Walk the Angry Beach aka Hollywood After Dark (1968)

Low budget film about a scrap yard proprietor who agrees to become part of a heist, Rue McClanahan plays a stripper (shiver). Bad, pointless and slow. This was the ‘Film Crew’ version, which is basically a reteaming of some of the old MST3K guys, only here they can be more racy. Commentary not exceptional, whole thing seemed more then a little tired. What an awful movie, would have been nice if character motivations seemed coherent. 1 out of 5.

With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America (2004)

The first half of this documentary is material condensed from the 1996 PBS mini-series "With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America", which I had already seen. The second half covers the same material as Stephen Mansfield’s book The Faith of George W. Bush, which I have already read. So on the whole this was review for me, but a good summery presentation of the ‘religious right’s’ attempts to influence the presidency from 1960 on. I appreciate the fact that this story of evangelicals reach into the white house is told almost exclusively by evangelical players themselves; not that there’s not room for the other side of things, there most certainly is (I would like to see such a documentary), but the evangelical right often complains they don’t get a fair shake at presenting their story, and here they are given one by the reputedly highly secular PBS, and some admirably detached British film makers. I liked that. 3 out of 5.

Homicide: Life on the Street: Season 5 (1996-1997)

Fifth season and still as strong as ever. A really tough year for Kellerman (arson department scandal, the Luther Mahony saga.) , but the Bayliss/Pembelton dynamic remains at the series core. I was very impressed by the revelations we got about Bayliss’s childhood this season, they make total sense, they explain Bayliss; yet we didn’t get them until season 5, which just made them that much more powerful, looking back and retroactively seeing them simmering all this time. Plus the way the stroke changed Frank Pembelton‘s life forever, and in ways not expected, very well handled. Two episodes from this season I would most like to show others: "The Documentary" and "Kaddish". 5 out of 5 for 5.

S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale (2009)

Simply put a sequel to writer/director Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult film Donnie Darko is a not a good idea. While Kelly developed an elaborate universe for his genera bending mediation on teen angst, such a personal film stands on its own, plus the primary character died at the end. Kelly was not involved in this follow up film, he probably never though someone would have the audacity to a make a sequel. The Donnie Darko magic is just that, a one of a kind thing that happens every so often, develops a cult following, and can’t be conscious replicated; even Kelly himself was unable to recapture his own signature essence in his much anticipated second film Southland Tales, which turned out to be an overproduced, contorted mess. S. Darko on the other hand is not overproduced, rather it is a pointless re-working of the original film, structurally dependent on parallelism to the first, it reminded me of how Home Alone II hued excessively close to the blueprint of the original, and was thusly pointless from a story telling point of view. But the Home Alone franchise is all about seeing inept crooks trip on stuff, while Donnie Darko was actually about story and character development. There is no point to S. Darko, except that actress Daveigh Chase agreed to reprise her rather small role from the original (the only Donnie cast member to appear in this movie), so the film makers felt they had enough of a tie in to warrant this purely money making exercise. This movie is really just a waste of time and effort. So boring and unfulfilling. 1 out of 5.

A Matter of Life and Death, aka Stairway to Heaven (1946)

I admit I’ve been kind of putting off this review because there is just so much great stuff in this movie that I didn't know where to start. Now my favorite Powell/Pressburger film, it is a lament for the young solders that died in World War II, as well as a plea for the continuation of strong Anglo-American relations now that the war is over. The film concerns Peter Carter (David Niven) a British bomber pilot and budding poet, who in a severely damaged aircraft and without a parachute, knowing he is going to die, strikes up a remarkable conversation with the American WAC (Kim Hunter) ’manning’ the radio tower at Carters home base. Carter should have died shortly there after, but was missed by the ‘Conductor’ (a delightful Marius Goring as a fmr. French aristocrat beheaded in the “so called glorious revolution“) assigned to escort him to the afterlife. In short time the mistake is noticed, and Goring’s Conductor 71 is sent down to Earth to fetch the pilot, who is as surprised as anybody by his miraculous survival. Carter won’t go quietly up to ‘heaven’ with his Conductor however, in the time he mistakenly inherited he has fallen in love with the same American girl he had conversed with over the radio earlier. Carter argues that it was not his fault that he survived and fell in love, but he did and has now “incurred new responsibilities” and deserves a chance at a life with June. An appeal is filed, and Carter must now find some one among the deceased to argue his case against the court appointed prosecutor (an amusingly stern performance by Raymond Massey), a Boston born lawyer who died in the American Revolution, hates the British, and is thus very much opposed to bending the rules to allow for this trans-Atlantic romance.

All the while we have June and local doctor Frank Reeves (another great performance by the one of a kind Roger Livesey) semi-humoring Peter, while trying to find a way to deal with what they suspect is a massive, potently fatal brain injury. Whether Peters angelic visitations, and the modernist after life we see on screen, are real or just transpiring in Carters mind, is left ambiguous, though the film went out of its way to be true to the neuroscience of the time. This is a wonderfully contemplative film, there are so many ideas to think about, performances to savoir, and unique visuals to behold. Most notable among the visual motifs is the black and white modernist heaven (while the Earth is shown in a vibrant Technicolor, prompting one of the best lines in the film). This after life, never explicably refer to buy its ‘employees’ as heaven, is devoid of traditional Christian imagery, and is instead a kind of socialist paradise, where everyone is equal, and has a job. Unlike most anything you’ve seen, A Matter of Life and Death could have been played any of a number of different ways, but the film makers play it mostly straight, fully endearing , and with the proverbial good-natured little sparkle in their eyes. Another Powell/Pressburger triumph, 5 out of 5.

Raw Force (1982), Savage Man... Savage Beast, aka Ultime grida dalla savana (1975)

The second double feature in the Grindhouse DVD set begins with Raw Force, a competently produced camp horror film with a slightly involved plot. You see there are a group of cannibalistic monks who live on ’Warriors Island’ in the South China Sea. During World War II the Japanese bypassed Warriors Island because the monks there have the power to bring back the dead, disgraced martial artists who go there to die, and use the zombie fighters to defend themselves. The only catch is, to bring back the dead warriors the monks require the flesh of human females to barbeque. By the early 1980’s this supply of unwilling female entrees is supplied by Mr. Speer, a German with a Hitler mustache, and his gang of American hoods who kidnap women, and sell them to the monks in exchange for some of the valuable jade that is plentiful on the island (Speer then sells the jade for cheap back in Asia and still manages to make a huge profit because he has next to no overhead).

Anyways our story really begins when passengers on a cheap cruse, including members of the Burbank Karate Club and a leggy blond SWAT team officer named Cookie, accidentally stumble onto the operation (though they really don’t put everything together until the last 15-20 minutes of the film). Needles to say the group ends up marooned on Warriors Island and must contend with the monks, the zombie warriors, Mr. Speer, American street hoods, and piranhas who live in the big lake at the middle of the island (would this make Warriors Island more of an Atoll?). I think now you probably have a sense of what the movies like, enjoyable nonsense, the Love Boat goes to Hell. My only regret, killing off the 3rd grade teacher character so early, I loved his cheesy earnest delivery.

Now the second film took me by surprise. The Italin produced Ultime grida dalla savana (American title Savage Man… Savage Best) turned out to be a documentary, or perhaps more accurately what Orson Wells would have termed a “filmed essay”. I though a bit about how to best describe the topic or theme of the film, and I think the best encapsulation would be to say that its about “Mans relationship with nature, through the prism of hunting”. The movie jumps around a lot, very lose narrative structure (held together by appropriately billed ’commentary’ by Italian novelist Alberto Moravia) is a series of vignettes ranging from aborigines hunting bats with boomerangs, to a traditional Fox hunt in England, to scientifically coordinated mass fishing off the coast of South America, to a man being killed in front of his family by lions at a nature preserve in Africa, to the plight of Eskimo hunters, to Falconry, the Burmese government clamping down on cannibalism, to hippie animal rights protesters camped out at Cape Code. This film is all over the place and fascinating, in part do to the sensational subject matter and in part to the nugget sized bits things are presented in (anticipated countless cable programs for the short attention spanned on VH1, Spike, and True TV).

In looking into the film after seeing it I learned that it generated a fair share of controversy. Of course because it was violent and exploitive, but also because some of the more sensational scenes were apparently staged, though whether that man being attacked by lions was staged is apparently still in dispute. I suppose I wasn’t as shocked by it as others because 1) I’m watching it in 2009 which is a very different, arguably more jaded and numbed zeitgeist then 1975, and 2) I viewed the film as being more of an artsy grind house offering then an exploitive documentary, though its easily easily one of the more attention grabbing and memorable ‘documentaries’ I’ve every seen. My favorite sequence is the very last in the film, with the German naturalist and mountain man and his (I’d be disappointed if it were faked) ‘first contact’ meeting with a pack of wild wolves (beautiful snow covered Bavarian wilderness all around, a lovely sight). Quite the film experience, I can only imagine it on the big screen.

Ah now I get it, cannibalism is what ties these films together.

I Wake Up Screaming (1941)

Based on the novel of the same name by pulp writer Steve Fisher, this film is notable for being a rather unlikely proto-noir, foreshadowing the ‘shadowy’ camera work and compromised characters that would come to define the genera when it really started to emerge around the end of World War II. I say unlikely because the movie is a Betty Grable vehicle, with a script adapted by musical comedy writer Dwight Taylor. Yet the noir elements are there, especially in Laird Cregar’s excellent performance as an obsessed police detective. Victor Mature, looking very much the young Jerry Orbach, straddles comedy and supposed intensity to serve as the lynch pin to the films unevenness, although its a likable unevenness (like a less well handled They Drive By Night). Elisha Cook Jr. and Carole Landis also appear, the later in a role that (again with the foreshadowing) evokes her early death. 3 out of 5.

Lynch {One} (2007)

Documentary on David Lynch of the ‘follow the subject around with a video camera’ verity. Assembled from footage culled over the course of two years, we see the eccentric director as he works on his largely improvised feature INLAND EMPIRE (2006), as well as on a verity of smaller projects from photographing Polish factories, to building a desk/podium type thing in his carpentry shop. That’s one of the things I’ve always liked about Lynch, very much the renaissance man, causally moving from project to project, both large and small, as the muse takes him. Lynch also shares some amusing anecdotes about living in Philadelphia and Boise, Idaho. All filmed appropriately in a Lynchian style. 3 out 5.

Stupidity (2003)

Documentary on the surprisingly understudied subject of ‘stupidity’. Topics include: what is stupidity?, the increasing prevalence and glorification of stupidity in modern culture, stupidity on television, in film, the internet, religion and politics. It’s a wide ranging primer that is really a creative topic for a documentary. George W. Bush is of course discussed, and even if you don’t think him stupid (myself and many of the commentators in the film don’t) you’ve got to admit that’s he’s not known as the greatest advocate of critical thinking. Noam Chomsky, Joel Schumacher, and Bill Maher are among those interviewed on the subject (Maher’s 2000 comedy special ‘Be More Cynical’ (which I watched last night) is mostly about stupidity). The documentary that introduced me to the admittedly stupid one time internet phenom ‘Evil Bert’. 3 out of 5.

Ironically Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judd made the same point about the ill effects of our increasingly imbecilic culture in his 'stupid' comedy Ideocracy (2006), which again ironicly was never abel to get a theatrical distributer.

Bolt (2008)

The only film to come out of Disney’s own computer animation department (as opposed to Pixar) that I’ve wanted to see. The plot about a ‘super powered’ dog (John Trevolta) who doesn’t know he’s an actor, attempting to return to his owner/co-star person (Miley Cyrus, appropriately cast) after an accidental separation, borrows heavily from other Disney properties like Toy Story, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, and one particular episode of Chip N’ Dale Rescue Rangers ("Flash the Wonder Dog"). Better then average kids movie has heart, as well as a scene stealing hamster (Mark Walton) who makes the movie. James Lipton has an amusing cameo-role as the ‘Truman Show’ type director of Bolt’s network TV series (which by the way looks prohibitively expensive to produce for television). 3 ½ out of 5.

Some Recent Deaths

Ken Annakin (1914-2009)

Long lived British director is best known to me for movies like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) and The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988), both of which I found quite satisfying entertainments in my younger days. His name is not the inspiration for Anakin Skywalker, George Lucas would like you to know that.

Jack Cardiff (1914-2009)

One of the greatest of all cinematographers, he was really the third man in the Powell/Pressburger creative partnership. He also worked with Ken Annakin, and they died the same day.

Beatrice "Bea" Arthur (1922-2009)

I enjoyed her character Maude in the few episodes of All in the Family I saw her in, I think I’d also probably like the series, and of course as I child of the 1980’s I couldn’t avoid seeing Golden Girls. Bea Arthur seemed like one enjoyably tough old cookie.

Dom DeLuise (1933-2009)

He was a go to man for voice work in animation during the 80’s and 90’s, but prior to that he was apparently a quite popular star. To me he’ll always be the featured player in the Don Bluth repertory company (and my six month old nephew looks a lot like him when propped up and wearing that silly hat).

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (2005)

Fascinating look into the ‘midnight movie’ phenomenon of the 1970’s, and the films that made it happen. The documentary is primarily the story of six movies, the giants of the midnight circuit, which launched careers and influenced the pervasive irony of modern cinema from art house to blockbuster. The first ‘real midnight movie’ was the 1970 Mexican film El Topo. A sort of Siddhartha meets Spaghetti western with traces of Todd Brownings Freaks (which also had much success in a second run as a midnight movie), it’s the story a Mexican gun man turned religious figure/revolutionary. The movie didn’t do very well until a New York City theater owner decided to show it at midnight after all his other shows were done. It became a phenomena, playing for six months to packed houses, and only taken from midnight showings when John Lennon arranged for an ultimately short lived mainstream re-release; it would be back playing around the county at midnight in short order.

Other important midnight movies include Night of The Living Dead, made by a group of Pittsburg friends and released in 1968, it didn’t gain cult statues until the studio accidentally let the copyright expire and it could be played basically for free across the county. John Waters first widely shown film, Pink Flamingos (1972) celebrated filth and united alienated sub cultures likes gays and hippies. The Harder They Come (1973) the first film made in Jamaica about Jamaicans was a sort of gangster picture that brought about something of a Reggae craze in the United States. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) show became maybe the most famous and successful of the midnight movies, with hordes of devotees that have turned its midnight showings into an interactive experience with special props, costumes, and lots of ‘speaking to the screen’. Finally David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead (1977) was unlike anything anybody had seen. A fascinating though loosely defined school of film, midnight movies (which would often play for years in the same theater) have largely dissipated as a collective experience since the 1980’s and the rise of home video; but the practice of midnight showings is still commonly revived for the initial release of expected block busters (its self sort of ironic). A fun informative documentary about some of cinema’s most significant ’cult films’. 4 out of 5.

The House Bunny (2008)

Rubber faced knock-out Anna Faris has certainly carved out an interesting niche for herself in Hollywood. Physically a male fantasy Faris could probably do all right for herself if she didn’t have a lot of talent, but the girls got old school comic chops of the pitfall variety, that have caused some to say she is the closest thing we have to a modern day Lucille Ball or Carole Lombard. Faris, who is well aware of how to use her looks for maximum comic effect, conceived of the idea for this film after wondering what happens to all the former playboy bunnies after they leave the mansion. The story has Faris playing Shelly, one such bunny forced to leave the mansion (where her character has lived since age 18) and make it on her own. She ends up house mother to a group of socially awkward sorority sisters who hope some of her magic with the boys will rube off on them. So predictably Shelly helps make the girls look prettier (and thusly more self confident) and they help her get a little smarter (and thusly more self confident). I suppose the message might be a little offensive if the film didn’t champion girls achieving a happy medium between their looks and their brains, you know, be yourself type stuff. Anyway Faris gets most of the laughs in the film, though I wish there were more, and future viewers may just find the movie most interesting for featuring a number of up-and coming young actresses as the sorority sisters (including Rumor Willis, Emma Stone, and American Idol winner Katharine McPhee). Also Colin Hanks has a nice turn as Farris’s well adjusted love interest, and Beverly D’Angelo appears on screen for what feels like the first time in a decade. Likable enough, 2 ½ out of 5. If you see the movie on DVD be sure to watch the last deleted scene (an alternate beginning) that’s actually kind of profound.

Star Trek (2009)

Here producer/director J.J. Abrams gives us what is probably the most literal franchise reboot in film history. Brought in by Paramount to revitalize and ‘broaden’ the venerable sci-fi institution, Abrams was selected no doubt because he is said to have his finger on the pulse of that which is cool, and Star Trek historically is not. So young, good looking actors are brought in to reprise the roles of the original series crew, and we get a story about how the gang all got together in their twenties, and plenty of broad appeal action and special effects sequences. This is the casual Star Trek fans Star Trek movie, Abrams obviously has an affection for the series, in the way he treats the characters and the plethora of franchise in-references for the devotees; but he is not a dogmatic hard core trekkie, continuity be dammed if it gets in the way of making the franchise hip, or limits his story telling options. In fact it’s that attitude towards continuity, audacious in its way, that will most divide hard core fans about the film. I won’t get into any details except to say that the implications of the film will be a lively source of debate on internet forums. I think I have a broad sense of where Abrams may be taking the franchise, and its got a lot of exciting possibilities, but I remain more then a little bit leery. A sequel to this film has supposedly already been greenlit, and I suspect that movie will determine the future of the franchise, and for how long it remains broad based and profitable summer entertainment, before reverting again (inevitably) to nerd dominated niche statues. 4 out of 5.

Women's Camp 119 (1977), Tortured Angels (1982)

In 2007 I watched two Pam Grier Blaxploitation films (Coffie and Foxie Brown), in preparation for viewing the Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature tribute to low budget exploitive fair: Grindhouse. I enjoyed Grindhouse, as I enjoyed the Grier films, there was something fascinating about them. It was a movie experience not quite like anything I’d seen before, a little seamy, a little shocking, surprisingly gripping, it seemed that anything could happen in a 'Grindhouse' feature. These are the types of film that you could easily label bad, but actually they can be kind of good, you see there’s an art to them, and Tarantino understands that art and has become the biggest main stream name to advocate this ‘underground’ cinema. That’s why when a chance came up to purchase the ‘Grindhouse Experience’, a collection of 20 films from among those Tarantino had selected for the 2007 Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival, I jumped at the chance (for less then $20 I couldn’t say no). Arranged as a series of double features meant to be representative of the various Grindhouse sub-genres, you’ll be seeing a fair amount about these movies on these pages in the coming weeks and months, so now its time to get started:

The first double feature could be classified as the ‘women’s prison’ genera, though actually none of the films presented here perfectly fit that description. The first film, Women’s Camp 119 is an Italian picture about a Nazi facility where various, how shall we say, sexual- type experiments are carried out with a group of lesbians, communists, and prostitutes as unwilling participants. The experiments are things like attempting (unsuccessfully) to transplant uteruses, and to ‘cure’ homosexuality. All of this under the supervision of the very ideologically committed Dr. Franz Wieker. Wieker is one of a number of over-the-top nemeses for the poor woman inmates (none of whom survive interestingly) including their lesbian overseer, a smiling Nazi torturer, and an aggressive retarded man. This is seamy exploitive stuff, yet it is oddly successful at its pretensions of being an exposea of brutal Nazi medical experimentation. At the end of the film, pictures of German men who had committed evil acts of this type, and where at the time of the films release still free, are displayed with brief descriptions of their crimes (including one who invented a kind of portable gas chamber, and one who killed 80,000 Jews). Again this mixture of low brow exploitation, and legitimate sociological commentary, is perplexing and fascinating.

Tortured Angels, aka Strike of the Tortured Angels is a cleaner film (i.e. no nudity) from Hong Kong. It is about three teenage girls who escape from an island camp for troubled youth (they sneak off on the side of the boat that comes to collect the flowers the ‘inmates’ grow for sale on the outside). One of the girls is determined to get revenge on the ambitious and unfeeling doctor who drove her sister to suicide, and who cheated with her mother on her ailing prominent physician father. She wants revenge, but will she sell out her innocent soul to get it? The answer is no, cope out ending has bad guy falling to his death inside a pretty beautiful canyon. Kind of helping the lead girl are a naive, kind of bimboish girl who keeps a small pig as a pet, and an obviously Asian girl whose either suppose to be mixed-race, or is doing the Al Jolson black face shtick (love her Afro). They are all pursued for escaping the island by the handsome and sympathetic councilor/ security officer Mr. Lee. Film feels like there’s five to ten minutes of plot missing. Again these movies being what they are defy my traditional ratings system, suffice it say, they were interesting.

Adventurland (2009)

Nicely grounding comedy sporting the classic boy-to-man-emotional-growth-arc that has become the stock and trade of the Apatow Industrial Entertainment Complex (I say this as a devoted fan of the Apatow Industrial Entertainment Complex). Ably helmed by Superbad director Greg Mottola, story concerns James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), forced by economic circumstance to spend the summer after college graduation working at Pittsburg amusement park Adventurland. This isn’t all bad because it provides, well the humor and setting for the movie, and allows James to meet Em (the already ubiquities but appealing Kristen Stewart) and fall in love. You know I really liked this couple, they seemed real and relatable, I sincerely wanted them to get together, and not in the forced way your suppose to in most romantic comedies. They have real problems (Stewart gets to show she‘s a good little actress with a well handled and developed emotional arc of some complexity), but their good people and you wish them success.

Film also offers some sure bets in the comedy part of its dramady. Martin Starr, who I want to become a breakout star so bad, finally gets sufficient screen time in a movie, pluse you’ve got two of the most talented players from the current incarnation of Saturday Night Live as the parks oddly low-key husband and wife owners (Bill Hedar and Kristin Wigg, that latter doing that dead pan thing she does so well). Plus 1987 setting equals cool music and references to Reagan and Apartheid, and working job your over qualified for refrences my current state of existence. So Kudos all around. 4 out of 5. Somehow I continue like Ryan Reynolds on screen, while suspecting that I would not like him off it.

Red River (1948)

This Howard Hawks production is one of maybe ten westerns essential to film literacy. The story is a variant on Mutiny on the Bounty, though here set on a cattle drive. John Wayne is Tom Dunson, the actors most complicated character beside The Searchers Ethan Edwards. Dunson lost the girl he loved to an Indian attack on a wagon train he had left to pursue new cattle land in Texas. Guilty over what he feels was an abandonment (he intended to send for her from California once he got his ranch going) he raises the lone survivor from the wagon train, a teenage boy, as his own. Fourteen years later, after the Civil War, with the southern economy a mess and Texas just lousy with Cattle, Dunson leads his adoptive son (as an adult played by Montgomery Clift in his film debut) and a group of men (including the always fun Walter Brennan), north towards Missouri where beef starved Yankees will pay a boat load for his 9,000 head of cattle. But en route Dunson becomes crazy and despotic, Captain Bligh-like, which necessitates Clift’s leading a mutiny against him when Dunson tries to hang two of the cattle hands. The deposed Dunson rides off for assistance, and with his new found posy presses after Clift with the intent to kill him. Very well done western with few dry spots. I was impressed with how many of the men on cattle train felt like they actually had developed characters. The citizens of Abilene on the arrival of the cattle seem probably more excited about access to beef then they were about the end of the civil war. John Ireland plays one of the great red hearing characters of all time. 4 ½ out of 5. Very watchable for a black & white western.

Little Children (2006)

Director Todd Field and writer Tom Perrotta adapted this from the latter’s novel, thusly it has a very literary feel (strangely enhanced by the Frontline-type narration) and is reminiscent of the kind of the thing you might read in a freshman literature class. The film, as the title obliquely implies, is about emotional adolescence, featuring many characters who set themselves upon a corse for tragedy, because as the narrator tells us speaking for one of the characters point of view: “We want what we want, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

Spoiler Alert

But that’s the beauty of the story, though it builds seemingly towards one ominous conclusion, it acknowledges that much tragedy can be avoided, if we just grow up. I was impressed with this movie on many levels, technically, actorly, story structure wise, though I had been more emotional engaged by other stories which plumed similar territory (I am thinking particularly here of the work of Alan Ball), but the ending made up for that. It was like the ending of Stranger then Fiction, but without feeling like it was the deliberate and self-acknowledged cheat that movie presented (though in all fairness, the acknowledgment of the cheating is what made that ending work).

I also need to spend a moment to complement the performance of Jackie Earle Haley (with whom I share a birthday), the former child star whose more recent work (2006 and on) has been transfixing. He was one of the two most complicated characters in Watchmen (in which co-star Patrick Wilson also appears),and his small silent role in the All The Kings Men remake was for me the most fascinating part of an otherwise awful film. Here Haley is a partially reformed pedophile, one who you actually feel emotional empathy for! He still punishes himself for what he’s done (his mother describes his room at home as a self imposed continuation of his prison cell), but he’s also still tempted (his scene at the public pool). The relationship between him and his mother is the most tragically sweet thing in the film, and his dynamic with obsessive ex-cop Noah Emmerich could have been its own film.

Little Children continues my recent viewing pattern of Kate Winslet movies, and I’ll tell you that so far nothing I’ve seen here in has been anything less then a must see. 5 out of 5. In reflection the few things which I could see as possible flaws in the picture, mostly slight story omissions, are really just the movies way of not spelling everything out for us.

Homicide: Life on the Street: Season 4 (1995-1996)

I continue my love affair with this series, somehow it just keeps getting better. Some cast transition this season, harbinger of the more massive changes I know are coming later. Reed Diamond’s is a character I grew to like, subtly quirky. With the existing cast I thought it was nice to see Yaphet Kotto out of the station house more this season (The Stakeout, The Wedding), and Clark Johnson’s Lewis character certainly got more interesting (Scene of the Crime, Full Moon, The Wedding). Many memorable episodes include Dolls Eyes (Strong performance by Marica Gay Hardin as a grieving mother), Hate Crime (episode about an alleged hate crime against a homosexual somewhat daring for the 1990's), Quirky gems like The Hat (Lily Tomlin won an Emmy for her guest work here) and Full Moon, which I can only describe as a David Lynch tribute episode. Heart Beat and the Sniper 1 &2 give us three really good ‘serial killer’ episodes, but since they’re three different killers, I wish they hadn’t followed on each other so closely, though any of those would be good introduction episodes to the series for viewers transitioning from more pedestrian cope fair. Solid as can be, I think I watched all 22 in like a week and a half. 5 o 5.

The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003)

A melancholy film about husband (Campbell Scott) and wife (Hope Davis) dentists and their marital difficulties. Film focuses on Dr. David Hurst, an unassuming man whose blandness masks an inner complexity. Campbell Scott (George C.'s son) gives an excellent performance here, he can elicit subtle nuance from his stone faced character, watch as he beautifully slow burns through much of the picture, yet conveys a mighty restraint. Hope Davis is good as the wife, she’s got a lot going on to, but its all more distant since the story is from Scott’s point of view.

Notable also are the fantasy elements which balance just right with the near hyper-reality of the everyday life within the troubled marriage. Little is said overtly between these characters about their situation, so we get fantasy and memory sequences, which especially towards the beginning of the film are reminiscent of Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours. Denis Leary shows up as a difficult patent who Davids character’s subconscious internalizes as a living embodiment of his self loathing, with which he alternately co-operates and does battle. In its repeated juxtaposition of the profound and the mundane this is probably one of cinemas most realistic depictions of married and family life (the sequences in which the family suffers from the flu drag the way the flu drags, but are always interesting). While this film seems to have made it largely under the radar, it’s a true accomplishment worthy of attention. 4 out of 5.