Johnny Handsome

Walter Hill's Johnny Handsome has so much going for it that I just can't fault it when it trips ten feet from the finish line and wretchedly crawls across the finish line. It's both his and Mickey Rourke's last film of the 80s, and a sort of last gasp for the both of them, though Rourke finally climbed back on top with Sin City and of course The Wrestler. Rourke alone should alert you to the necessity to watch this film regardless of its overall quality, as the man quite simply walked away with the 80s as far as I'm concerned.

Rourke stars as the titular character (née Johnny Sedley), a small-time career criminal who ends up on the bad side of a botched heist and spends the rest of the film plotting his revenge against the people who sold him out. He got his nickname due to the horrible facial disfigurement he's suffered since birth, scars that both swell his head and force him to speak with a lisp. Later in the film, Johnny recounts how, as a child, a young boy ripped off his jack-o-lantern mask on Halloween and said "Johnny don't need no mask," and Johnny responded by beating the poor kid senseless. Rourke brings all his tortured soul to the part, and only makes this creature even more wretched and pitiable.

An older man named Mikey looks after Johnny and includes him in his robberies. For a particularly big heist, Mikey recruits the help of two pieces of street trash, Sunny and Rafe (Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen, both of whom play just about the best scumbags you could ever hope to find) in order to pull things off successfully. The robbery goes bad, and Rafe ends up killing Mikey, while Johnny gets captured and sent to prison.

While there, a Lt. Drones (Morgan Freeman) mocks him and his looks but, after an inmate stabbing leaves Johnny in the hospital, a doctor (Forest Whitaker) takes pity on the man. Believing that Johnny's life choices are the direct result of the shame he feels from his disfigurement, he offers to reconstruct Johnny's face and to hire a speech pathologist to rid him of his lisp in order to provide a fresh start. After a few weeks of painful surgeries, we see Mickey Rourke's beautiful face freed from all those prosthetics.

Soon Johnny gets paroled and finds a job and even starts going out with a girl who loves him (Elizabeth McGovern), but there's only one thing on his mind. Drones correctly guesses that Sunny and Rafe would never recognize the new Johnny, and sure enough he hatches a plan to win the couple's trust with another robbery that would get him close to his foes. He even toys with them at first to make sure they don't see it coming; "There's something familiar about him," wonders Sunny after Johnny tells the two that he knows them.

For such a short film, it plays out with a great deal of tension and suspense. Until the ending that is. I won't give it away, but some characters suddenly get smart while others don't think at all, and the short length suddenly becomes very, very apparent. The film runs barely over 90 minutes, and the final bit unfolds after an hour and a half has passed. I can't really say why the ending doesn't stick with me other than the fact that it seems to thoroughly clichéd as to be interchangeable with any number of "guys trying to break out of lives of crime" stories. Hell, Mickey Rourke himself built his career in the 80s on films that had endings too similar to this.

Nevertheless, the film remains a must-see on the basis of its fantastic opening heist sequence and the acting performances of Barkin, Henriksen and Rourke. Rourke in particular knocks it right out of the park; he puts so much pain into the role that it breaks through even the prosthetics and only magnifies on his actual face. I think the film was written with any actor in mind, but when Rourke took the part and made it his own suddenly the short running time became noticeable. For my money, his portrayal here is in his top five performances, and for that reason alone you should track this above-average piece of 80s noir down; I believe the DVD is being reissued soon anyway, so you're in luck.

Run Lola Run

I was looking forward to watching this movie. My film teacher decided it was good enough for class (though he did show Donnie Darko, so I find his judgment a little suspect), and I've heard all sorts of good things about the movie. Imagine my surprise, then, when the lights came down in the classroom and I had to sit through the longest 76 minutes of my life.

Run Lola Run concerns itself with its titular character (Franka Potente), who receives a frantic phone call from her boyfriend at the start of the film. She was supposed to pick him up after he made an exchange for a local crime boss, but someone nicked her moped so she never came. Well, poor Manni had to take the tube, and he accidentally left a sack full of 100,000 Deutschmarks on the train when he ran from cops. A homeless man picked up the bag, and now Manni has to come up with 100,000 marks before crime boss Ronnie meets him for the payment.

What results in a visually inventive yet ultimately dull piece of flash that's so preoccupied with creating an original film that it does not bother to make it good. Lola agrees to meet Manni in order to prevent him from doing something silly like robbing a store, and her 20-minute run repeats two more times, each with wildly different outcomes based on the tiniest variations. When Lola accidentally runs into a person or near a cyclist, we see snapshots of their futures, and these futures play out indirectly as a response to their interactions with Lola.

But those aren't the only tricks writer-director Tom Tykwer uses to add flash to the story: he intersperses Lola's runs with animated stretches, film references, and total asides to background characters. For him, Lola is running so fast that she break the very properties of physics, even though she still moves realistically. When a run ends in tragedy, he fades to red, shows us a tinted flashback, then starts the whole thing over again.

Now, the point of the alternate storylines is, of course, a simple take on the butterfly effect, that old theory that the tiniest interactions have the most drastic consequences. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, and the distortion in the wind magnifies until a thunderstorm hits San Fransisco. Every time Lola begins her run something minor occurs in the beginning animated segment, and it generally informs the new direction her run will take her.

You could also argue that Tykwer is making an argument for the idea of predestination and fate with these runs. When Lola runs past a cyclist the first time and we see his future, we see that he eventually crashes, falls in love with the nurse who helps him recover, and the two live happily ever after. The second time Lola passes him, we see that he becomes a bum. Everything is all a game of chance, and our lives all depend on the tiny interactions that make them up.

What I took from the film, however, is that Tykwer simply proves that film has no consequences, that emotional involvement is pointless because it's all based on the whims of its creators. Run Lola Run is its own trilogy, the same idea repeated three times with just enough variations to make them "different;" even characters can come back from death if people love them enough. I suppose that could be a meta-statement of sorts, but really it just comes off like Tykwer only had enough material for a short film and decided, logic be damned, to just repeat the thing three different times.

Any enjoyment you might take from this film can be directly attributed to editor Mathilde Bonnefoy, who offers up a veritable feast of quick cuts and visceral editing. However, I couldn't help but wonder how a film only 76 minutes and filled with such an action-packed style could be so boring. Most if not all of the blame falls upon Tykwer, who tried to write funny lines and failed, derailed its interesting structure with some pointless shots that strip the film of its urgency, then forcing us to sit through these flaws two more times. The actors do a pretty good job, but at the end of the day if a thriller is going to risk thrills by taking itself this seriously it better have the substance to back it up. Run Lola Run simply doesn't.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

I have seen movies about filmmaking and I have seen movies about movies themselves, but Ingmar Bergman's Persona is something altogether different: a movie that reminds you it's a movie. Now, I don't mean fourth-wall breaking winks to the audience or asides, but a systematic reminder through daring and unexpected shots that make sure we are always aware that the film isn't "real." In that respect it follows more in line with the cinema of the French New Wave, but even then it doesn't quite fit; New Wave directors expressed their joy of filmmaking in their work, but Persona uses self-reference and breaking narrative to make the grandest of all meta-statements on both the cinema and human life.

The film opens on a purely black screen. Slowly, blinding white fills the screen as eerie music blares. Random shots of everything from covered corpses to a few frames of an erect penis flash briefly amidst the white light. Short scenes of old silent films pop up on screen. We then cut to stark and unsettling images of faces, that Bergman trademark close-up, before settling briefly on a boy who tries to reach out to a distorted image of a woman. At last, nearly five minutes in, the title cards appear.

Then we shift to a nurse, Sister Alma, who arrives at the hospital to learn that she has been placed in charge of Elisabet Volger, a famous actress who stopped speaking in the middle of a performance one day and never started again. For three months she's stayed in bed, awake by unmoving. The head nurse suggest Alma return the actress to her summer home and to stay with her there for possible recuperation, and the two move in together for a few months.

At first Alma speaks only of herself. She gives up expecting her charge to speak to her, so she fills the void. At first she prattles about minor things, but slowly she comes to see Elisabet almost as a wall, or a diary. She does not respond; therefore she she cannot pass judgment. One night, Elisabet sits so still she seems almost a painting as Alma recounts her infidelity and how, as a teenager, she and a friend engaged in an orgy with two boys they'd never met. She describes the sexual bliss of it all, only to remember with grief that she had to later get an abortion because of it. Elisabet takes this all in and comforts the now-sobbing girl.

Then something strange happens; Alma stumbles upon a letter from Elisabet to her husband, and reads it only to discover that the actress told him of all the "sins" she confessed. Suddenly, Bergman pulls more chicanery, making it look like frames got stuck in the projector a caught fire, then sending us back to the silent clowns. The film kicks back in, but something has drastically changed...

Elisabet's husband arrives, but he speaks to Alma, not his wife. Yet he speaks to her as Elisabet; at first she points out the error, then she finds herself replying as Elisabet. It leads to an existential crisis, as Alma seems to lose herself before she finally can take no more and begins to slap Elisabet repeatedly. Then Bergman throws up one of the most shocking images I've ever seen: he superimposes the faces of the two actresses over each other where half of their faces make up one whole, and we finally learn the truth: Alma is Elisabet. I hope Chuck Palahniuk sent in a royalty check when he wrote Fight Club.

A persona is defined as "a social role or character played by an actor," and Alma is a role played by the actress, only within her mind. This revelation sheds Bergman's visual tricks in a whole new light: he's using meta-cinema to move the movie outside of the confines of film. It's the old Shakespearean nugget "all the world's a stage" pushed to its most perverse and cynical extent: in the end, everyone plays a role, and we wear masks not over our true selves, but over nothingness. Man can never know himself, and it's futile to try.

That futility may have led Elisabet to her crisis; we don't know what caused her silence for sure, but later we see her watching news reports of the war in Vietnam and monks immolating themselves, and she cannot even voice her horror. At another point she gazes at photos of Jewish families led out of their homes by German guards, and the feeling returns. She turned to silence in an attempt to cut herself off from the world and to gaze within herself, and when she found nothing she created Alma.

Her story also works on the metaphorical level: Bergman funneled his fears and incomprehension of nuclear war and the Holocaust into the spiritual despair of Through a Glass Darkly, and here the artist expresses his feelings of impotence and inadequacy when it comes to dealing with such subjects. Bergman never was a political filmmaker, so he looks for the answers in the faces of his actors. He, along with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, really took the idea of the close-up far beyond anything ever seen before, and he pours over their starkly contrasted faces for answers he knows he cannot get. Rarely does he move away from their faces, capturing only the rocky landscape that symbolizes the desolation of the human condition. Even his beautiful tracking shot across the beach pauses for some close-ups.

I cannot possibly claim to understand everything Persona has to offer on the basis of a single viewing. Hell, I don't think I could ever know everything there is to get about it. I don't even think Bergman could possibly have conceived of all the psychological quandaries presented in the film's 83 minutes. What I can say is this is without a doubt one of the ten most perfectly crafted films I've ever seen. If Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris took man to the end of the universe to confront himself, Bergman was waiting to tell him not to bother.

Bergman later said of this film and Cries and Whispers, "I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." I submit that he not only went as far as he could go, but he took cinema to its brink with him. After making an expressionist masterpiece on the subject of God's absence (The Seventh Seal) and an entire trilogy on the matter, he finally realized that Man is his own God, as the final shots of the film are of Bergman himself zooming in on his actress. Plenty of people have used cinema to teach us lessons on real life, but Bergman used the crushing cynicism of reality to break cinema in two.

The West Wing — Season 4

[Warning -- contains spoilers for the last season and possible minor spoilers for this one]

Well, nothing is forever, I suppose. After an ever-so-slightly flawed first season and two of the finest seasons of television I've ever watched, The West Wing finally slipped a bit. Oh, it's still heads-and-shoulders above 98% of any TV that was airing at the time or indeed has ever aired, but Sorkin finally got carried away with himself with one too many flights of fancy. The fourth season of his transcendent show still flirts with the high-water marks of past seasons, it sadly marks a slide into the merely above-average.

The third season ended with the overflow of goings-on that was "Posse Comitatus," in which the possibility of a new beau for C.J. was tragically cut short, Bartlet had a mini-battle of wits with Governor Ritchie, Charlie pushed wacky-but-likable Deborah Fiderer (Lily Tomlin) as Mrs. Landingham's replacement, and the President relucantly decided to assassinate the Qumari ambassador for his involvement in terrorist activities. That's a lot to handle, but unfortunately Sorkin decided to just move on from the death of Simon Donovan without ever really showing C.J. deal with it in order to make room for Qumar and the re-election campaign. I guess the message there is that life goes on.

Nevertheless, the season gets underway in style with the uproarious and insightful two-parter "Bartlet For America," in which Josh, Donna and Toby find themselves trapped in the middle of Podunksville, America after the motorcade leaves without them. It leads to some more flashbacks of characters dwelling on what brought them to Bartlet, and the present-day scenes are filled with some of the shows best gags and one-liners. It's an auspicious start to follow up on a killer season finale.

Then things go awry for a bit. Because Sorkin makes Governor Ritchie out to be a two-dimensional chimp of a man, we know he doesn't stand a ghost of a chance (yes, I know that such a character ran the real world for 8 years, but since the show never brings up mass corruption and cronyism I know Ritchie had no shot). Nevertheless, we have to sit through 7 episodes of "suspense" as somehow Ritchie pulls ahead even in Bartlet's home state, New Hampshire, which is too ridiculous for words. We're really not given any concrete reasons for Ritchie being popular with anyone, much less posing a threat to a wildly popular incumbent, but you have to have some conflict, I guess.

Ritchie of course loses and things start to pick up for the most part. With such a terrible character gone, things can't help but look up. Sadly, the next few episodes fail to capitalize on the momentum of Bartlet's win and the characters even mention how they're just basking in the victory for the moment. That's great guys, but what about the terrorists? Even the Christmas episode doesn't stand up to the previous installments; "Holy Night" introduces Toby's father, who used to be a hitman for the mob, because hey, why not? It also introduces one of the worst characters I've ever seen distract me from an otherwise great show: Zoey Bartlet's new French boyfriend.

Now, I don't remember his name because I simply don't care, but I'm willing to wage money that it's Pierre, Jacques, Jean-Paul, or (if Sorkin just went all out) Jean-Pierre. Hang on, Wikipedia tells me his name is Jean-Paul. Of course it is. Jean-Paul belongs on that list of characters like Jasmine in Angel or Pyz in Veronica Mars, the forced foil to established characters that never quite fits with those characters and instead just wanders around sucking the life-force from the screen. JP fills the role for Charlie, who separated from Zoey for reasons we're never told, as he somehow finds himself in the White House constantly, ostensibly for no other reason than to taunt Charlie because he's tapping that now. Eventually he brings about a terrible event for the Bartlet family, so I can only pray that when I pop in the first disc of Season 5 it shows his body being cremated by Secret Service officials.

Things pick up, funnily enough, with an episode that has almost nothing to do with politics. In "The Long Goodbye," C.J. returns home to see her Alzheimer's-stricken father and must decide how to handle the situation. It's heartbreaking and real, even if the actor playing the father slips in and out of the real symptoms of someone in the advanced stages of the disease (and trust me, I know). From there the show picks up to the same level of quality it enjoyed in past seasons, as the the Bartlet administration must handle a crisis in the fictional Kundu. We also meet Will Bailey, a marvelous character who essentially swaps places with Sam Seaborn when Sam promises Will he'll run for the House in Orange County. Will has a lot on his plate when he arrives at the White House and becomes Toby's direct subordinate on the basis of his skill; in protest of this promotion, the writing staff up and quits, leaving Will in charge of four bubbly look-alike interns, three of whom are all named Lauren.

The finest of these late game pre-finale shows is "Evidence of Things Not Seen," a gripping hour of television where the White House literally comes under fire. The Qumari threat has been bubbling under the surface all season long, but it finally begins to genuinely show itself in the confusion of the small attack. Did the Qumaris fire the shots, or was it just some wannabe anarchist? It all culminates in the usual stellar two-part finale; "Commencement" is one long thriller, unsettling somehow even from the start even though it opens with the President's elation that his daughter is graduating college and that he gets to give the address. Zoey goes to a party afterwards with Jean-Paul, and things go terribly, terribly wrong. An event occurs that is so shocking that Bartlet makes a shattering decision in the follow-up, "Twenty-Five," easily one of the top three episodes of the show so far.

For all my criticisms of this season, even at its weakest moments it contains enough to Sorkin's wit to make it entertaining, even if the plots get just too ridiculous at times. But the sheer two-dimensionality of Ritchie and Jean-Paul grates, and once again Sorkin just flat out declines to explain where peripheral characters go. Near the end of the season Josh and Donna pick a new Associate White House Counsel, who eventually uncovers a scandal. But far more interesting than that was the fact that Josh and Donna mention that the man, a Republican, was the perfect replacement for Ainsley Hayes. I didn't even know Ainsley Hayes had left! I understand that Sorkin wrote every last one of these first 88 episodes, but swallow your pride and hire other people if you can't keep track of things.

Nevertheless, this is a damn good season of TV, and a bit of a watershed moment. After this season, Sorkin and executive producer Thomas Schlamme departed the show citing difficulties with the studio. Without its two dominant runners behind the show, The West Wing fell into the hands of E.R. producer John Wells, a move that I've widely read meant the end of the show's status as a must-watch, but I'll just have to wait and see. But whatever happens after this will hardly dent my love for these first four seasons, even this occasionally tedious one. For my money both "Commencement" and "Twenty-Five" belong on the short list of the show's greatest episodes, and "Evidence of Things Not Seen" and the two-part premiere belong somewhere on that list as well. Now I must brace myself to see what new direction the show will take.

The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)

This is only the second French New Wave film I've ever seen, but I think it brings with it all you ever need to know about the genre. A few months ago I watched Jean-Luc Godard's debut Breathless, and though I found it to be a technical watershed and could see its influence immediately in numerous movies, I found myself alienated by what I perceived to be an air of great pomposity, of -- as much as I hate the term in the world of cinema -- style over substance. What I saw in that film was the obsessiveness of the New Wave, an anal-retentive need to be in control of everything to the point of myopic self-absorption. I feel like I need to give that film another go, and luckily I'll be watching it in my film class in a few weeks, so perhaps locking myself in a room with no distractions to see it on a big screen will help. Happily, I have absolutely no reservations about the debut of Godard's colleague, François Truffaut.

Also a contributing writer of the groundbreaking French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut took the auteur theory to heart with this debut, pouring his own life story into the tale of the young delinquent Antoine Doinel. To aid him, he found 14-year-old actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who delivers one of the all-time greatest performances from a child actor in this film. So personal was Antoine's story, and so successful were Léaud and the film as a whole that the actor and director would continue Antoine's life over the course of four other films.

Antoine has a hard life, to the say the least. At home, his harpy of a mother screams at him for the smallest things. When she is not outraged with her son, she simply acts as if he isn't there; she's too occupied with lamenting her poverty to her friends and conducting an affair with one of her co-workers. Conversely, Antoine's stepfather seems nice enough, and even enjoys a friendly bond with the boy. However, he never feels truly attached to him as a son; when his wife accuses him later on of not supporting the boy enough (oh, the irony of that statement), he replies angrily, "I gave him my name! I put food on his table!" Amicable as he may be, the stepfather views Antoine as little more than baggage and cares little what happens to the boy.

Because his family neglects him, Antoine must essentially be raised by society. First that responsibility falls upon his teacher, who views Antoine as little more than a rebel (the title of the film itself is a French idiom for "raising hell"). It certainly doesn't help that the boy can't seem to catch a break: a pinup calendar makes the rounds amongst all the lads in the room, and the teacher spots it when it reaches Antoine's hands. As punishment, the boy must remain inside for recess, where he starts to scribble a half-apology/half-apologist statement on the wall, only to be harangued once more. When the teacher assigns him extra homework, Antoine stays home "sick" the next day. He misses another day, and tells the teacher his mother died. The teacher is of course stunned and reaches out to the boy, until the mother shows up at school and he rages once more.

The school dismisses the boy as a liar and a delinquent incapable of learning. Yet we see the real Antoine behind closed doors: he pours over Balzac and even sets up a small shrine to the man's work. When he lights a candle for it and the whole thing (made of cardboard) burns down, he's so devastated that even his parents forgo yelling at him and take him to the movies. The boy even pays tribute to Balzac's style in an assignment, but the teacher simply accuses him of plagiarism.

Finally sick of it, Antoine runs away from all of this with his friend René. Their friendship is the only genuine and touching bond we see in the entire film. As they roam the streets trying to survive, Antoine begins to sneak into the cinema, and we get beautiful shots of Léaud's awed face looking up at the flickering gods. As a boy, Truffaut himself was a delinquent, neglected by a mother who wished him to be neither seen nor heard. As a result, he read and snuck into the theaters through the emergency exits as a kid, and found happiness and meaning in what he saw. When Truffaut stated "Cinema saved my life," he wasn't kidding.

Eventually Antoine gets arrested for yet another misunderstanding, and now society shifts the responsibility for him onto guards and wardens, who send the child to work in a camp near the sea (his mother wanted him to be able to see the ocean). The film ends with that justly famous tracking shot of Antoine escaping, running and running until he reaches the beach and stopping only when he reaches the water. Then he looks into the camera and the film freezes. What do this ending tell us? That no matter how much Antoine tries to escape, he'll never break free, that even if he somehow breaks free of society nature itself will hold him back? Yes, but there's also an uplifting beauty to this last shot, unmarred even by the decades of cheap ripoffs found in everything from comedies to commercials. There's a hint of defiance in Léaud's face: I might not ever win, but damned if that means I'm gonna give up.

Though certainly not a happy film, The 400 Blows overflows with oy, albeit from behind the camera. "I demand a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema," he once wrote, and that unbridled happiness fuels Antoine's journey as much as Léaud's incredible performance. His camera moves throughout the children in the classroom and in the theater as if one of them, pausing to capture their faces, focused and down-turned on their schoolwork and ecstatic as they look up at entertainment. Later, Truffaut jogs the streets of Paris with Antoine and René, and that ending tracking shot contains in it more boundless joy than 99% of all fantasies combined. Breathless may have set a standard, but for my money The 400 Blows is the French New Wave film you simply have to see.

Invincible (2002)

As exploitative and insulting as Holocaust movies are, anything that tends to take place before the Holocaust is usually worse. There's a sort of winking referencing, a manipulation of foreknowledge for sick irony. It's what makes Life Is Beautiful far more enraging outside of the concentration camp than within it. But, of course, if anyone could make a film about pre-Final Solution Nazi Germany that offered up a straight-talking portrait, it would be Werner Herzog. And by straight-talking, I mean so utterly bizarre that you'd fly off in a rage if the material was handled any other way.

But isn't that what makes Herzog such an exciting and singular filmmaker, arguably the most visionary director working today? His combination of surreal imagery and documentary-like verité allows him to explore the theme of existentialism and the human identity better than any other filmmaker I've ever seen. That search for identity plays a big role in Invincible, in which a Jewish strongman's faith leads him to defiantly claim his Jewish heritage in the middle of 1932 Berlin.

Ostensibly Herzog based the film on a true story, but if this is your first tango with the director I should warn you how loosely you should interpret the word "based." Herzog searches for that "ecstatic truth" of his, and as such he fudges dates, events, and anything else in order to propel his characters towards the purpose he gives them. Case in point: the real Zishe Breitbart died a full 7 years before the events of this story, in 1925. Yet his story works so well as a piece of Nazi defiance that Herzog just lifted the story and shifted it down the timeline.

As he often does, Herzog casts untrained actors in order to carry the film. Jouko Ahola may not have the chops to star in a character study, but he is perfect for the part. A two-time winner of the World's Strongest Man competition, Ahola certainly looks the part, but his lack of polish comes in handy for the character as well. Breitbart is a man of simplicity and geniality. A "real" actor likely would have called attention to this, but Ahola just walks through the scene taking in information, then responding like a normal person.

Breitbart lives in a small town in Poland, where all the locals know him as the strongest man around. A talent scout visits and sees Breitbart in a competition with another strongman. The contender lifts a boulder, and Breitbart walks up and lifts the man as he holds the stone. The scout takes Breitbart to see his first film and before long the strongman is in Berlin, working in a variety show run by Hanussen (Tim Roth), a supposed mystic who also employs a pianist Maria, and a mime he dubs Rothschild trotted out to appease the growing Nazi clientele. When Zishe lumbers through his door, Hanussen comes up with a plan. "We will Aryanize you. A Jew should never be as strong as you."

So he puts a blond wig and tosses Zishe (under the stage name Siegfried) on stage, where he delights the brownshirts. Here is an example of Aryan perfection. Hanussen, who knows of the Nazis' dabblings in the occult and wants in, speaks endlessly of the power of the mystical and the will of the body and things of that nature. Breitbart stands there but does not take it in, and finally has enough. He announces his Judaism to the crowd as he rips of his wig and proclaims himself the next Samson.

Breitbart is a fairly straightforward character, but then so is Hanussen. We expect him to be furious -- and he is -- but he notices the lines of Jews eager to see the strongman and sees nothing but dollar signs. After all, in 1932 the Nazis had power but were not yet rounding up Jews in the street; soon the cabaret theater becomes as much a boxing ring as a show, as the seats get split right down the middle between enraptured Jews and enraged Nazis.

Breitbart of course represent Jewish identity, a voice unwilling to hide as Nazis come to prominence. Yes, he is more symbol than man, but Herzog's characters (even his documentary subjects) often fit this description. Hanussen likewise fits a thematic role: the foil. Where Breitbart bulges with ridiculous musculature, he's genial and open-faced. Hanussen, on the other hand, is hunched over, as if always scheming to himself. When he must go to trial to prove whether or not he is a mystic or just a con man, we learn a shocking truth about him that offers up the flip-side of identity, the kind that masks itself in shame and fear and rage.

The film slips for me at the end, when Zishe returns home to warn his Polish brethren of a vision he has of the coming Holocaust. I mentioned my distaste for Holocaust-related dramatic irony, but sure enough the crowd who hears him retorts with "The Germans could never invade Poland! They have no army!" Well, they do have one, full of 100,000 men. "Well, we should still worry about Russia, not Germany." But there are moments of this proud Jewish man's fear of the coming events that forgive this. When he explains his vision to a rabbi, the man responds that he just doesn't understand what Zishe is trying to say. "I don't know if I understand either," sighs the strongman, and it sums up -- whether Herzog even realized it or not -- the entire suffering of the Holocaust in one understated moment: people simply can't comprehend such an event, so how could they ever prepare for it?

Invincible isn't in that top-tier of Herzog's classic narratives, but it's an honest and bold depiction of a man who proved wrong the notion of Aryan superiority, that the Jews were just weak and greedy. It never insists upon itself, and for that it deserves special mention amongst any film remotely concerned with the Holocaust, which usually spell SUFFERING in bold letters while never actually telling the story properly. There is a shot, as in all Herzog films, that seems to sum up at least one aspect of the film, and as in all Herzog films it's just weird. He films a flood of crabs walking out of the sea and shuffling about on the beach. Is it an allusion for the rise of the Nazi tide? Does it capture the jittery, horrifying feeling in the pit of Zishe's stomach when he sees what will come of the National Socialist party? Did Herzog just think the crabs were kind of cool? You never can tell with him, and it's why I'll always hold him dear to my heart.

The Rocker

If you like to see people get hit in the head with various objects, boy, do I have a movie for you. A companion piece to School of Rock riding on the coattails of that film a mere 5 years too late, The Rocker presents another story of an aged wannabe who finds renewed vigor with the help of rockin' kids. That is not to say the two are clones, however; no, School of Rock had a point, while The Rocker comes off as a lowbrow, borderline creepy piece of slapstick. Over the course of 102 minutes (seriously?), Rainn Wilson hits people in the head with things and even gets hit himself a few times, and if that isn't wisdom I don't know what is.

Wilson plays Robert "Fish" Fishman, a pasty layabout who dwells upon the golden days. In the 80s, he rocked out in Vesuvius, the next big glam band. They even landed a record deal, but it came with a caveat: the other members have to ditch Fish because the label head wants to get his nephew famous. Even by the standards of studio involvement, this kind of stretches believability, but whatever. The band relents, and goes on to superstardom that survives even into the present. Yes, a generic glam band became so popular that even grunge and nü-metal and simply getting too old to play dress-up didn't hurt their sales.

Fish now lives with his sister and her husband (Jane Lynch and Jeff Garlin), and learns that their son Matt (Josh Gad), a fat nerd who has a band of his own, A.D.D. Gad is latest in a string of Jonah Hill wannabes, and even kind of looks and sounds like him too, which creeped me out more than fooled me. His band includes Amelia (Emma Stone), the shy punky bassist and Curtis (Teddy Geiger) who seems to be trying to outbrood David Boreanaz's Angel. A.D.D. is set to play the prom but hits a snag when their drummer gets suspended for distributing pot brownies at school. Matt suggests they let Fish play and, for reasons that escape me, his bandmates reluctantly agree.

Fish amazingly fits in the band perfectly, at least musically, and eventually he finds a permanent place within the band. He calls around all the old venues he used to play and secures A.D.D.'s first gig and encourages Curtis not to feel down about himself; things are looking up. Then, through a mishap, a video of Fish practicing nude hits Youtube and the band lands a record deal. Look, I know I must seem unreasonable pointing out all the contrivances, but read them aloud and see if you'd buy them. Oh, never mind. Suddenly the band is on tour and Fish tastes fame once more.

Tour life plays out rather muted considering how quickly A.D.D. rises to the top of the charts (you know what? I'm just letting these go from now on); Fish parties it up, but then Curtis' mother (Christina Applegate) decides to travel with the kids so they don't get corrupted by their drummer. A will-they-won't-they-who-cares? subplot develops between Amelia and Curtis, which is pointless because they both clearly love each other, neither is in a relationship, and neither is too strong-willed to admit their feelings.

Just when it all can't get any better, the A&R rep (Jason Sudeikis) informs the group that they'll open for, you guessed it, Vesuvius. Fish flies off in a rage, only for Curtis to agree to the gig out of spite that Fish has gotten close to his mother, and then all is forgiven within the span of 6 minutes. Six. Of course, the night can only end in triumph for our heroes at the expense of Vesuvius, who have turned into faux-British, self-absorbed rock stars, and we've learned...what, exactly? Let your dream die for 20 years, then get back on the horse like nothing changed and win?

The cast is too good for this movie. Jane Lynch and Jeff Garlin are far too talented to take the roles they do, as is Christina Applegate. I understand character actors can't be as picky, but how much could this have possibly paid? And Rainn Wilson, God bless him, he just doesn't strike me as a leading actor. I think he's just great on The Office, but he lacks the charisma for a lead role, and I couldn't help but think he spent more time trying (and often failing) to stop himself mugging than actually acting.

The Rocker isn't an atrocious film, but it has nothing to say and takes up nearly 2 hours doing so. No one sticks out as being especially good or bad, to the point that Demetri Martin steals the entire film in a brief cameo as a music video producer. For me, the best way to judge this film, which concerns itself with the power of rock, is to look at the soundtrack; School of Rock scored artists like The Who and even the rights-guarding Led Zeppelin, while The Rocker relies on Teddy Geiger's own derivative compositions and the occasional musical rearrangement of a classic rocker. That's about as metaphorical as the film ever gets.