank rampages/singalongs, etc. At over three hours long, the film tries to pack about as much information and jubuliation as it can, I lost count of how many parties there are. Theres an insistent zeal and vitality in this film that come out in the first frame, where two men drive a wagon drunkenly through town while a full horn band runs behind them playing in perfect time. "Undergound" covers a huge amount of time in a dense allegorical space, but does without succombing to mellacholly or pretension, or getting to tangled in its own details, though with further views, the details are plentiful. This movie made good on it's hype, and managed to really be one of the best films of the 90's, it's massive scale, and manic performances, probably turned away as many as they might have brought in, as might the allegorical nature of the story. Which is a real shame because this is the most entertaining historical movies, I have ever watched, almost each character monologues, sings, dances, performes phsyical comedy, and all without feeling staged or forced, or rather feeling appropriately staged, the right style at the right moment. It's a long, long, sit, but it's well worth the time, a fun, funny, lyrical, surreal, and boisterous epic of a country existing in the minds of it's people, it's passions and virtues as well as it's trappings.

A perfect movie. The music, the editing, cinematography, writing, all working on overdrive and complimentary each other perfectly. Each time I see it, I'm impressed and enthralled. Experimental film as a parlour game, it's brilliant. One of the top ten best films of the 90's.

Great performances, great script, great directing. A hot summer day and racial tensions on the verge of exploding. An ensemble piece that feels as much designed for theater as it does for the screen. Few films really capture an era, but this is one that get's it spot on. Spike Lee is here at his creative apex, a pinnacle he has not yet topped.

HA!

The first film by Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children Of Men, HP: Prisoner Of Azkaban), is a multi-layered satire of Mexican culture, and a hilarious lighthearted dark comedy?

Tomas is an ad agent, and ladies man by reputation. He...(read more) 's trying to think of a new slogan for the worst Chille in Mexico, sleeping with his boss, and trying to balance a revolving door of woman, with an interest in a mysterious new neighbor....which is all pretty standard Spanish language sex comedy (at the time this film was financed by the Mexican government the overwhelming majority of Mexican films where the kind of saucy soaps you see on Telemundo apparently)...which is why a little over half way through the film, a jaded ex lover of Tomas', falsifies his AIDS report to make him think he is HIV positive, and then the fun really begins.

It's as well crafted and gorgeously shot as any of Cuaron's other films, and the in-titles used before the film, do not merely recall the french new-wave, but serve as linguistic puns for each section of the film, be they the poem by E. E. Cummings about the color green (used again and again in this film, shoes, rooms, the Aids report),to the Itsy Bitsy Spider(and the crossing the ledge sequence), to Newtons third law of thermodynamics, to the Olympic Slogan, each heading really does say a lot. It's appropriate that the last heading be an actual slogan, which is what Tomas is trying to come up with for most of the film. And in the end, a slogan is what he get's "love is the cure for those sick of life". Like the traditional comedies of old, it even ends with a marriage!

The film is a satire of Mexican soaps, but also the way Mexico sells it's stereotypes,(Tomas's neighbors ditch, two Japanese business associates who don't speak any Spanish with Tomas, to go watch "the new Kurosawa film". Tomas takes them through a montage of traditional Mexican debauchery, Mariachi's, bars, something that looks like shots of Tequilla..?, etc), and let's not forget the scene of the Aztek running epically down the beach (one of the first scenes), only to run into a Conquistador and offer him Gonzalez Beans, as it had all along been a commerical. Or the dream sequence on the plane with Mexican wrestlers, Mariachi's and a host of assorted references.

I can see how some could compare this to Pedro Almodvar, the zany surrealism of "What Have I Done To Deserve This" comes to mind, easy. But even at his best Almodvar was never this laugh out loud funny.

In some ways it's also a coming of age tale, it begins with a sex scene (like Y Tu Mama Tambien), where Tomas claims he has no condoms, though a few moments later we see that he has plenty(not that he ever uses them, this scene plays out more than once). At the end he is buying a pack for himself, just as his friend the gynecologist, so envious that Tomas can indulge in the desires he represses, by the end of the film, is able to see his relationships in a new light as well.

That being said, this was really, really, funny, clever, and just a pleasure to watch.

"No ma'm you can't get AIDS through the phone!"

Cube is one of the most underrated film's of the 90's, and especially one of the least known horror films. It's a genuinely fascinating look at buerocracy, technophobia, and a Kafkaesque nightmare world as chewed up by Rod Serling.
Cube is the story of six people who wake up to find themselves in a strange room connected to a series of identical rooms on all sides, some are booby trapped, some are not, some contain seemingly random numbers. No one knows why or how they got there, or what the meaning or reason for "The Cube" is, more profoundly freightening is the fact that it may have none.
(SPOLIER INCOMMING). What always made Cube stick out in my mind, wasn't it scarriness, or it's goriness, but it's central concept, as delivered by one it's characters who beleives he designed part of it. No one knows what it's for, people do not ask questions, a contract comes along to construct just one part in a vast machine and everyone complies and goes along with it. After it's built it's purpose might no longer exist, but there it is, and you have to do something with it....there they(the characters) are.
Cube is a universe of Buerocracy gone mad, a purposeless place, where we build machines to destroy ourselves and ask no questions till it's far too late. There may not be an ultimate evil "they" "them", just an endless and headless series of blunders and button pushers, and that is much scarier, than an alien experiment, or a secret government test. There is no one to appeal to, or way to fight back, the Cube is the world, and one can only navigate it's torture rooms and decipher it's autistic codes.
Anyway, it's great performances all around(this could easily be a play, since it all takes place in pretty much one room), and it never get's to heady into it's greater abstractions, there's plenty of horror and suspense and there's something of interest to think about, not to mention to the character study breakdowns of power survival situations(which is a subject almost any zombie or lost in wilderness movie covers, but its here too). Cube is the best in what is now a trilogy with "Hypercube" the sequel and "Cube Zero" the prequel, and though the others make some interesting additions to The Cube universe as whole, for best all around movie, my money's on this one. A minor classic.

"You must bury a picture of your mother and your favorite toy, before you can become a man...", says Alejandro Jodorowsky to a naked infant as he rides through the desert in all black with an umbrella.

El Topo(The Mole), is a story about one long...(read more) gunslingers quest to become the greatest of all killers, along the way he encounters and duels several "masters", until he reaches the final stage, where the most enlightened of all masters, kills himself.

Distraught the lone gunmen, goes underground where he meets a group of kindly deformed people who have never been to the surface...

The best way to explain the rest may be to mention another scene in a Jodorowsky film, The Holy Mountain, where the thief gives food to a group of starving children, at which the alchemist scoffs and asks if he wants to see what would happen if he tried to feed them all, and the alchemist makes dozens of loaves of bread appear. The children began fighting over the food, snarling at each other, etc. The Alchemist tells the theif, "all the food in the world is useless if they are not ready to share".

If you havent seen the movie yet, ignore that, but if you have think about the mole going into the light prematurely and blinding itself at the beginning (and others ancient stories of Caves and temporary blindess?), about what the gunmen is attempting to do for the people underground, and why it goes wrong? Anyway it's food for thought. Don't take anything about this film literally.

Surreal, allegorical, violent, and sensory pounding, take on the Sphagetti Western and Samurai tale, set in the Mexican desert. Wasn't available in the states for years until very recently, if uou get the chance, see it. Recommend | add comment

Mix tapes from the dead and stolen novels, mean ambigious beautifully photographed crowded dance halls and lonely deserts.

After Morvern's boyfreind kills himself on Christmas Day, he leaves a note saying "don't try to understand, be strong, pay ...(read more) for my funeral with my account and send my book to the publishers", and instead she cuts up his corpse burries him(after several days of him on the kitchen floor), signs her name to his book, and uses the advance to go on a trip to Spain to with her best freind, who she later ditches in the desert.

Though the journey sounds thrilling and surreal, and it many of its finest moments it is, it's a also haunted one, beautifully photographed and excellently aurally composed. It is as much and visual and tonal expression of isolation as it is a feast for the senses.

There's very little dialogue and somewhat thick scottish accents are a little hard to hear without subtitles, in many scenes though what is audible is often fighting over the roar of crowds or the roar of music. Not unike Callar herself, one small voice, among many, being at best, partially heard, but talking on anyway.

Samantha Morton (the main pre-cog in Minority Report) is hypnotic and commanding, as is the movie in general. One of the best Christmas films in years!

Synecdoche, New York, is a play on words, as the story takes place is Schenectady, NY. Synecdoche, according to dictionary.com means "a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special".

I went to see this with someone else, I walked out a bit stunned and a little dazed, they left bored and hostile. I loved it. They hated it. We argued the drive whole way home. It got heated.

I know why people won't like this movie, I think, and it makes me disappointed. It is true that Kaufman could use an editor, he is a first time director after all, and is not perfect. There were allot of moments I was repulsed and wanted the movie to end, but then I found myself being sucked back in the next scene. Few movies can play this kind of continual tug of war of repulsion and attraction as this film does, even at the end I wanted/didnt want-it to end.

Unlike previous Kaufman films there is no discreet "genre" mechanism to kick in and explain away the films inconsistencies, there are no sci-fi memory companies, fantastical portals to people's heads, ape-men, or meta-factious twin brothers with just the right words for the right moment. Instead your left Caden Cotard, a theater director, whose life is slowly deteriorating, until he get's a genius grant and begins the great, true, meaningful work of his life. From there Kaufman explores just how impossible it is to ever fully master a narrative.

"Simulacrum might be a good title" he says at one point, one of many tiny jokes (like tiny paintings) you will only get for a split second (there's a bus in the fake city, marked as headed to "Funland", for another).

"Simulacrum" would be such a good title because almost nothing in this film is the genuine article, the title Synecdoche implies as much. Everyone becomes a character, idealized projection, or distortion in the world of Caden. He reads a diary of his daughter, throughout the film, who hasnt lived with him in years, this is his projection of what she would be writing, which naturally would be about him. This extreme narcisissm becomes apparent in the film pretty quickly, the cartoons on the TV in the background, all have a Caden figure.

For me the most beautiful scene (don't read this paragraph til after you see it), is when Caden and Hazel finally move in together into her house that continuously burns but is never consumed...until Caden moves in, and then Hazel dies of smoke inhalation. I don't know if there's been a better metaphor for fantasy, in cinema, ever. The house is only possible so long as Caden doesnt live inside it! That's why we never see Adele, after she leaves Caden, she appears only as notes, a voice on a tape recorder, her tiny paintings (which you can only see with a magnifying glass; that is to say if you pay Close attention).

You could go so far as to see each female character represents a bit of Caden's view of women, and his need to be "redeemed" by them; his daughter, his psychologist, his three love interests and eventually the woman comes to replace him as the new Caden, with the exception of his shrink and the New Caden, all reject him at some point (not without good cause).

The scenes within the fake city; all revolve around an attempt to tell an honest story, one which includes everyone, every possible story that could occur, including the story of the creation of the fake city; the story of Caden, as he hires actors to play himself and the important players in his life, he then has to hire actors to play the actors who become themselves a part of the story, and on into infinity, until from this germ, youve built an entire world around yourself, or at least the projection of a world.

There are something like 200 scenes in this movie according to Kaufman, when a film of its length normally has half that. This more than anything makes the film seem longer than it really is. A tremendous amount of ground is covered very quickly. To say this is a movie just about a man trying to make a play, is like saying Inland Empire" like it's movie poster said was just about "a woman in trouble", or "8 1/2" is just about the movie making industry.

That's not even to start with the other theories that have already started flying around for the ultimate explanation of the movie, which I have heard range from; Caden is God and the theater the imperfect, incomplete world that grows beyond his control, Caden is a suicide in some surreal afterlife of half-complete (like the buildings) thoughts, "Why did you kill yourself", "What?","Why would you kill yourself?"..."Harold Pinter is dead, oh no he just won the Nobel prize", Caden is hazing a seizure induced hallucination (he shakes on a bed uncontrollably at one point), but like I said there are no formal "genre" mechanisms to let you get comfortable in your knowledge of what to expect next.

It's an exhausting movie, very complex and emotionally draining experience, but it is very rewarding (not entertaining). I would have seen again the next day, if I could have. But like I said I didn't see this alone, and this movie wont be for everyone, but thats a good thing.

Movies should not be for Everyone. Who is Everyone anyway, Joe Sixpack, Joe The Plumber, whatever imaginary average idiot we can project are fears of the "other", who wont get it, onto? (Night At The Movies; gave this two skip its, while High School Musical 3, got a rent it, though its not for Everyone...).

My conversation with someone who didnt like it, told me this movie was too long, too confusing, and too depressing. Where I thought it was a bit long, but excellently paced, challenging, funny, and ultimately moving. So to each his own, but if you like movies as more than just entertainment (whatever that could be), this is probably the first movie this year that really needs to be seen for yourself.

"Un Chien Adalou" inspired Yakuza film, with some of the finest editing Ive ever seen (that goes for the black and white cinematography too).

Butterflies, bullets, mirrors, again and again as death, action, and cinema, refracted around themselves and each other, in a whirl wind of jump cuts and shadows.

Fans of Lynch, Buneul, or Takashi Miike will enjoy. I can see how this inspired, alot of film makers, but it still doesn't look like anything else Ive ever seen. Much better than "Gate Of Flesh", my only previous Siejen Suzuki experience, though the plot is more intentionally confusing, the images and the experience on a whole, is inspired...and a very good, very strange time.

Like an miniature epic Spy Vs. Spy in Japan, in a dream you forget when you wake up in the mourning, but can't stop thinking about for the rest of the day. Funny too.

Werner Herzog makes Anartica, strange, magical, hypnotic, and relevant, mostly without the use of penguins(who are apparently at turns insane and suicidal prostitutes and swingers).

Some of the images were very familair to his earlier "Wild Blue Yonder", but the narrative, holds together much stronger here.

Eccentric scientists, and travelers from all over the world, discussing the foundations of evolution, the invisible energies that permeate the cosmos, the constant shift of water and energy just beneath the surface of the ice, they also play guitar and wander around with boxes on their heads.

It's not so much a documentary about "Antartica", the geographical location, but about Antartica as an idea, an image, the people who go there, and why, a little of everything or anything that's is interesting. Though Herzog in voice over gives us a few pet peeves, and doesnt mind talking about not liking a person or place, just as much as finding one interesting, it can get a bit distracting, even annoying...but mostly it's kinda funny, and can break up some of the slower moments.

My favorite Herzog quote is "Documentaries are as close to truth as glaciers are to farting", here, staged as it may or may not be, you can still smell the ice, and it's stinks brilliantly.

Alot of the political commentary in the arts to come out of the eastern block during the cold war, especially in film, wear absurdist and surrealists garbs (Jvan Svankmajor, Milos Freeman, Vera Chytilova, etc) in order to escape censorship, though few, if any did. One that did however, is the delightful "Who Want's To Kill Jessie?", that dances somewhere between Fellini and golden age Charlie Chaplin, Michel Gondry doing Marx Bros., etc. Though made in 66 this film harkens back to the times of the silent comic stars and gags, like another Czech film "Daisies", this is surreal slapstick at it's finest. Unlike other Czech and Euro films of the era, there is a persistant lightheartedness and absurdity throughout the film, and a genuine "feel good" ending, where the cartoonishsly simple fact that "dreams can't be killed" becomes politically, personally, and comically profound. The humor is admittedly dated, but it's a fun forgeten little film, for people who like comics(the characters from the comic book only speak in word balloons), slapstick, Czech films, and comic(as in funny) surrealism. Whimsicle good times, in this forgeten Czech comedy.

I had completely forgotten about this movie, until I had a dream about
the bicycles and the beach at the end. The more I thought back, the
more I wanted to see it again.

I know this film has a very firm political message, but the images are
so simple, universal and kinda powerful they linger with you, or at
least have with me for years.

Three stories, none of which connect, about woman living in Iran, a
young girl who finds out she has has to go to the "all girls" school
soon, leaving behind her male friends, a woman bicycles away from her
wedding and refuses to pull over, an and elderly woman whose husband is
dead who can now do what she has always wanted, create the home of her
dreams, with furniture right along the beach; a house without walls.

Effective, original, and poignant. When does one, become a woman(or
man), and why? How is it different for each character, how is it the
same, and what does is spell out once it's all putt together? ...almost
makes me want to learn to ride a bike.

I'm the first one to review this film, an odd beginning, but here it goes.

Vera Chytilova's Fruit Of Paradise, is a lost masterpiece of a film. Lost because Chytilova was not permitted to make any films for decades, after her first film Daisies(an...(read more)other gem), was censored and banned by the Soviet/Czech government. These films show us a new language in cinema, that never got to develop. Her use of sound alone in this film puts her on par with Godard and Leone, her use of color is unlike anything I have ever seen(the first 10 minutes in Eden are a luminous collage of images, patterns, and live actors), and her sense of story(arguably her least accessible trait) is like Bunuel or Svankmajor(her fellow Czech), albeit with a distinctly feminist, whimsicle, slapstick bent.

The story is an allegory of Adam and Eve, in a modern(made in 60's) Health Retreat. The action involves our heroin wandering the grounds where she becomes obsessed with a mysterious man in red, who may or may not be a killer. What follows is a fragmented story of awakening, it's pains and pleasures, but don't look more literally than that, like Lynch's Inland Empire, it's best to view this film topologically(on the surface), as an aesthetic object like a painting, rather than a cinematic tool for conveying a "message". Not that you cant or shouldn't get anything more out of this film, than a lesson in the expansive possibilities of film-making itself, but you get out of it, what you put into it. If you want to just watch the pretty colors, it's got that, if you want to argue about "ontological freedom and meaning", you could use this film as a trampoline, but that role rests here on the viewer.

Chytilova's film's however cannot be accurately described by text, they have to be viewed, listened to puzzled over, drank with(a glass or two of wine), and then viewed again. If your looking for a novel experience in a sea of modern cinematic redundancy, the Fruit Of Paradise, is the food for you. If you want to watch realistic characters, exchange in pseudo-naturalistic dialoge about modern issues of social import, "Crash" can be found at your local blockbuster, if you've watched Maya Deren, Luis Bunuel, or Kenneth Anger, and said, why can't there be more films like this; then Netflix, steal, beg, borrow,(or try your local library), but find this film. That goes double for Chytilova's first film Daisies, which is as adventurous as this, but is more slapstick to this films baroque; basically a lot more fun

Enormousely incoherent, ridiculous plot, terrible main actor, and one of the most enjoyable film experiences you may ever have. If the themesong by Queen doesn't make you smile in the opening credits, there is something wrong with your TV.

A footbal player for the Jets, is on a small plane which happens to crash into the home of a man building a space ship which is to go beyond our solar system to investigate a series of anomalies befalling the earth; wierd stuff like "hot hail" and other acts of God. Before there is time for introductions our hero Flash(his t-shirt has his name on it), the Dr., and some girl, are whisked away to the planet Mongo, ruled by the evil and legendary Ming The Merciless, played by one of my favorite all time actors (after Bill Murray), Max Von Sydow (of "Seventh Seal" fame). Jeremy Irons is his chief of secret police, hidden behind a Dr. Doom like metal mask.

By the time Flash and company arrive, Ming is already barking "sieze them", and suddenly Flash and the girl are a couple. Flash and this girl, met on the plane, some five minutes before this, by the movies time...they don't call him Flash for nothin. Flash then, manages to fight off Mings goons with his football moves...but is taken prisoner, and then escapes and has to convince, the Tree People to join with him and the Hawk People, against Ming.

The planet of Mongo, seems to exist inside a lava lamp. There's a constant technocolor swirl of clouds, that never goes away; there is no seemingly no night or die, and the vacume of space between planets is breathable. Like "The Jetsons", we never see the ground, only floating fortresses and land masses.

Basically it's an absurdly plotted, visually stunning (Mongo: where all the women look like peacocks and the men look like robots), superhero movie with a character whose been out of print since the 1930's, and music by Queen!

A true classic.

"You kill bugs good!"

A few notes about the book this film is based on "Starship Troopers", has been accused by some in the sci-fi community of being a fascist manifesto of militarism, and praised by others like the "US military" who have it on th...(read more)eir official reading lists of the navy, the marines, and the army, as well as at four out of the nations five milatary academies(thank you wiki), not to mention actual funded attempts to emulate the technology and combat strategy of the Mobile Infantry, all volunteer army, specific high tech weapons, exo-armor, etc.

That bieng said the movie itself is one long propaghanda commerical for the mobile infantry in their war against "the bugs".
It's ads and info spots serving as comic timers, in between the explosions and limb removals. The satire get's lost in the run of the mill dialogue(but suprisingly long if inconsequential character development). Still a fun, gorey, balls to the wall, action satire, and a strangely oddly important artifact of American culture

Hans Richter and some of his friends in the old time surreal avant garde gang; Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Max Ernst, decide to get together and direct a suprisingly acessible (for these guys this is Oceans 11), film about a man who sets up a buisness selling dreams to people, who cant' have any of there own. After all, as our narrator Joe, informs us, "If you can look inside yourself, other people shoudnt be any problem".

Assorted "characters" come into the Dream shop, a gangster, a repressed banker, an overzealous pamphletere, a blind man, a bored housewife, etc, and all are given dreams, each one directed by a different surrealist; Ernst, Duchamp, Ray, etc. Which alternately, delight, offend, distrub, and annoy there patrons.

In that respect it's a little like an anthology film, with each dream, a story in the story, the best of which is a satire of conventional(1940's) relationships, staring two mannequins who fall in love and get married. It's a suprsingly charming and funny little feminist music video (I want the soundtrack, just for this sequence). Though the rest of the music is handled by experimental composer John Cage, who gives the film both a traditional comedic tone and one of ambigious drones and general avant-gardishness.

The narravtive of the framing tale, that is the story of Joe, owner and dream weaver of the buisness, is also distinct in that, none of the characters mouths move, and when dialogue does take place on screen it comes as voice over, usually with one characters monologues followed by the others...most of which is spoken in a kind of Beat style rhyming (this is also a decade before any of the big Beat writers Keroac, Ginsberg, etc, start publishing.). That though a bit silly at first, actually enriches the story, really quite beyond, any individual dream sequence.

If you like early avant gard films or the artists involved, this is an absoulte must see, but if your also just interested in early comic fantasy, stories about dreams, poetry, or just watching something visually different, that doesn't just dismiss narrative as a nuisance, it's worth the price of admission. Few films see the relationship of dream, cinema, and audience this clearly or disticntly.

It's the feel good avant garde comedy of the 40s! If only it would get released on dvd already...