Kunstler's Capsule Movie Reviews

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Disclaimer: we have a mall cineplex in our town run by the brain-dead Regal chain (formerly Hoyt's), so we rarely get movies worth writing about, in case you're wondering why I review shit like Ocean's Eleven and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Apologies to readers for slackening off the last few months. I saw very few movies this spring (because they were so juvenile and idiotic). Picking up where, sadly we left off so long ago. . . .

The War of the Worlds
(Director Steven Spielberg)
My expectations were low, given all the negative buzz, but I liked this movie a lot. It was very scary. Among the best things about it: Spielberg completely dispensed with any scientific "explanations" for what the invaders were up to -- no government experts, white-smocked lab nerds, or other stock sci-fi types came on-stage to declaim this is what the invaders want from us! The fuckers from outer space just turned up and let her rip on the human race. The carnage is impressive. Old Stevie doesn't pull any punches on the mayhem. The world gets quite a working over. The monsters are very eerie (when they creep out of their megamachines on a little recon mission). Whatever Tome Cruise's problems may be with the news media nad the public, I couldn't fault him for the job he does in this movie portraying a Spielbergian lumpenslob hero. He's expressive and appealing. The sub-plot involving Cruise's snotty, rebellious teenage son is the one tiresome element. The little girl, Dakota Fanning, is a very good actress. No doubt six years from now she'll be dating Vince Vaughn. . . .

Cinderella Man
(Director Ron Howard)
This draggy story about a not terribly interesting boxer of the 1930s, James J, Braddock, is mostly worth seeing for its graphic depiction of the Great Depression, including the social aspects of the early 20th century mass man phenomenon -- a product of industrial gigantism and the way it required our society to be organized. In short, it was a different world, one that we have left long behind us, especially the way our cities worked. The great Russell Crowe is Braddock and the portrayal has real dimension, as is always the case with Crowe. Renee Zellweger, as his long-suffering, faithful wife, has less to work with, but it's always fun to see Renee's face move in eleven different directions at once (is she laughing or crying?). Okay, for all that, the pace of this movie is terrible. It really only comes alive in the final act when Craig Bierko enters the scene as Braddock's nemesis, Max Baer, then the reigning heavyweight champ. Bierko gives us a villain of heft and dimension equal to Crowe's Braddock. The screenwriters also woke up at this point, and the best scene in the movie is the big setpiece in a nightclub when Crowe confronts the flamboyant Baer. I wasn't sorry I went to see it.

Kingdom of Heaven
(Director Ridley Scott)
I am partial to historical stories. This turkey started gobbling within the first 90 seconds and didn't let up until we walked out maybe a half an hour later. In line with the general trend down in Hollywood lately, the concept of "story" was here completely abandoned -- and I mean this in the strict dramaturgical sense. Character means nothing. Things just happen for no reason. A juicy Arab girl falls into Orlando Bloom's lap like a ripe date falling out of a palm tree. And so on. Ridley Scott is apparently suffering from a kind of combat fatigue. I couldn't bear it.

Million Dollar Baby
(Director Clint Eastwood)
A rather amazingly grim tale about lost and de-railed lives with a bravely stark, tragic ending. It is also a movie larded with just about every boxing movie cliche ever invented, and some that ain't, and rather consistently annoying for that. The performances are all competent and then some: Clint himself as the despairing old fight manager, Morgan Freeman in a classic "sidekick" role, and of course Hillary Swank, who once again gets to play against type, and pulls it off seamlessly. The movie is really a thumping downer, and most of all you have to admire the fact that Eastwood got it made in the current Hollywood system. My favorite thing in the piece is the depiction of girl-boxer Hillary Swank's trailer trash family, a gang of venal imbeciles -- a glimpse at the real America.

Ray
(Director Taylor Hackford)
Jamie Foxx does a credible and complex turn impersonating the late Ray Charles. The era, running roughly from the 1940s through the 1960s, is nicely evoked, and Charles's difficult relations with business partners, lovers, and fellow musicians is nicely explicated. The director doesn't shrink from presenting Charles as the rather selfish and exploitative person he was, and Foxx pulls it off by showing how the charm and charisma worked in the foreground to hide the machinations running in the background. The music is especially well replicated and after a while you kind of wonder if there had never been a Ray Charles, would we be listening to Jamie Foxx records?

The Aviator
(Director Martin Scorsese)
A peculiar story about a bizarre person, Howard Hughes, but rather grandly put together against the background of Hollywood in the early-to-mid 20th century -- an era that now seems as remote and enchanted as the medieval period. Hughes's parents die when he is barely out of his teens, leaving him a fortune and an oil drilling equipment company that runs like a cash register. Rich young Howard, though, is magnetically drawn to the new movie industry in Los Angeles, with its air of risk, and adventure, and sex-on-demand. Scorsese's evocation of the early Hollywood scene is the best thing about the movie -- the big set-pieces in the fabled Coconut Grove nightclub, the behavior of the slick young men and women who would become the stars of Hollywood's "Golden Age," all that glamorous fluff. Leonardo DiCaprio is consistently interesting to watch. Whatever his public persona may be, the young feller can put across plausible behavior on screen, even with such an implausible character as Hughes for material. The other big splash in the movie is Cate Blanchette doing a dead-on imitation of Katherine Hepburn, one of Hughes's more serious paramours. Blanchette doesn't really look anything like Hepburn, but she gets the weird, grating voice just right and the imperious manner. The best scene in the movie, for my money, is the one in which Hepburn takes Hughes home to meet her family in Connecticut -- a clan of self-conscious and excrutiatingly phony rich bohemians, especially Katherine's censorious "socialist" mother who Howard neatly tells off. It seems to me that the movie ran about fifteen minutes too long, but it was all-in-all a competent and admirable job.

Collateral
(Director Michael Mann)
This one had the potential for being the hit of the summer, but alas. Michael Mann is consistently stylish and intelligent. I thought I was in for something as engrossing as his earlier LA crime tale, Heat, which was operatic and deeply mysterious. But this story of a hit man on a one-night rampage around Los Angeles with a cab driver under his thumb ends up hopelessly hokey. Tom Cruise plays the silver-haired professional killer and Jamie Foxx is the cabbie he shanghaies for his night's travels. Things go wrong from the first botched hit. A lot could have been made of the relationship between the two men, but Mann succumbed to cliche and convention instead. Cruise is actually the more interesting of the two. Jamie Foxx ends up playing a mere type rather than a person. Contemporary LA, as depicted in this movie, looks so hopelssly depressing between its endless dreary commercial strip boulevards and its empty corporate "downtown," that the city of Blade Runner seems positively Beaux Arts in comparison.

The Machurian Candidate
(Director, Jonathan Demme)\
Hard to believe that the usually excellent Demme could make such a miserable hash of a tale that has already been told once brilliantly. Demme takes all the story elements from the 1962 original (by John Frankenheimer) and scrambles them hopelessly to try to make up for forty years of changes in the political map. It doesn't work. Meryl Streep is fun to watch, though, turning the old Angela Lansbury role of the Black Widow political mom into Hillary Clinton. Liev Shrieber is also interesting as her manipulated son. But Denzel Washington's role (Frank Sinatra in the original) gets most scrambled of all and Demme ends up making this excellent actor look lost. If nothing else, this movie shows how the current Hollywood system turns silk purses into sows' ears. An embarrassment for all concerned.

The Bourne Supremecy
(Director Paul Greengrass)
Despite the dopey title, this tale about an amnesiac American spy/killer hung out to dry by his own agency is consistently enjoyable. The convoluted story is never preposterous enough to subvert one's suspended disbielf and everybody plays with admirable restraint: Matt Damon as the put-upon hero and Joan Allen as the CIA "handler" who mistakenly betrayed him. Strange to relate, I believe that not one single curse word is uttered during the entire movie. As someone who employs profanity now and then, I was impressed with this experiment, which resulted in characters who, for once, don't sound like Hollywood industry brats in a production meeting.

Spiderman Two
(Director Sam Raimi)
It's about as good as a comic book movie can be, I suppose, but it's still a comic book movie. The producers hired a couple of really good writers (veteran Alvin Sargent and novelist Michael Chabon) and the result is a bunch of scenes containing something that resembles real human adult behavior instead of what we usually get: insults, bluster, boasts. Oddly, the movie looks more like a series of story-boards than a movie, but then story boards are just cartoon panels. Of course, the fundamental premise of the story and all of its detail are preposterous and/or incoherent. Tobey McGuire is interesting to watch as the tortured shlump superhero and the always excellent Alfred Molina brings a few flickers of life to the villain-cum-monster. Finally, it's sad to see all that talent put into the service of, well, a mere comic book story. Hollywood is a sad-ass place these days.

Fahrenheit 9/11
(Director Michael Moore)
As discussed in Clusterfuck Nation:  
Michael Moore's Farenheit 9-11 was doing a brisk business for the 10p.m. show at the local cineplex Sunday night, which tells me that the public is hungry for someone to make sense of the events of recent years. It's too bad that Moore has been annointed the Great Explainer because he has only an attitude without a coherent point of view. That attitude mostly consists of paranoia, and it actually explains (and foretells) a lot.
     It accounts for the American public's complicity in its own problems. The grossly obese and slovenly Moore is a poster child forWalMart shoppers everywhere, for their childish addiction to cheap goodies and lack of impulse control. Like the public he represents, Moore has no cognizance of the larger problems behind the churn of recent events, for instance the public's own surrender of its allegience and personal sovereignty to giant corporations and the cheap blandishments they offer in return for slavish loyalty. All you get from Moore is shopper's remorse. He's never gotten over the fact that his hometown of Flint, Michigan, sold its soul to General Motors, and eventually got fucked for doing it.
     The Flint that Moore revisits is a slum partly self-made, full of people too busy watching $50-a-month cable television to paint their houses or even clean up their yards. Moore is angry that the great paternalistic institutions of American life have stopped being good Daddies, and so his ire and paranoia eventually fasten on the chief big daddy of all, the President. The fact that George W. Bush is a pure product of the Daddy class and its agencies feeds Moore's sense of betrayal -- but doesn't lead to any more understanding of the public's predicament. For instance, Moore dwells on the attempt to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Does he suppose the oil would only benefit a few fat cats driving Hummers around Houston?
       I say Farenheit 9-11 foretells a lot because as conditions grow more desperate in post-peak-oil America we will see politics grow more delusional -- especially grass roots politics. The poor shlubs who Michael Moore represents will demonize politicians who fail to keep up deliveries of cheap gasoline and bargain merchandise, and in their wrath they'll eventually elect maniacs who will make George W. Bush look like a paragon of prudence. Like the flag-waving angry mother of a dead soldier Moore portrays blundering in rage around Lafayette Park in Washington (a pitiful Moore set-up), the American public will choke on its inchoate grievance as reality withdraws all the presumed entitlements to the world's highest standard of living.
      Michael Moore gives me the chills and the creeps. I see America's future in his ponderous, slovenly, lurching figure, stalking congressmen with his video camera and his childish rhetorical questions. I see a nation of feckless, clueless overfed crybabies building up to tantrum. It will be a long, destructive tantrum with no times-out and it will prevent the nation from getting on with life under the new realities of the 21st century.

The Day After Tomorrow
(Director Roland Emmerich)
Emmerich manages a really amazing feat here: to take a crucially pressing world issue and make it absolutely ridiculous. Global warming leads to a systems collapse of the ocean currents and brings on another ice-age -- all in about forty-eight hours. The special effects, such as a fiesta of multiple super-tornadoes tearing through Los Angeles, have an impressive nightmarish appeal. Everything else is melodramatic garbage. The script is unworthy of a home video. In a better world, Dennis Quaid's preposterous performance would be a career-ender.

The Ladykillers
(Director Joel Coen)
I admit a fierce bias for the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan. They have never made a movie that failed to delight or amaze me and this one is no exception. It was savaged by the critics when it came out in early spring, but so was practically every other movie they've made, including their masterpiece, O Brother. This one has Tom Hanks chewing the scenery as a prissy old fraud of a music professor out to rob a riverboat casino in a decrepit southern backwater. The Coen's humor is dark and hilarious -- and apparently too complicated for the American press. It had me doubled up in my seat half a dozen times. I'd pay to see it again.

Troy
(Director Wolfgang Peterson)
Fight Club meets The Time Machine. The most memorable moment occurs about five minutes into the show when a mopey Brad Pitt as Achilles dispatches an enemy giant with a nifty kung-fu sword plunge to the carotid artery. The rest is bombast and bad statuary. Pitt is so over-developed he looks like he was costumed in strip steaks. The computer jocks remain in the driver's seat, though, with their endlessly replicated armies and navies.

House of Sand and Fog
(Director Vadim Perelman)
This tragic, wrenching tale based on an Andre Dubus short story is heartbreaking to watch and contains great performances. Ben Kingsley plays a former Iranian army colonel exiled in California and reduced to working two shitty jobs (days on a highway crew and nights as a convenience store clerk) to support his family. Jennifer Connolly plays a lonely, suicidal young woman who manages to lose the beach house left to her by her father only eight months after his death. The county re-pos the house for nonpayment of taxes (which turns out to be a bureaucratic error) and puts it up for auction. Kingsley's charcter buys it cheap, hoping to improve his family's fortunes the American way. A vicious struggle ensues that leads to a lot of death and misery. Connolly's character, Catherine, represents everything that is empty, purposeless, and needlessly destructive in our contemporary life. Kingsley's Colonel Behrani stands for 'normal' virtues such as love, honor, and loyalty. Guess what loses.

Thirteen
(Director Catherine Hardwicke)
It seemed to me this story was not so much about the condition of being thirteen years old per se, as about living in an America so blown apart at the seams socially that kids can't make sense of who they are or what to do. Evan Rachel Wood plays Tracy, caught up in the sordid initiation rites of middle school in a culture ruled by hyper-sexuality and consumption frenzy. She befriends one of the school's 'cool' girls, Evie, and embarks on a career of shoplifting, drug-taking, and competitive sexual gaming. All this sensation-seeking is a substitute for a life of purpose and structure (exactly what America is fresh out of). Her single mother, Mel, played by Holly Hunter, is a loving and caretaking presence who struggles to make a living by styling hair in her home and can do nothing to help, guide, console, or discipline her child. Male human beings are hardly hardly present in this world, and the few on the margins are feckless losers. It seemed to me a sharp portrait of the kind of desperate people I see every day in the local supermarket. All the performances are vivid. Director Hardwicke's view of these goings-on is bravely unsentimental. The camera work, however, is needlessly jerky and harshly lit -- in an attempt to lend things a ragged MTV-style cinema verite edge -- which made hard to watch.

Lord of the Rings III (Return of the King)
(Director Peter Jackson)
Empty spectacle at its emptiest and most spectacular. I saw it out of a misplaced sense of duty to keep track of pop culture. If I could possibly understand how a child might sit through this exercise in tedium, I would die happy. The story (if there is one) is incomprehensible. Instead of drama, we get ceremony. The dialogue is mere recitation. Even the combat is visually incoherent -- it's a hypertrophied video game. The only thing left to marvel at is how many catering companies were involved in the production. The fact that these "Rings" films garner so many profits, kudos, and awards says a lot about the decadance of popular culture and the zombified audience that supports it. This final chapter may be the single most boring movie ever made.

Cold Mountain
(Director Anthony Minghella)
I was a fan of Charles Frazier's novel and the movie version was a big disappointment, especially after all the pre-release media hype and the rave reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker. True, the movie has sweep and color. So, what went wrong? A lot actually, starting with the screenplay and leading to a lot of bad directorial choices. The book starts with the protagonist, a confederate soldier named Inman, eloping from his hospital bed to return home to his village in the Carolina mountains. The movie begins with the seige of Petersburg and an elaborate 'back story' showing us pre-war life in Cold Mountain. The flashbacks are awkward and confusing and none of it was necessary. For one thing, they confuse Inman's chief motive, which is to flee the now-obvious lost cause, and replace it with an overcooked 'high concept' romance to explain why two people who barely know each other are so mutually obsessed. I didn't buy any of it. At bottom, it's really just a gimmick to give Nicole Kidman's character, Ada, more upfront screen time. But the strategy really gets annoying in several scenes concocted to explain why everybody calls the character "Inman," instead of by his Christian name. In the book it was unnecessary to explain because wherever Inman roamed he was a stranger to the weirdos and villains he encountered. But in the movie, they have to invent some cockamamie reason why the home folks don't even call him by his first name, and then stupidly dwell on it. The whole process stops the story cold. For all the research and money that went into the production, I found a lot of set and prop details annoying. For example, Ada's house has perennial flower beds right out of Sissinghurst; in one scene, we're even shown a slave hoeing in it! Ridiculous. I could have sworn the soldiers in the battle scenes were firing repeating rifles, which didn't exist at the time; and in a scene at the general store, the storekeeper is shown carving ham with a meat cleaver, which is also ridiculous (plus they refer to it as 'salt pork' which doesn't look anything like ham). I know, picky picky -- but these details and annoyances keep heaping up and pretty soon your disbelief is crashing. Within the troubled confines of this work, the performances are fine, especially Jude Law as Inman and Renee Zellweger as a rowdy-dowdy hillbilly gal who teams up with Ada. But annoying details keep a'comin' right down to the bloody climax in the snowy woods, in which Nicole Kidman for all the world looks like she is posing for a J. Crew catalog shoot. Blame the director and the costumer who couldn't pass up the chance to make Nicole look strikingly gorgeous one more time -- but by then my disbelief was down on the floor with candy wrappers. You probably can't skip this movie, but you'll discover that it badly fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts. Read the book sometime. It's much better.

The Last Samurai
(Director Edward Zwick)
For all its color, sweep, and production values, this is a surprisingly empty spectacle. I had to vigilantly fend off sleep. The reason: the screenplay basically sucks and the director, Mr. Zwick, lacks a firm instinct for human behavior, emotion, and motivation. What you get is canned, overcooked, and deeply static. There is no real drama based on personalities.. Even the battle scenes were boring. The whole thing gave off an odor of ceremony. I hasten to add that Tom Cruise literally soldiers through this badly-written role with enough smoldering charisma to give you hope that the thing might actually go somewhere plausible. But he is eventually defeated by the inertia. The rest of the actors are capable, too, but undone by the material. It's the guys behind the camera who fail.

Bad Santa
(Director Terry Zwigoff)
This movie has been getting very good reviews, and I happily braved a snowstorm to see it at our near-empty mall cineplex, but I found its vileness beyond the pale. Despite all-around excellent acting jobs, the film is so fundamentally disgusting that it even surpasses the sordidness of the culture it pretends to satirize. Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken reprobate safecracker who uses his annual gig as a mall Santa Claus to case and pull off a six-figure robbery in a different part of the country each year. His accomplice (and caretaker) is an Afro-American dwarf played by Tony Cox. Bernie Mac is a repellent chain-smoking store detective. Every character's behavior is so disgusting that my disbelief became completely unsuspended and crashed (except for the late John Ritter playing a dim, provincial mall manager with comic subtlety). I blame the director. The comic idea of a degenerate Santa is swell, but Zwigoff beats every gag to death and then way beyond death. By the time it's over, you desperately want to take a bath.

The Missing
(Director Ron Howard)
A nickel-plated stinker, director Ron Howard must have phoned this one in. Everything besides the props, sets, and horses throbs with inauthenticity. Cate Blanchette is a widowed homesteader in New Mexico whose teenager daughter is abducted by a renegade Indian sorcerer-thug. Her erstwhile father, played by Tommy Lee Jones, wanders into frame as a wasted-but-wiley old ne'er-do-well and he undertakes to rescue the girl. Everything that follows is utterly phony. The fight scenes are so badly blocked and photographed that you can barely make out which of the bad guys is getting it and how -- a basic violation of the revenge movie. Deserves to be melted down into guitar picks ASAP.

Master and Commander; the Far Side of the World
(Director, Peter Weir)
First of the famed 19th century naval epics out of Patrick O'Brian's long series of books, this is a rousing and satisfying movie. Russell Crowe is the ship's intrepid captain, "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, and Paul Bettany plays his sidekick, the ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. Women are virtually absent. What stands out in the movie is that the heroes are presented heroically, as men of real nobility, vision, and human kindness -- despite the fact that they are warriors. This is contrary to the long-time Hollywood habit of presenting protagonists as thugs and churls, snarling "fuck you" to all comers and behaving badly most of the time. This movie is really different. For example, the child-ensigns on board (middle sons of aristocratic families cut out of an inheritance by the rule of primogeniture) are not sexually abused by the officers but rather tenderly cared for, as by fathers. Lucky Jack and his sidekick relax between battles by playing string duets on violin and cello. The movie serves to demonstrate how different human behavior can actually be between different historic periods, social classes, and vocational conditions.

Lost in Translation
(Director Sofia Coppola)
Enjoyable chiefly as a travelogue starring the city of Tokyo, of which I'd never seen so much before -- it looks like Wilshire Bloulevard in LA to the third magnitude. The action takes place so far in the background that it is barely discernible. Bill Murray is a washed-up American actor making a one-shot pile of dough performing in a Japanese whiskey advertisement. His character is apparently a kind of cult figure over there. In the same ritzy hotel a hot young American fashion photographer, Giovani Ribisi, is staying with his dazed wife, Scarlett Johannson. She is left to her own devices most of the time and gravitates toward Bill Murray's gloomy but kindly character. The two end up having a sweet and utterly chaste quasi-romance. End of story. It's all mildly absorbing because it evinces plausible human behavior between likable personalities, but the story really goes nowhere

Seabiscuit
(Director Gary Ross)
A sweet and winning picture, but something substantially less than the sum of its parts. Toby McGuire really disappears into the strange role of jockey Red Pollard, a hard-bitten, combative figure deprived of his childhood by the Great Depression, and Jeff Bridges warms your heart as the millionaire substitute dad and horse-owner. (Chris Cooper as Seabiscuit's eccentric trainer gets so little screen time he barely registers.) The horse itself remains in the background, as perhaps a dumb animal should in a study of basically human emotion and behavior. It's an interesting portrait of America at mid-20th century. The cinematography is lovely. To sit through a movie in which nothing explodes is itself a kind of novelty.

Pirates of the Caribbean
(Director Gore Verbinski)
Why did I go to a movie based on a Disney theme park ride? Well, two reasons: 1.) air conditioning on a torrid evening, and 2.) Johnny Depp. With apologies to Anthony Lane (or was it David Denby) in the New Yorker, who liked this picture, I found it a mess of rubbish tedious to the extreme. Not even Depp's sly inventiveness could save it. The chief plot device sinks the whole enterprise: to wit, the villians are already dead -- so what's the point in fighting with them? To kill them? On that basis, no amount of color, spectacle, or acting panache really matters,

Identity
(Director James Mangold)
A badly overcooked genre shocker combining the Ten Little Indians and Motel Hell motifs. Apart from the story's glaring deficiencies, Mangold assembled a capable bunch of first-rate actors led by the always-interesting John Cusack and including Alfred Molina, Parker Posey, John C. McGinley, and Ray Liotta, but all of them seem under-occupied despite all the running around and shouting. The resolving plot gimmicks are transparent and disappointing. Unless you're stuck in a stange city with nothing else to do, as I was, skip it.

About Schmidt
(Director Alexander Payne)
Everything about Warren Schmidt's life is pathetic and third-rate -- his home and all its furnishings, the city he lives in (Omaha), the way he spends his time both before and after his retirement as an insurance executive, the people he consorts with, and his family. In that sense, the movie is an apt and accurate depiction of the way life is lived in America these days by "average" citizens, and laudable for it. But it is torture to watch -- like being in a provincial "fancy" restaurant with stinking carpets, which is, by the way, exactly the kind of restaurant Warren Schmidt would go to. Jack Nicholson was very brave to portray such a pitiful shlub.

The Hours
(Director Stephen Daldry)
This powerful, moving, and beautifully-crafted movie is also a stone downer and full of bizarre assumptions about human behavior that are really peculiar to our time. I will not attempt to summarize the complex three-part story. Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, Julienne Moore is a depressed 1950s housewife, and Meryl Streep is a contemporary career woman. Their stories are all knit together by the conceit of Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and their destinies hinge on questions of sexual identity and suicide. One can't fail to observe that all three women are lesbians in different stages of self-recognition, and to wonder how strange it is that sexual maladjustment grows across the span of the century from a bohemian neurosis to a kind of fatal Boomer indulgence. In Woolf's case, mental illness (and I take it to be depression and anxiety) seems like a lifestyle accessory, and despite her suffering, I sense that she got a lot of brownie points for acting out the role of the tortured artist. Julienne Moore's character is as lost, purposeless, and vapid as the post-heroic post-war era she inhabits. Meryl Streep's character enjoys normatized conjugal lesbian life, but her homosexual boyfriend from college, played by Ed Harris, is a poster boy for the ravages of AIDS. Nicole Kidman is especially interesting as Woolf. The now-famous prosthetic nose gives her a raptor-like beauty much more alluring than her actual kitten-with-a-whip real-life look. But Woolf comes off like a trust-fund brat who has made an art-form of perpetual adolescence. One can't help but feel she would benefited hugely from a whack upside the head and a year on Zoloft.

Adaptation
(Director Spike Jonze)
I admired this without liking it very much. Nicholas Cage plays a tortured loser screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman,whose failure to adapt Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, leads him to compose a screenplay "adaptation" based on his own failure. The result is clever without being compelling. Spike Jonze was the director previously of Being John Malkovitch, about which I felt the same. Jonze's work does, however, highlight an interesting condition about Hollywood -- the industry is losing its ability to tell stories, to handle straightforward narrative; and I don't believe it is because straightforward storytelling has become boring. The truth, I think, is that the only kind of behavior Hollywoodians can imagine anymore is their own: the way they act in their own production conferences and pitch meetings. All other human predicaments become incomprehensible. Hollywood has become a self-referential vacuum. Adaptation is about faking it when you have to work in that vacuum.

Gangs of New York
(Director Martin Scorcese)
What you get is like a sci-fi movie set on a strange planet resembling Olde New York with 19th century costumes. I didn't buy it. Mostly I didn't buy the behavior of the characters. More and more in Hollywood movies these days, the behavior of characters is based not on true human psychology or historical circumstance, but is modeled rather on other movies or on the behavior of Hollywood players themselves in development meetings -- in other words, all bluster an narcissism. Considering the top screenwriting talent involved -- Jay Cocks, Steve Zallian -- the script was remarkably lame. In so many major ways, the story was misconceived. I kept waiting for Vin Diesel to show up. The gang fights between the Irish and the so-called Nativists were particuarly implausible. They looked like out-takes from Braveheart. For all this, Daniel Day-Lewis put on a marvelous exhibition of scenery-chewing as the boss of the Nativists. And Leo DiCaprio acquitted himself neatly in a rather thankless dour role -- he gets a lot of milage out of small telling gestures. Jim Broadbent does a nice turn as Tammany Hall leader William Marcy "Boss" Tweed. But Cameron Diaz's character seems more like a hard-luck Hollywood bimbo than a real female lowlife of the period, and the movie is otherwise weirdly devoid of significant female characters.There were some knockout set-pieces in theaters and brothels, a fiesta of art-direction not clearly in the service of story. Mainly, I kept on waiting for my disbelief to be suspended, and in this I was greatly disappointed.

Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers
(Director Peter Jackson)
I'm sorry folks but I find this material brain-deadening. The New Zealand scenery is gorgeous and the computer effects are dazzling but this director can't tell a story. The action scenes are hyper-kinetic without advancing the narrative, and between battles you get interminable droning exposition that sounds like a reading of Mormon genealogy or the Welsh telephone directory. The only thing that works is the sub-plot involving an anguished misbegotten creature named Gollum who teams up with the peripitetic hobbits Frodo and Sam. This computer-generated character is a better actor than the real human stiffs in the other roles. When he is not on-screen, the movie sinks back into colorful but remarkably empty spectacle. As in the first one, I was mostly bored shitless.

Frida
(Director Julie Taymore)
I quite enjoyed this vivid bio-pic about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her husband, the political muralist Diego Rivera. Taymore beautifully captures both the haunted flavor of Mexico City (where the ghosts of Cortes and Moctezuma still reign, and death is everywhere), and the look of the period, which runs from the 1920s to the 1950s. As a college student, Frida is grieviously injured in a bus accident, and never fully recovers. But she has enough pizazz to persue the already-established, notorious womanizer Rivera and to haul him up to the alter of matrimony. Their personal, amorous, and political relations are equally tempestuous and after three decades the couple sort of flame out. But this movie is full of genuine emotion and one gets a comprehensively believable picture of how bohemia and communism, shall we say, got in bed together in the 20th century. Salma Hayak is a glamorized version of Frida. We get the trademark single eyebrow, but the choice was made to dispense with the artist's creepy mustache. A few glimpses of Hayak naked are breathtaking. My Gawd, what a babe. The always splendid Alfred Molina does Rivera very convincingly. James Woods turns up as Leon Trotsky in exile. You want to weep for Mexico and for everybody in the movie. It's really very good.

Punch-Drunk Love
(Director Paul Taylor Anderson
I was among the admirers of Anderson's previous flicks, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and Hard Eight, but in this one his mannersims veer wildly out of control and, for the many clever and beguiling touches he brings to this piece, he ultimately fails in the movie-maker's primary task: suspending our disbelief. Adam Sandler plays an opaque young businessman so devoid of social skills that he might not function successfully within a troop of baboons. He actually seems mildly retarded. God more or less tosses the sprightly and zaftig Emily Watson in his path and their courtship is quite incomprehensible. The San Fernando Valley setting is suitably ghastly -- a wilderness of highway strips and garden apartments that resemble prisons. It wasn't boring but it wasn't convincing, either.

Bowling For Columbine
(Director Michael Moore)
Michael Moore's confused screed against gun violence in America sets out with a visually engaging first twenty minutes, but soon devolves into a sour exercise in docu-egomania. Only morons are in favor of gun violence, and Moore manages to dredge up quite a few specimens of true-blue idiots, but Moore's method becomes increasingly wearisome as the thing plods on. His climactic sandbagging of the pitifully senile NRA spokesman Charleton Heston seems at least as ethically dubious as Heston's activities. Moore's own persona has become increasingly disgusting over the years. He must weigh well over 300 pounds now and looks like he sleeps in his clothes. His next movie ought to be about American slobism and obesity.

Signs
(Director M. Night Shyamalan)
On the basis of other reviews, I wasn't expecting a movie as scary as this one. Shyamalan's method reminds me of those old documentaries about Bigfoot: there's just enough footage of something to recognize that you ain't seen nothing like it before, but not so much that you become familiar with what you're seeing. In this case, it's a gang of space invaders from who-knows-where. Unlike other typical stories of this genre, there is no communication between the aliens and the earthlings. They've got nothing to say to us; they're just hungry.  Shyamalan's story-telling abilities are high-order, though the piece slips and slides a bit at the end. You're left with a pretty impressive sense of dread. Mel Gibson's mannerisms are becoming a little tedious, but Shyamalan knows how to work within limitations. Joaquim Phoneix is more interesting as Mel's brother. The director himself takes an acting turn as the local vet; it's an interesting lesson in what movie stars grandiosely call "their craft."Warning to children: induces real fright.

The Road to Perdition
(Director Sam Mendes)
I really admired this movie for its consistent and compelling mood, tone, and texture. All the pieces were right. I missed the name of the production designer, but he/she has put together a visual world of the 1930s midwest that was both inpeccable and surprising, especially the many details of an urban world that has pretty much vanished in our time -- the look of a small city hotel. . . the look of the streets, with life in the wondows of the enfronting buildings. . . the drearyness of mass industrial man as depicted in a Chicago train station waiting room or trudging along a factory exterior. It's all captured rightly and beautifully shot by Conrad L.Hall, the cinematographer. David Self's screenplay is true to the pitch of credible human emotion -- unlike most movies these days, the characters do not interact like Hollywood brats at a production conference. Tom Hanks puts more across by holding back than most actors do by chewing the scenery. The notoriously handsome Jude Law plays a psychopathic creep so loathesome, so well, that the women of the world may never forgive him for it. This movie has been compared to the Coen Brother's Miller's Crossing. There is a visual resemblence, both depict a bygone mythical urban industrial midwest that now seems as historic as the medieval period, and I am very fond of that movie's many bravura flights. But The Road to Perdition has a wholly different and authentic emotional tone. As the scenes went by, I couldn't help thinking all along the way how well they did everything and how nicely it all came together.

Minority Report
(Director Steven Spielberg)
This exercise in techno-shit futurism set in 2054 is just as repulsive as his previous "A-I." The two really are companion pieces. Speilberg shows an amazing inability to imagine a future much different from the suburban dystopia we currently inhabit. Just about everything on the screen is already here: freeways through the city; apartment towers-in-the-park. Stainless-steel-and-glass office interiors. It's more like the 1939 General Motors futurama than anything else. The props -- vehicles, guns -- are all recycled Buck Rogers. For what it's worth, his vision sure doesn't comport with my notions of the future will be about. Certainly not just the same only more so. Spielberg is obviously in thrall to computer magic, though he ignores the huge diminishing returns that ought to be a major element in any serious consideration of where computers are leading us. I found the story preposterous, overcooked, and belabored. That Tom Cruise was able to make a compelling performance out of this mess shows why he is a movie star. The villain, a Justice Department snake played by Colin Ferrell, looks like he graduated from college three days before shooting began. Peter Stormare is amusing as a depraved outlaw plastic surgeon, but his big scene leaves you scratching your head -- huh, what was that about?? We get some some interesting Orson Wellesian camera work, perhaps to make up for the fact that so much of the action seems to have been filmed on-the-cheap in the back alleys of Compton. Even more amazing than Spielberg's limited vision of the future is the icky emotional coldness that envelopes every moment of this movie like a gelantinous shroud. At the end, we get a little sentimental relief. Spielberg apparently thinks sentimentality is the same thing as emotion. He's become a lost soul of the cinema. My wife was completely bored, and a friend with us actually fell asleep twice.

The Sum of All Fears
(Director Phil Alden Robinson)
Ben Affleck gets completely lost in this plodding melodrama from the Tom Clancy bookshelf. It's not Affleck's fault; he's just miscast. The character needs to be older and more experienced. I missed Harrison Ford's cuckoo desperation. Affleck is way overshadowed by the more charismatic Liev Schrieber as another CIA spook / assassin. Morgan Freeman brings his customary, but now rather boring, gravitas to the role of CIA boss. The film-makers (I include the producers) obviously lacked the guts to make the villains Muslims. Instead they're Nazis -- not neo, strictly old-fashioned Junker types. I was bored shitless.

Monsoon Wedding
(Director Mira Nair)
The enormous extended upper middle-class Indian family in Delhi behaves just like the sort of New York Jews I grew up around -- the endless bickering and qvelling, the drama queen histrionics, the fatalism of the men. It all seemed utterly familiar.  Most endearing, however, is the tender romance that buds between the striving, scrawny, homely, low-caste wedding planner, Dubey (Vijay Raaz), and the shy scullery maid, Alice (Tilotama Shome) he meets in course of his assignment. No gunfire, no exploding heads, no computer wizardry. I enjoyed it hugely.

Y Tu Mama Tambien
(Director Alfonso Cuaron)
Sweet, raw, and tender like a ripe mango. Two horny Mexico City teenage boys, Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna), run off in a beater car with Luisa (Mirabel Verdu), a distraught housewife, to find a marvelous "secret beach" somewhere on the Caribbean coast.  They find it all right. Along the way, the boys serially enjoy Luisa, give their hearts to her, quarrel, make up, break up, and eventually go home where a sort-of surprise ending explains it all rather sadly. I liked this movie because it was about the authentic mysteries of human personality depicted in plausible emotional terms. The sex scenes are quite believably awkward.

Monster's Ball
(Director Marc Forster)  This is a compelling story about grief and love among the lumpenlosers of Backwater America with hardly a false note. Billy Bob Thornton plays Hank, a penitentiary guard whose family falls apart following the electrocution of an inmate (Sean Combs, aka the rapper P. Diddy).  The execution itself is depicted as a ritual carried out with great solemnity, even reverence for the awsome mystery of death.  Other tragic events bring Hank into the orbit of Leticia (Halle Berry), widow of the executed prisoner. Love rescues these two lost souls.  It's all told with assured rhythm and understated conviction.  Race obviously permeates the air, like humidity, but never has to be underscored. We know its there.  The movie is about redemption minus the triteness of therapy. Small town Georgia seems a kind of slow-motion hell in which only ocassional acts of tragic violence avail to wake up the sleepwalkers who dwell there.  Billy Bob Thornton proves once again that he is the real deal, and Halle Berry is completely convincing, beautiful as she may be.  Sean Combs is fine as the doomed inmate as is Peter Boyle playing Hank's creep-bigot father.  The cathartic arc in Monster's Ball is just about perfect.

A Beautiful Mind
(Director Ron Howard)  I'm sympathetic to any story in which math drives a person crazy.  The difference between me and John Nash, the Nobel Prize winner on whom this movie is based, is that I was a math moron and Nash was a math genius.  I put off going to this flick for a long time (perhaps due to my own math-o-phobia), but found it compelling and, in the end, quite moving.  From the opening shot, at the fall reception for Princeton's entering graduate students, you know that Nash, a West Virginia hick, (played by Russell Crowe) is off his rocker.  He muddles through the program, though, produces a brilliant doctoral dissertation, and goes directly onto the MIT faculty. Soon, he marries one of his grad students, an angel with a brain (the formidable Jennifer Connelly).  Meanwhile, he is recruited by a shadowy government agent (Ed Harris) to work at a task that you know instantly would drive anybody nuts: to use his genius for pattern recognition to comb all the popular magazines in America for secret messages transmitted by Soviet spies.  I pretty much bought into this, though we find out eventually that the agent is but one figment in an elaborate paranoid fantasy that takes poor Nash way over the edge.  His route back to a kind of normality is singular and quietly brave, and finally God puts a Nobel Prize in his lap. Critics have complained that the movie is biographically disingenious.  Perhaps, but I didn't care. I was moved and interested by it. And from now on we'll have to refer to the lead actor as the great Russell Crowe, because he is.

In The Bedroom
(Director Todd Fields) Whenever a movie comes along that is not explicitly made for teens or mental defectives, the critics swoon.  That has been the case with this much-praised melodrama, which I found merely lugubrious. Story:  college senior, son of doctor in small town on the Maine coast, has summer romance with somewhat older local gal separated from abusive husband.  Husband ends up shooting college boy.  Parents agonize when the legal system seems to be letting the killer off easy.  The actors and actresses are all dandy, but the story is both ploddingly solemn and unsatisfying. Sissy Spacek as the grieving mother plays a character so charmless and annoying that after a while you kind of wish she'd end up dead, too. No such luck.

The Royal Tenenbaums
(Director Wes Anderson) Yeah, I realize it was released three months ago. Sorry for the delay.  One of these days, Wes Anderson is going to make a great movie. This one gets part of the way there.  He's capable of constructing a rich fictional world full of charming details, and populating it with characters who are plausible and interesting individuals. The story, if you can call it that, is more of a portrait of a family over twenty years.  The erstwhile patriarch, a shifty lawyer named Royal Tenenbaum, played marvelously by Gene Hackman, returns to the household to reestablish relations with his three ultra-neurotic children and saintly wife.  The movie is set mostly in and around a magnificent 19th century townhouse in a city that looks sort of like Philadelphia but could be the best neighborhood in any ANY-EASTERN-CITY.  Both the house and the city are as well-developed in character details as the human characters.  The soundtrack is a splendid mish-mash of oldies, indies, and standards used, much as the Coen Brothers did in Oh Brother, to very effectively comment directly to right side of your brain. Hackman is too much.  A real crack-up.  The Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke are on hand with their complex facial features and capable talents. Owen co-wrote the script with the director, which is full of clever touches. Gwyneth Paltrow is arrestingly dry and Ben Stiller is both fierce and ridiculous in a convincing way.. Angelica Houston manages to convey a completely believable human being in very few scenes.  Bill Murray and Danny Glover are little more than props.  It's all very admirable except for the fact that the movie never adds up to more than the sum of its exceedingly fine details.

[Mini Capusle Retro Reviews of several recent flicks seen lately on DVD]
Moulin Rouge (director Baz Lurman). Cinema lovers of the future will shake their heads over this numbing extravaganza. My particular fantasy about it is that the night of the premiere was the night Tom Cruise packed his bags and left home.  In a way, it's a perfect movie for our culture: incoherent, overblown, lewd without being sexy, childish, referential only of other pop culture, and tedious to a supernatural extreme. Inside John Malkovitch (Director Spike Jonze).  A movie you can admire for its audacity, but is ultimately annoying for trying too hard. John Cusack is a friendly presence despite the hallucinogenic gimmicks.  High Fidelity (Director Stephen Frears) Ditto. Annoying. Ditto Cusack. Jack Black does an amusing turn as a mouthy snob / slob.  Memento (director Christopher Nolan) Guy Pearce is very good in this clever, slick, but ultimately annoying tale told backwards.

The Count of Monte Cristo
(Director Kevin Reynolds)
      A sludgy tedious hack job.  Nothing really works except the costumes and the sets, and perhaps Guy Pearce's hammy turn as the chief villain. (After half a dozen movies, including "LA Confidential" and "Memento," Pearce has established himself as a riveting presence, fun to watch in just about anything, even tripe as odious as this stinker.)  James Caviezal plays the Count (aka Edmund Dantes) like a Prada shop-window dummy.  It is a little sad to see the usually excellent but limited Luis Guzman wasted as a cartoonish pirate who becomes the Count's factotum and sidekick. "I swore an oaf," Guzman's character says at one fraught moment. Can we retake that, please?  I wanted to put a paper bag over my head on my way out of the cineplex.

Black Hawk Down
(Director Ridley Scott)
      Harrowing and effective recreation of a misguided military mission in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October, 1993, when US Rangers and Special Forces attempted a pinch and grab operation of Somali warlords during a period of extreme political anarchy and famine induced by local gangs in the absence of a functioning government.  A bunch of helicopters and armed humvees are sent into the giant, chaotic,decrepitating shit-hole of a post-colonial city and find themselves way outnumbered and overwhelmed by an "indigenous" urban peasantry armed to teeth.  Without being explicit, the movie underlines one of the key tragic elements of world politics today: there are too many potent small arms loose in the world.  Any band of wretched angry youths, no matter how poor, can get ahold of unlimited quantities of machine guns, ammunition, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missles, and rocket-grenade launchers and stand off the world's best professional soldiers.  It's one of those epochal flip-flops in tactics-and-strategy that change world politics -- such as the use of the stirrup by mounted Seljuk Turks in their conquest of the Byzantine empire, or the introduction of the repeating rifle in the mid-19th century. The military pros are now using the term "asymmetry" to describe the process. The futility of operating in such circumstances prompted Bill Clinton to yank all US forces out of Somalia two weeks after this incident happened.  We'd gone in there with the limited beneficent aims of supporting a UN food aid operation and gotten our ass kicked for our trouble.  The movie raises the very disturbing specter of what the 21st century international scene will be about -- starving multitudes, no authority, breakdown of all civic norms -- and the impotence of a great empire (US) to do anything about it.  As a movie, it's quite an achievement.  Vainglorious histrionics are at a minimum. You don't really get to know the individual soldiers very well, but it seems more real for that, especially since many of them end up KIA.  The violence depicted is sometimes extremely gruesome-- men blown in half but still living another few minutes at the top end.  Sam Shepherd is the general in charge of the botched operation, saved only by his handsomeness from looking like a complete asshole.

Gosford Park
(Director Robert Altman)
      Finally a movie created for adults, not children and mental defectives. Altman is back in symphonic mode, using an acting ensemble like an orchestra.  The scene is an English country manor in the 1930s.  A claque of titled twits has been assembled for a weekend shooting party.  Grievance and animosity hang in the countless rooms and corridors like an odor.  The upper-crusters are selfish, depraved, bored, ridiculous, and often vicious, and their servants, who operate in the great house's "B" side, are pretty cold fish, too. Someone gets murdered, though we are meant not to care about the victim..  In fact, there are few characters of any rank or station in this piece that one might comfortably identify with -- a tactical error in dramaturgy, by my lights.  But the depiction of the great creaking machinary of the social order in inter-war England is worth the price of admission, and the production is sumptuous with all the photogenic trappings of English country manor life. Maggie Smith stands out as an exceedingly malicious, self-absorbed, and cash-strapped countess. (She reminded me of my late mother).  Michael Gambon is the lord of the manor, a licentious old creep.  Kristen Scott Thomas is his reptilian wife (in a sleeveless cocktail dress, she looks like she's been doing Ashtanga Yoga workouts and power shakes between takes).  Ryan Phillippe does a shrewd turn as an American imposter.  The ensemble includes other great old workhorses of the British film scene: Helen Mirren, Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, and Charles Dance.  I liked it quite a bit.  It was a little short of the wacky genius touches of prime Altman ("Nashville," "MASH," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller") but it was an admirable piece of work for a 76-year-old director who has been beat up by the Hollywood establishment his whole career.

Lord of the Rings; Part I, The Fellowship of the Ring
(Director Peter Jackson)
      Like watching paint dry.  The Hollywood gap between art direction and story telling is now a gaping canyon -- like many of the scary sets depicted in this yawner.  The result demonstrates how special visual effects are simply not enough if the story is weak, and this one plays like the proceedings of the Icelandic parliament.  In the course of almost three hours, a handful of lively battle and chase scenes pepper a much longer series of solemn, static debates in which the characters stand around jabbering over what they shall do next. For variety we get long, boring exegeses of Middle Earthian history and lore, played like Books-on-Tape. The pacing of this boresome business is terrible. The movie also sorely suffers from a noticable shortage of female frisson.  The characters played by Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchette drone through their brief appearances like zombies.  I was rather shocked at how dull and draggy it managed to be.  And I surely fail to see how this one can capture the attention of children.  In fact, one kid sitting right behind us at the 6:30pm show started wailing about halfway through that he wanted to leave. I suppose the boffo box office numbers since its Christmas opening demonstrates the power of the consensus trance as a cultural behavior modifer.

Mullholland Drive
(Director David Lynch)
     Absolute Rubbish.  The script plays as though it were written by Pee Wee Herman while many of the scenes appear as if John Waters directed them. In other words, you get an extremely childish view of what constitutes adult behavior. Since none of the characters has a comprehensible motive for anything they do, Lynch doesn't tell a story so much as convey a sequence of moods, with an emphasis on weirdness, to distract the audience from the fact that he has no narrative skills.  It's the worst kind of aesthetic faggotry.  Hollywood is the world capital of pretending and this David Lynch movie about Hollywood is about pretending to be a film-maker.  What a joke that this pretenious mess made some critics' Ten-Best lists.

The Man Who Wasn't There
(Director Joel Coen)
      It's hard not to admire anything that the Coen brothers, Joel amd Ethan, come up with.  Even their lamest movies are beautifully made, written, photographed and directed.  If nothing else, they powerfully evoke a sense of time and place. And that is the case here with their dark little story of murder and blackmail in Santa Rosa, California, set in the late 1940s.  The cast is splendid, led by Billy Bob Thornton as an affectless barber who aspires to nothing greater than a career in the new dry cleaning industry.  The Coens are fastidious with the textures of their setting; their America of the late 40s is truly a different planet.  Finally, though, it is difficult to give a shit about any of the characters and their banal destinies. Other reviewers are correct to spotlight Tony Shaloub's fabulous character turn as a defense lawyer in love with hs own facile mind.

Behind Enemy Lines
(Director John Moore)
      Turgid stuff about impotent American warriors in Bosnia.  Owen Wilson has a very complicated nose and a likeable demeanor that will surely make him a big movie star, but this tale is deeply unsatisfying. Gene Hackman as his mentor and commander seems to be brooding over his losses in the post-Internet NASDAQ.  Hollywood scriptwriting is now so uniformly bad that you spend the whole length of the show rewriting each scene in your head as it is being mis-played on the screen.  The Hollywood establishment's old skills at straightforward storytelling have fallen on evil times, and this stinker is a prime specimen of crap filtered through innumerable layers still coming through as crap.

Ocean's Eleven
(Director Steven Soderbergh)
      Sheer rubbish despite a charismatic cast.  The writing is sloppy, the story is lame -- limping on such tired cliche's (my wife points out) as the criminal mastermind who knows how to do everything.  I didn't buy it for a moment.  Pretty good chemistry between George Cloony and Julia Roberts is wasted in the service of the idiotic story.  Brad Pitt is fun to watch but also wasted.  Andy Garcia's costumes as the casino mogul -- featuring a weird silk bib under a sportjacket -- would embarrass a typical Las Vegas doorman.  Soderbergh seems to have phoned in the directing job from another continent, while stoned.

Apocalypse Now Redux
(Director, Francis Ford Coppola)
     Personally, I didn't feel that the addition of forty-odd minutes of footage improved the story as a whole, or made it any more coherent.  This magnificent movie was always kind of a mess, but so was the subject it attempted to capture: the Vietnam War.  One could not escape the feeling that absolutely everybody connected with the making of it was stoned the whole time. It has exactly the kind of temporal distortion that you get from a heavy marijuana high.
     One also could not fail to observe that Marlon Brando looked almost physically sleek in his role as Colonel Kurtz, compared to the veritable land whale that he became afterwards.

AI
(Director, Steven Spielberg)
     This overcooked mess of a movie is a perfect expression of the overcooked mess of a culture that it represents.  Spielberg takes the icy anti-humanism of Stanley Kubrick -- who had the story "in development" for years before he died in 1999 -- and adds a sugar coating of gooey sentimentality to this robot version of "Pinnochio" set in a grim global warming future.
      I didn't believe for a moment that a flesh-and-blood mother (her real son incurably ill in medical cold storage), would accept the simulacrum child (played by Haley Joel Osment) as a plausible substitute, since there is absolutely nothing that she can do in the way of caretaking (the robot boy neither eats nor sleeps) or teaching (he's programmed) which constitute the sum total duties of mothering.
      Spielberg's idea of the future (a century or so hence) is sloppily imagined.  Global warming may have swamped all the great cities of the world and ruined advanced economies, but plastic forks and rubber balloons are still available at a children's birthday party.  Please.  One can't fail to notice, either, that "home" is just another version of Spielberg's beloved suburbia -- hubbie still drives to work in an arcadian office park -- while the places where human life is more concentrated have become lawless whoredoms dressed up in the nightmare carnival trappings of a low-grade Baptist "hell."
      There's a self-referential hermetically sealed Hollywood quality to these imaginings that grates. The bunch of real children depicted in the birthday party scene behave just like the cynical over-privileged brats that one would expect to find at a Bel Air barbeque.  And only in Hollywood would "God" be seriously imagined in the context of a conference room.   (One can imagine the real-life scene of Spielberg huddled with his producers in a conference room coming up with the "brilliant" story idea of the robot boy finding his long-sought-after Creator in a . . . conference room!  Wow!) 
      Later on, as the story speed-wobbles toward its metaphysical train-wreck of an ending, Spielberg sends in a rescue squad in the form of. . . guess what: extra-terrestrials!
      AI not only fails to suspend one's disbelief, but does it so aggressively that you are soon overcome by an aura of sheer repellent creepiness that lasts through the bitter end.  Spielberg has made at least two movies -- Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan -- in which he managed to convey complex human behavior and emotion very plausibly, and he has made a big bunch of strictly show-biz entertainments -- Jaws, the Indiana Jones epics, ET, the dinosaur epics, etc. -- in which suspension of disbelief was, at least, not a gross impediment to the storytelling.  But in AI, Spielberg appears to have downloaded the worst instincts of late-period Stanley Kubrick into his own brain, and the result is a movie that, despite a lot of arresting visual imagery and some good acting, is nearly unwatchable.

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