Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

If you ask me what my ten favorite films are, chances are 9 of them will change every time I hear the question. But two films have stayed there without fail no matter how often I change things up' incidentally, both were directed by Stanley Kubrick. I have seen Dr. Strangelove at least 15 times, and each viewing offers up something I hadn't noticed before, a bit of visual irony or a line I missed, that makes the whole thing even funnier.

The finest piece of political satire ever filmed (and certainly the second best piece of satire of the 20th century behind George Orwell's Animal Farm), Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove paints a hilariously over-the-top yet terrifyingly plausible picture of nuclear holocaust, brought on by an exploitation of complicated and self-defeating "safeguards." The President is the only one with the authority to order a nuclear strike, but the military so feared the Reds and what they could possibly do that they created a number of preventative measures that would allow generals to take matters into their own hands if Soviets managed to incapacitate the President.

As the opening credits roll, Kubrick inserts shots of a nuclear bomber refueling in midair as a tanker locks into an intake valve in a sort of ballet. He plays on our romanticizing of war by making the shots strangely beautiful and serene. Then we go inside the bomber. An operator checks today's codes for their instructions; the orders come in and decode as Wing Attack Plan R. He contacts the plane commander, Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickens), who dismisses it out of hand. No one would order Wing Attack Plan R. But the code checks out, and Kong rallies his men as he sets a course for a Russian target.

Meanwhile, back at Burpelson Air Force Base, Group Caption Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), an RAF pilot working on the American base, impounds radios on the order of base commander General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who also ordered the nuclear strike. Mandrake switches on one of the radios out of boredom and hears music on civilian broadcasts instead of news bulletins on a Communist attack. Mandrake reports this to Ripper expecting a recall of the bombers, only to find that Ripper knew perfectly well that nothing was wrong and ordered the bombers into Russia of his own volition.

The third and final location is the War Room. President Merkin Muffey (Peter Sellers) meets with his chiefs of staff to figure out what's going on and how to get the recall code to stop the bombers. The only general who ever gets a word in is Air Force General Buck Turgidson, commander of Strategic Air Command. He reads out Ripper's rambling, incoherent call to arms but does not want to "pass judgment" on whether or not Ripper's gone mad. He views the strike as opportunity to catch the Russians off guard. Instead of figuring out how to recall the planes, he urges the President to mount a full-scale attack; if those bombers drop their loads and Russia retaliates, losses will be astronomical, but if they send in every bomber in the fleet American losses will be "10, 20 million, tops" he says with a grin.

Kubrick uses these three main locations and the characters in each to put forward a vicious satire on Cold War politics and the general nature of war. When the Army sends soldiers to break into Ripper's base for force the code out of him, Ripper convinces his men that the attackers are Commies in disguise, and to shoot on sight. Mandrake tries to talk Jack down, and eventually learns that Ripper ordered the attack because he believes that Communists have fluoridated the water supply, and he blames this for his impotence. As a result, he ordered the attack to protect the "purity of essence," "essence" in this case of course being semen. Plenty has been said on the phallic nature of weapons and the need for males to mask inferiority, but Ripper is willing to end the world in shame.

But of course the War Room is where most of the comedy plays out; George C. Scott excels as Turgidson, and in many ways is representative of the film itself. He hams it up for the camera, but does so intentionally. Like the film, he makes OTT theatrics work almost as realism because he works within the logic of many Cold War generals: it's not his fault--or Kubrick's or satirist Terry Southern's--that the reality is so bizarre. When Muffey calls in the Russian ambassador to inform him of the situation, Scott goes wild. "Mr. President, he'll see the big board!" as he flails wildly. The second the ambassador arrives, Turgidson flies into a stream of insults directed at Communists and accuses him of trying to take photos of "the big board." Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky (supposedly a play on the Marquis de Sade), connects the President with Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov, and the resulting phone call is, in my humble opinion, the funniest scene in the history of cinema. When Muffey turns to his ex-Nazi nuclear expert Dr. Strangelove (Seller yet again), it sends the film into the comedy stratosphere.

What I see more and more as I rewatch the film is how brilliant Kubrick uses visual irony and juxtaposition between the three sets that compliment the tight script. Ripper launches the attack because of his impotence, and the base itself looks very sterile: white walls and harsh lighting, signify his inability to "perform." When soldiers attempt to take back the base, the two factions of Americans battle as a large sign reading "Peace is Our Profession" looms in the background. Conversely, the scenes on the bomber are not inherently funny; Kong and his men believe that the Russians have already attacked America, and they move forward into enemy territory under the notion that they're going to be heroes. Kong tells his men that they'll all get commendations out of this "regardless of your race, your color or your creed" as "When Johnny Goes Marching Home" softly but boldly plays over the scene. It rams home the tragic irony of these men's lives, that they are but pawns in a game they can never understand, not because they're stupid but because the people who invented the game never thought of its implications. Besides, if for no other reason it's worth it for that shot of Slim Pickens riding the bomb into oblivion.

The War Room itself is widely-celebrated, and deservedly so. Kubrick had the table at which the generals sit lined with the gree felt of a poker table. He knew the film was black and white, but he wanted the room to feel like a poker game, and indeed it does: apart from the table, lights pierce through cigarette smoke in the background, giving the place the feel of a seedy den. These men look at all the figures, and reduce lives to statistics: I've got 30 million megatons! I see your 30 million and raise you a doomsday machine.

Dr. Strangelove applies to nuclear war, but its vicious examination of the nature of war itself gives it a timeless quality that survived the fall of the Soviet Union. It reduces war to the exploits of men whose inferiority complexes drive them to kill. Even when a nuke sets off the Russian doomsday machine and it spells the end of mankind, Turgidson and the Russian ambassador still bicker, and the ambassador sneaks off to take secret photos of the War Room. Why on Earth would he do this? Does he not understand that the notion of politics no longer has any meaning? It's just his job; who knows if Americans will agree to a peace settlement as a band of specially-chosen survivors (including all politicians and military leaders, of course) flee to mine shafts, or vice-versa. Even at the end of civilization, man will look for any excuse to kill someone else.

Badlands

"I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died"
-Bruce Springsteen, "Nebraska"

Terrence Malick began work on his debut Badlands in his second year at the American Film Institute, crafting not only a script but a sales pitch complete with videos and slides for potential investors. It didn't matter, though; he got his money on the spot and ended up crafting possibly the best "road" movie ever made.

Loosely based on the infamous 1957 murder spree of Carl Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, Badlands opens with garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen) walking up to Holly (Sissy Spacek), surely enough, on her front porch twirling a baton. In her voice-over, Holly describes Kit as "the handsomest man I ever saw--he looked just like James Dean." Kit gets fired from his job, and comes to sweep Holly off her feet and take her out of this dead-end town. Soon, Kit leaves bodies wherever they go.

Malick uses the voice-over to create a dialectic between the actual events on-screen and how the character interpreted them. This style would become Malick's trademark, bringing Linda's detached perspective to the love triangle in Days of Heaven and prying into the minds of the soldiers in The Thin Red Line. Holly speaks like the child she is: she views their road trip as the ultimate romantic getaway. Even as Kit blows another hole in some poor sap for no reason, she narrates her journey as if reading out of a teen magazine. Though the real Caril Ann was supposedly just as violent as Starkweather, Malick turns Holly into an innocent child who follows her boyfriend simply because he likes her. "I wasn't popular at school on account of having no personality and not being pretty," and this flattery wins her over as if Kit were Romeo incarnate.

What makes the film so interesting is how little Malick cares about these characters' psyches; Kit never gives a reason for killing, nor does he seem to enjoy it, but he murders anyway. Martin Sheen, in his major debut and possibly his finest performance, plays Kit as a man driven by loneliness and isolation. We don't know--and we never will--why he kills, but we know something went wrong in his life to make him this way. Spacek keeps Holly from being one-dimensional by giving her just enough smarts to figure out that Kit is...a little off. At the end she muses what may have drove him to his ways, but as is often the case with Malick, the point is to ask the questions, not get the answers.

Holly's voice-over and Malick's structuring deliberately rob the film of emotional impact, as he would do with his subsequent films. When Holly starts to spend time with Kit, her father disapproves and, as punishment, shoots her dog. "I was greatly distressed," recalls Holly. Because Kit gets no pleasure from his killings, the murders seem so matter-of-fact that they're emotionally draining. Malick's films would play out like anti-climaxes if they didn't spend the whole time detaching you from the proceedings, and it makes his films so singular in an industry of tropes and cliché.

What brings these two characters together? Kit is 10 years older, and Holly clearly has enough intelligence to see Kit's madness, even if it takes her awhile. What drives them to such acts of horror? The stark feel of the film seems to suggest that they see each other as kindred spirits in alienation; both feel alone even together, and crime seems to be the only thing that adds meaning to their lives. In the final moments, Holly tells us that Kit got the death penalty and she got off with parole and eventually married her lawyer's son, telling us that she's speaking to us from well into the future. It tells us that she's just as empty in the future as she is in the present. Maybe Kit got off lucky.

Children of Paradise

As I run down the list of the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? top 1000, I've been surprised to find how much I've loved just about all of the films I've gone through. Now, granted, I'm still tying up the top 100 and one assumes those would be there for a reason, but I've come a long way from my childhood dismissal of any monochrome film it would seem. However, I have at last found a high-ranking entry in the list that I'm just not crazy about, and that film is Michael Carné's epic Children of Paradise.

Billed as "the French answer to Gone With the Wind," Les Enfants du Paradis concerns itself not with war but the theater; the original French title refers to the "paradis," the upper balcony of the theater in which the rowdy poor shout their (dis)approval of the play. The actors refer to them as the 'gods' and strive to please them above all others, for impressing the rich regulars is simple; winning over the uneducated who won't be impressed by form and stucture requires talent.

The opening shot of the film is simply one of the best I've seen in classic cinema. A tour through the bustle outside the Theatre des Funambules, it captures a the dreamlike quality of the stage shows outside designed to entice gods into Paradise while also revealing the thriving crime that exists in the form of thieves. At one exhibit, the beautiful Garance sits in a bathtub admiring herself so she supplies "truth, but only from the neck up." Frédérick, an aspiring actor, spots her and immediately falls in love. A thief, Lacenaire, also takes a shine to her, but believes in business before pleasure and nicks a wallet.

The victim blames Garance, but Baptiste, the performing pantomime, comes to her aid while proving his silent skills. She hands him a flower in gratitude, and yet another man falls for the beauty. What makes Garance so alluring? She's beautiful sure, but not launch-a-1000-ships beautiful. Really, Garance attracts men because she's so dominant and knowing in a society that keeps women simple and obedient. A fourth suitor, the rich Count Edouard de Montray later in the film, and he completes the roster of men irresistibly drawn by this independent woman.

It's a tangled web, and ultimately it's the reason why the film never clicks for me; love triangles (or pentagons, as the case may be) are well and good, but Carné structures things so we never really get involved with the melodrama. The men figure out the identities of their "competition" fairly quickly, but no one takes action on it until the last half hour in a three-hour film I'm not expecting shootouts or anything, but why let them figure it out if they'll do nothing for the next hour? At some point we wonder why they all cling to this woman when she divides her affections between them, genuinely attracted to at least one aspect of each man; clearly she'll never be able to pick one, and if she does she'll not stay with him, so why bother?

The only real emotional connection I had to the film was with Nathalie, a mime in the theater, who deeply loves Baptiste and even marries him, but knows deep down that her husband will never love her. She speaks in leaden tones as she buries her agony under propriety, and it's heartbreaking. When she finally catches the two in Baptiste's room at the end, her mild outburst deafens more than any shouting match ever could. It's the only bit of drama that worked for me.

Honestly, I find the production of Children of Paradise more interesting than the film itself. Carné and writer Jacques Prévert had to make the film in Vichy France under Nazi rule, and collaborators and resistance fighters stood side by side as extras. Production started and stopped for years due to budgets limited by rationing, forced location changes, a destroyed sets. The set designer and the score composer worked in secrecy due to their Jewish heritage. No film in the country could be longer than 90 minutes, so Carné split the film into two parts: "The Boulevard of Crime" and "The Man in White." It's a fascinating history I'm barely summing up here, and frankly I think a documentary on the filming would be a much more telling experience.

In the end, though, I'm glad I watched it. It's one of the most technically proficient films of the period, using all sorts of techniques that had only recently been developed to craft a visually resplendent world that looks like a wild dream. When Terry Gilliam cites this as a major influence on his work in the Criterion intro, I could see it immediately. Nevertheless, the plot itself never sucks me in, and it's not enough of a fantasy for me to place visuals over storytelling. Children of Paradise certainly isn't a bad or even merely "good" film, but I wouldn't rank it as one of cinema's finest achievements. And it's definitely not, according to an old Cannes proclamation, "the greatest French movie ever made." Go sift through Renoir or Godard for that.

Breaking the Waves

For whatever reason, the Dogme 95 movement has always seemed pretentious to me on paper. Actually, no, I know the reason, it's the rulebook the founders established with the group in order to promote intellectual growth in film. Known as the Vow of Chastity, it essentially enforced a strict verité approach even though it forbade any action like murders and guns. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but I think guns are an everyday aspect of life; besides, I have issues with someone calling a type of film verité if you're just reading out of a guide. However, if the Dogme 95 products contain more films like Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, I will gladly eat a mountain of crow.

In a small Calvinist community in Scotland, Bess (Emily Watson) gets engaged to an outsider who came through town working on an oil rig. Bess is devout in her faith; she cleans the church and even has two-way "conversations" with God in which she speaks for the Lord in a gruff, firm voice and for herself in a timid, childlike tone. Initially the community resists her marriage to Jan, but Bess is in love and her family reluctantly agrees. At the reception, one of Jan's rig buddies crushes a beer can to impress Bess' grandfather, who in turn breaks a glass of lemonade with his bare hands. Though a virgin, Bess is ready to be a good wife from the start, even offering herself to him before the reception.

Bess' best friend, her sister-in-law Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge), worries for her: she knows that Bess is childlike and naïve, and even confronts Jan to warn him not to corrupt his new bride. But we see that Jan is a good man, and we do no worry. After a honeymoon, he heads back to the oil rig to work, leaving Bess to deal with loneliness for the first time. When he comes back, he's been paralyzed by an accident. "Life should not always be preserved at all costs," warns one of the community's pragmatic doctors, but Bess will hear none of it. She's just glad her husband is alive.

Now incapable of making love, he encourages his wife to sleep with another man and tell him about the experience. Why? I am not sure, for we never learn. If I had to guess, I'd say he felt guilty that his wife, a virgin until their marriage, could only experience such carnal pleasures for a short time before she became saddled with a paralyzed husband. But the reason matters little, as Bess' obedience of her husband leads to the real crux of the story: a spiritual journey.

Bess, so torn by her religious upbringing, comes to view her husband's request as her duty to God: sleeping with other men will convince God that she loves her husband, and He in turn will heal Jan. Jan's condition instead worsens, and it drives Bess to near-madness. Soon she's so desperate that she rides out to a ship that even prostitutes avoid because of how rough the men treat them. These events lead to several big revelations and twists that make you think about the nature of God and spirituality, as well as the relationship between Jan and Bess.

von Trier forces us to ask ourselves one big question with the film: is Bess a sinner? Certainly the community thinks so. At the start of the film, we see how dogmatic her small town is: "We don't need bells in our church to worship God," Bess' grandfather growls to an inquisitive Jan. At a funeral, the priest actually calls the deceased a sinner and assures the congregation that the man currently resides in Hell. Women do not speak in the services, and any display of emotion is frowned upon. When the town eventually figures out that Bess is sleeping with other men, they cast her out, and the children who used to speak to her now throw stones. I can't imagine they know why they throw them, only that their parents have condemned her. But even in her darkest moments Bess remains spiritually pure even as she places herself in situations that are anything but innocent.

The film rests squarely on Emily Watson's shoulders, and she delivers an absolutely devastating performance. The more hopeless Bess' situation becomes the more Watson becomes unhinged. Yet the nature of her character keeps Watson from slipping into overacting or mugging; instead, she makes the whole thing strangely plausible. As we learn more about her character and what possibly motivates her, our sympathy deepens for this poor, tortured soul. Her story ends in tragedy, but the ending contains a sort of cosmic intervention that does not fix problems but gives us a sense of closure (it did take me a second to get, though).

von Trier noted that the film broke a number of Dogme 95 tenets: the director used sets instead of actual locations, set the film in the past, hints at extreme violence in one moment, and even uses CGI at one point. He even uses non-diegetic music with occasional irony: I got a kick out of hearing Deep Purple's "Child in Time" as it played over a port at sunset, when the water actually looks purple. All of this delights me. It tells me that von Trier was more concerned with making a good film than a "proper" one. And what a good film he made; Breaking the Waves is one of the most insightful films made about spirituality, and that may very well have to do with the fact that religion itself plays only a peripheral role; clerics stick to the "rules" as if that makes a good Christian, but this woman true faith confuses them. While they may not react as violently as the judges did in The Passion of Joan of Arc, we still see how myopic and misguided they are in the face of a true believer.

Naked

You know, as much as I absolutely adored Happy-Go-Lucky, I almost wish I hadn't seen it yet. Going back through the rest of his oeuvre, HGL is just about the least representative starting place you could choose. Secrets & Lies displayed the comic bent of Happy, but it also contained a tragic edge that gave off a sense of personal doom even with its upbeat ending. Then I went farther back, to Leigh's 1993 film Naked, and I felt just as confused as before.

If Secrets & Lies put forth a certain amount of misery in the characters' interactions with each other, Naked casts any semblance of subtlety aside and goes straight for pitch-black nihilism. Leigh grabs your attention from the start with his hand-held camera run through a darkened alley ending in a close-up of a man sexually assaulting, possibly even raping, a young woman. She knocks the grungy man off and threatens him before walking into the night. The man stumbles in the other direction, finds and steals a car, and heads out on the road as the credits flash: "A film by Mike Leigh."

The man in question is Johnny (David Thewlis), a sort of wandering minstrel, although instead of music he spouts fatalist philosophy to anyone who will listen (or at least to anyone within earshot). Johnny wears all-black clothes that he's worn so long without washing they seem to be an extension of his ratty skin and sports a wispy beard that barely clings to his face, as if he somehow shaved but the hair never really fell off. You can practically smell him.

Johnny slinks his way back home to London to stay with his ex-girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp), who's revulsion for Johnny is outweighed only by her pity. Her point of view on our protagonist eventually became my own: Johnny is twisted, even borderline sadistic, but he's also very eloquent and witty. He even manages to seduce Louise's roommate Sophie with his philosophical musings.

Unlike Secrets & Lies, there's not a real narrative here, or at least not a focused one: Johnny spends his days roaming the streets as if they were his hobby; somehow he manages to charm everyone he meets: a night porter invites Johnny into the building he monitors, and the two strike up a philosophical discussion and gain a mutual understanding of one another. A Scottish couple lose each other, and Johnny comically tries to reunite them only for each to wander off once more. He even manages to woo a waitress and come back to her place, only for her to realize the underlying insanity under Johnny's wit and kick him out.

There's also a disturbing subplot involving Louise and Sophie's landlord Sebastian, a sadist and a rapist who torments his tenants for no other reason than because he's bored. If Johnny believes in the impending doom on mankind and other fatalistic thoughts, Sebastian is the reason why. Much of the film gets some dark laughs, but Sebastian moves through the story like a sex-hungry Lucifer, and the only person who finds his lines funny are him.

Naked is not a movie for the faint of heart; hell, it's not a movie for the particularly strong-willed. It contains such an utter hopelessness that the DVD should come packaged with a free therapy session. However, it manages to entertain because it makes Johnny such a pathetic figure: his bleak outlook on life manifests itself as crass and arrogant, but occasionally we break through to the desperation and fear of a man so smart he realizes the futility of it all. He grew up expecting nuclear holocaust, and after finally preparing for death it never came, and Johnny doesn't know how to react. In a perverse way, Naked is one man's quest to find meaning in life, only he knows that life is ultimately meaningless. Whatever. It's a masterpiece. Now someone hand me some Zoloft.

Short Cuts

Sometimes I think people overstate Altman's state of affairs in the 80s. First of all, "Popeye" didn't flop, and regardless of whatever box office business his films did after that, it's not like he was a commercial titan in the first place. Nevertheless, everyone can agree that Altman returned to making classics with 1992's biting satire The Player, but it was this follow-up that confirmed one of the best late-career resurgences in cinema.

Consisting of 22 major players and 10 distinct and interweaving storylines, Short Cuts may not be Altman's best film (I gotta give it up for Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller), it's certainly his most daring. If The Player examined the ins-and-outs of Hollywood, Short Cuts pulls the camera back a bit to capture all of Los Angeles, and he uses this larger frame to delve into the modern state of America. Here, community has given way to individuality too self-absorbed and detached to produce anything of worth, and even the ties that remain are weakened by dysfunctionality.

To tackle all of the films threads would utterly drain all the entertainment I take from this film, so here's a recap: waitress Doreen Piggot (Lily Tomlin) accidentally hits a young boy with her car, and the boy's parents (Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell) must deal with his comatose state for most of the film. Meanwhile, two marriages crumble from infidelity, one comes under strain due to the wife's occupation as a phone sex operator, and another, the most stable, survives on the husband's (Robert Downey, Jr.) sadism. Also, three fisherman spot a dead woman in the water on their trip but decide to continue fishing before altering the police. Yes, this is a recap.

It'd be easy--hell, almost understandable--if Altman lost his way amongst the disconnect of the original Raymond Carter stories, but not only does he make the stories work, he ties them together in ways that manage to be both tangential and vitally important. Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pool of the Finnigans (the parents of the struck child), then he goes home to his phone sex operator wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Both are friends with Downey's character Bill and his wife Honey (Lili Taylor), the daughter of Doreen and her husband Earl (Tom Waits). All tiny, insignificant little threads, but they combine to make a much fuller story.

All of these individual stories confirm Altman's predictions in Nashville: with that film the director noticed the growing self-denial and personal isolationism of Americans, what with the constant pontificating of empty words no one really paid attention to and the immediate denial of the ending tragedy. Here, at last, is the final outcome of that mentality: some have labelled the film as misogynistic because its various abused women stay with their men, but it's because everybody's so wrapped up in themselves that interpersonal conflicts come second to internal ones.

There's something about Altman's direction that I just love: he gives us all these characters, but there's never anything episodic about his visual style. Even though the cuts between stories and characters are more jarring and sudden here than in Nashville and McCabe, Altman moves between characters with grace, and often tackles more than one story at the same time using overlapped dialogue that confuses as it enlightens. This style of visual narrative is much of the reason why I think Altman is one of the best directors ever and a true original.

The use of music in Short Cuts also adds a dimension to the proceedings. This is my second time viewing the film, and this time I paid attention to the music after flipping through Michael Wilmington's essay for the Criterion booklet. A mixture of somber classical music and upbeat jazz variations, they do what all great scores must: capture the mood. Of course, Altman's working with a soundtrack, and he has to capture moods within moods, so the fact that he and his music department pulls it off is nothing short of amazing. The classical music plays over moments of despair--indeed, the suicidal cellist (Lori Singer) is the only person who confronts her despair head-on instead of burying it under obliviousness or drugs--while the jazz songs, which all belie severity under their swinging tempos, characterize those who mask their pain.

All in all, this is a late-stage masterpiece from a man who had been dismissed by most in the business as a has-been. For a film with almost no character evolution, it gets out unbelievable levels of pathos, and it uses characters that would be one-dimensional in any other film to paint a complex portrait of personal interaction and the despair of the human condition. It's absolutely essential.

Chinatown

I hereby forgive my film teacher for making me suffer once more through Donnie Darko. The poor man has to show us movies in a room with wired emergency lights that never show off, on a crap little projector, but seeing Chinatown on anything bigger than the tiny-ass T.V. I keep in my apartment gets a pass. I love this film so much I wouldn't mind if we just watched it the entire semester; hell, I love it so much he could have run Donnie Darko again and I wouldn't complain. Too much.

Far and away the greatest of the neo-noirs, Chinatown deserves a place in the cinema hall of fame just because Jack Nicholson plays a character other than Jack Nicholson. While Jack Nicholson the character is certainly a load of fun, it never ceases to amaze me watching his performance here. Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private eye in Los Angeles who makes a living outing cheating spouses for paying clients. One day a woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray, the wife of the chief engineer of the town's water supply, stops by to hire Gittes, and it launches him into an endlessly tangled web of deceit, corruption, and murder.

Gittes gets evidence of Mulwray's adultery, but the evidence makes it way to press. Gittes winds up in an argument in a barber shop with another patron who insults Gittes' profession. The detective blows up at the man, a banker, and asks who's the real scum, a private eye who uncovers truth, or a banker who forecloses on the poor. It's a bit obvious, but moments like these show screenwriter Robert Towne adding more than just the usual flourish to the proceedings. Then the real Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) shows up and sues Gittes for slander.

Slowly Polanski peels back various, seemingly disconnected elements into a sinister whole: we learn of L.A.'s water drought, yet Jake notices water dumped out of the reservoir as he spies on Mr. Mulwray. Mulwray eventually turns up dead, and Evelyn decides to drop the suit with Gittes, in order to keep a private eye out of her affairs...

Eventually--and without giving too much away though, honestly, it's been 35 years--Gittes uncovers a plot to dry out the San Fernando Valley to bankrupt its farmers, only for some ruthless businessmen to take over and bring the water back, making ludicrous profits. A similar scandal occurred in the city in 1908, and Towne transplants it to 1930s, possibly to comment on how the power elite could still eke out a profit in the Depression. In the end, just about every established character relationship gets turned on its head. I've seen the film three times, but Polanski structures Towne's brilliant script in such a way that I'm still-- well, not surprised, certainly, but still floored by its perfection.

The ending is cynical, borderline nihilistic, but I think it fits both the film and the general path of Polanski's life at that point. Five years earlier, members of Charles Manson's cult brutally murdered his wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child. In grief, Polanski stayed in Europe. Then he came back to make this film and place himself back on top, only to get hit with charges of sex with an underage girl, which led to permanent exile. Polanski had reason enough to be dark what with his wife's death, but history has only made this period darker.

But regardless of his personal flaws, Polanski is a great filmmaker. He got his start with critically acclaimed European thrillers like Knife in the Water and Repulsion, only to score a smash hit in America with Rosemary's Baby, the film that not only established Polanski as a hit-maker but producer Robert Evans as well, a man who would go on to bring this film to light as well as the Godfather films. What I noticed about his direction here is, of course, his use of shadow and lighting (it is a film noir, after all).

Particularly of interest is how Polanski and his cinematographer John A. Alonzo conveyed so much foreboding in Gittes' suits. At the start of the film, Jake wears a white suit, but the more complex the story becomes the darker the suit he sports. Even when Gittes doesn't have time to change they cast Nicholson in such light that his gray suit can look black. Whever Gittes gets closer to the truth, the color lightens. Following this pattern, you can tell Jake is wrong about 20 minutes from the end when he confidently declares he knows the identity of the killer; when he does so, his suit is fully black.

At the start of this I called Chinatown "the best of the neo-noirs," but I have a hard time thinking of it as such. Neo-noir generally works as a broad homage to classic noir; the best certainly work as their own films, but consider Sin City, Blade Runner and the entire filmography of the Coen brothers. All of them draw clear influences--and most downright reference, movies like The Third Man and Double Indemnity. Chinatown, however, works completely as its own film, and I believe it belongs on the list of the classics.

[Note: I just realized I went through this entire piece and never mentioned Jerry Goldsmith's score. It's phenomenal, full of misleading cues that keep you constantly on your toes. It only adds to Polanski's thoroughly Hitchcockian feel.]

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

The universally accepted wisdom dictates that Buster Keaton is the greatest of the silent comedians, but I've always preferred Chaplin, basic camera setup and all. Of the two, Chaplin is the better filmmaker, but I will side with the conventional wisdom and say that Keaton is both a better director and a better actor. A month or two ago I sat down with my first Keaton picture, his official masterpiece The General, and was too wowed to laugh. Oh, there were gags aplenty, but I found myself more drawn to the incredible skill involved than the humor. I suspect I need another viewing to fully appreciate its comic side as well as its technical aspects, but I experienced no such problem with my second Keaton picture, Steamboat Bill Jr.

The plot, as with all silent comedy, is simple: our titular protagonist takes over his father's steamboat fresh out of college. Along the way, he falls for the daughter of his father's business rival. By comparison, The General is Rashomon. Normally such a simple plot exists as a loose narrative on which to hang various gags, but Keaton surprisingly makes the story genuinely relevant.

Not to say that the gags aren't great, though. Keaton, the master of deadpan, starts off small: he hops of a train wearing a carnation so his father can pick him out of the crowd, loses the carnation, and walks up to people shoving his lapel in people's faces to get them to notice the flower that isn't there. Then, it ramps up into classic slapstick: people get punched, fall into the river, etc. But Keaton's deadpan sells everything; silent film generally features a lot of overacting by today's standards, but no duh. Without sound, of course the actors resorted to pantomime. Keaton, however, walks through his films with a look of mild puzzlement, as if he'd just fallen into this black-and-white world and convinced himself he was just in a dream.

Even though the film concerns his trials and tribulations aboard the steamboat and his romantic quest, undoubtedly the film's most memorable sequence is the destruction of the town by a cyclone. Keaton's crew designed breakaway buildings and streets, and flung him about the place on a cable as if being hurled about by the twister. The scene is certainly funny, but again I found myself more amazed at the fact that such a trick could exist in 1928.

The sequence climaxes in the most recognizable image from any of Keaton's oeuvre, a shot so endlessly parodied and referenced that by all accounts it should have lost all its power. I'm speaking of course of the moment where Keaton stops in front of a house as the wall breaks apart and falls towards him, only for him to survive as he's standing exactly where the window ends up. It's utterly brilliant even today. Just think: he had one shot to get all this right, and he had to stand exactly in the right spot. There was no CGI or fail-safe to stop the wall if it looked like it was falling wrong; a few inches off the mark and Keaton would have been pancaked. Some people will do anything for a laugh, indeed.

At its heart, it's a simple tale. Like The General, this film doesn't set out to really teach us anything, which is A-OK in my books. Granted, I already stated I prefer Chaplin and his sentimentality, but even I have to admit he crosses the lines into preaching in more than one spot in more than one movie. Keaton just wants you to have a good time, and damned if you won't. Even after 80 years, Keaton's films hold up, and that's pretty impressive. Steamboat Bill, Jr. marked a transitional point for the filmmaker: after this he went to work for MGM, put out one last accepted classic (The Cameraman) and then lost creative control of his work. Where Chaplin defied the talkies for over a decade, Keaton found himself thrust into the new medium, and he never recovered. Cherish, then, this film, for it's one of the last gasps of genius from one of the best filmmakers of all time.

Ikiru

Akira Kurosawa earned his reputation as the supreme director of action, chiefly within his jidaigeki samurai epics, but he also had a gift with simple, human stories, and of them none can compare to his 1952 masterpiece Ikiru. Firmly entrenched in the upper echelon of the master's films, Ikiru displays just as much camera mastery as his action films, but Kurosawa shrinks the scope down to craft a commentary on the rise of the bureaucracy in Japan and unfulfilled life.

In the very first shot of the film, Kurosawa displays an X-ray of Kenji Watanabe's stomach, revealing a large tumor. A cold, dispassionate voice tells us that Watanabe has less than a year to live, then he goes on to say that Watanabe never really lived anyway. We see him at his desk in a government office, mindlessly shuffling papers and keeping to himself. He returns to his home, where his lives with his son and daughter-in-law, yet he does not communicate with the two. The son and his wife couldn't care less; they just want to make sure they get his inheritance.

Watanabe is played by Takashi Shimura, one of the three big recurring stars in Kurosawa's pictures. Of the three, Shimura is surely the one with the most range, and he puts forward a hell of a performance. Shimura walks through the film hunched over, as if to withdraw from the world. He slacks his jaw a bit to make his face look utterly blank and unnoticeable, yet he stands out all the more for his ability to completely blend in. Compare this sullen, weak man to Shimura's next role for the director, the wise Kambei in Seven Samurai; they're so radically different it's hard to think the same man could go to such extremes.

After experiencing stomach pains, Watanabe goes to the clinic to get checked out. As he waits, another patient strikes up a conversation, and mentions a friend of his who died of stomach cancer. He goes on to describe every symptom that Watanabe experiences, and tells our protagonist that the doctors will tell a person with cancer that they just have an ulcer. "If they say you can eat anything you want, you've got less than a year." Watanabe hears his name, enters for tests, and waits some more. The doctor returns, and tells him he has an ulcer. Kurosawa abruptly cuts to the coat Watanabe drops to the floor, then to his terrified, knowing face. He begs the doctors to tell him the truth, but they all smile and repeat their diagnosis. Watanabe leaves, and one of the physicians questions the wisdom of lying to their patients. "What would you say to a man who has six months to live?" fires back a colleague.

At the start the narrator told us that Watanabe never really lived, and he knows it too. He waits in his son's dark room, and when he and his wife return home they are so surprised and annoyed by it that the old man does not tell his son of his illness. Watanabe decides to have a night out just to do something for once, and runs into a writer who offers to show him a good time out on the town.; he'll be Watanabe's free Mephistopheles for the evening.

The journey though the night clubs is about as close to an action sequence as the film gets. Mephistopheles takes our dying Faust through a hell of debauchery and, though Watanabe smiles as he watches exotic dancers and guzzles sake, by the end of the evening he realizes he's gotten no pleasure out of any of it. While sitting in a club, he requests a sullen song that urges young women to find happiness while they can. This club, initially bustling with life, cows into silence as Watanabe morosely sings the words.

Eventually, Watanabe finds a purpose. He runs into a young woman from work, and her joie de vivre attracts him. But this is not a love story; he's simply awed by someone genuinely happy. When she reveals that her happiness stems from her new job making toys for the children of Japan, he suddenly gets an idea. The first half of the film closes as he runs down the stairs of the restaurant the two are in as a group of children sing "Happy Birthday" to one of their friends, signalling Watanabe's rebirth.

We then cut to Watanabe's funeral, as his colleagues wander aloud what drove him to the actions of the final few months of his life. We then cut back and forth between this scene and Watanabe's final months, and learn of his quest to clean up a park and convert it into a children's playground.

At the start of the film Kurosawa gave us a quickly edited (and highly amusing) series of shots displaying the bureaucracy's unflinching ability to shift any and all responsibility between departments until the people filing requests simply gave up. Now, Watanabe moves between each department with precision, begging his colleagues until they acquiesce in embarrassment. He succeeds through pure determination, and in the final moments we see of him, he sits in a new swing, singing the same song he crooned in the club, only now with a glimmer of hope.

Back at the funeral, his business associates drunkenly pledge to follow Watanabe's example, and to use their "powers" for good. Yet when the mothers of the children who now have a place to play enter and weep at Watanabe's shrine, the workers look uneasy. Sure enough, the next day they all go back to their desks having forgotten those vows in their sobriety. Only one man dares to stand and defy them, but soon he sinks down to his chair, and a mountain of paperwork buries him.

These final moments underline the existential message of the film: life is ultimately meaningless. We go to our jobs, marry, reproduce, then die. One man's life has no effect on the world. However, to that one man, life can have meaning if he does something that gives him fulfillment. The seemingly cynical final shot only reinforces the larger picture; it does not invalidate Watanabe's personal quest.

Though ranking masterpieces is always headache-inducing, trying to decide between this, Seven Samurai, or Rashomon is just impossible. All three broke so much ground it's hard to consider what might have been without them. Ikiru is the director's most personal films; the word itself means "to live," two words that form the basic foundation of the director's work. Kurosawa always walked a fine line between pure cynicism and hope, giving us many fundamentally good characters in a terrible world. Some characters triumph, others die, but they all realize that the world is evil and try to do something about it. In a world of rote and banality, these characters decide to actually live.

The Thin Red Line

In the mid-70s a director named Terrence Malick graduated from the American Film Institutes's conservatory with a master's degree, and set about making two of the finest films in the richest decade of American cinema. Badlands (which I have not yet seen) and Days of Heaven (which is one of the best films I've ever watched) established Malick as a master filmmaker, one who could capture images of endless natural beauty and mix them with meditative scripts that were uniquely his. Days of Heaven in particular defied just about any convention you'd care to name, with its passionate love triangle filtered through the eyes of a teenage girl forced to grow long before she should have. With that film, Malick was on top of the world.

Then, he disappeared. For twenty years the world wondered where this visionary filmmaker had gone and, of course, rumors circulated. "I heard he died." "No, man, he's just living on an island somewhere." Finally, in 1995, Malick began casting for a war movie. Three years later, The Thin Red Line hit theaters, and it looked as though he'd made it right after Days.

Starring an ensemble cast including Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, John Cusack and future torture porn star Jim Caviezel, The Thing Red Line documents the Battle of Guadalcanal through the eyes of a fictionalized group of soldiers, some fresh-faced, others old. Yet the age gaps don't mean as much in this film as they normally do in a war film; many of the educated officers are just as green in the field as their cannon fodder.

The film opens with Caviezel's character, Pvt. Witt, living AWOL with a Melanesian tribe. For him, the tiny village on the edge of the sea is Eden, a location Malick alludes to throughout the film. His paradise is short-lived; a patrol boat tracks him down and Sgt. Welsh (Penn) sends him to join the front line. As the company prepares to invade Guadalcanal, we meet yet more characters on the boat and learn more about the characters.

Even before the first battle, Malick crams two films into one. One film is a war story that subverts some war clichés without calling attention to itself, and the other is an existentialist search for spiritual truth. We start with a peek of Witt's heaven, and on the boat we learn of Colonel Tall's (Nick Nolte), a career-soldier who's never seen a battle. He speaks proudly of how he read Homer in the actual Greek, and cannot wait to see what a battle will actually look like after reading of them for so long. In his voice-over he mentions that this battle could be his last shot for a promotion before retirement. War is not necessarily his Eden, but he clearly looks forward to it.

The two aspects of the film create a dichotomy that most directors could never reconcile, but--and I humbly beg you forgive the cliché--Terrence Malick is not most directors. He captures the reedy hills of Guadalcanal with pristine detail, yet he breaks up the long, pastoral takes with quick cuts that leave the audience as confused as the soldiers. They land to find a deserted beach, but when they attempt to move in the center of the island a hidden machine gun nest mows down every advance. Even so, Tall orders his men on.

This all could have very easily devolved into the usual war archetypes, but Malick doesn't take the easy way out. Yes, Tall callously orders his men on a suicide run without considering the consequences, but when a field captain refuses he wonders if he might be wrong and heads to the front lines to see for himself. He realizes his error and the men change plans and take the bunker.

But just as Malick took much of the passion out of Bill's scheming in Days of Heaven, so too does he break up the visceral battles. Now, his battle scenes are chaotic, grand, and every bit as exciting as Spielberg's in Saving Private Ryan, but he spaces them out between meditations. If I had to hazard I guess, I'd say The Thin Red Line is Malick's way of saying that all creatures kill, and that Earth itself is our Eden, but we can never regain it. After the first grand battle, Witt disappears to another village but no longer finds comfort in it, for he sees the violence and evil even there. Malick inserts shots of crocodiles and a bird, injured by crossfire, dragging itself along the grass. In voice-overs, the characters search for meaning and they always lead to death.

I wouldn't call the film realistic, or at least not aspects of it. It gives us fleshed-out soldiers, but I doubt these kids were thinking about the nature of evil and death as mortars exploded around them. Personally, I'd be thinking "Don't die, don't die, duck! Don't die." But, of course, I can only speak for myself. However, Malick is a surprisingly adept action filmmaker; armed with a team of editors, he splices together rapid cuts to keep the viewer disoriented without ever going hog wild like more recent action purveyors. Combined with his more epic long takes, it makes for just about the most beautiful looking war film I've ever seen.

This is not my favorite war film. Hell, it's not even my favorite war film of 1998. However, it's maybe the most original and singular entry in the genre. The original running time clocked in at about 3 1/2 hours, but Malick recut the film down to just under 3, and it shows. He clearly aims for a more holistic approach rather than touching on each character individually, but even then some characters come off as barely cameos for special celebrity guests (Travolta and Clooney come to mind). I also would have liked to see some perspective from the side of the starving Japanese soldiers, but I cannot complain since we eventually got that film in the form of Clint Eastwood's masterpiece Letters From Iwo Jima (which plays not entirely unlike a companion piece to this film). Nevertheless, this is easily one of the finest war movies ever made, one that adds an approach entirely its own and, though that perspective creates some disconnect, makes for thought-provoking moments to compliment the carnage.

Solaris (1972)

When legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky saw Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, he hated it for its coldness. In response, he adapted Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel Solaris, a film regarded rightly as an anti-2001. However, such an easy description unwittingly pigeonholes the film into some narrow vision of a pithy comeback, failing to mention its endless depth and Tarkvosky's ability to suck you in to the story as much as Kubrick kept you at arm's length.

Tarkovsky, like just about every great Russian director stretching back to Soviet propagandist Sergei Eisenstein, endured nothing but hardships from Soviet censors, even though most of these directors (especially Eisenstein and the Constructivist directors) made movies that celebrated Soviet ideals. Tarkovsky, however, was doomed from the start. He couldn't make the film he wanted because the censors proclaimed it too "personal"--this was an ardently socialist empire, remember--so the director returned with a copy of Solaris. After all, the masses could get behind a science fiction film, couldn't they? The censors agreed, and sent Tarkovsky on his way. Oh, if I could just see their faces when they saw the final product.

Eisentstein set down the unofficial rules of Russian cinema with his pioneering use of the montage, but Tarkovsky moves in the polar opposite direction, crafting a series of long takes that, like the work of Yasujiro Ozu but with moving cameras, linger before and after the scene's action, giving us enough time to collect our thoughts. We need that time, too, because Solaris is an endlessly layered trip through the human mind, providing us with possibility on top of possibilty from which to choose.

Tarkovsky takes his sweet time from the start; we begin with Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, walking around his father's land before he meets with a retired cosmonaut, Burton. Kelvin finally goes inside to speak with Burton, and we discover some strange anomalies about the cosmonaut's mission. Sent to the liquid-covered planet Solaris, he went down to the surface to find a missing comrade. We see a tape of Burton's debriefing upon his return many years prior, as he tries to explain what he saw on the surface to a group of dismissive bureaucrats (undoubtedly Tarkovsky's slam against those who perennially kept him down). The camera footage contains nothing but shots of the planet's barren, liquid surface, but Burton maintains they are not hallucinations.

At last Kelvin prepares to leave for Solaris himself. He is played by Donatas Banionis, a stoic man with a shock of prematurely white hair and a look that balances between unkempt and professional: he has a paunch and he needs a shave, but there's a fierce intelligence behind his look of self-defeat. To gaze upon him inspires a seemingly contradictory mixture of pity and respect. We learn before he leaves of his wife Hari, whose suicide haunts his dreams, and he understand him more.

We do not see Kelvin's journey to Solaris, and while I'm sure budgetary and technological reasons exist for this, I imagine Tarkovsky wants to take the "space" out of the equation and force the audience to pay attention. He arrives on the aging space station orbiting the planet and meets the two remaining scientists, Snaut and Sartorious. A third, Kelvin's friend Dr. Gibarian, committed suicide before Kelvin arrived. The two scientists have little time for their new comrade, and Snaut warns Kelvin not to overreact if he sees anything...unusual.

As Kelvin begins his research, he catches glimpses of a woman moving walking along the station, but she disappears out of sight when he tries to follow her. That night, he awakens in his barricaded room and finds himself face to face with his wife Hari. Soon we learn that Hari, like the child Burton saw on Solaris, is a reflection of memories. When the scientists sent X-ray probes onto the planet's surface, something on the planet probed back.

As a reflection of Kelvin's memories, this Hari has all of his wife's mannerisms and all of their shared memories, but none of her own. Perhaps this is Tarkovsky's way of suggesting we can never really know anyone else, though I don't mean it as bleakly as it sounds. Nevertheless, Kris latches onto this corporeal manifestation of his mind as his wife out of desperation. Here the film, whether it realizes it or not, becomes less like a take on 2001 and more a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo. Kelvin treating this creature as an object that he can mold into that which he failed to protect eerily mirrors James Stewart's obsessive remodeling of Kim Novak's character to make her look like the woman he loved. The knowledge that this Guest (the term they use for Solaris' manifestations) is the reflection of Kelvin, we must ask ourselves how subjective this manifestation is. We know that Hari committed suicide after a vicious verbal fight between the two, yet this Hari is caring and calm. Is this Hari an idealized version of the real wife? A representation of all of his fears? Or is it, in a manner of speaking, the real thing?

What Tarkovsky wants to say with this film is that man's attempt to move ever forward, to find out destiny, serves as a comforting distraction from our regrets and sense of personal isolation. Here, man finally reached the end of the universe, and now he must face those feelings. This knowledge drove Gibarian to his suicide, and it left Snaut and Sartorious teetering on the edge of madness. Sartorious in particular reacts to this forced introspection with great anger; he proposes bombing the planet with high doses of radiation to stop the Guests. It's interesting to see that Hari, created from mere fragments of the human mind, seems infinitely more human than the two scientists.

Though the film presents itself almost like a continuous sequence, two scenes in particular stick out. The first--and likely most famous--occurs when the station momentarily loses gravity, and Kelvin and Hari float in the air as lit candles tumble up with them. The emotional center of the film, it conveys Kelvin's deep longing and his sense of contentment with this copy, the first happiness he's felt at least since being with his real wife, if not before that. The second is the final sequence, in which we learn a twist that makes us rethink everything before it and decide what we want to think about it. It's a moment that the characters themselves do not realize, and the moment thankfully does not insist on only one interpretation.

The censors refused to allow any mention of God, but Tarkovsky's characters reach for a higher power here, as did the scientists in 2001. However, where Kubrick's vision of man's future entailed a combination of man and machine that could explore the universe forever, Tarkovsky believes that man's future is the inevitable reconciliation of his past and present. Our true path is one of spiritual longing, not physical discovery. Solaris represents the literal end of this journey, but it represents the spiritual endpoint of man, where no more distractions exist. Solaris, the God substitute, can only catalyze this self-evaluation. As the characters embrace in their uncertain conclusion, we are left with an unsettling question: can man ever truly understand himself and evolve, or are we forever trapped by our regrets and uncertainty?

Happiness

Just how much dramatic irony can you pack into one word? Todd Solondz seems willing to find out with the title of Happiness, a vicious social satire of the misery of human existence. Constructed as an ensemble piece, Happiness uses an Altmanesque ensemble piece to examine how each of these self-centered individuals struggle for contentment in this world, and how they fail utterly. The film also stands as the logical outgrowth of the geek explosion of the mid-90s that gave us quasi-indie wonders (they started out independent but all got signed quickly) like Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. The 90s brought about geek protagonists, and Solondz uses geeks--or at least social outcasts--to make his point.

The film opens with Joy (Jane Adams), who has just broken up with her sadsack boyfriend (Jon Lovitz). He gives her a laughable present (a mail-order ashtray even though she doesn't smoke), only to snatch it back in defiance. Joy is one of three sisters, the other two being Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) and Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle). Their parents, Lenny and Mona (Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser) have been married for 20 years, but Lenny wants to leave, not for another woman, but for solitude.

We also meet Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the geekiest character of them all, a computer nerd who cannot speak to women. He details his nervous sexual fantasies to his therapist Bill (Dylan Baker), only to conclude that he'd never act on these fantasies because he's too boring. By this time Bill has become so bored he's thinking about what he needs to get done the rest of the day. The only woman Allen can speak to is his neighbor Kristina (Camryn Manheim), a fat woman who loves Allen but has as much trouble saying it to him as he does speaking to other women.

Slowly the stories play out, and the characters intertwine. Trish is married to Bill, who seems proper and calm but has terrible dreams where he kills people for freedom. On his way home from his session with Allen, he buys a teen magazine and masturbates to the photos. Then he spots a boy on his son Billy's Little League team and, when the boy comes back to his house for a sleepover, he drugs his family and molests the boy (thankfully, the act is not shown).

Allen, in the interim, gets out his sexual frustration by going through the phonebook and making obscene calls to women. Eventually he dials Helen. In an earlier conversation, Helen told her sister how bored she had become with casual sex with countless narcissistic men; therefore, Allen's heavy breathing and dirty talk arouse her and she redials the number to ask for sex. Allen gets nervous and returns home and is comforted by Kristina. Allen's full of too much nervosa to act on his impulses, and Kristina hates sex. They'd make a compatible couple if Allen could see clearly. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays his part brilliantly; he completely captures the nervous, never comfortable body language of someone afraid to talk to women.

Many films have an ebb and flow, but the lives of each of the characters in the film only ever seems to get darker. Joy's ex- kills himself over her, and we soon learn she has a history with losers and cheats. Trish continues to live her life as chirpily as ever, unaware of her husband's activities. We learn that one character is a murderer. Mona continues to hang on to her marriage as if it's the only thing keeping her alive, but Lenny has seemingly moved beyond feeling. For him, cutting himself off from others would only stop all the noise distracting him from being alone. Of all of them, he is perhaps the best they can hope for, because he has moved beyond the self-pity on which everyone else sustains themselves.

But it's Dylan Baker's Bill who walks away with the film. There's a slippery slope involved with making a child molestor three-dimensional, but Hollywood has always used that as an excuse to just not deal with the topic and portray any and all pedophiles as pure evil, Lucifers walking amongst us. Baker, however, crafts a complex performance of a man who forever battles against his impulses. He molests his son's friend, but we see him in scenes with that son as a loving and caring father. Early on, Billy asks his father about what it means to "come," and Bill gently explains it to the boy and is supportive of him as he enters puberty. Bill speaks to his son with the same honesty in the most devastating moment of the film, when Billy asks his father if he did something to his friends.

Solondz uses Bill as the emotional crux of the story: he, along with the entire film, illustrates a mixture of sexual perversion and empathy. He plays Bill not entirely unlike Peter Lorre played the child killer in M: you view him with a perfect (and infinitely unsettling) balance between pity and revulsion. Despite all this, Solondz never exploits these characters and, though his comedy is at times too forced, he crafted an immeasurably dark look into the hopelessness of the human condition.

Gimme Shelter

There are plenty of documentaries that capture the end of life, of dreams, of careers; but how many have shown us the end of an era? I'm not talking about newsreel footage of something like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall was simply symbolic, but the zeitgeist had changed in the Eastern bloc well before it. I mean a snapshot of a culture crumbling before your very eyes. The events of Altamont on December 6, 1969 could not have been predicted by anyone, yet, when you watch the film, it creeps up with a terrifying inevitability that turns this rockumentary into a suspense thriller.

The Maysles open the film with the Stones at Madison Square Garden earlier in '69, strutting out on the stage triumphantly to "Jumpin' Jack Flash." We then pull back to see the Stones also watching this footage. They're in the final stage of the documentary: reviewing the planned cut to see if they'll give it their approval. They wistfully smile at Jagger's stage banter, but something is amiss. We soon learn why; after this brief portion of footage, the Maysles play a radio broadcast aired shortly after the disastrous Altamont concert in which we hear the report of 4 dead (one murder, three accidental) and numerous injuries. Sonny Barger, the leader of the Hells Angels who provided "security" at the concert, calls in and blasts the Stones' ego and unruly crowds for the violence and stands by his boys.

The look on the Stones' faces go from nostalgic to morose over the course of the broadcast, and we begin to understand how the event has impacted them. The rest of the film plays out in chronological order: the Madison gig ends and the Stones, on top of the world, announce a free concert at Altamont Speedway without planning a thing beforehand. Now their managers have to deal with furious organizers who were barely contacted before the announcement and now have to lay down an actual deal. Though the organizers rage, it's the Stones who look foolish in all this; what right did they have to just announce a concert? Even here you can see the rampant, unchecked ego as their managers schmooze the organizers and deflect any blame they try to place on the band.

The set-up for the event builds, frankly, like a Hitchcock film. Roadies attempt to set up scaffolding and amps, but the already gathering crowds begin climbing them immediately. One of the technicians tries to warn Jagger, but he dismisses the man as "trying to tell him what to do." After the technician comes back a few times, he finally gets sick of Jagger's foppish dismissal and simply walks away.

To make matters worse, the Stones won't go on until nightfall, even though the supporting acts conclude mid-afternoon. The Flying Burrito Brothers start things up, and immediately it all goes to Hell. A great deal of the audience showed up a day in advance to get close to the stage, so they were worn out and stoned out of their skulls before the place was even rigged properly. Combined with weather fluctuations (hot during the day, cold at night), improper facilities and a lack of "freak-out" tents for people to be calmed during bad trips, the tragedy seems an inevitability. Some concert-goers start tussling with the Hell's Angels as soon as the Brothers strike up, and one of the band members pathetically calls out to the Angels to stop beating the zonked out fool, practically weeping "You don't have to do that!"

By the time the Stones take the stage, the crowd is at each other's throats. They strike up "Sympathy for the Devil," and the place goes off like a shot. People rush the stage and the Angels close in from the rafters. There's something infinitely striking about the Stones' most sinister tune causing such a riot; especially disturbing is the fact that during a song named "Sympathy for the Devil," a group called the Hell's Angels seem to materialize out of nowhere to protect the band. The Stones stop and restart, and by the time the song is finished they must ask for a doctor and an ambulance.

But it is their next number, "Under My Thumb," that the infamous stabbing of 18-year old Meredith Hunter occurred. A black man in a green suit so loud the blind could spot him, Hunter pulls a gun on the Angels during the song and is promptly stabbed by another biker. The Maysles replay this moment for the Stones as if it were the Zapruder film, freezing on Hunter's gun and then the knife plunging into his back.

The film up until this has a sinister, darkly funny irony, as it captures a mindset that the film eradicated. At the earlier Madison Square Garden gig, Ike & Tina open for the band, and it's impossible not to think of their then-secret domestic life as Tina seduces the crowd while Ike looks on coldly. The Altamont gig, though unsettling from the start, overflows with people so firmly disconnected by drugs that they'd become truly lost. The hippies started out as rebellious youths who came together to "free their minds" as it were to search for some higher plain of consciousness, or at least that's what they told us. But here they've simply lapsed into drug addictions, and they've lost politics to vague messages of love and the chance to see bands for free.

Consider the frail white woman who walks among the crowd raising money to "Free the Black Panthers." She doesn't really know what some members of the Panthers are being jailed for, but argues that they should be let go because (and this is a serious quote), "After all, they're only Negroes." Now, I know that was the polite term in the 60s, but the way she says the statement shows such a deep ignorance of, well, everything that you can't help but laugh at her. Likewise, there's something kind of amusing about hippies getting stoned, stripping nude, "dancing" (or whatever you call those frantic spasms), and then getting violent. It's something you expect to see in a Bunuel film, and suddenly it's happening in real life.

But for sheer wretchedness, nothing beats the bands pleading with the crowds for peace. Apart from that member of the Flying Burrito Brothers who whimpered at the Angels for beating an audience member, Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick gets big unintentional laughs when she breaks up a fight of her own, admonishing the Angels for their brutality but acknowledging to the crowd that, when they get unruly, the bands "need people like the Angels to keep people in line." These bands can sing and preach about peace and brotherhood all they want, but in the end the artists are clearly on a pedestal. Jagger too tries to calm the mob with pleas of "Brothers and Sisters! Why are we fighting?" that seem even more pretentious when you consider how little he cares for anyone but himself the entire time.

However, the ending saps any and all of the dark chuckles from the piece. The Stones refused to release an earlier doc called Cocksucker Blues because it depicted the more hedonistic aspects of the band (a.k.a. everything everyone already knew about the band even then), yet the sign off on this film, unquestionably a darker portrait of their shortcomings. I wondered why they would do such a thing, and came to the conclusion that, for the band, this is the closest they can come to absolution. Perhaps by putting the film out there someone will forgive them. I don't know why they'd think this, as the band come off like prima-donnas who allowed a crowd to become a mob just so they could make an entrance in style, but I think they made the right decision in the end. As they file out of the room, the camera freezes on Mick Jagger's ashen face before showing people leaving Altamont and cutting to the credits. If you look at Mick Jagger lately, he looks as alive as ever; sure, he looks like a skeleton re-animated through Dark Arts, but he's still vibrant. But the Mick we see in this freeze-frame looks closer to death than even the post-drugs elder Jagger ever has. It's a haunting image that could play in any horror film.

Gimme Shelter has been describe as the greatest rock and roll movie ever made--and it certainly is--but that neglects its much greater significance. Gimme Shelter premiered exactly one year after the events on Altamont, mere months after the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rocked the counterculture, and it put the nail in the coffin of the 60s. It captures the hippie culture as it passes its crest and begins to crash ashore; in 1967 they became the dominant youth force in the country and, in the turbulent election of 1968, it seemed as if the lunatics had taken over the asylum (though the hippies were never as big as people make them out to be). But by 1969, with LBJ gone, the hippies ran out of a big issue and slowly slid into permanent drug hazes. Though Gimme Shelter is a comment on the egos and callousness of rock stars, it endures as a snapshot of this downfall of the counterculture, the moment where the 60s, a beast that was already dead, finally rotted until someone noticed the stench. For that reason Gimme Shelter belongs as much in a history classroom as it does the shelf of any rock aficionado, and it's one of the all-time most important documentaries ever made.

The Silence of the Lambs

In my ongoing quest to grow the hell up and get over my childish fear of the horror genre-- though I believe most horror filmmakers would be delighted that I spent the first 17-18 years of my life desperately avoiding the genre-- I've been going through the classics and finding most of them to be too entertaining to frighten. When I watched Alien about a year and a half ago, it served as my gateway into the genre, a beautifully crafted example of how a gifted filmmaker could actually get scares out of something other than things popping in front of the screen (though there's plenty of that). Well, after slowly working my way through some of the more notable names, I've finally gotten to The Silence of the Lambs, the horror thriller renowned for giving us what, for many, is the greatest screen villain of all time.

I became less eager to see this film a while back when I heard Lecter only shows up for 16 minutes of screen time, and I'd seen at least half that on any TV show that mentions him. However, having watched it, I agree that Anthony Hopkins' performance is justly famous. The film is about Clarice Starling, and the villain is Buffalo Bill, but Hopkins walks away with the show. His Lecter is mannered, erudite and fiercely intelligent, which makes it all the more shocking when he suddenly reaches out to eat someone's face.

His performance is so good that it sadly overshadows the excellent work put in by both Jodie Foster and Ted Levine. Foster plays Clarice Starling as a cauldron of insecurities and trauma simmering under a collected yet clearly nervous exterior. At the start of the film she's in training to become an FBI agent and, for reasons that somewhat escape me, her boss Crawford sends her to interview the infamous, cannibalistic psychologist Hannibal Lecter in order to gain some information on a serial killer known only as 'Buffalo Bill.' Before she leaves, Crawford warns her "Don't let him inside your head."

She visits Lector's maximum security cell and, of course, immediately lets him inside her head. But he does not do so because Starling is some bubbly fool like most horror females; instead, we see how he uses his psychological knowledge to weaken and destroy his victims. The scene is less an insult to Clarice as it is a testament to Lecter's fearsome reputation. After all, with 16 minutes of face time, you have to hook the audience fast.

The two enter into a sort of a waltz; Lecter speaks in cryptic riddles and slowly extracts pieces of Starling's past and persona, while Starling solves his misleading advice. Starling uses that nugget of information, then the process starts again. You get a sense from Lecter that he's almost proud of Starling; after all, he got into her head early and stayed there, but she never backed down and she's learning enough about him to figure out his lies.

Demme cranks up the thrills as the film goes on. Buffalo Bill, a wannabe transsexual who, instead of elective surgery, has chosen to kill women and piece together a suit out of their skins, captures a senator's daughter, suddenly putting even more pressure on the Feds. Meanwhile Lecter stages a bold escape attempt, and at some point the psychological drama kicks into action overdrive. Eventually, Clarice finds Buffalo Bill, and it plays out in moments of incredible suspense aided by Craig McKay's skillful editing.

Overall, I found the film to be taut and intelligent. Though people always refer to it as a horror, I don't know if I'd call it one. A thriller certainly, but just because there's a cannibal and a killer doesn't make it a horror film. Then again, true horror stems from suspense, I think; I derive much more visceral terror from, say, North By Northwest than I do The Exorcist. The Silence of the Lambs isn't perfect, but it boast stellar acting, great writing and great direction, and I imagine it'll entertain audiences for generations to come.

Once Upon a Time in America

In 1969 Sergio Leone released the epic Once Upon a Time in the West, a commentary on his own bloody spaghetti Westerns that examined what brought men to violence and introduced the first genuinely three-dimensional characters in the genres (John Wayne's revelation at the end of The Searchers always felt tacked on). For once characters moved outside of the archetypes and actually came off the screen, giving the Old West a three-dimensionality it always lacked. But as a commentary on American life, Once Upon a Time in the West feels like a mere warm-up for Leone's final film, the epic tone poem Once Upon a Time in America.

As much a deconstruction of the gangster genre as his previous epic was for the Western, Once Upon a Time in America looks at the gangster as an individual, rather than as an outgrowth of familial bonds and strife à la The Godfather, yet it is as much an examination of what America has to offer, both good and bad, and how people can twist their own dreams into nightmares. As a matter of fact, we can not be altogether sure that at least a portion of the film does not occur with the opium dreams of our protagonist.


David "Noodles" Aaronson comes of age in the Jewish ghettos of Brooklyn in the 1920s, struggling to get by with a small gang consisting of his friends Patsy, Cockeye and Dominic. The four toil for local hood Bugsy, but that all changes when they meet young Max Bercovitz. Soon the youth strike out on their own under Noodles and Max's leadership, trying to assert themselves in the neighborhood. Eventually Bugsy catches wind of these boys trying to muscle in on his turf and assaults the gang. Dominic gets shot, Noodles kills Bugsy, then he stabs a cop in his madness and goes to jail for 9 years.

Noodles emerges from prison in the middle of the Prohibition era, only to find that, after Bugsy's death, Max and the gang took over the place and have become lucrative bootleggers. Suddenly Noodles can live in the lap of luxury after a lifetime of hardship. This new found affluence allows him the shot to pursue Deborah, the fancy girl he for whom he always had a thing. Deborah, an aspiring dancer, was far out of Noodles' class. Now she's an actress, and Noodles still can't attain her.

Leone structures these sequences perfectly; he rests on these characters in a way that will make The Godfather seem like GoodFellas. His camera lingers on conversations, pauses, evens stretches of seeming nothingness as he looks around the towns. That brings me to my next point: the art direction. Leone creates vast, beautiful sets, then sprinkles a fine layer of soot and dirt all over it, giving the film the beauty we expect from a period piece but with a realistic grime. So many period films look like gaudy musicals, but this is one of the few that feels as real as our current buildings.

Just look at how he crammed this beautiful room full of dusty old junk.

Also of note is the incredible acting across the board. De Niro, coming off some daring and timeless performances, is at his most understated as Noodles. He has to carry most of this 4-hour epic, and he succeeds magnificently, showing us a man forever haunted: haunted by his past, haunted by the decisions of the present that leave him with increasingly fewer choices and, finally, utterly broken and weary as an old man. Just look at De Niro's depiction in his later years and at De Niro himself now. De Niro is still full of life, but Noodles, who physically just looks like the younger version with gray hair, seems infinitely older.

De Niro isn't the only one who owns his role. James Woods, who cannot help but be interesting, imbibes Max with a slickness that makes him impossible not to like, even though he leads Noodles to his eventual self-destruction. What makes their acting even better is that Leone found kids that were actually right for the part. Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, and Jennifer Connelly not only resemble their older counterparts, but capture their mannerisms; Connelly in particular makes even more of an impression than McGovern.

Eventually Noodles' life crashes down around him; Max's plans get more audacious, Prohibition gets repealed and, in a dark turn of events, Noodles rapes Deborah when she rejects him. When Max plans a suicidal robbery on the Federal Reserve, Noodles realizes what will happen and warns the police. When the police show, a shootout ensues that forces Noodles into exile for 30 years.

The final moments of the film, set long after the terrible shootout, elevate the movie from brilliant to masterful. Noodles returns as the old, broken man, and makes peace with Deborah, only to find that Max is still alive. The two reconcile and each apologizes for wronging the other, and it seems if, at long last, Noodles has found some semblance of happiness.

We then flashback to the 30s, in the wake of the botched robbery. Noodles visits an opium den, and Leone watches his face as the attendant slowly fixes his pipe. In those moments we see indescribable pain cross De Niro's face, then he at last takes a puff from the pipe and the film freeze frames and ends as he breaks out into a smile. What is the significance of this scene? The predominant theory is that the film itself is Noodles' opium dream: in it, he relives his past and then hallucinates a future. I prefer to think of the film this way as well; after his life finally crumbles, Noodles' future gives him some sliver of hope of redemption, yet in the back of my mind I know it cannot happen.


I know I need to see this more times just to absorb the awesome scope of it all, but for a four-hour film, Leone crafts an incredibly personal and captivating film. If The Godfather used the gangster genre and the perversion of the American Dream to delve into the generational gap, Once Upon a Time in America uses them simply to paint a portrait of a man's life. Most gangster films end in the defeat of the bad guys because the law (whether within the film or, in the case of old Hollywood Production Code, the real world) deemed they must, but Noodles here has defeated himself, more so than even Michael Corleone at the end of the second part of The Godfather. The law never catches up with him, but his own consequences consume and haunt him more than prison time ever could. Death itself would be a release for this man.

Though I am inexplicably given to making arbitrary lists and rankings (in fairness, I am very bored very often), I don't know how I'd place Once Upon a Time in America in Leone's oeuvre. It's certainly his most ambitious, his greatest in scope and scale, but I may actually prefer his previous epic, and maybe even The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. Of course, these are personal preferences, and ranking masterpieces is a maddening effort and should never be dwelled upon. Quite simply, this is one of the greatest films ever made: the acting is superb (particularly De Niro and Woods), the sets teem with that scuffed and dirtied beauty that made Scorsese's New York so tangible and its meticulous examination of one man's life and how the people around him shape him make this a must-see. Supposedly Leone's estate is preparing a new 4 1/2 hour director's cut for release in the near future. I'm always uneasy about extended cuts, but hopefully it gets an opulent DVD release worthy of its grandeur, or at least to replace the crappy DVD they have out now.