Wild Things

An absolutely brilliant piece of cheap trash about a high school guidance counselor accused of rape by two of his students. The actors in "Wild Things" -- Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, and Matt Dillon -- are not known as gifted, but here they're at the top of their game, slumming it in a late-night Skinemax flick that's a flawless exercise in genre. It has the look and feel of a noir thriller from the '40s or '50s, except it's in color and more explicit. I've seen this at least seven times, and every time I appreciate it more, everything from the exquisitely framed cinematography to the tightly wound plot. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Bill Murray is in both films I have described as flawless in this blog. His every action and twitch is in character, and he delivers absolutely hilarious lines so subtly you miss them if you're not paying attention.

Malena

A young Italian boy comes of age while being infatuated with Malena (Monica Bellucci) during the reign of Il Duce. In fact, every guy in the town is in love with Bellucci, and boy do the ladies hate it. It plays like a fairy tale about the dangers and self-fulfilling prophecy of objectification, showing the effects of small-minded gossip on a lonely woman who happens to be gorgeous. In its broad outline, it's not too unlike "Pan's Labyrinth": a young child whose imagination tends to the fantastic, using it to cope with adolescence during a time of war. But though the movie focuses on the boy, we know very little about him, other than that he loves Malena. I would have liked a little less coming of age and a little more Bellucci, which makes me like every man in this Italian town, which makes me seem like a pig, which makes me feel bad.

"Malena" is gorgeously shot, with an always scrolling camera that shows all the rooms and landscapes from every angle without cutting too much. When it does use cuts, it's with a deft touch. For instance, there's a scene where Bellucci is waiting outside a door for someone to drop a key down to her while the kid looks on. The film alternates between shots of him and of her, and while the shots of the kid are all the same distance, the shots of Bellucci alternate between long-range, medium, and close-up, in sync with the kid's emotional attachment to her as she goes through the motions of sneaking into this guy's house and the kid feels further from her when he thinks she's seeing another man. Though the result isn't perfect, people put thought into this movie, which is more than can be said for most these days.

Italian films always seem like the people are overacting, but I think that's just what Italians are like. Not Italian-American, but Italian-Italian. Big arm gestures and people shouting things like "badachoota, bona mitza, badababah." My viewing of the classic 6-hour "The Best of Youth" was hampered in parts by this trait, but maybe if I watched it again, I could accept it, or at least look past it.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

A mesmerizing look at the real world of competitive video gaming, setting Billy Mitchell, recognized as the best classic gamer in the world and a kind of cocky and slimy ambassador of the sport, against Steve Wiebe, the dark horse, a struggling family man with OCD or autism or something. Billy held the world record in Donkey Kong since 1982, but then, like 20 years later, Steve breaks his records in Donkey Kong AND Donkey Kong Jr.!

Into the fray comes Twin Galaxies, a non-profit video game high score records organization where volunteer referees do things like -- for no money -- watch 8 videotapes of 48 hours of footage to verify someone's high score on a game called Nibbler. Opposed to Twin Galaxies is a guy who calls himself Mr. Awesome who's miffed nobody recognizes his Missile Command high score. You can't make this up.

When Twin Galaxies rejects Steve's high score for various reasons, Steve sets out on a righteous, frustrating mission to be acknowledged as the best. And we know he's the best because when he plays Donkey Kong, the documentarian plays things like Joe Esposito's "You're the Best" and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." What ensues is fascinating, sad, enraging, and inspirational. The climax builds tension more effectively than most thrillers out there, and the ending is perfect. And it's all true. This is as good as movies get.

Gates of Heaven

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris trains his eye on pet cemeteries, those who run them and pet owners who use them. It has its moments of humor and provides some food for thought on several subjects, such as the nature of death and the relationship between religion and business. But Morris has made better work. "Gates" bears some similarities to Morris's "Vernon, Florida," a carefully crafted, brilliant examination of some of the most interesting small-town folk ever caught on film. Morris has also made more, for lack of a better word, relevant films like "The Thin Blue Line," about an innocent man locked up in prison, and "The Fog of War," a study of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

R-Point

During the Vietnam War, a team of South Korean soldiers must search a place called R-Point for another missing squad of soldiers. They come to believe the place is haunted and ghosts may be among them. The ending reminded me a little of "Jacob's Ladder." There's nothing special about "R-Point." But "Jacob's Ladder" is great. Just watch "Jacob's Ladder."

Rambo

This might be the most violent film I've ever seen. People talk of the guy's head getting blown up in "Glory." You see that at least 20 times in "Rambo." People talk of the beach landing in "Saving Private Ryan," but at least three sequences in "Rambo" make that gritty World War II fight seem tame. According to Wikipedia, this film features 2.59 deaths per minute. That sounds about right.

Rambo lives in Thailand, and a church group from the United States asks him to take them upriver to Burma, where the military is committing genocide against the Karen ethnic group. Before he goes, we witness several exchanges between Rambo and members of the church group, all to the effect that if they're not bringing weapons, they're not changing anything, and they should just go home. When he finally does take them up the river, the violence starts in earnest, and it never lets up. We see the military massacring civilians and Rambo massacring the military. And in the end, "Rambo" wraps up the Rambo series a lot better than last year's "Rocky Balboa" wrapped up the Rocky series.

The story is lean and focused, short and direct, not getting distracted in useless subplots. This movie is about 90 minutes long, and that's a good thing. More films should be this short. That's part of why I liked "Vacancy" so much. "300" would have been a lot better if it were half an hour shorter. If it's short, that means the filmmakers trimmed the fat and are showing you only what is necessary to tell the story. It shows, I think, that more thought was put into the film. Instead, nowadays people can't decide what's useful and what isn't, so they put everything into the movie, and a lot of times, it ruins the experience. But I digress.

"Rambo" is not pleasant to watch, but it is good, and I think there's value in seeing it. In one notable sequence, "Rambo" shows the Burmese military committing horrific acts against the Karen people, including the lopping off of body parts and even some close-up killings of children with bayonets. Unlike the film "Hotel Rwanda," which tried to convey the horrors of genocide within the framework of a PG-13 movie (and for the most part it succeeded), "Rambo" is not so subtle and wants it in your face so you can't look past it. The explicit nature of the film is the political message, much like last year's powerful "The Devil Came on Horseback," which used mountains of photographic evidence to show the Sudanese genocide in the Darfur region. In "Rambo," the images leave an indelible impression of the horrors being committed, and -- possibly, arguably -- of the horrors that need to be committed to stop it. And the film also carries a more personal message, of finding oneself and remaining true to who you are. For Rambo, that's being a killing machine: "You either live for nothing, or you die for something." While it's completely understandable that some people would not want to see this, for those who do, it's curiously thought-provoking and it accomplishes everything it set out to do.

Total Recall

Kuato lives! This movie didn't make sense to me when I first saw it when I was 10, and it still doesn't make any sense to me. It seems a step back from Paul Verhoeven's earlier, darker "Robocop," and it doesn't contain many signs that the director would go on to make the sleeker thrillers "Basic Instinct" and "Black Book." But it's still thoroughly enjoyable and, at parts, unintentionally hilarious.

Norbit

Everyone's ripped on this movie, but I don't get it. It's not that bad. Don't get me wrong, it's not good. Give me any two minutes of "Coming to America" over this any day. But Eddie Griffin has some good moments. Eddie Murphy's kind of funny as Rasputia Latimore, the plump meanie who terrorizes Norbit, especially when he/she's commenting on a daytime Jerry Springer-type show, telling the guest, "You know damn well that's your baby. You know it's yours. Got the same chin. The same lip. That baby got the same head as you and the same eye. Go take the test. Take the test. In the case of the little baby . . . how you doing?" It may not make you laugh, but at least it's not painfully unfunny like a Woody Allen movie.

Atonement

The comedian Eddie Izzard did a sketch where he characterized British films as "A Room With A View With A Staircase And A Pond"-type movies. He said in these movies, "everything's people opening doors." And the ensuing dialogue was, for lack of a better word, subdued: "Oh, I'm - oh, what? Well, I’ve - oh." "What is it, Sebastian? I'm arranging matches." "Well, I - I thought you - ... I'd better go." "Yes, I think you'd better had." That's kind of what "Atonement" is like.

"Atonement" is basically two very different films. It starts as a tale about the unreliability of perceptions, not too unlike documentaries like "After Innocence" and all the stories of people being freed from prison after being convicted based on faulty eyewitness testimony. We see various people at a large English estate before England entered World War II. For the most part, it's rich people being bored. But we also see Briony, a young girl, witness two encounters between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, who looks like a poor man's Russell Crowe. Briony interprets these incidents to show McAvoy is a sex-crazed psychopath. The film then immediately shows the events leading up to these encounters and we see that Briony was mistaken. Then Briony sees another girl being raped and, even though she saw the perpetrator in the dark and only for a split second, she says she believes it was McAvoy. Hmm, was she right? The point of this film can't be whether or not McAvoy did it, because it's pretty obvious who was responsible.

The film next moves to England participating in World War II in France. Briony and Knightley are nurses, and McAvoy is a soldier. With gruesome scenes of war wounds and characters mourning over their lives' turns, the film's theme switches to showing the vicissitudes of fate, how random events can lead to dramatic consequences. "Irreversible" conveyed something similar, but much more memorably and provocatively. But whereas the first half of "Atonement" uses changes in time to further the story, the latter half switches too much between past and present and the device is a crutch more than anything else.

The problem isn't the acting, with decent performances by Knightley and McAvoy. Some decent directing was also present, especially in a several minute shot on a French beach that shows hundreds and hundreds of soldiers going about their daily routine, and is at times comical, nationalistic, terrible, and bewildering. Doesn't quite pack the punch of the long shots in "Children of Men," but it's still good.

The problem is in the story. There's no reason the two halves go together. We watch an hour of rich people being bored, and then we watch how war can be bloody, mundane, and horrific. They have nothing to do with the other. Also, the title begs the question, has the character who has sinned atoned for her sins? The answer is a resounding, unqualified no. It's not even a close call. There's nothing to debate at the end of the movie. Did Briony make up for what she did? No, no, no. So what's the point of this movie?

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Not the biggest fan of Brit comedy, but when they get it right, they get it right. Here, they got it right. Good stuff.

Giant

Texas cattlemen vs. oil prospectors, old money vs. new money, set in a time when cars could have license plates like "275." Back when scripts had dialogue that was as biting as it could be with a G rating, "Giant" tackles a surprising number of issues, from racism to sexism, especially primogeniture. It's an old-style big Hollywood production, with grand strings and horns and formulaic acting, which can be good, but is usually restricted to showing one emotion. The three main actors -- Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean -- were pretty good at showing their characters age over the course of three generations. They don't make movies like this anymore, thank Christ, but some of them, like this one, are still worth watching.

Killer of Sheep

Several critics said this was one of the best films of 2007, even though it was made 30 years ago. Several critics were wrong. The director, still in film school, took $10,000 and tried to portray the life of everyday people in Watts in the '70s. It has the look and feel of a documentary, as if the director went up to people and said, "Do what you're doing and I'll film it." But to construct a film out of such circumstances is an inherently worthless enterprise. Better would have been to make an actual documentary, without forcing people to say dialogue that doesn't go anywhere because there's no story in the first place. If there is a story, it's about a man named Stan, who kills sheep. It follows him, his family, and his friends, through their day-to-day struggles in poverty. There's no story, just different scenes of their daily life. You can respect someone for making a film with no money, but that doesn't mean you have to respect the movie.

Cinderella

A band of Korean girls get into plastic surgery because, let's face it, you're never too young. Only problem is after they come out from under the knife, their face feels odd, they see a creepy girl with long hair crawling on the ground, and they start dying. And the mother of one of these girls, who is the plastic surgeon for all of them, tells them it's all in their heads. Sounds like something's amiss, no? Something is indeed missing: suspense, drama, terror, and everything else that should go into a horror film. And, since it's an Asian horror film, the plot makes sense at first, but then becomes basically incoherent for the last half. "The Audition" addressed similar themes of beauty and objectification in Japanese society, and "The Audition" was a hundred times better. Just watch "The Audition."

Factory Girl

Edie Sedgwick was a so-called "It" Girl in the '60s, which means she was famous and no one in the world could point to a thing she'd done in her life. She's like Paris Hilton. She's an heiress and aspiring model and the press follows her, and Sedgwick also tries to get into the movie business; Paris, too, has made some films. The problem with this movie isn't the main actors -- Sienna Miller and Guy Pearce -- but rather that they portray people who are not that likeable. However, casting Hayden Christiensen as "Billy," aka Bob Dylan, the love interest, was a mistake. But casting him in anything is a mistake.

"Factory Girl" is way too fawning about Sedgwick and Andy Warhol and everyone else at the Factory, which was the place where they hung out and made terrible movies and not much else. It's full of lines like, "You're a superstar," and "You've got the whole world on a string." There's a difference between saying it and showing it. And there's no sense of irony here, no critique of a culture that would make people like this famous. The movie does show a downside to Sedgwick's life, but it's that she got into drugs and died too young, not that she didn't do anything with her life. As if the movie doesn't go over the top in making Sedgwick so glamorous, the credits even feature interviews with real people who knew her and talk about what a wonderful person she was -- it's unwatchable.

Hard Eight

Paul Thomas Anderson must have taken mind steroids, or something. "Hard Eight" is Anderson's first feature-length film, a by-the-numbers flick about an experienced gambler who takes a struggling gambler under his wing, shows him some things, and then they face some conflict. It's okay. "The Cooler" covered similar terrain and was better. Yet, just one year later, Anderson made one of the best movies of all time ("Boogie Nights"), and then he went on to make one of the better films of the late '90s ("Magnolia") and one of the better films of 2007 ("There Will Be Blood"). There are no signs or flashes of his future brilliance in "Hard Eight." I don't know how else to explain the trajectory of his career, except for mind steroids.

There Will Be Blood

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an oilman who, with his son H.W., has come to Little Boston in the early 20th Century to exploit its untapped oil. There he finds himself in conflict with the budding preacher Eli Sunday, and the story that unfolds becomes increasingly darker and more burlesque as the two face off.

"There Will Be Blood" --


aside from being the ad slogan for "Saw II" -- is director Paul Thomas Anderson's epic about the American experience and the forces -- capitalism, entrepreneurial ingenuity, and religion -- that have shaped it.

Much of this movie reminded me of "The New World," another American historical epic told in part by the use of iconic images. One example is in the beginning sequence, with the discordant strings, where Plainview holds up his hand, covered with oil, for others to see, reminiscent of a preacher testifying, signaling a coming conflict with religion. The film also features several parallel sequences that frame the narrative. Plainview in the beginning and the end finds himself in two very different ditches. Sunday makes Plainview speak to the congregation and say what a sinner he's been, knowing full well Plainview doesn't believe it. And later in the film, Sunday gets his comeuppance.

The main conflict in the story is between the oilman and the preacher. Plainview is self-aware. He knows exactly what he's selling and how to sell it, and he knows what he wants. And when he's telling people of all the benefits he'll bring to their community when they let him use their land, we the viewers know -- because Day-Lewis conveys it in his portrayal -- that Plainview is not making promises he plans to keep, but is merely telling the people what they want to hear.

But I get no sense that Eli Sunday's character knows what he really is. He comes across more like a nutter than a businessman who is selling religion. The dialogue was written so that the actor playing Sunday might have tried to convey this self-awareness -- I'm thinking of where he asks Plainview to introduce him at the inaugural well blessing, where he confronts his dad about how stupid the deal they made was, and where he's baptizing Plainview. But Paul Dano doesn't really convey that he knows he's a self-promoting fraud who, deep down, is not too dissimilar from Plainview. Instead, I see him as sincere, a little callow, and a weakling. To the extent this lack of self-awareness was on purpose, I think it was a mistake, as the movie would have been a lot more interesting to have that similarity between Sunday and Plainview. To the extent Anderson and Dano meant to have Sunday be self-aware, I don't think they succeeded.

I said in a previous post that I didn't see a major career for Paul Dano, and I stand by that statement. To be fair, very few people could have acted opposite Day-Lewis in this movie and succeeded. But regardless of that, to have him in conflict with Day-Lewis is no conflict; Sunday is clearly outmatched, and there's never any question that Plainview will roll right over him. That may be the point, but I would have liked it if it was more of a fair fight. But of course, then you'd have to find an actor that could go toe-to-toe with Day-Lewis, and that's an awfully short list. Possibly Gael Garcia Bernal would have worked. He's shown he can convey the fraud ("Bad Education"), the poor man with a subtle, wounded pride ("Y Tu Mama Tambien"), and the sincere believer ("The Motorcycle Diaries"). And to top it off, he's handsome with seductive eyes; it'd be more believable that people would follow him than a scrawny sapling like Dano.

The ending -- "I'm finished" -- turns the previous 2 and a half hours into a joke, the punch line of which is the name of the movie. But I dig it. Unlike the Coen brothers in "No Country for Old Men," Anderson knows how to end a movie. The last line is also as pregnant with meaning as that in "Bad Education." And the final confrontation between Plainview and Sunday is great. It's almost too outlandish and over-the-top, but it's clear that the fight's been building up the whole movie, so when all their pent-up emotions come out, it's believable because the film has earned it.

Can't Hardly Wait

Also known as "that high school movie with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Seth Green." High school's over, and everyone goes to one party, where the pining loser gets the hot girl, the cool jock gets humiliated, and the socially awkward dork has some new experiences. Tried and true territory here, but it's enjoyable. It also has some of Seth Green's finer on-screen work.

Old School

A comedic remake of "Fight Club," starring Luke Wilson as Edward Norton, Vince Vaughn as Brad Pitt, Will Ferrell as Meatloaf, and Ellen Pompeo as Helena Bonham Carter, in which a man and his alter ego start an underground club in order to cope with the changes occurring in their lives. Quite good, and it holds up after, I don't know, at least four viewings.

Year of the Dog

Rare is the movie where the death of a two-legged dog is hilarious. Such is "Year of the Dog," in part. Molly Shannon plays a woman whose life revolves around her dog, Pencil. But when Pencil dies, her life is upended. At first, the film is about her evolving relationships with her neighbor (John C. Reilly) and a man from the vet's office (Peter Sarsgaard). When it focuses on the relationships, it's consistently LOL funny. It shows that low-budget comedies can actually be funny and entertaining, given the right script and actors. Shannon and Reilly are talented comedians, and even the usually worthless Sarsgaard turns in a decent performance. But then for the last hour or so the movie focuses on Shannon's increasingly militant animal rights activism, starting with her becoming a vegan. The movie then becomes a lot less interesting.

The Nanny Diaries

Scarlett Johansson is a nanny! She spends her summer after college caring for the offspring of the upper-crust WASP bluebloods Mr. and Mrs. X, who, contrary to what you might think, are not members of the Nation of Islam. But it's not one of those so-and-so-is-a-nanny movies like Jaime Pressly's brilliant "Poison Ivy: The New Seduction." (Pressly's mom was the nanny, and only for a few minutes, but still.) Instead, it's light PG-13 fare: the nanny is treated poorly by the parents, but she sticks around for the kid's sake. She also has a tepid romance bloom with someone known as Harvard Hottie; since the filmmakers didn't trust us to understand that, given his name, he went to Harvard, he also wears a Harvard shirt when he's out and about. At the end, we learn, get this, that the ultra-rich don't really care about their kids and they lead superficial lives, but deep inside, they're still human. And now that we've gotten this film out of our systems, we may watch "Poison Ivy: The New Seduction" again.