Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998)

It may come as a surprise that Terry Gilliam, surrealist animator and maker of various self-contained fantasies, has never touched drugs in his life. It therefore comes as an even bigger surprise that he would put one of the great drug odysseys ever written on the big screen. As a fellow teetotaler, even this writer can plainly see Gilliam's vision owes nothing to drug-induced hallucination.

However, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas succeeds in a far more important task: it successfully presents the sentimental cynicism of a cult hero's last-ditch effort to find the dwindling glimmer of hope of the American Dream. That this effort came so early in Hunter S. Thompson's career says something about the bleakness of the majority of his output. Gilliam succeeds by filming the story in emotional retrospect: his broad interpretations of Thompson's prose and Ralph Steadman's sketches contain less the hints of addled paranoia than the creeping horror of seeing the naked, reptilian face of America.

Fast Five (Justin Lin, 2011)

Having seen neither the third nor fourth entries in the Fast and Furious franchise, I cannot say whether Fast Five is, as so many now say, the finest film in the series. I certainly preferred it to the first two, inasmuch as one can prefer one case of chlamydia over another. Ludicrous the point that even the strongest critics are powerless to stand in its way, Fast Five offers enough entertainment, at least of the unintentional variety, to make for a decently fun, if unnecessary, 130 minutes . Yet the filmmakers' awareness of Fast Five's inanity leads to such a disregard for character, coherence and, frankly, morality, that it proves the first film of this series I've found genuinely troubling.

Fast Five once again locates its core band of crooks and expert drivers as they continue to inexplicably walk away from all sorts of consequences of their actions -- only Michelle Rodriguez has truly suffered among the main recurring cast, suggesting that even the physics-suspending Fast and Furious franchise cannot surmount the immutable curse of the Michelle Rodriguez character. Ex-federal agent Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and his girlfriend Mia (Jordana Brewster) bust antihero crook (and brother to Mia) Dom (Vin Diesel) out of a bus bound for prison. They leave all other convicts to be picked up by cops. The three escape to Rio de Janeiro, where soon they find themselves targeted by a dictatorial businessman (Joaquim de Almeida) over some ridiculous matter concerning a computer chip containing information about his business transactions and where he keeps his money.

Ulysses, Chapter Nine: Scylla and Charybdis

The Scylla and Charybdis episode marks a turning point in Ulysses: though it once again only teases the reader with the near-miss of Stephen and Bloom, it at last expounds upon Stephen's much-touted theory on Shakespeare, a convoluted, witty explication de texte that would stand as the magnum opus of any critic. However, insecure, self-conscious thoughts nag at him throughout his attempts to convince librarians and intellectuals of his talent, and the chapter ultimately reveals as much about Stephen as anything in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Naturally, Joyce drops us in the thick of it, as Stephen lays on the complexities of his theory on Hamlet and Shakespeare's corpus at large. Sitting in the director's office in the National Public Library, Stephen gives an example of his theory -- the full idea of which we have not heard, by saying that Shakespeare "plays" the ghost father in Hamlet, thus making the titular character the Bard's dead son Hamnet and Gertrude Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway.

The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991)

Made in 1991, The Fisher King is both somewhat dated and remarkably ahead of its time, a rarity among the classical mythological/folk-tale fantasies of its maker, Terry Gilliam. That aspect of Gilliam's filmmaking is certainly on display, of course: the film gets its title from the Arthurian legend of the keeper of the Holy Grail. But its view of healing wounds and redemptive human arcs is far more deeply felt than anything else in the director's corpus, and it set the stage for a number of reductive movies that used some facet of its subtly sociopolitical construction without understanding the true humanity that powered it.

The film's first shot places a mouth in extreme close-up as it sleazily talks into a microphone in a smoky radio studio. Jack (Jeff Bridges), a shock jock who combines Rush Limbaugh's combativeness with Howard Stern's puerile humor. For the entire first scene, Gilliam never places Bridges' face in full view, alternating between overhead long shots of the jock mocking disembodied voices and more close-ups of an almost toad-like mouth smacking and oozing literal and metaphorical spittle at those poor saps foolish enough to call in and argue with the man. Even in person, Jack is a voice, a lecturing superego as vile as the most uninhibited id, spewing bile upon the populace he so completely loathes.

Numéro Deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975)

Numéro deux represents Godard's first fully successful attempt to include the elements of his previous films into a cohesive whole. Ironically, it may also be his most abstract and jumbled film yet. Shown entirely on video monitors (even the two establishing shots showing Godard in his studio contain running images on screens), Numéro deux takes his Brechtian distance to a new extreme, creating such an aesthetic distance that the cold abstraction of his characters can be attributed as much to the blatant falsity of it all as it can to Godard's philosophical and political musings.

And yet, the film represents the best-yet examination of Godard's obsession with the line between discussing politics and embodying them. Despite its formal minimalism -- employing nothing but static shots of video monitors themselves displaying solely static shots -- Numéro deux at last emerges as the true heir to the poetic 2 or Things I Know About Her, a film that partially informed every Godard film that came after it, as well as a further exploration of not only the ideas behind the Dziga Vertov Group but of the reasons that collective failed. It represents a better meditation and autocritique than Here and Elsewhere, and somewhere in its brutal asceticism is a poetry I'd begun to think Godard lost.

Announcement: Inexhaustible Documents

Next month, Ed Howard of Only the Cinema will launch a new series at his blog called Inexhaustible Documents. Modeled after The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, Inexhaustible Documents will instead focus on music, with one blogger selecting a title each month and posting about it on his or her blog as the others discuss it in the comments.

The first edition will cover The Congos' Heart of the Congos, which is almost perfect, as reggae represents the biggest gap in my music listening. Starting May 23, you can read Ed's post on the album and join in the discussion.

Some bloggers, including yours truly, have already signed on to participate, but this is by no means a limited series. I hope this series gets a good turnout and leads to some great discussion, and that some bloggers I know and love join in the chat. So mark your calendars, and do please participate.

Taxi Driver

To commemorate the release of Taxi Driver on a downright essential Blu-Ray, I've reviewed the film at Cinelogue. Almost assuredly my favorite movie of the 1970s, Taxi Driver hasn't aged a day regardless of the vastly different condition of modern New York City. This is a film for the lonely, the hurt and the angry, which makes it as good a fit for millennials as it did the post-hippie burnouts.

I only briefly touched upon the extras included in the Blu-Ray, but everything you need to know about the movie can be found in its commentary track or the bevy of retrospective material. The A/V restoration makes the film come alive more than it already does, yet this gorgeous transfer does not take away from the dingy feel of the movie. It is already my to-beat disc for 2011.

You can read my review now at Cinelogue.