It might seem strange to see Mickey Mouse in a film in which a cigar-smoking baby, pondering a woman's shapely posterior, laments "My problem is I got a fifty-year-old lust and a three-year-old dinky." A movie where a busty lounge singer cavorts in her changing room with a business tycoon, their indiscretions prefaced with her condition: "This time, take off that hand-buzzer."

Relax, it's just patty-cake...

A few introductory observations:

First, what is it about Steven Spielberg and failed inventors? Over the course of a single year (1984-1985), he executive produced a trio of commercial hits - the Gremlins, Goonies, Back to the Future trifecta - that each feature these found object inventors who complicate life's simplest tasks with a Rube Goldbergian, low-fi elaborateness. Shuffling cards. Feeding the dog. Opening the front door. We can see Spielberg's later, anti-technological themes (which bloomed in pictures like Jurassic Park, Minority Report, and War of the Worlds) taking root, even if they are by proxy. It's worth noting that early Spielberg-collaborator (and later schmaltz factory) Chris Columbus wrote both Gremlins and Goonies, not to mention the Lucasfilm special effects orgy Young Sherlock Holmes, likewise exec-produced by Spielberg...

The hardest thing about being a film critic - besides fending off the adoring fans, autograph seekers, and loose women - is determining how much of a film you have to enjoy in order to recommend it. Does a film simply have to be more good than bad? What if it's mainly poor but preferable to standing in the rain? Is it a relative scale, the quality of a picture in comparison to its contemporaries? Does one recommend Cloverfield because it doesn't suck as bad as other action films?

Doug Block begins his awful documentary, 51 Birch Street, by introducing Mom and Dad. "This happy-looking couple is Mike and Mina Block," he says. "There's not rich. They're not famous. And while they're not exactly ordinary, they're hardly people you'd think of making a documentary about. Even if you were their son and even if making documentary is what you do." You can be pardoned for thinking the film that follows is about his parents or that Doug Block, having announced himself as a documentarian, would demonstrate any real aptitude for documentary filmmaking...

Here's where I warn you that the ending of Atonement will be discussed at some point in this critique. I don't make it a rule to reveal endings, but I will this time, partly because it's central to the meaning of the picture but mostly because it is so awful. Being the the charitable sort, I'll try not to go into such detail that it precludes any enjoyment of the picture that comes before those final, crippling scenes. Atonement accomplishes this feat quite well all by itself...

There are a lot of worlds, apparently. Parallel universes. Connecting all these worlds, these universes, is "Dust." On Earth, souls live inside our bodies (putting aside all existential/theological questions about whether there is, in fact, a soul, or one that "lives" independent of the "shell" that is our body). In the world of The Golden Compass, souls walk beside their human counterparts, taking the form of animal spirits called "daemons." Daemons sometimes fight each other, as when those daemons materialize as animals that are natural enemies (ie: dogs and cats). In other cases the people are evil, thus possessing aggressive, attack-minded daemon souls like snakes or Arctic snow leopards (rather than, say, beagles)...

This really is a subtly detestable film at times. The presentation of history, the martyring of the Confederacy, the characterization of black people, the absurd straw men constructed for so much bayonetting. It's too much...

Buzz can be a blessing and a curse. It gets asses in seats, obviously. A good segment of these people will find it easier to enjoy something if they're told beforehand that they're supposed to. What you are about to see is good so like it. If you don't, you are probably a philistine, a contrarian looking for arguments, or a humorless asshole that can't get pleasure from anything, much less the mirthful life of a teenage girl who gets pregnant and acts like a smart-ass about it for an hour and a half...

Imagine Lassie goes off to war. The soldiers renaming Lassie "Duke" and tattooing an identification number on his ear. Lassie bunkered down on a mountainside against "the Japs." Lassie rescuing his imperiled army platoon from doom but losing his mind in the process...

How do you discuss this film without revealing the ending? The running amok. You can't, so I won't. If you don't wish to know how Herr R. runs amok, you probably want to look away right now as I'll be talking about it very shortly.

Still here? Let's proceed.

I'm sure Andrew Wagner, director and co-writer of Starting Out in the Evening, is a nice person. No animals were harmed in the filming of his motion picture. It's not an ugly film, or a cynical film, or a sadistic film. Andrew Wagner, by all appearances, means well. Not that I've ever met him socially. He could very well be Hitler. I guess what I'm saying is that Andrew Wagner shouldn't take it personally that I dislike his movie with such passion. It has been accepted to a number of film festivals. Prestigious ones, like Sundance and Toronto. Plenty of people do like Andrew's film, quite more than don't, so there is great solace in that. I am just a man...

Twelve-year-old boys say "fuck." They also say "shit," "shithead," "tits," "pussy," "ass," lardass," and "asshole." They are vulgar. They ridicule the imagined promiscuity/libertine sexual habits of each others' mothers, even if they could describe a vagina about as well as they could Superstring Theory. A few of them smoke, especially if the year is 1959 when a twelve-year-old with a cigarette in his mouth wasn't acceptable, per se, but neither was it the scarlet letter of absolute, irredeemable delinquency. Others steal. Some are hit by trains and die.

As a filmmaker, the problem with being ahead of your time is that most audiences/critics/quasi-Luddites won't like your movie. Certainly not at the time of its release, after which it will be relegated to the dustbin of celluloid history; there they await rescue by a new generation of pretentious cinephiles who like to impress friends by resurrecting forgotten classics. Unless, Mister Director, all surviving negatives of your masterpiece are incinerated in a storage vault fire, in which case you're fucked.

Paramount has done a superior job of keeping lit cigarette butts and exposed electrical wires away from its flammable film stock than studio compatriots Fox and MGM, so Ace in the Hole survives...

Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) sucks at basketball. His high school team consists of similar social outcasts, humiliated both on and off the court; a fat team mate keeps his gym locker filled with cookies and deli meat. Because he's fat. Appropriately, the squad is named the Beavers. Of all possible after-school activities, why the five-foot-nothing Scott has chosen the sport of giants is something of a mystery. Masochism, perhaps, or simply the same willful ignorance of one's own talents that informs his pursuit of the prettiest girl in school (as dork heroes in teen films are want to do), with predictable results. However, things are about to change for Scott and those hapless Beavers.

Attention horse-fucking enthusiasts, have I got a movie for you. It's called Zoo. Not so much the cautionary tale one might expect given it features death by horse-fucking, but something of an apologia. For horse-fucking. Not that Zoo advocates horse-fucking, per se. It just seeks to understand those that engage in in an act that provokes such visceral repulsion in those that don't.

This is an unconventional film...

Don't read any further if you don't wish to learn the ending to Gung Ho. I'm about the give it away, so consider yourself warned...

Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine) run a boarding school for girls called, with some logic, the Wright-Dobie School for Girls. Their new business is just now getting on its feet: numerous wealthy families have chosen them to instruct their young daughters in etiquette, piano, the French language, and other demonstrations of good breeding. Things are progressing so well that Karen finally agrees to marry her physician boyfriend Joe, so unquestionably masculine (so virile) he smokes on the job and is played by James Garner. She envisions marriage as reading books, side by side in their own bedroom. He has other ideas; it is 1961, after all, when people still waited, so we can forgive him for his sudden impatience...

1982 was a good year to be a teenager at the movies. Fast Times at Ridgemont High was released. So was Porky's; this unlikely production would be the fourth highest-grossing film of the year (behind only E.T., Tootsie, and Rocky III). Adjusted for inflation, Porky's still has the largest box office of any Canadian production.

Then there was The Last American Virgin...

I'll assume you've already seen The Maltese Falcon. It is a classic film, after all. An iconic film. It is, well, The Maltese Falcon. I'm also going to assume you think it's a great film, because it is, so I won't tire you with a redundant and masturbatory laundry list of its chief attributes. I'll be foregoing a plot synopsis as well - these things you can find elsewhere. What you may not find mentioned elsewhere is that for as great as The Maltese Falcon is, the picture has two fairly significant shortcomings that no one really wants to talk about...

Laura Palmer has a secret. His name is Bob and he comes in through her window at night. He rapes her, repeatedly, and has been doing so since she was twelve. "He says he wants to be me," she says, "or he'll kill me." She thinks he's tearing pages out of her diary, the ones that refer to him. Some people don't think he exists, like her friend Harold. She shows him the diary. "There are pages torn out. That is real, Harold. Bob is real." Bob also goes by another name, but we'll leave that for now...

How, exactly, does a film like Zardoz happen? John Boorman completed the filmmaker trifecta on the picture - writing, directing, and producing - which makes it considerably easier to assign blame. Boorman himself bemoaned the low budget available to him (despite coming off critical and commercial hit Deliverance). One sympathizes...to a point. While the production values are, generally speaking, atrocious, this can't all be ascribed to lack of funds; rather, Zardoz is a perfect storm of parsimony and bad ideas. It's difficult to imagine that any amount of money would bring clarity to this campy, impenetrable boondoggle...

Roughly fifteen minutes transpires in Once when a struggling Dublin street musician teaches a girl he just met a song he'd written. She plays piano, he the guitar. The scene takes place at an instrument shop, closed while the proprietor eats lunch. The girl comes there sometimes to practice. "Falling Slowly" is the name of the song and, for reasons I don't really know, I began to cry. I'd prefer not to overanalyze it, honestly; rather, be thankful that there are films still capable of provoking that kind of visceral response simply by virtue of how genuine they are, by their depiction of authentic, uncynical human interaction...

Something has been lost. It's been a gradual process; tolerant, live-and-let-live libertarianism giving way piecemeal to kiddie-proofing the world in safety and security (or at least a false sense of it). Some monsters are real, but others are imaginary, even fabricated to keep us in collective fear. Society is sick, our cultural guardians/warriors tell us, and here's your medicine. Don't worry if the cure is worse than the disease...

I'm not sure whether Diane Arbus is a good photographer. Rather than celebrate the "freaks" (her word, not mine) that dominated her portfolio, one can't help but feel the artist's antipathy. Loathing. There is no beauty, but instead a voyeuristic revelry in the grotesque. How do you humanize a transvestite when you refuse to even give this individual a name? Two Female Impersonators Backstage. Albino Sword Swallower. The Human Pincushion. Perhaps there is an intended irony - defining social outcasts by their perceived scarlet letters - but I doubt it. Like a grandmother filling her shelves with porcelain dolls, Arbus strikes me as a collector; of the melancholy, the macabre, and the masochistic...

Though released theatrical, The Queen is basically a television movie, insomuch as the ripped-from-the-headlines material and execution feels like something that would be developed for the small screen. It’s also a television movie because its famous characters – the British Royal Family - are always watching television, sometimes themselves on television. When they’re not watching television, they’re reading the newspaper. Multiple newspapers, actually, like the Mirror, the Sun, and the Daily Mail. Their faces are often on the cover. They also talk on the phone a lot, about what they’ve seen on television and read in their newspapers. No one leaves the house much. When they do, they hunt...

Despite the money-grabbing cynicism of its conception, Psycho II is not without merit. Actually, some vaguely human-esque characterization, a capable director, a title change, and a script that dared follow through on its own provocative premise could have yielded an interesting film worthy of its royal lineage; a film Alfred Hitchcock might have composed. Alas, he died three years prior to this sequel's production, so what we have instead is a picture directed by Richard Franklin, a man who's obvious affections for the fat man outweigh his skills as a filmmaker...

George Miller has had what you might call a peculiar career arc. He began in movie-making by churning out the subversive ultra-violent actioners Mad Max and their sequels; now, Miller makes subversive children’s entertainment. The first time at the kiddie table, he gave us Babe: Pig in the City, which is basically The City of Lost Children but with talking animals and Holocaust overtones; an incredibly intelligent motion picture, all said, one audiences were not prepared for, so it’s no surprise they whole-heartedly rejected it at the box office (the misleading ad campaign and summer release did no one any favors).

I can’t imagine there were too many financiers lining up to have their money burned a second time. Yet, here we are eight years later with Miller’s latest exercise in anthropomorphization, Happy Feet, the dark tale of one flightless bird’s struggle against cultural orthodoxy and the marine harvesting industry. It opened at number one in the American box office over the heavily-hyped Casino Royale and at the time of this writing has grossed close to $400 million worldwide, demonstrating once and for all the Hollywood proverb that no one knows anything. Especially me...

Bobcat Goldthwait probably thought he was rather clever, even provocative making this film. We're talking about Bobcat Goldthwait, after all, the oddly-voiced star of such seminal 80s viewing as Police Academy 2, Hot to Trot, Police Academy 3 and, well, Police Academy 4. Who would expect Bobcat Goldthwait, filmmaker, to make a romantic comedy about a woman who once fellated her dog and then dedicate said picture to his mother? Such are careers redefined; Bobcat Goldthwait doesn’t simply act in bad comedies, now he writes and directs them, too...

I almost feel bad for Robert Rodriguez, insofar as he has the misfortune to make a generally entertaining feature only to have it eclipsed by some sublime genre work by Quentin Tarantino. It’s the story of his career, the two filmmakers having hitched their respective wagons to each other a long time ago. No one forces Rodriguez to habitually collaborate with a director who is clearly his creative superior, so really he only has himself to blame...

I have a complicated relationship with the French.

I hate their socialist politics. I hate their false sense of cultural superiority. I hate their terrible pop music. I hate that the xenophobic Le Pen and his National Front can make it to a runoff. I hate Jacques Chirac. I hate their ten percent unemployment. I hate the incessant labor strikes. I hate the absurd resistant to any free market influence on their economy. I hate the denial of their own colonial past. I hate that there is such reverence for a revolution that ends in Napoleon. I hate Airbus.

This being said, the French make great films...

Someday, possible soon, possibly not, an ambitious director will make a provocative, creatively-satisfying motion picture with unsimulated fucking. There have been a number of attempts lately, mostly awful, tending either to induce sleep or nausea. Michael Winterbottom’s soporific 9 Songs springs to mind, a well-intentioned but wholly boring affair (whose soundtrack exhibits symptoms of Cameron Crowe Disease); cynical French-language abortion Baise-Moi is another notable failure. Only a couple of “mainstream” money shot pictures are halfway watchable: Cannes whipping boy The Brown Bunny (even if the single scene of fellatio might be the worst thing about it) and Intimacy, a film with two compelling performances mired in narrative quicksand. It seems that The Brown Bunny and Intimacy succeed, relatively speaking, where the others fail because these two are films with identifiable plots and characters that also happen to show their actors fucking, either out of fidelity to realism or to communicate vague themes; Baise-Moi and 9 Songs start with the fucking and work backwards - much like your traditional pornographic film, really, but without implied permission to masturbate...

System Requirements: Mac OS 10.4 or higher

The Science of Sleep is so lovely, so gloriously un-cynical that I almost don’t want to ruin it by writing about it. I will write about it, of course, so apologies in advance for that. This is what I do...

In Genesis 11:9, “Babel” is the name given to Babylon by God, taken from the Hebrew balal: “to confuse.” The people there had taken it upon themselves to construct a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven…and let us make us a name.” Bad idea: angered by this symbol of hubris and grandeur, God took steps to prevent a repeat performance. First and foremost, a common language had to be eliminated; it was this that allowed man to cooperate on scale such as the Tower of Babel. “Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” Some Rabbinical sources actually characterize the Tower as a revolt against God, a physical attempt to wage war against those that reside in the clouds.

We still use the word babel in much the same way, but with a slightly altered spelling. That is, babble: to speak without actually saying anything. Talking without being heard. It just so happens that there’s a lot of babbling in the film Babel, acclaimed Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s own attempt at grandeur. Like the fabled tower, his towering ambition falls short of Heaven, but it certainly isn’t for lack of effort. Unfortunately, the continent-hopping execution is bigger than the picture is...

David Fincher's sanguine exploration of materialism and masculine identity, Fight Club, is a magnificent picture. It's so complex, topical, piquant, so romantically recalcitrant of studio filmmaking mores you have to wonder how it got made in the first place. Yet for all its virtues, Fincher's Fight Club is lacking in one crucial thing: the redemptive power of dance.

Thank God for small miracles and Vikram Chopra, the intellect behind Bollywood's reimagining Fight Club: Members Only. It would be unfair to say this picture outrightly plagiarizes; the plots differ substantially, saying nothing of Chopra's glorious execution. There are elements of the original that filter in, surely, but these are tempered by a more obvious filching of auteurist touchstone Road House. If you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Magic tricks consist of three parts or acts. The first act is called “the Pledge,” where a magician displays something ordinary, like a man. Sometimes he asks the audience to inspect the man, to verify that he is ordinary. He isn’t, of course, but no one notices. The second act is called “the Turn”; the magician takes this ordinary man and makes him do something quite unordinary, like disappear, except making a man disappear is not enough. For this, the trick requires a third act: “the Prestige.” That's when the man comes back...

We tend to make our own monsters. There are the ones born into the world as babies only to be shaped into maniacs and murderers. Then there are others that only truly exist in the collective mind, where one attention-starved madman can collude with media to create headlines and fear. What was it about the late 20th century monster incubator that created such a uniquely-deranged killer like the Zodiac, a man who manipulated the press, quoted films, gave himself a logo, and took his moniker from a wristwatch advertisement...

Kurt Vonnegut once said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” If you do it for long enough, sometimes you don’t even have to pretend any more. People tend to think of themselves as two people; there’s the façade we present to others and then there’s the true self, the person we are when alone. But what makes one more real than the other? It's a subjective world, where who we are is simply what others perceive us to be? We succeed when we are thought of as successful, fail when we are failures...

I'm tempted to call Back to the Future one of the more subversive films about the Reagan era, but that would imply intent. I honestly don't believe Robert Zemeckis really knew what he was making, so crammed as it is with mixed messages, Oedipal subtext, and nostalgic revery/wish fulfillment. He probably thought he was just making a movie, albeit one where a mother wants sex with her own son...

Today, we no longer poke lunatics with sticks. Don't have to, as there are films like Napoleon Dynamite that do the poking for us and then record it for posterity. All we have to do is look, point, and laugh...

And then there's the other 0.01 percent...

Urban Cowboy is the rare film that combines all these, but we'll get to that in a moment; first, some gender theory...

The second question people asked is "why," as in, why make this movie? Conspiracy theorists aside, most people are fully aware of what happened that day. The heroics of United Flight 93 are well-documented - do we need the facts recounted for us one more time?

Kind of like life...

But does David Lynch know he's weird?

And then came High Sierra and everything changed...

First immutable law of cinema: Wolfgang Petersen likes to set his films on boats

Second immutable law of cinema: one doesn't often root for Germans...

This world is an ominous place and few people are made more aware of it than the titular Claire Dolan...

In 1943, the filmmaking tandem of Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), probably best known for their expressionistic Technicolor fantasies (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus), found themselves enlisted into the war effort. Britain was about to be invaded, not by the Nazis, but by visiting Yankee soldiers preparing for D-Day and the retaking of the continent.

Overpaid, oversexed, and over here...

- 1 Corinthians 13

Seven years in the future, Officer Fred (Keanu Reeves) spends most of his life on the front line of the drug war, undercover in what is known as a "scramble suit." His voice is disguised and his appearance transforms constantly; he describes himself as "the ultimate Everyman." Officer Fred is, quite literally, us. He is also a hypocrite, an impostor in his own changing skin, hunting down dealers while also indulging his habit for the era's narcotic of choice, Substance D (or Slow Death)...

This being said, Freddy’s Revenge is the kind of bad film that’s interesting to talk about - this has to count for something....