peteg's blog 2010-01-22-WhiteHeat.autumn

Toy Story

Wow, I am slow to see this one, 15 years after it made such a splash for Pixar. It is parked at #149 in IMDB's top-250, understandably enough. I liked the two-track humour, but was hoping for more of the adult track to be integrated with the story, as I remember it being in Shrek. The whole thing felt a bit twee, to be honest.

...And Justice for All

I saw this 1979 Pacino vehicle a long time ago, probably on video tape. It's a fun but not particularly subtle or plausible drama set around the courts of Baltimore, or perhaps a subtle comedy saddled with excessive melodrama and obliviousness. Pacino here is just slightly smaller than the movie, and perhaps this is one of his last efforts where he tries to do more than just channel his inner-Al, enjoyable though that often is.

City Hall

A seriously mediocre political thriller. Pacino phones it in, and Cusak is yet to hit his High Fidelity straps. The requisite romance subplot is a fizzer.

In the heat of the night

A Sydney Poitier classic, rated at 8.1 on IMDB and unbelievably not in the top-250. Rod Steiger got an Oscar for being the police chief here, after playing Mr Joyboy so well in The Loved One a few years earlier. I somehow managed to pick the person who did it, which is unusual for me; perhaps the murder plot is pedestrian. I also found the racism a bit one-dimensional, and the peripheral characters a bit flat.

Dick Tracy

As cartoonish as Batman, but otherwise forgettable. I didn't get any of the humour in this at all. The acting is so-so, and Warren Beatty quite wooden. There are good reasons that it is largely forgotten. I don't understand why Pacino got a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but in any case he didn't win.

Brides of Christ

Like The Thorn Birds, they don't make them like this anymore. In this case it is easy to see why: the last big piece of drama that I can remember the ABC funding (and producing?) was Changi, superficially structurally similar to this. We can thank the funding cuts and crap management of the Howard era for the current situation of outsourced mediocrity.

The first episode is nigh-on perfect, and though the later episodes flag a little the standard is kept high. All of the actresses are brilliant, with perhaps Josephine Byrnes and Brenda Fricker being the standouts. The young Naomi Watts is just a little too histrionic and bloody-minded for my tastes; some of her mannerisms are familiar from her later work, but she learnt subtlety after this one. Harold Hopkins puts in an appearance as a worn-out husband, and Russell Crowe as a gung-ho mechanic.

Has there been anything in Australia in the past twenty years that would be worthy of this sort of treatment?

The French Connection

Hackman got an Oscar for his efforts in this one. I don't know, it's all a bit too Dirty Harry for me. At least it doesn't patronise its audience even at its most artificial. The cinematography is pure 1971.

Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood's first Oscar success, from 1992, deservedly. Suspenseful, character-driven, a new play on old clichés. That the Man With No Name is reborn was always on the cards; it was going to be about the how. Hackman hams it up a little.

Batman

Nicholson has a lot of fun here. Burton keeps everything moving, and the cinematography is perfect. The plot is comic-book pure.

Scarecrow

I saw this one ages ago. It features a Godfather-era Pacino in a comedic role, and a pre-Lex Luthor Gene Hackman doing his best to be sensitively tough. Driven by dialogue, which is sometimes sketchy. There is a washed-out early 70s realism to the cinematography. Not bad, but it does drag at times. A counterpoint to Cool Hand Luke, perhaps.

In the Year of the Pig

This is the pick of the anti-Vietnam War docos I've seen so far. I struggle to believe it was made in 1968, while LBJ was in power and Hồ Chí Minh still alive, as the level of cultural awareness canvassed here far outstrips that of the U.S. Government as represented by McNamara, Rusk et al.

Like Hearts and Minds, many injudicious comments are made, but these are counterbalanced by erudite commentary from some people who do know South East Asia, including at least one US Senator. Perhaps most interesting is the Frenchman Paul Mus, who demonstrates a keen understanding of Vietnamese culture and aspirations. He died soon after the movie was released. Also David Halberstam puts in a suitably literate and awestruck appearance.

The iconic footage of Madam Nhu, Uncle Ho, LBJ, Bảo Đại, Ngô Đình Diệm, Curtis LeMay, ... is priceless, as are the images of the Vietnamese people during wartime, especially around Hà Nội. There is much less war porn here than in the typical doco.

Topical: The Journal of Vietnamese Studies had a forum on Paul Mus in 2009.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

At the Chauvel with Rob at their show-and-tell with one of the writer/directors Judith Ehrlich. I think she was out here for the Sydney Film Festival. It opens more broadly this coming Thursday.

I'd been meaning to see this film since I first heard about it more than a year ago. It is well-constructed and occasionally riveting, with some great selective quoting of Nixon. They could have dropped some of the worn-out war porn though. There is a degree of self-absorption here that is also vaguely troubling, but it is difficult to communicate the nuance of political influence without sliding to extremes.

Much was made during the discussion of the recent hoopla around Wikileaks and its founder Lassange, and also the similarly-recent legislation in Iceland to protect whistle blowers. There seems to be little to learn from this film about connecting to the general population in ways that might change policies; Ellsberg's big impact was to get the Watergate investigation started, which was also a fortunate accident for him as it allowed the court to dismiss the charges arising from his leaking the Pentagon Papers. As always with technicians, he failed to understand how little the people care about details and proof.

Ellsberg is very similar here to what he was in Hearts and Minds, which is perhaps unsurprising as his life has been in some kind of stasis since 1971. (Ehrlich stated this quite flatly.)

I wonder if Ellsberg's book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is worth reading.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

I remember Bob Carr calling this one a turkey when it won an Oscar (or something) back in 2000. I have to agree, the cliches are tedious and there is no depth. All the flying looks totally fake, the fighting is ho-hum, except perhaps between the two women. Oh sure, it's a form of dance, in which case I'm watching the wrong movie. Capriciousness robs everyone and everything of possibility.

The Karate Kid

On the strength of Dana Stevens's review of the remake; I can barely imagine that Jackie Chan is as funny there as Mr Miyagi was here. Having an Okinawan protagonist was apposite then, and I wonder if the Beijing setting, the fresher prince, the kung fu, etc. will satisfy. This was perhaps the Gran Torino of its day.

It has the cheese, and all that other wonderful 1980s stuff. The ending is a bit abrupt, and the whole thing is totally implausible, both of which add to its charm. I liked the lead boy, he reeked of east coast meets west, but his opponents were banal. Shue is vapid and game.

Another Slate article on the cultural import of this film.

Hearts and Minds

An anti-Vietnam War doco from 1974. There is some iconic footage here, and some stupendous comments from people who should have known better. I am keen to see more of the Saigon from that era.

The summary at Wikipedia is quite good.

The Thorn Birds

Loan's mate chị Mai is a big fan of the book (in translation) and this mini-series, so I figured it'd be worth a look. There are some great performances from actors in minor roles, especially Christopher Plummer as an Italian Catholic operator. The leads are a bit more wooden, partially excused by some dodgy dialogue and hackneyed set pieces. The characters are a bit too shallowly drawn for me to get excited about, but are sufficient vehicles for the main themes, I guess.

Whatever its faults, they don't make them like this any more; no longer is anyone really interested in romancing undeveloped Australia...

City Lights

Classic Chaplin. It didn't exactly scream "masterpiece!" at me, but it had its moments.

All about Eve

Something of a chick-flick with brains (but only something). Bette Davis is great, as is Anne Baxter. Addison DeWitt is such a cliche that I can't believe the actor got an Oscar for playing him. This is the sort of intrigue Sydney theatre types dream of.

This is parked at #88 on IMDB's top-250.

The Book of Eli

Ah, the power of the trailer... Oldman, Waits, Washington, how could it be this bad? I felt ashamed that I took Loan to see this pile of crap at the Cinebox Hòa Bình on 3/2 street. Should have seen a chick flick instead.

The English Patient

A movie that tries to appeal to everyone: a bit of war, romance, deserts, exotic localities, history and so forth. It succeeds mostly when expansive, and is tedious when personal. Fiennes does OK, but is lumbered by an incoherent character who gets implausibly histrionic when he should have been stone cold. Binoche steals the show, as she always does, and won an Oscar for doing so.

Iron Man

Ah yes, the original. Apparently I saw this back in August 2008, but it didn't stick with me. It is superior to the sequel. The climaxes in both movies are unsatisfying as the boss dude is killed off way too quickly.

Iron Man 2

At the Galaxy Cinema on Nguyễn Du with Loan. I enjoyed it, but would have preferred more screen time for Mickey Rourke. There was too much to fit into the time, and it was very dissatisfying that this neo-Vlad got destroyed so quickly. But yeah, something to see.

Infamous

I had put off watching this one for years, as I'm just not that interested in Capote. There is a narcissism at work here that is truly repellent. Still, good performances all round: Toby Jones is convincing, Bullock almost fabulous, Daniel Craig able. Good Sunday evening fare in Saigon.

The Field

Another Jim Sheridan effort, recounting the strong identification of the Irish who stayed behind during the famine and the land, and the generation gap they have with their children. It's OK but failed to grab me as much as his best did. The acting is solid. Brenda Fricker has a marginal role, unfortunately.

El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes)

I found this one by trawling the IMDB top-250: it was parked at number 216, presumably because it won an Oscar. I'm thinking the Inspector Rex fans would like this one, but I somehow didn't really get into it. There's a lot of repetition of the motif of the empty life: the missed relationship, being incarcerated, the murdered wife. Perhaps that covers everyman; unfortunately the central female character is overly passive about these matters, even though she wears the pants.

Bladerunner

Rob lent me his DVD of the Director's Cut from 1991 (I think). No narration. Brilliant visuals, camera angles, photography. Irresistible.

The Man from Earth

Imagine a parallel universe where the averge script writer was as famous as Tom Cruise and remunerated similarly. Further, that dialogue and argument are prized over explosions; anti-Michael-Bay forces dominate. This is what Highlander would look like in that universe.

I got the pointer from jwz's webspace.

No Way Out

I got talking to Rob about Blade Runner and he suggested I see this as another example of Sean Young's efforts in the 1980s. It also features Gene Hackman and a young Costner, both of whom are bigger than the movie. It's not bad, and very 1980s — I don't doubt that it was IMAN's acting in this that won her David Bowie's heart. The tension ramps up, sometimes implausibly and clunkily, but nevertheless resolutely, until it is abruptly terminated by a non-sequitur of an ending.

The Messenger

Worthy themes, similar to those of Brothers, but I didn't get into it. Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton are solid, albeit playing characters not particularly interesting to me.

Welcome

A French flick in the Ken Loach mould. This is the best movie I've seen for the first time in a long time. I think I caught the short at Micmacs, which sketched the bones of the plot, the characters and calibre of the story without making it at all clear how things were going to go.

The main characters are well drawn and their motivations clear. Vincent Lindon is the leading man, and Audrey Dana plays his ex-wife. Occasionally the cinematography is perfect.

I would have liked the backstory to be fleshed out just a bit more, particularly the trek from the Middle East to Calais, how the Frenchman and his wife got to where they are, and to make Mina into more than just a pretty face. These are mere quibbles. As in Micmacs, Sarkouzy is on the screen just long enough to switch him off.

It is unbelievable that France can have so many people in bureaucratic limbo within its borders. For all its faults, is Australia's system this bad?

This movie is somewhat like Lilja 4 Eva with less brutality, allowing some hope for the individual human spirit.

Brothers

It seems that Jim Sheridan can indeed do some wrong. The topic of this one is worthy, focussing on the psychological destruction of Marine Captain Tobey Maguire at the hands of some badass Afghans, and his inability to relate to his brother and wife on return. (His relationship with his father is obdurate.) We are told a few times that Portman is beautiful, just in case we have let her involvement in the mentally scarring Star Wars pre-trilogy besmirch our opinions of her. Gyllenhaal comes out looking the best in this cast of cardboard cutouts.

The plot is quite holey as it is difficult to wring the kind of tension Sheridan is looking for while retaining a grasp on reality; the whole thing falls apart if, for example, we knew what Portman was told about Tobey's existential status (presumably he's MIA, but she's in no doubt that he's dead). Also this fictional military has a quite ineffectual hands-off recovery program.

More show, less painting the past with words please Mr Sheridan. And try to make a movie that outdoes the short next time.

In America

Jim Sheridan is a master story teller, focussing in tight on a very few characters and showing how things are for them. Clearly this is a deeply personal story for him. The acting is quite good, the children particularly excellent, Mateo electric and beautiful. I remember Samantha Morton for her luminous performance in The Libertine, and here she is grittily competent. I would only quibble about the manufacturing of tension, and the slightly stodgy (Irish?) narrative arc. Immerse yourself and ruminate.

Secretary

I remember seeing this when it was released, which must have been sometime in 2003. This is Maggie Gyllenhaal in her break-through role, and she is game and lustrous. Her love interest (James Spader) is a Mickey Rourke-alike, and this is indeed a 9 1/2 weeks sort of deviancy for the new new century. What's not to like?

The Twin Peaks aesthetic is sometimes a bit kooky, a bit creepy, but this is alleviated by a tight focus on the characters, and some of that Lebowksi dreaminess. Maggie is great and I liked how her character evolved; a more sophisticated take on power relationships that is not as readily trivialised as stereotyped feminism.

I reckon this would have made a great stage production ala Oleana, which I saw NUTS produce so many years ago.

Johnny Mnemonic

Who would have thought that Keanu's power animal was a dolphin? This one has a bit of everything, except a plausible plot, characters, continuity, tension. As such it is fine except where it obviously fails to match grasp and reach; it is something of a dry run for The Matrix. Lundgren hams it up well as the preacher, but Rollins is only convincing when aggressive. Keanu markedly improves in his next few movies after this one.

The animation is Tron-ish. Gibson's work is debased as he is usually focussed on the immediate, the local: his characters don't save the world. Also there was a marked lack of sexual deviancy, a central theme of cyberpunk. It could have been worse, but it could also have been a lot more than just a quest.

Those with sharp eyes will spot a frequency counter (or something) with nixie tubes in one of the climactic scenes.

Micmacs

Mr Amelie returns to his kooky childish roots in his signature style. I got a freebie from the distributor via the State Library. I could only make the 12pm screening at the Academy Twin today, and just one other person present. How can they turn a profit on these sessions?

The theme of this one is infantile, and taken on with the moral clarity of George W. Bush: the CEOs of two weapons manufacturers are identified with all the evil machinations of any and all such companies. They get the comeuppance that is so obviously in the offing from the first few frames.

The aesthetic is a return to his classic washed-out colours, ala City of Lost Children. Individual scenes are great, as are the sundry mechanisms and automata. He makes good use of his varied cast. The sexy stuff should be on the cutting room floor. So enjoy things while they're on the screen, and don't think too hard: this is like Amelie but more so.

K-PAX

Spacey and Bridges are in it, so it can't be too bad, right? Right? Well, it just might be. Spacey plays an American take on Douglas Adams's Ford Prefect, a too-human alien apparently compiling some kind of report for some unstated purpose. The plot tries to riff on the ambiguity of unAmerican alienness or (entirely?) American insanity, but falls apart at times as the man is clearly both. Spacey is always a bit patronising, and here he is positively encouraged to be godlike. Bridges does not look right with short hair.

The technicalities in the movie are irritating; for example, if K-Paxian reproduction was as terrible as claimed, the species would have died out, especially with long life spans.

Zodiac

Apparently I saw this with Rob back in 2007 at the Ritz. It must not have stuck. The story and acting are pretty good, though Fincher et al have to massage some tension in there to keep us on the hook. It suffers a bit from an accelerating time-frame and no real conclusion.

Up

Delightful.

Tender Mercies

I got this on the strength of the comparisons with Crazy Heart. Robert Duvall is the leading man here, and given the chance won the Oscar for it. He is excellent, reversing his psycho-with-some-empathy style (in my mind) to play a seemingly decent bloke whose boozing makes him plausibly dangerous. Indeed all the actors are great. I would have liked to see a bit more character from his new wife as she didn't seem to want a hell of a lot. Why did she get remarried? Did she want another child?

I think Bridges earnt his Oscar more than Duvall did here.

Wilde

I saw this biopic at the cinema back in the late 90s with an unlikely crowd. Stephen Fry is very good, as is Jude Law. The narrative arc is a bit lame; this writer's life is the tawdry, tragic flipside of his beautiful and timeless work. Martin Sheen holds up the home front.

Waterworld

Costner as a merman, and Dennis Hopper in his lamest effort yet. As one would expect from the hype when it was released, the narrative/plot is crap, the characters undercooked, and the whole thing is within a hair's-breadth of failure. They should have spent more on the script (as they always should). Generic good guys, generic bad guys, generic pirate imagery, a find-the-promised-land, booty, Rambo-esque rescue effort, etc. that would shame the makers of Mario Bros. There are shades of Indiana Jones and sundry American myths here, as one always finds with Costner.

I guess it is easy to see how Costner's ego got the better of him after Dances with Wolves. His acting here is reprehensible. Rob reckoned the premise is interesting and epically fumbled. It is somewhat like watching the Wallabies play rugby.

This movie is mythical, like Star Wars, and is a mandatory watch even if it is a turkey. The cinematography is pretty good and I did like his boat.

Sleuth

Michael Caine and a fruity Laurence Olivier play deadly games in a country mansion. The piled-up twists are let down by Caine's inability to completely mask his accent, which is a shame as he had me going for some of it. I reckon the stage production would have been superior. Rated at #203 on the IMDB top-250, as it should be.

The commentary on class/migrant relations/condescension in England circa 1970, when there was some pretension to a new classless society, was a bit pedestrian but articulately delivered. The automata are pretty amazing.

Apparently Caine decided to participate in a remake with Jude Law, using a script by Harold Pinter.

Tightrope

Another Eastwood, this time from the early 1980s. The cinematography is washed out, just right for some seemy police work in pre-Katrina New Orleans. It tries to fish for a new angle on the psycho-thriller, but that particular character is shallowly drawn and implausibly generic, along the lines of Malkovitch in In the Line of Fire. The focus is on the cop played by Eastwood, a bit of a down-at-heel Dirty Harry who gets organised with the lady from the rape crisis centre. Arnie plays a similar cop in End of Days; was it never a cliche?

Again, I saw this on the strength of that New Yorker article. Overall OK but difficult to talk up as anything great. One for the Underbelly crowd.

Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries)

I can't believe this is #151 on IMDB's top-250: it is pretty much the definition of arty pretentiousness. Briefly: a black-and-white dreamy life-wasn't-so-beautiful recreation of an old medical professor-ermeritus's life, a character study of an unpleasant sort of bloke. Narrative and plot are mostly absent. It is showy, I'll give it that, but I found no real depth in it, just allusion. Is he cold because he doesn't care about anything or vice-versa? Does this movie tell us anything we don't already know? The women are shallowly drawn, apparently lacking inner lives or anything but material motives for love. Manipulative too. Boring!

It doesn't encourage me to see any more of Bergman's work.

Crazy Heart

This feted vehicle of Jeff Bridges's performance-of-a-lifetime took an age to get to Australia. I caught it at 2:30pm on this, a cheap Tuesday, a week after release, four rows from the front of cinema #2 in The Ritz. I'm sure the oldies had their fun up the back.

Bridges is indeed awesome, inflating his character as Mickey Rourke did in The Wrestler, even looking like he'd been drinking steadily since The Big Lebowski to just this end. I'll admit I enjoyed the music, though I can never tell if it's country or western, or whatever it is that Leonard Cohen does.

Maggie Gyllenhaal lit up the screen as she always can, but the script cast a shadow long enough to prevent her being anything interesting. Indeed the narrative arc, the possibility of plot development, was restricted to wondering how the whole thing could possibly conclude, preferably satisfyingly. I don't think Cooper figured this out either. Redemption is popular in the U.S., and probably everywhere that God is thought to be a friend of humanity, and for it to fail as blandly as it does here makes one wish for the grand follies of past times. It couldn't even manage a decent double-dip. These days even failure tastes like success.

Robert Duvall is always a bonus to me, playing those unforgettable supporting roles in great movies like Apocalypse Now and Magnolia. (Didn't these movies show us how to screw up properly?) Here his character is too minor to rescue anything from anything. The IMDB boards are saturated with pointers to his earlier take on the same theme, Tender Mercies, a Beresford effort. It's enqueued.

This movie is worth seeing on the strength of Bridges alone; be placated by the musical interludes! ... and certainly don't read any reviews before you go. Afterwards you can nod along vigorously with Dana Stevens, Paul Byrnes and Stephanie Zacharek. Or not.

In the Line of Fire

I got sucked into this early-90s Eastwood thriller by an article in the New Yorker about his movies. Malkovich is a good psycho, but I rank him below his contemporaries Spacey and Hopkins. The plot has myriad holes large enough for a plethora of successful assassinations; perhaps the most ludicrous is Eastwood pulling up in a taxi on an otherwise baracaded and barren street, just in time to show us how intel was done prior to computers and save the PUSA. Eastwood is fun to watch, at times, but wooden at others, and while the scaffolding of his later signature moral complexity is assembled, nothing is made of it.

The article is better than the movie, trust me.

The Truman Show

This one just scraped into the IMDB top-250; I guess the next blockbuster or two will push it off that highly esteemed list. I've never been a fan of Carrey and have definitely seen more of his movies than have been good for me. I had the distinct impression that he'd packed in after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so much wishful thinking on my part.

I doubt this is worth watching now that the reality TV bubble has come and gone, but perhaps it will be in a decade or two, when old things are new once more. The movie is thoroughly American, right up to the saccharine ending.

Witness for the Prosecution

Agatha Christie made this for the stage and it shows. Dietrich is weird, unattractive and hackneyed here, a frosty scheming German who spends the dying parts of the movie pretending to be a woman overpowered by her emotions. The occasional good line for the barrister does not make up for the myriad dei ex Christies. I'm sure her fans think it really does rank around #150 in the IMDB top-250, but there's no need to inflict this stuff on the rest of us.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

More dreck from Spielberg. Connery is implausible from the first. Given that this is ranked #100 in IMDB's top-250, I can see the population at large is fascinated by this mangling of mythology, a sort of Lawrence of Arabia for twits. How dumb would you have to be to invest that much effort in traps that are not reentrant?

Presently I'm chugging through Richard Burton's A Thousand Nights and a Night, which is more fascinating for Burton's footnotes than the stories themselves. The narrative structure is cute, and I now see where Salman Rushdie got a lot of his ideas from. Much doughtier fare.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

More dreck from Spielberg. All of the characters are irritating infantile stereotypes, and I fail to see how anyone could consider it fun to know that each problem will be solved within a few minutes, usually by an omniscience blinded only by the requirements of plot. Apparently all Sikhs are evil, unless they're smurfs, in which case they're good because they're fighting with the English Empire... or something. The female offsider whines and squeals like C3PO, but with even less humour, and the child offsider is just plain awful.

The best part of it are the occasional iconic photographs, such as Harrison Ford wielding a whip on a rope bridge, but these are easy to get over.

Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Unbelievably #18 in the IMDB top-250. Riffing on all the cliches and motifs of Orientalism, there is little worth seeing here. Harrison Ford is at his wooden best, being marginally less banal than Karen Allen who plays his presumed-shaggable offsider. Totally unsubtle — the baddies are Nazis for god's sake! — but perhaps we can be thankful that it is certain that Indiana shot first and that's the way it's gotta be. Lucas was involved in the production and writing, and it shows: the treatment of anything human is entirely infantile.

It is much better than the recent one, for all that is worth. I remember now why I haven't seen many Spielberg films.

Cool Hand Luke

A Paul Newman classic, perched precisely midway up the IMDB top 250. Not really to my taste. I watched it in two sessions about a week apart, and that might have been why.

The Game

I remember seeing this, apparently five years ago. It's a twist-piled-upon-twist sort of flick, not as successful as Fincher's best but still watchable.

Fritz Lang: M

Apparently a classic, and highly-rated on IMDB to boot (#57). I couldn't get into it.

Schindler's List

Another movie that was huge in the early 1990s that I only got around to seeing now. A great story, well told for the most part. Glad I did see it, for I usually give Spielberg flicks a miss. Ben Kingsley steals every scene he's in and a few in which he isn't.

Se7en

I saw this movie at the cinemas on George Street in Sydney with Lev back in 1996. It was the first R-rated movie I saw in a theatre, and with Trainspotting set my expectations of new-release cinema too high to be satisfied in this epoch. Start with something mediocre, I suggest to the youth of the day. Fincher's other classic is Fight Club, which it seems I haven't seen in five years.

This is Spacey's finest effort, and I was a fan right up to American Beauty. David Bowie's classic industrial-pop Heart's Filthy Lesson plays over the closing credits. I like what Reznor did to it.

The Loved One

I stole Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One from mrak's shelf a few years ago, but it must have left little impression: I thought it was all about a pet cemetery. Apparently this movie is more faithful to the novel than my memory is.

Anjanette Comer's Aimee Thanatogenous is luminous, wide-eyed and credulous, the graceful love-interest of the Dr Strangelove-ish Joyboy and English cad Barlow. Cinematically this is very Strangelove, black-and-white, kooky and stylised. It is an unflattering satire of American life, almost unthinkable now.

Wages of Fear

A French classic perched somewhere in the middle of IMDB's top-250 list. The cinematography and effects are top-notch. Transporting nitroglycerin somewhere in South America makes for riveting cinema. Who'd have thunk it? I grant that the town scenes early on don't look promising.

Fallen Angel

Another Otto Preminger effort (he directed Laura). An overly pedestrian whodunnit with an all-American huckster whose shyterism wears thin quickly. Lord knows why a small-town beauty falls for him.

The Wild Bunch

I'm not much into westerns unless they've got an Ennio Morricone score. This movie probably deviates from the hallowed central precepts of the genre, and so might be some kind of revelation to connoisseurs.

Incidentally I realised while watching this that Stanley Kubrick never made a western.

Dial M for Murder

I saw this a while ago, but can't remember when. I think this highly-rated Hitchcock left me a bit cold.

Dances With Wolves

This movie was huge when I was a kid, the Titanic or Avatar of its day. I'd put off seeing it as Costner is an all-American clown, and Waterworld made his name mud. (I'm going on inuendo here, I haven't seen any of these movies.)

To my surprise this overly-long-but-not-long-enough epic didn't drag. The narrative arc was too predictable — I knew the wolf was going to get it from the get-go — but the cinematography and editing redeemed this a lot. They make the prairie look both alluring and adversarial, justifying the bonding and xenophobia of the native American tribes and the way Costner develops a relationship with them. The score was more intrusive than I expected.

Even so, Costner is a ham actor. He overplays the American pioneer self-stereotype: the rugged individual worthy of respect who everyone truly respects, and gushes respect at everyone and everything around him. There is simply too little contention after he is initiated into the tribe for it to be any more realistic. I was hoping they would explore the politics between the native tribes, the local economies and also the civil war itself. Why was the soldier's fort where it was? — after the initial suicide-run the confederacy is MIA.

Worth a look. The frontier is a grand American myth.

Das Boot

Kyle told me this was worth watching back in 2004 or so, and I can now, finally, agree with him. The version I watched over two nights was the director's cut, dubbed in English. I feel a bit cheated by that, but at 3hr 20min I won't be rewatching it any time soon.

Well, what's not to like? Somehow it being slow as hell does not drag, and unusually for cinema it encourages the imagination by alluding to, but not explaining the implications of, various mechanisms, protocols, political views and so forth. The acting is pretty good, characters generally solid, the direction sure and cinematography fine.

Sweet Smell of Success

Not sure why I got this one; perhaps just because it was there to be had. Ah yes, it is number 10 on one of IMDB's lists of noir. Well constructed, I guess, but one really has to like scuttlebutt and muscular hustling to get into it. It is too much of a snotty society piece for the dialogue to be affecting.

Leave Her to Heaven

Gene Tierney in colour, in the upper reaches of IMDB's noir list. I think she was upstaged by on-screen-younger-sister Jeanne Crain here, maybe because her character was a frosty whiny psychotic bitch who we saw coming from the earliest frames. The blokes were mostly limp and the plot a bit fanciful. The cinematography was occasionally great when it wasn't fake. Probably a cut above the average Days of our Lives arc, and not generally suitable for any other audience.

White Heat

Over several evenings. Another of IMDB's highly-rated noirs. I didn't really get into it.

Heaven can wait

Another Gene Tierney, and doesn't the colour film just love her. The plot is a bit too this-is-my-life to get excited about, though there are a few set pieces I found funny. I'm guessing they lifted those directly from the stage play. The Age of Innocence this is not.

Laura

Another from IMDB's list of noir. Had me going the whole time, though long-time murder-mystery addicts might find it straightfoward. The lead murderee, Gene Tierney, is gorgeous and cuts a plausible swathe through a long list of suitors. Clifton Webb is authoritative in his role as Oscar Wilde clonee in full Importance of being Earnest mode.

The production is not far from a stage play, relying on dialogue and acting, poise and grace where special effects dare wander now. I am flummoxed by IMDB's rating system: this garnered 8.1 out of 10 from more than 13,000 people, and is still somehow not in the top-250.

Shadow of a Doubt

Sifting down the IMDB noir list, I found this, an early Hitchcock. It is a bit too slow and all-American for my tastes. Joseph Cotton is creepy, and not altogether unlike Jude Law. Teresa Wright is wide-eyed and luminous in this performance, the year after she won an Oscar (how young she must have been). The comedic relief was too robotic, and the climax a let-down.

The Narrow Margin

Another noir from the early 1950s. I have no idea why I picked this one in particular; perhaps because one of the actresses is also in Kubrick's The Killing. The acting is a bit patchy, the plot a bit predictable, modulo a twist of a very short duration.

Casablanca

As good as ever. Can't believe I haven't seen this in five years.

Gomorrah

Well made, I guess, leaving aside the tangled, unresolved plot. Gangland reality TV?

Léolo

On the recommendation of Pete R., who somehow discovered this obscure French-Canadian film from the early 90s. A lyrical coming-of-age story. I am sure I missed most of the point. Occasionally worthy, regularly scatalogical, wry and unearthly: "I dream and therefore I am not".

The Night of the Hunter

What a strange movie. Rife with biblical allusion and a psycho who wouldn't be unfamiliar to the Coen brothers, this is a sort-of Hansel-and-Gretel where the witch is a warlock who comes to them. Robert Mitchum nails his role as the murderous preacher. The black-and-white cinematography is amazing, and directing it must have taken it out of Charles Laughton as he didn't try to do it again.

This was the last of the IMDB top-10 noir movies for me to see. Definitely worth a look, though it doesn't completely hang together (nor separately).

Balibo

Of the feted Australian movies of last year, this is the best I've seen yet. The story itself is a bit thin, but it is powerfully articulated and beautifully rendered, and it comes as no surprise to find David Williamson's fingerprints on it. I wish it had a little less melodrama and a bit more contextualisation; what were the roles of Portugal, of the U.S.? Did Britain really pay for the helicopters? What else did Gough Whitlam say before bodies were broken? — and so forth. Hamish McDonald feels likewise. Hmm, is he the last journo working at Fairfax?

The story of Roger East was unknown to me. Could they not have found a place for Jill Jolliffe within the film too?

It demands a follow-up, a sequel of sorts, on the liberation of East Timor, and then perhaps another on whether they've got their hands on any kind of justice yet, or ever will. Last I heard the East Timorese government had opted for a blood-under-the-bridge approach, but it seems the wind changed almost immediately. Apparently Australia still has troops there, at least according to Wikipedia, and I have to wonder whether the dog or the tail is wagging on that front.

Femme Fatale

Stephanie Zacharek rated this somewhere in the bottom 24 of her favourite 25 movies of the previous decade. (Let us be mainstream about decades and calendar years ending in 0.) Well, what can I say... Rebecca Romijn-then-Stamos giddily gyrates and the boys go ah... the plot is MIA and de Palma's cinematography is excellent. The only substance in this whole picture was probably a Class A.