This far behind, at least one had to slip through the cracks...

#30: Terribly Happy

This 2008 Danish (Czech?) film has been compared to Blood Simple, The White Ribbon, an (any?) Eastwood western, and films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. And this is just the NYT review. What is to be made of a film that apparently evokes films from so may genres and across so much time? Either it is so original that it can be described only via analogy or it is a pastiche of influences: Quentin Jerome Tarantino in the land of the midnight sun!

My own notes on this film suggest that I was extraordinarily stoned when I watched it. I do not believe that I was. All I can really make out now is:

• Blood Simple?
• Everybody knows everything as it happens
• Full embrce of community--knows his secrets

I have no idea what any of this means. Just go see the film before the remake comes out and we'll be compelled to compare it to all of the other remakes in the history of film--It's like if in Jaws II the shark had been played by Robert De Niro!!!

What is a "scripted documentary" and does it matter?

#29: Araya

On occasion, when getting ready to go to work, I've been known to compare my job to working in salt mines. After seeing this 1959 film I no longer do so.

More illuminating than any number of Marxist dependency tracts, this film almost wordlessly shows what dependent development looks like. In a moment of 1960's post-colonial optimism, in the end of the film the salt mining process is being industrialized, with machine power replacing human labor. Looking back, it is difficult to muster the enthusiasm for this process suggested by the cinematography.

Araya puts the lie to the neoconservative/neo-colonial position on the causes and consequences of underdevelopment. Plus it is beautiful, heartbreaking, and mesmerizing.

Having said that, director Margot Benacerraf calls Araya a "scripted documentary". Such characterizations make me nervous. Not that any documentary can, or should, reach some objective truth but comparing her characterization of Araya, the actual place, after revisiting it years later with the observations of others ...

Over 50 years later, it seems Araya is still the end of the road but whether it is the road depicted in the film, well, who knows.

First of Several Japanese Classics

#28: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

This 1960 classic from Japanese director Mikio Naruse feels like a strange amalgamation of Italian Neorealism and pre-war American melodrama. Neorealist in its cinematography, melodramatic in its characterizations, Naruse's film focuses on Keiko, a young widow turned aging "bar girl" in post-war Tokyo, as she realizes that her days of cajoling businessmen into spending their evenings drinking are numbered. Her future is either to marry or to buy a bar of her own. Neither seems to be in her cards.

The bar girl culture is depicted as something between dating and prostitution: more overtly commercial than dating but not as straightforward as prostitution. Businessmen follow the girls from bar to bar where the women work as something like independent contractors. Their welcome is dependent on their ability to attract men, which depends on their fulfilling some chaste fantasy (sex was apparently career suicide) for these men, who, in turn, spend substantial resources on drinks and gifts. Clearly a young woman's game, Keiko finds herself losing both clientele and interest.

The bulk of the movie consists of Keiko wandering through her life encountering a number of archetypal Japanese men as she struggles to make a living and a future. Women in this film are more nuanced and better characterized but only Keiko is depicted as fully human. Laden with worry, responsibility, and feckless men Keiko emerges as strong and noble, even as her problems are not resolved with any sort of happy ending.

Proto-feminist in its sensibilities and with a remarkable cast, this film is definitely a gem of Japanese cinema.

Go See This Film Now. I'll Wait.

#27: A Prophet

This remarkable film by French director Jacques Audiard follows the development of Malik, a young petty criminal of Arab descent from his first adult arrest, and imprisonment with the adult population in the French penal system, through his education as a criminal until he emerges six years later as a formidable leader of a crime syndicate.

This film is amazing. While violent and brutal in places, its real contemplation is on the soul of a smart and sensitive outsider who is confronted by the simple choice of oppressed or oppressor and chooses the latter. Violent and bloody in places, funny and charming in others, brutal and loving and loyal all at the same time, this film sugarcoats none of it. No house soundtrack and jump cuts take the edge off of someone bleeding to death, no soft focus and sunsets set a romantic tone. Malik wins not in a blaze of glory but in persistent hard work, a willingness to do the ugly jobs when necessary, a high tolerance for humiliation, strong and dependable friends, and a cultural invisibility and bigotry that leads everyone to underestimate him until it is too late. In short, this is an allegory for the universal immigrant experience.

This film covers similar cultural ground as the District B13 films reviewed earlier--ethnic conflict and French culture, the effects of political and social marginalization on immigrant communities--but whereas B13 played those fissures as revenge fantasy this film just looks directly at them.

Fantastic film. Go see it now.

So you think your high school reuion was uncomfortable...

#26: Prodigal Sons

This documentary is directed by Kimberly Reed who, in her youth, was voted most likely to succeed, was the star quarterback of her high school football team, was handsome and popular, and apparently the chief nemesis of her older, dumber, uglier, less athletic and (as if that weren't enough) adopted older brother named Marc. She returns for her 20th high school reunion as a post-operative transsexual and stunning lesbian with girlfriend in tow who is still smarter, more popular, prettier, and more likely to succeed than her now literally brain-damaged older brother.

Poor Marc just can't get a break.

The strangeness of the high school reunion (which, despite whatever stereotypes you may harbor about Montana, actually goes off without a hitch) is just the beginning. It gets stranger as the story veers away from what must have been it original conceit (what happens when you really are the most changed at your high school reunion?) to just hanging on as Marc becomes increasingly unstable and a brotherly rivalry--clearly left far behind by the victor who was only dimly aware of it in the first place, wrapped up as she was in her ideal life and pantomime of perfection--metastasizes into full blown hate.

The first-person urgency of this documentary wears a bit thin and if Kimberly is as narcissistic as this film suggests then some of my sympathies certainly lie with the difficult to like Marc. Nevertheless, this is a curious and engaging story.

The tag line really says it all: " A brotherly rivalry between a man and a woman . . . and Orson Welles "

"Children are people. They are no better or worse than any adult. They are merely more helpless." M. Haneke

#25: White Ribbon

This bleak, black and white, film by Austrian director Michael Haneke is set in a German village in the year immediately prior to World War One. On the edge of the end of the Hundred Years Peace and in a bucolic rural hinterland, the film suggests the last gasps of a dying era, not yet aware that it is at its end but clearly having lived beyond its usefulness and into caricature.

Told as a flashback from the perspective of the idealistic young teacher, the story is of the secrets of the village, its hierarchy, and its civic leaders within the context of how he met his wife. Both his shy fiancee and the teacher exemplify the aspiring working class--she the daughter of laborer in a neighboring village enlisted to work as the governess for the town baron and he the impoverished professor brought in to indoctrinate the children of the village. Both are in jobs that require them to impose discipline on the children and both are, in turn, disciplined into a repressive Victorian culture. Both aspire to a level of propriety and moral rectitude, aping of their social betters, as a mechanism of social mobility. They are dimly aware that these social betters (the Baron and Baroness, the doctor, the pastor, the children themselves) are not the pillars of virtue they appear to be but at the same time the social code of the era does not leave room for the aspiring petite bourgeois to notice, not to mention judge, those above or empathize with those who occupy the lower social strata.

The dramatic heart of the film is a series of accidents, or maybe criminal acts, and the mystery that surrounds them. Are they divine punishment? Cruel and mindless acts by jealous villagers? Acts of retribution from a secretive cabal of children resisting and replicating the oppression and violence of their own treatment as the had of prim and moralistic adults? Or as suspected by the Baroness, just more of the animal violence of the German peasant and by extension, Germany itself?

The film is clearly allegorical. Pre-war culture has ossified into a rigid and overt morality occluding the violence, perversion, and human indifference of the adults. The children are both the victims of this hypocrisy and its most vigilant defenders. Both the decadence of the Wiemar Republic and the Nazi hive are seeded in this one village in this one moment.

This film is beautifully shot with little narrative. The story is told largely through the images and through half-observed moments when the Victorian facade falls away. One is made to feel an accidental voyeur; turning corners or peeking through doors only to see flashes of perversity that are immediately suppressed when they become aware that they have been observed and making all involved feel uncomfortable.

Nada de Nada

#24: The Paranoids

This Argentine entry into the slacker artist oeuvre is centered on Luciano, a marginally employed writer who wanders rather aimlessly through his miserable life without much interest in anything except indulging his paranoid tendencies. He pesters the STD hot line about his sexual risks, he ritualistically lights incense and hides his dope obsessively, he worries about what his landlord thinks about his friends. And he's very depressed. Immobile.

This is all mildly amusing in that early '90's independent film way but when Luciano's much more successful college friend returns from a successful stint as a television producer in Spain to re-create his most successful production, a series called The Paranoids, in South America, it becomes clear that Luciano is not a simple artist in an uncaring world. It turns out that he's the central character in The Paranoids television series about a miserable, aimless, depressed, and paranoid writer named Luciano.

That feeling one has when confronted with a version of oneself that seems to have taken all the right steps, moved down the right paths, lives the life one deserves for oneself, and it still kind of a condescending prick? Imagine that one those right turns was using your actual life as fodder for his success. Luckily, the friend has one chink in his armor: an unhappy, beautiful, and restless girlfriend. It would be too much to say that Luciano pursues her. It is more accurate to say they share a slacker valence that is befuddled by, and a little disdainful of, actual success.

The music in this film is great and it is well shot. But the film itself is only an adequate outing of an overdone genre. Being set in Buenos Aires is not enough to make it interesting.

Mirimax Sucked Before Disney, Too!

#23: The Burning

This 1981 film is the first film produced by Mirimax Films, was funded by Miriam Weinstein, mother of Bob and Harvey Weinstein and the Mir in Mirimax, and is the special effects sequel to Friday the 13th for gore auteur Tom Savini. As such, it is exactly what you might expect.

The plot line is standard maniac killer at oversexed summer camp. This one is based on the Cropsey stories that apparently terrorized campers throughout the 1970's and 1980's. The foundation of these stories is chronicled in the documentary Cropsey, screened at the 2009 DIFF.

In this telling, Cropsey was an abusive and alcoholic caretaker at a summer camp. The campers prank Cropsey but when the prank gets out of hand he is hideously burned. When he recovers, he decides to take his revenge on the next generation of campers and their councilors, one of whom was among the original group. And on an overnight canoeing trip... well, I'm sure you know the rest.

Aside from a fairly tolerant view of date rape, there is nothing noteworthy about this film. There is some dispute, apparently, about whether this film rips off the camper in peril theme from Friday the 13th or if the script was written before it was released. I honestly didn't care enough either way to try to figure it out.

The Ghosts of the Mohawk Valley

#22: October Country

This documentary chronicles the life of four generations of a working class family in Mohawk Valley of upstate New York. It is a family that seems trapped in economic insecurity, serial attachments to abusive men, unintended pregnancies, and relationships that force the viewer to ask what is the meaning of masculinity and femininity is a world that looks like an endless wrap party for the Steve Wilkos Show only without any yelling or crying.

The recurring theme that brings together the film, which follows the family from one Halloween to the next, is the persistence of ghosts. Between the patriarch's sister, a self proclaimed witch who hobbles around the local cemetery asking to communicate with the ghosts who presumably live there, to the whole array of family dysfunction that infiltrates the lives of the people in the film, each generation is haunted by the bad decisions of the generation before. The people look clear-eyed at these decisions, even as they replicate them, seemingly unable to break the pattern. The effect is not so much learned helplessness as daytime TV confessional and a disturbing disconnect between how they describe their conditions and how they respond to them. It seems to occur to none of them before the fact that they have options. It is tempting to say that they don't but that is clearly not true. Granted, their options may be unconscionably limited but they are options.

The emotional center of the family is the mother, the director's own mother, for whom family is the most important thing and who provides unconditional love from the middle of the chaos that surrounds her. Offering level-headed, if sometimes seemingly callous, advice to her daughter and granddaughters she seems to know what the future holds but, like them, is powerless to alter it in any meaningful way. She exhibits no sentimentality about the state of her family but also withholds no support or love, even for the foster child who spends his days stoned in the basement and is ultimately incarcerated for stealing from her. When he gets out, she is there to take him to Wal-Mart to buy new clothes and to admire the authenticity his Halloween costume, an abused woman, complete with black eye.

The trajectory is relentlessly down.

Each woman in this film has made disastrous choices in men, men who molest their daughters, beat them, dominate them. For what it is worth, most of these men are themselves family ghosts--long gone or at least absent. The men who are around seem to be grasping for a sense of their own identity as men in stereotypical notions of breadwinning and control, neither of which they can manage given the circumstances of their lives. This seems to be the primary inheritance passed between generations of women.

The only potential exception to this rule is the second daughter of the second generation, eleven year old Desi, who sees her way out. She's spunky, smart, and perceptive but her vision is distressingly narrow. Her plan to break the cycle of abuse and neglect is to graduate from high school.

These people talk like people who have been exposed to a lot of Dr. Phil and the family has all of the marks of the beaten down blue collar scrim: obesity, lots of plastic tchotchkes functioning as decor, Mt. Dew for breakfast. The POV is not judgmental--these folks spend plenty of time judging themselves--and it is not overtly critical. What it is is resigned.

In the end, the director's off-camera voice asks each person if he or she believes in ghosts. The father, a Vietnam veteran who carries around a lot of resentment about being sent away before he could grow up, answers that they are all in your head but that "a lot of times what's in your head is physical." But his wife, given the circumstances of her life, has the most perceptive answer. "I'm more afraid of the living than the dead."

Who the Hell is the Big Bad Wolf?

#19--21: The Red Riding Trilogy

Made for broadcast TV in Britain, these films are fictionalizations of a string of real murders in working class Yorkshire--dubbed the "Yorkshire Ripper" cases at three separate moments: 1974, 1980, and 1983. The films present a story of murder, mystery, police corruption, strange and creepy clergy, and a sketchy land deal to build an American-style mall all set against a rather desperate and bleak backdrop of northern England. So bleak, in fact, that in the 1974 episode the protagonist tries to convince the mother of a missing girl to run away with him to London, where the sun shines. It is enough to say that the plot line is convoluted.

The mysteries in the three episodes are tangentially connected but the attempts to wind them up in the final episode is only partially successful. Because I watched all three films end to end, I really felt the films they could have benefited from a good, brutal, edit. The films lack discipline and pacing. This might be less problematic on TV (when you are blogging, eating, and watching a film all at once a little lethargy in the pacing is easy to miss), but in the theater the scenes tend to drag on and on.

That aside, the mystery is compelling. Each piece has a different director (1980 is directed by James Marsh--the Oscar winning director of Man On Wire) and marginally different atmospheres, although the reviews that suggest dramatic differences in style are overstated. In the end, the differences are more like differences between TV dramas filmed on fading 1970's film stock rather that individualistic stylistic choices.

The most interesting part of the triptych, in my opinion, is the Red Riding Hood thread. At various points, the comparison is quite broad. For example, in the 1983 story the man who may have been falsely convicted of the 1974 crimes refers to the murderer as "the wolf" and Red Riding is clearly a reference to the blood-stained East Riding of Yorkshire where the film takes place. These moments are disappointing. The real question here is what is the wolf? Is it the crooked cops? The greedy and entitled developers? The inner demons that haunt even the most prim among us? The monster that lurks around the schools? In the end, it is the desperation of the people, trapped in their poverty and their isolation, amidst the rubble of civil society in post-industrial England that makes space for the wolf in the first place.

I'm not sure these films are worth the time, unless one is a fan of the books on which they are based. My favorite was the last but, frankly, it is the least free-standing of the three. In the end, these were probably compelling TV and moderately engaging movie fare.

What is it about Thanksgiving?

#18: The Vicious Kind

Thanksgiving is apparently the American holiday that captures the zeitgeist of damaged families better than any other. Perhaps it is because it is so brief, there are no twelve days of Thanksgiving. Maybe because it ushers in the season of mandatory nostalgia and memories of holidays gone sideways. For whatever reason, just invoking the Thursday in November serves up images of concentrated family dysfunction. In The Vicious Kind the family consists of a father and his two grown (or nearly grown) sons. This Thanksgiving the younger son, Peter, is bringing his sorority-goth girlfriend home from college to meet his marginally lecherous father, played by J.K. Simmons.

The center of the film is the older brother Caleb, played by a very charming Adam Scott. Chain smoking and an aficionado of classic diners, Caleb picks up his brother and begins to try to convince him that his new girlfriend is a very bad idea. One gets the sense that, to Caleb, all women are a very bad idea. His anti-social behavior does not improve once the girlfriend has joined them in the front seat of Caleb's pickup wherein he sets out to prove that all women are sluts. Oh, and for some reason Caleb can't be seen near his fathers house.

This movie is part mystery, part comedy, as we set about figuring out slowly what is wrong with this family. Of course the good girl/bad girl/good girl girlfriend recognizes that boring but safe Peter is no match for unpredictable and sleepless Caleb and Caleb, trying to protect his little brother from the inevitable heartbreak of his first love, becomes obsessed with the girl himself. But the sex triangle is really secondary to the larger story of how one broken family got that way and how redemption is available but not guaranteed. This film is light on exposition and the mystery unravels slowly but its resolution is organic and fulfilling.

The best part of this film is the misanthropic and misogynistic Caleb and brutal take on life. His monologues are snappy and his performance is a pitch-perfect mix of arrogance and bewilderment; he thinks he has women figured out only to discover that he has no control over his emotions just the same. This conflict is told mostly through subtle shifts in tone and posture that doesn't quite comport with the words coming out of his mouth. This role is a high wire act. In the wrong hands Caleb is just an asshole. As handled by Scott he's one of those charming assholes.

Fair is Fair!

#17: The Legend of Billie Jean

This 1985 teen rebellion drama stars Helen Slater (of Supergirl infamy) as a trailer park idealist who finds herself defending her brother (a very blond Christian Slater in his first film role) in a conflict with the local petit bourgeois bully cum Romeo over a scooter. Billie confronts the bully and his father to collect the money to repair the scooter, after the local police decline to get involved, and is rewarded for her efforts with an attempted rape. One accidental shooting later and Billie Jean, her brother and two friends from the similarly wrong side of the tracks are on the run.

All of this ends, predictably for a 1980's anthem film, in the spontaneous generation of a cult-like following of teenagers across Texas, all of whom are willing to abet the "Billie Jean Gang" in its quest for justice for all people, no matter what their socio-economic status. Part road movie, part class struggle, part commentary on the power of television to create celebrity, and all Helen Slater in high 80's fashion this film has it all. Plus a smokin' Pat Benatar theme song.

I actually found this film a little difficult to watch. Helen Slater is better than one might expect if all you have seen her in is Supergirl. Having said that, directer Matthew Robbins seems unaware of the potential of the story he has to tell. Appropriate to the man who also directed Corvette Summer, all of the problematic issues presented in the script (class divisions, 80's feminist resistance, even the nascent seeds of reality celebrity--think the OJ slow-speed chase by way of Marshall McLuhan) are treated as fodder for a maddeningly routine teen flick. Billie Jean is a trailer park feminist (just think about how that cuts across major cultural cleavages!) but is still subjected to a chemistry-free romance with a wholly awkward teen heartthrob. As part of their celebrity the Billie Jean Gang finds itself literally a target for adult aggression but the potentially explosive question of the use of violence to discipline transgressive behavior is really just a set-up for an ill timed menstruation joke. And so it goes, on and on, for what feels like hours.

Even Billie Jean's messianic turn, inspired by a glimpse of the movie Joan of Arc, is really just an excuse to work in a rad haircut.

I know it is a bit much to expect powerful social commentary from a summer teen movie intended primarily as a vehicle to launch Slater's career. Nevertheless. As an aside, I'm beginning to wonder about Keith the Programmer's agenda here. I fully understand that The Watching Hour is just an opportunity for him to scratch his own movie itch but, still. Streets of Fire and now this? It is only a matter of time until he screens Fire with Fire.

I'm Seven Movies Behind!

#16: Food, Inc.

Directed by Rob Kenner, this is a preaching to-the-converted, Academy Award™ nominated documentary that, in the words of the press release, "exposes" the "mechanized underbelly" of America's food industry. Lining up the usual horrors: E-coli infected strawberries,dead children, feces in your hamburger, epic levels of Type II diabetes, sad-eyed cows strung up, alive, by their back feet to bleed out in the kill line, and that the victims of Nixon-era farm policy are the poorest people in our society. If you've read Fat Land and Omnivore's Dilemma there is nothing here that you don't already know. Granted, it is stuff that you should know but is there really anyone in America that can still muster righteous shock at learning that CHICKENS live in CAGES and that $1 Big Macs rest upon a tower of unconscionable human and animal suffering? We all know this but we as a civil society have, apparently, decided this is a price we are willing to pay for tomatoes in Colorado in December.

This film does have the advantage of providing a nice visual canvas to draw together the disparate threads of food politics. Reading about industrial chicken sheds is one thing but to see footage of the farmer picking the dead chickens out of an empty barn, preparing for the next shipment of Tyson chicks is something else. Considering the implications of proprietary, patented, seeds on corn monoculture takes on a different feel when the filmmakers follow a man who makes a living by cleaning seed corn being hounded by Monsanto lawyers to turn in his clients and neighbors for violating the seed saving restriction of their contracts.

Most interestingly, this film connects the dots between US industrial agricultural policy, the NAFTA-induced flood of corn into the Mexican market, the destruction of agriculture in Mexico, and the influx of illegal migrants into the US made up largely of former agricultural workers driven to work in US agribusiness. It is a chain of consequences that reaches beyond the partisan political debate and has the capacity to unite granola-munching hippies and Minutemen around a common cause. But there were no Minutemen in my audience. My audience was made up of equal parts back-yard survivalists and soft-hearted animal lovers who sneer at fat poor people trying to feed their families but gasp when the Tyson chicks are chipped for identification before shipping.

This film fails in exactly the same way that most of these sincere and pedantic films fail. People who will go to this film will leave feeling smug, superior, and well informed. Those who elect wallow in the worst of the American food system will not go to this film and will deflect the disturbing information with some variation on the John Travolta line from Pulp Fiction (but pork chops taste gooood). Those who don't have many choices will have their interests sacrificed to the Cargills of our world.

BTW, I also learned that Colorado has a criminal statute making illegal any statement that has the effect of disparaging the quality of perishable food intended for human consumption. So in my home state it may be a criminal offense to suggest that feces-infused hamburger, treated with sulfur dioxide to maintain its rosy blood-red hue well past is sell-by date, and compiled from hundreds of different animals is unfit for human consumption.

Blaxsploitation Feminism and Zombies. The Watching Hour.

#15: Sugar Hill

This 1974 entry into blaxploitation exemplifies all of the shopworn tropes of that genre but, unfortunately, has neither the pacing nor the sense of anticipation necessary to make a truly great, if low budget, horror film.

In this film, Diana "Sugar" Hill, who is apparently a fashion photographer in her professional life, inherits a Haitian voodoo-themed nightclub when local underground forces kill her fiancee because he refuses to sell out. The local mob is admirably racially diverse but ultimately no match for Sugar once she enlists the assistance of childhood mentor and Voodoo priestess, Mama Celesete, and an army of undead lead by head zombie Baron Samedi. One by one Sugar and her zombie gang take out the circle that protects the mob chieftain until no one is left but the chief himself and his blonde gun moll companion. Each victim is informed that he is about to die for his role in the initial murder, even the guy who did not participate in the original murder but has to die just the same. Sugar does not quit until each has been killed and the gun moll handed off to Baron Samedi; her body to serve as payment for the Baron's assistance in lieu of Sugar's own.

This film is slow, lacks suspense, and even the fight scenes lack the enthusiasm one usually associates with 70's blaxsploitation. The fashion is super fly and the good guys are relentlessly hip in the face of the "honk" white cops and mobsters. Having said that, without the Curtis Mayfield soundtrack, deviant take on 1930's Warner Brothers horror classics, or afro-kung fu moves, it turns out that blaxsploitation is almost intolerably didactic and about as much fun to watch as a home economics film strip on gynocolocical hygiene. Visually these are the hippest zombies I've ever seen but they just aren't very scary.

The redeeming quality of the whole adventure lay in its slightly sideways take on morality. Sugar is obsessed with vengeance (she doesn't even pretend that what she seeks is justice). In her initial evocation of Baron Samedi Mama Celeste warns Sugar that the spirit she seeks is a greedy spirit. After offering her jewelry and engagement ring as payment for the services of his zombie army, she offers him her soul. Samedi rejects her soul, saying that he wants flesh. All of this sets up the story as a kind of bargain where Sugar gets her revenge but, in traditional morality cliche, she should find that the price is high and that she must pay for her single-minded violation of the basic Christian principle of cheek turning.

But no.

In the tradition of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song the normal standards of morality do not apply. Sugar is not held accountable for her deal with the undead. In fact, she avoids the one price she is expected to pay, that of handing her body over to the Barron to be used for his pleasure, by handing over the N-bomb dropping concubine of the head mobster who disappears, screaming in terror, into the mists of the graveyard. Sugar gets the revenge she desires and escapes without a scratch on either body or soul. The morality here is one of the cleansing virtue of bloody revenge, not of proportionality or even less of forgiveness of trespasses.

With its depiction of upwardly-mobile African Americans in trendy and highly remunerative professions, Sugar Hill offers up the very images cherished in this genre of film. It functions as an unironic take on pimp fashion (you haven't seen fierce until you've seen the scalloped lapels and checkered silver lame unitard with matching suit jacket and fedora on display here), and a slave revenge fantasy (the undead are Yellow Fever victims from the bowls of a slave ship from the 18th century dumped into mass graves on the outskirts of New Orleans). At the same time it suggests a black nationalist resistance to the dominant white culture using voodoo tropes and unmitigated violence. Sugar dresses to the nines and even in her grief finds the gumption to flirt with old boyfriends and use her tough, independent, and overt sexuality to divert the suspicion of the mob capo as she sets up her bloody revenge.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this film was the pristine quality of the archival 35 mm print dug up and screened by Keith Garcia, programming manager for the Denver Film Society, and the good people of the Starz Film Center. I am accustom to seeing these American International films from the 1970's with the faded color projection, jumpy splices, and looking like they've been edited by a caffeinated Freddy Kruger. This print is beautiful. The colors are rich and the editing and reel changes smooth. Seeing this film in this original form calls into question the obtrusively low quality that one normally associates with films of this era an caliber. Once again Quentin Jerome Tarantino seems to have missed the point of the genre he caricatured in Grindhouse.

I could get behind all of this if the zombies were just a little scarier.

Repent Ye Visa and Internal Combustion! The End is Near!

#14: Collapse

Twice a year I have to represent my department at recruiting open houses. Parents inevitably ask what one does with a degree in political science. I now have an answer. BA, political science UCLA 1972 = a chain smoking, wild eyed, Michael Ruppert.

Apparently Ruppert made his name, such that it is, as a cop in L.A. by publicly accusing the CIA of being involved in the street drug trade in the 1980's. From there he went on to expose a large number of government and corporate conspiracies--the kind that seem to transcend the left/right political divide and bring together survivalists, anarchists, old hippie communalists, and likely a Wiccan or two.

Despite the title, this film has more in common with George Noory than Jared Diamond's book by the same name.

In this documentary Ruppert is given free reign to "connect the dots" between peak oil, the fractional reserve banking system, organic heirloom seed hoarding, and the inevitability of T-Bill defaults to make his argument that the world is rapidly approaching the collision between an ideology of infinite growth and the reality of finite resources. In fact, this is a mash up of old fashioned Malthusian theory and an Errol Morris documentary. Well, an Errol Morris documentary without Errol Morris but with a Phillip Glassish electronica soundtrack, a single talking subject, and an ample sampling of archival footage. After illustrating the correlation between human population growth and the advent of the fossil fuel economy, Ruppert asks us to imagine what will happen when that economy collapses assuming that no alternative energy source or sources emerge. The future is one where governments collapse, civil society ceases to function, and, in his most colorful analogy, the slower "campers" get eaten by the bear while those of us who are better prepared get away to re-create some new, post-collapse, human-sized social order.

Rupert had his moment of clarity in re: the inevitable (and incipient) collapse of the global human system after a discussion of the science of peak oil. At that time he began to understand, he says, the interconnectedness of all of the discrete issues that he had "investigated" previously which lead him to predict, in 2005, the collapse of the financial system in the US and a subsequent world-wide depression.

Go ahead and insert your own "1000 monkeys typing for 1000 years" joke here.

It is not that Ruppert is necessarily wrong about any one of these issues; peak oil strikes me as logical even if it is difficult to predict before the fact, fractional reserve banking likely has its limits. But the way it is all put together here takes on the feel of paranoid delusion early and often. I can envision Ruppert as Russell Crowe in his carriage house linking random bits of information together into an intricate conspiracy while eluding an imaginary Dick Cheney played by Ed Harris. But that was a better movie than this one.

Critical Theory and French Action Films, Partie Deux

#13: D'13: Ultimatum

This sequel to the delightful District B13 returns to the squalid Parisian suburb only to find that conditions have not markedly improved. The tribal gangs, having taken the upper hand after the defeat of the drug lord in the last film, seem better organized and more explicitly stereotypically representative of Parisian boogie men. There are the Islamisists, the Neo-Nazis, Haitian/Caribbean gang bangers, and Southeast Asians (headed predictably by a woman straight out of a Hong Kong action flick). These gangs are locked into a balance of power battle for territory and the District seems hopelessly divided, content to direct its anger internally rather than against the authorities that have walled it into its Hobbesian state of nature. In the midst of all of it is still Leito, the home grown avenger for justice, and Damien, the go-to undercover cop, too honest for the Parisian authorities to allow to snoop around when trouble is afoot.

In this film, shady government contractors, headed by a corporation called Harriburton and apparently having read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, decide that D13 is not so much a suppurating urban sore as an untapped business opportunity. The plan? A literal moment of Schumperterian creative destruction: persuade the new government into nuking (yes, with advanced neutron nuclear weapons) D'13 and then swoop in to acquire the contracts for reconstruction. The trick? Dividing the population so thoroughly that it is unable to wage resistance against its forced relocation and ultimate, gentrified, redevelopment. Suddenly the depth of the tribal rivalries comes into focus: this is not a product of human nature but a strategic plan by Harriburton to divide the population into political apathy while mobilizing the fear of the middle class to accept their cultural liquidation.

In the end, Damien and Leito must unite the rival gangs to take on the evil thugs at Harriburton and save the district. But first they must reunite.

Taken together, these two films are quite interesting. They depict a Parisian underclass, robbed of its dignity and trapped in a world without justice. In both, the government has left these people to the predations of the worst human instincts, all of which are framed through unrestrained market logics (the logic of the black market drug trade and, more dangerously, the logic of the outsourcing of basic government functions without sufficient social management). Each of these markets exist outside of effective governmental control. Tellingly, the bad guys from Harriburton and their government lackeys early in the film bemoan the fact that their urban redevelopment plan would take "eight years" under normal regulatory conditions in France whereas in Dubai they could be completed in "eight months." On its face this has the appearance of a critique of an overly-regulated market that makes beneficial redevelopment too onerous. But over the course of the film it becomes clear that the intended beneficiaries of the development are the middle class and Harriburton itself. The poor are to be, once again, marginalized; their class status translates into their inhumanity from the perspective of a state that functions almost exclusively as a handmaiden to the ruling class.

Yes, D'13 is a Marxist film.

The residents of D'13 reclaim their humanity by overcoming the artificially-imposed differences rooted in nationality and uniting around their shared class status. The heavy-handed conclusion is that tribalism, nationalism, and jihadism are ideological tools that facilitate the interests of the nationless corporate entities that really rule the world. Only through the united action of the underclass can the state's sense of humanity be re-awakened, at which point the underclass can use the tools of the state to promote its own interests in the class struggle.

Curiously, the tools available to the state seem strangely limited. Once Leito and Damien, in coalition with the leadership of the rival gangs, break through the protective walls, defended by the class interests of Harriburton, to speak to the president they make an eloquent case for the nobility of the working class and the duty the government has to human uplift in the face of capitalist greed. Convinced, the president asks Leito and Damien what is to be done. All agree to go forward with the planned destruction of the district. Its rebuilding is to be in the hands of the workers themselves in the person of Damien, now representative of the desire of the underclass to forge a new society free from the failed warehousing plans of the original suburbs but also, presumably, under the wing of a state apparatus now in the hands of a sympathetic bureaucrat.

Vampires from Outer Space! (but not in a good way)

#15: Lifeforce

Space vampires.

Another Watching Hour movie at Starz. In this one NASA and a UK space agency launch a joint interplanetary space shuttle mission to investigate Halley's Comet. However, when the shuttle gets there the astronauts discover an abandoned alien ship, looking a lot like a space fallopian tube, wedged into the head of the comet. Inside they find a collection of dessicated man-sized bat skeletons and, beyond that, three glass caskets with three perfect, and perfectly naked, people inside. The astronauts do what any red-blooded humans would; they decide to bring the caskets on board!

When the shuttle, the Churchill (seriously), arrives back at Earth it is an abandoned, burned out shell filled with dessicated man-sized human corpses. The only survivor is the American captain who ejected himself from the dying ship in the single-occupancy escape pod. However, the rescue team also finds three glass caskets containing three perfect, still perfectly naked, people. What to do other than bring them to Earth?

Space Vampires.

But instead of blood these lycanthropes sustain themselves on human "lifeforce" which seems to be a bluish electrical soul that can be spewed out of the mouth. Instead of terrorizing an English manor these folks focus their mayhem on downtown London. The space fallopian tube is a kind of collector that concentrates the souls for intergalactic travel. And the vampires have been here before; the vampire myths are all distortions of their prior visit. Oh, and the female space vampire is stunningly beautiful and spends most of the movie wandering around naked looking for souls to acquire and has a (gasp!) "special bond" with the surviving shuttle captain who is tearing around London with his HRH's Special Air Services sidekick whose fundamental purpose is to convince us that the Brits can be as badass and droll at the same time.

This movie is filled to the brim with unlikely plot twists, cheesy special effects (hold your judgment until you see the clearly animatronic head of Patrick Stewart --yes, that Patrick Stewart-- spew blood out of its eye holes. Better yet, hold it until you've seen the exact same effect footage spliced into the film four times), gratuitous nudity and violence that has no plot purpose, and a naked space vampire lap dance/lifeforce abduction climax.

Written by Dan O'Bannon (Alien) and directed by horror autodidact Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), this film has legitimate genre DNA but some combination of inattention to detail (shouldn't the BBC presenters have British accents?) and not even enough pride to try write in an explanation for the space vampire's nudity (are we to infer a plot point from her gravity-defying tits?) turns this film into a sloppy mess. The budget at play here could not have been small. Overcoming the odds, Hooper did not let the size of his budget get in the way of making a crappy, intelligence insulting, low-budget flick.

Really. Space vampires?

It was Disney killed the beast

#14: Jean Cocteau's La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast)

Before there was a Disney animation department devoted wholly to the (re)construction of folkloric heroines as Barbie-esque princesses, there was the dark world of European folk traditions. In this didactic world, step sisters jealously enforce a Darwinian wall of genetic defense against beautiful interlopers, evil spinsters are blinded and dragged to their deaths behind wild horses before cheering townsfolk, children exact terrible revenge against their torturers and, when the wolf gets his teeth into grandma, there is nothing to be rescued by the time the woodsman slices him open. In this world, lessons are not subtle, heroes are not unambiguously virtuous, and the line between civilization and the state of nature is razor thin.

La belle et la bête exists in this second world. This is a fantastic re-telling of the classic French folk tale that has about as much in common with Disney's vision of the world as a Miley Cyrus' Vanity Fair photo shoot. The plot counterpoises the mundane life of Beauty, the faithful daughter of an aging and failing merchant, against the enchanted world of the Beast, looking all the world like a hypertrichosis acrobat. Beauty ends up as a captive of the Beast when she willingly trades her freedom for her father's after he is caught stealing a rose from the Beast's garden; a rose intended as a gift for his loyal daughter.

Yes, in this universe it somehow makes sense that the daughter, who personifies fealty to her father, can be held hostage in his place.

Of course, the lesson of both the story and the film is that Beauty's capacity to love the Beast despite his hideous appearance is rewarded in the end as her love breaks his evil enchantment and transforms him into the Prince. But the way to this tidy, moralistic, conclusion is at least interesting and not sprinkled with comforting sugar. Beauty does not offer unalloyed acceptance. In fact, she's kind of a bitch to the Beast and even after he extend his absolute trust to her, placing his life in her hands, she can't quite bring herself to uphold her promises to him. We are not in Disney's world here.

The imagery of this film is literally fabulous. The Beast's world is magical, misty, and dark. Beauty's world, on the other hand is bitter; filled with scheming sisters, a prodigal brother, and an avaricious suitor for Beauty's hand whom, despite his general oiliness, she appears to love. In a Merchant of Venice subplot, there is even a stereotypical Shylock moneylender who claims the family's wealth in repayment for his son's debts when the father's ships are lost. As an aside, one has to wonder about that particular characterization choice in 1946 France.

Filmed on high-contrast black and white stock and with a musical score reminiscent of that of The Bicycle Thief this film is beautiful. I was born without the whimsy gene and generally abhor magical stories. But I do like this movie. Perhaps what I like is the rough justice meted out by the film. This is not a story with an unmitigated happy ending. The Beast is transformed and Beauty is promised a life of royal pleasures but the selfish sisters are promised nothing more than the opportunity to carry Beauty's train. Beauty's original suitor is transformed into the Beast, captive inside the body of an animal. Forgive maybe but never forget seems to be the underlying theory of mercy.l

At the end of the original version of Snow White the evil Queen goes to Snow White's wedding only to be captured by the wedding party, slapped into iron shoes heated to glowing, and forced to dance herself to death. Justice? Maybe not. But at least there aren't any cute talking animals and no Celine Dion Oscar™ bait.

Films must be finished; even if you do it blindly

#13: Broken Embraces

This is the latest film from director Pedro Almodóvar, his most recent with Penelope Cruz, and I don't really feel up to the task of reviewing it. I've not seen all of Almodóvar's films and the ones I have seen I've found enjoyable enough although I have never understood the cult-like status of him as auteur. He is capable of sketching interesting characters with compelling if not wholly credible emotional lives and can keep the slapstick moving when the scene calls for it. He is adept with quirky material. I love and respect the tastes of people who love Almodóvar's work but, well, I just don't get his buzz. I don't think I can do justice to this film because I'm afraid it is my movie destiny to find the charm of his films elusive.

Furthermore, I must admit that I have never liked Penelope Cruz as an actor. My dislike of her runs so deep that I have actually avoided her recent work. She sucked so bad in Vanilla Sky that I'm not sure she can, or should, ever be redeemed. I have seen neither Volver nor Vicky Christina. My favorite Penelope Cruz production is her characterization in this episode of Family Guy. But I do have a soft spot for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

The conceit of this current film is that in 1992 a Spanish director found himself directing a Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown kind of farce with a leading lady with whom he is obsessed and who is the mistress of a real estate mogul who has maneuvered himself into the role of producer of the film. Justifiably suspicious about the relationship between his mistress and her director, the producer gets his son to videotape the production and hires a lip reader to decipher what the two are saying to each other on set. Broken Embraces is set in 2008 and the story of the old film is told in long, unbroken flashbacks from the perspective of the director, now blind and living under a new name as a screenwriter. Between the flashbacks and bits of contemporary action and drama, the film pieces together the emotionally complex and convoluted story of how the director abandoned his art for love only to lose everything, his love, his sight, in a completely random moment.

I liked this film more than I expected I would. I was most surprised by Cruz's performance. Did I mention that she is not among my favorite actors? But here she is impressive, shifting her character between authentic emotions and her two acting jobs--one on the movie set and one in the bedroom with her sugar daddy--managing to make them all seem charming and real. Her character is so persuasive it is difficult to tell where her opportunism and/or duty ends (it is difficult to figure out how she sees her own situation) and her real life begins until well into the flashbacks. I can't pin down what it is about this movie that is so seductive. But the texture of daily life, the color palate of the production, even the pacing of the scenes makes me want to embrace this movie. Its last five minutes draw an explicit contrast between this film and WOTENB and the comparison enhances both films.

I'm sure this film is littered with worthy allegory: the blind director, Cruz's seamless transformation from actress--prostitute--secretary--mistress--actress--lover suggesting they all deploy the same basic skill set, etc., etc. But, as I said, I don't think I'm up to the task and part of me fears that trying too hard to figure out what it all means might just diminish its effects.

Hardcore and Parkour

#12: Banlieue 13 (District B13)
This French action film depicts a dystopian future (2010!) where the Parisian suburbs have become so ungovernable that the French authorities elect to wall off the districts and eliminate all public services including the police and schools. Left without any civil authority, these districts devolve into semi-autonomous regions governed by drug lords and their hired thugs. The hero of the film, Lieto, is a resident of the district who seems at once to be one of the leaders of the community, which in this context means that he seems to have some armed staff, and a kind of a civic avenger, trying to impose some order on an otherwise wholly disorderly world.

The plot of the film is wholly predictable. The avenging hero ends up involuntarily paired with the lone-wolf undercover detective attempting to clean up the city, rescue Lieto's sister from the Scarface-channeling drug kingpin, and stop the bad guys from deploying a hijacked nuclear weapon against the still-civilized parts of Paris. But, in good dystopian form, it turns out that the real bad guys are employed by the government itself, which has decided to wipe out the population of B13 because it has "run out of ideas" about how to bring it back under control.

Don't go to this film for the plot. The remarkable parts of this movie are the action sequences. The stunts are ostensibly performed live, by the actors themselves, with no CGI interventions. And they are amazing. This film is said to exemplify the French discipline parkour, a kind of urban running that focuses on the synergistic potential of human movement and the physical environment. So walls exist to be bounced off of, scaled or walked up; speeding cars to be climbed, deflected, and jumped; and tables to be scaled, stood on, and used as leverage. It looks really cool. If you are particularly sensitive to the jerks, jumps, and color inconsistencies of even high quality CGI and green screen action then this movie will be a breath of fresh air. More than anything, the action sequences remind me of old Jackie Chan action movies from his pre-Hollywood Hong Kong days. When these guys jump a car, they actually jump the freakin' car. Cool. Plus the soundtrack has an understated techno vibe that lends the action a kind of balletic grace. It doesn't amp up the action so much as it abstracts away from the action to the acts themselves.

The film was originally released in 2004. Its sequel is being screened at Starz this month.

My favorite moment in the film: While the protagonists are figuring out that the bomb was actually placed in B13 by the French authorities to wipe out the impoverished (and notably darkish) people imprisoned behind the nearly impenetrable walls of their suburban ghetto , Lieto calculates that even the timing of the appearance of the bomb is suspicious. It turns up in B13 on September 7, just in time to catch everyone back in the city from their summer holiday. Apparently even after the meltdown of civil society Parisians will still get their statutory minimum of 30 days holiday. And all of them will take it in August.

In the not too distant future, somewhere in time and space--

#11: Predator 2

Once a month, the Denver Film Society at Starz hosts Mile Hi Sci-Fi, a MST3K-like event where local comics riff on bad science fiction films, sell Dale's Pale Ale out of an ice chest, and generally make a nuisance of themselves by talking over the movie and thus disturbing those in the audience who would talk over the movie anyway but now have to compete with professionals. This month's installment was Predator 2 about which nothing really needs to be said.

God Speed, Speed Us Away!

#10: Streets of Fire

This 1984 self-described "rock and roll fable" takes place in a past/future time and place where early 1950's style melds with an early 1980's version of post-apocalyptic tribalism (think American Graffiti meets Mad Max set in Robocop's Detroit). Streets of Fire is perhaps the paradigmatic late 70's/early 80's youth-in-rebellion movie, full of big hair, big leather and vinyl jackets, urban sleaze, all set off by an overwrought Jim Steinmam new-romanticism soundtrack. Visually this film evokes director Walter Hill's better known The Warriors but here the line between good and evil, personified by Michael Pere (immediately recognizable from his Eddy and the Cruisers fame) and a very young, very creepy, very powdered and rouged Willem Dafoe, is clearly drawn. It completely captures a tiny slice of time, say 1979 to 1983. That moment when Cyndi Lauper seemed like the future and Madonna was a flash in the pan. However it had the misfortune to be released in 1984. Its performance at the box office suggests it missed its zeitgeist.

I can't believe I missed it the first time around.

Given that this film is everything 1982 only more so, it would be easy to dismiss it by pigeonholing it as of the its-so-bad-its-good variety. This would be a mistake. It is true that this film deploys some of the more embarrassing fashion and cinematography of its time. It is also true that the plot is thin and that the dialogue lacks nuance. Hell, sometimes the dialogue seems to be missing verbs. But all of that does not diminish the power of this stupid movie. Its power is in its visuals, its music, and its guileless embrace of unlimited youth. It is not art but it is worth seeing. I suspect this is one of those films that benefits from a theater screening. Part of what makes it work is its ability to displace mundane reality for its own and that might be difficult to achieve if watched between phone calls while surfing the web.

The cast is full of people who will do important work in future movies. At the same time, much cultural shame could have been avoided if the people who decided these things had watch Rick Moranis in this movie more closely.

My only complaint is that the movie doesn't have enough Steinman music; he only provides two songs, both presented as concert performances by Diane Lane's character. Seriously? The whole vibe of the movie is a visual representation of the world his music describes--that excessively hormonal infatuation with speed, drama, sex, satin, and hair.

Black Metal and the Fate of Civility

#9: Until the Light Takes Us

This documentary chronicles the rise and fall of the Norwegian Black Metal movement of the late 1980's and early 1990's; the period when the movement went from an underground collection of outsider musicians with a thing for indigenous culture and against the "Jewish cult" Christianity to a violent public caricature of church-burning satanists. This was a musical and cultural movement centered on a rejection of consumer culture, popular music and, apparently, the influence of American forms and values in Norway. Like the demise of Grunge in the U.S., a number of the stars are dead, apparently the most charismatic of them a Swede (who adopted the name "Dead") and shot himself in the head with his own shotgun. Some are in prison, and others are just confused and angry that their personal movement turned into a commercial enterprise only to be digested, sold and then crapped out into mainstream culture. One difference, which may be telling, is that the photos of Dead's suicide ended up as the cover of his band's next album.

All in all, this is a pretty pedestrian documentary that could be made about nearly any deviant cultural movement that blasted into the popular culture, indulged in the worst of its own excesses, and then flamed out in a orgy of suicide, murder, arrests, and acrimony.

What was remarkable about this film was the experience of watching it. When I got to the theater there was a snaking line of people dressed in black. I was pretty sure they weren't there for the screening of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. This was, without a doubt, the most polite line I've ever been in. There were two guys behind me in the line to purchase tickets who had bought their tickets earlier in the day. I told them this was the line for people buying tickets but they stood in line anyway because they didn't want to "cut ahead." Wow.

The theater was sold out. People moved around so that late arriving groups could sit together. When the lights went down the crowd fell silent and for the next hour and 30 minutes no cell phones went off, nobody was texting, nobody was chatting, confused about the plot, or driven to deconstruct the film during the film. The movie was only average but I intend to go to films that attract death-metal heads from now on.

BTW, the maximum sentence for murder in Norway is 21 years and they are spent in what are basically dorms decorated by Ikea? Wow.

Can you oppose the Bush foreign policy and still be an unreflective sexist and racist? Seems so!

#8: American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi
If you think you are angry at Barack Obama after his first year, this may be a good time to remember what a truly awful presidency can bring. At the same time, this film is a little demonstration of what happens when you conflate political venom with cultural biases and an object lesson in being very very careful about understanding your anger before you buy the film stock.

This film is comprised of a series of interviews with people who knew Rice when she was growing up in Birmingham, as a college student in Denver, during her time at Stanford and then into her disastrous runs as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State for the GW Bush administration. There are two underlying themes here, neither of which put Rice in a complimentary light. First, filmmaker Sebastian Doggart sugggests that Rice has something of a daddy complex (beginning with her own daddy); her life has been a chain of close attachments to older men who bring her prestige and power and whose worldviews she adopts chameleon-like and wholeheartedly. It is not clear if Doggart believes this is a strategic ploy to climb the professional and political ladder or if she is just a woman with very little moral compass but a canny ability to be at the right place at the right time. Either way, he makes it clear that pretty young girls who function as ideological mirrors for old men have and advantage in this world. She, for what its worth, attributes it to God's plan for her.

The second theme is that Rice has consistently found herself promoted above her capacities. In this film she is portrayed as the mechanical concert pianist who lacked emotional content, the
Affirmative Action hire at Stanford who undid much of the good of Affirmative Action as its Provost, and the least-prepared National Security Adviser in the history of the post who came to the job as a Soviet specialist even after that country had ceased to exist and failed to protect the president from his own delusions.

I agree that Rice, and the entire edifice of foreign policy under the Bush administration was one long disaster punctuated by sardonic punch lines. No president has ever failed as spectacularly as that one. And Rice certainly bears blame for it all. Only Rice is accountable for her own mendacity. I hate Condi Rice, everything she is and everything she ever will be. She is an American disaster.

And yet this film leaves me feeling a bit icky, as if by agreeing with its conclusions I am somehow complicit in what are fairly routine rhetorical troupes trotted out to undermine women and minorities. Is it really necessary to gender load the pattern of sycophancy that has marked her rise? It seems to me that being personally ingratiating and reflecting back old men's egos is a pretty reliable path to power for both sexes. Is the fact that she benefited from Affirmative Action really necessary to explain her professional incompetence? If so, I must have missed the era of Affirmative Action that forced JP Morgan to take on Jamie Dimon.

Plus the repeated tape of jilted fiancee (and former Bronco Wide Receiver) Rick Upchurch claiming that Rice picked power over love as he described in excruciating detail their sexless engagement was just creepy and mean. Given the tenor of the rest of the film, I'm surprised that Doggart didn't take the opportunity of all of those swirling rumors that Rice is actually a lesbian to make the case that the Iraq War is what happens with lesbians act out their buried hostility to masculine men.

Finally, I can't figure out the title of this film. There isn't even an allegation here that Rice did what she did for knowledge. Sure, I can find plenty of devils in the sorry story of the Bush administration but little evidence that anybody in the joint was thirsting for truth. Least of all Rice.

The Bride is a Bitch

#7: Bitch Slap

If your favorite part of Kill Bill 2 is the fight in the trailer between The Bride and Daryl Hannah then stop reading right now and go rent this movie.

Borrowing key plot points from The Usual Suspects but with a lot more cleavage, this film is exactly what it purports to be: a sexploitation rip off with a cast of pole dancers and the movie that Quentin Tarantino wishes he had made instead of Grindhouse. Hopefully he will take a look before he remakes Faster Pussycat Kill Kill.

The acting is better than you would expect and the story line has absolutely no redeeming qualities. By the way, the psychopathic sadistic murdering lesbian is a feminist. Classic.

Sexy Hot Priests?

#6: Into Temptation
I just like Jeremy Sisto.

Setting that aside, this is a fine film. Sisto plays an inner-city parish priest whose sparsely attended masses and slightly off-center sermons belie the actual man who occupies the role and can't quite tamp down real human emotions behind the doctrinal and institutional walls that separate the priesthood from the laity.

Sisto is great in this role. It would be easy to depict this character as torn, or tortured, or tempted (aren't all movie priests all of the above or, alternatively, gay?). But Sisto's Father John is just a priest. Not gay. Not excessively tortured. Not really contemplating leaving the priesthood. Not solving crime or sleeping with his sister. He's just a guy whose taken on a tedious job tending to a blue collar flock and who takes his duty to save his confessors as seriously as you would hope he would if it were you in the confession booth. Confronted by both real pain and love, Father John just tries to help. That sounds way cheesier than the film actually is.

One unremarkable day, Father John hears a preemptive confession from a woman who intends to kill herself on her birthday and seeks ablution for her sins, both current and future. Unable to just let her go her way, Sisto's character sets off to rescue her. His search leads him into a world of prostitution, strangely engaged librarians, pornography, and urban violence and decay. At the same time, an old girlfriend comes back into his life, newly divorced and still carrying a torch. Here is where you expect him to struggle, to reconsider, to waver. Sisto manages to relay deep and conflicting emotions but none of the ones you might expect.

Once again, Starz is screened this little gem with DVD projection, which is doubly sad given what appears to be a nicely executed cinematographic scheme. Damn you Starz!

This film does slow well. It leads the viewer up to the movie priest clichés but avoids them without resorting to tricks or ill-conceived cinema interventions. If you can get past the sincere depiction of a quietly compelling faith this is a fine film. It doesn't exactly endorse the Church nor does it put its faith in the magic of faith but, in the end, the hero is a slightly pudgy, fairly geeky, sorta hot, priest...

The Missing Noir

#5: The Missing Person

This update of the noir genre is a plodding private detective mystery that puts the self-consciously referential Bogartish leading man on the trail of a mystery man and child. Full of elusive characters with obscure motives and lighted largely from behind venetian blinds, writer/director Noah Buschel deploys a series of noir tropes (cigarettes, booze, floozies, voice-over exposition) in a way that both honors the form and answers the question of how those props would play in contemporary America. Turns out it is much more difficult to be a hard-boiled private dick swaddled in smoke in today's L.A. than you might think.

Unfortunately this film is paced so slowly, and with so many feet of film dedicated showing us that the protagonist drinks and smokes, that I forgot to care about the plot at all. The good news is that the film, and everyone in it, seems to be moving through molasses such that it is difficult to miss anything. And while the film tries to hold its audience with the classic neorealist visuals, the grainy footage and washed-out colors are more annoying than expressionist.

Part of the problem may be that Starz elected to screen the film with DVD digital projection rather than on film. What might have been starkly high contrast scenes on film in this format are just harsh. (I don't know why the Starz Center does this--it is my least favorite thing about the place and I think they should tell us before we get there when they aren't going to screen actual film.)

Finally, something about this picture seems stale, like it has been in the can for a very long time. It premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival but Amy Ryan looks pretty young here and the technology seems a bit dated. I have no evidence, it is just a hunch.

The film has a terrific jazzy score and is clearly a labor of love but overall it seems to fall between the cracks of a genuine genre film and an ironically detached homage to the genre. It could be that a genuine noir is impossible today; noir may require a more visually innocent audience in order to shock with its gritty realism. As for ironic detachment, does American film really need any more of it?

John Huston might have been able to do something with this material but in its current form it seems to have lost its way.