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Everybody loves this one, as attested by the ratings and writeups, so you probably will, too.

I have ed through this one again, now watching Hitchcock chronologically, and the 1930s intrigue-stuff is growing a bit thin. Of course the foreigners are the ones whodunit. Of course the English are innocent, or "honest," as the vanishing lady puts it, though cheekily in her way.

I'm guessing that Hitchcock veered toward comedy after "Sabotage" when he blew up a kid. This feature is two removed from that one, yet it has similar worries: the amalgam of continental Europeans, represented by the fictional country the British characters are in, conspires against the honest types.

Sure the old lady who disappears is a bore and babbler. But she's one of us!

Now the setup, which takes awhile to unravel and has been done suspensefully better over the decades, is an essential plot that should always play well in the medium of film. It is: a woman thinks something has happened, and everyone else says it hasn't. She's been hit on the head, so she's possibly concussed. Maybe she's seeing things?

The question of individual perception is possibly *the* fundamental question of the film medium. You see and hear what you see and hear, and I see and hear what I do. These often result in different outcomes. Voila! What s for perceptual difference? One of us has to be wrong.

In "Lady Vanishes," a political aspect is added, with the individual believing in a truth that implies a conspiracy, while all others deny the conspiracy. Do large groups conspire against the individual? In moviemaking , yes, for an entire crew and movie studio can make a movie that enraptures us, fools us, and conspires against our perceptions and anticipations. This is partly movie "magic," as in the actual magician in the film, who can pull rabbits out of hats.

Moviemakers can make anybody disappear at any time. Just make a cut!

But politically, in the 1930s, Britain may be at war against most of the continent. "Lady" blends German and Italian types, plus others, as conspiring against the poor Brits. As usual, Hitchcock figures this as young,"innocent" types -- his last feature was titled "Young and Innocent" of course. The young woman desperate to find the vanished British lady doesn't quite realize all the political intrigue that has aligned against her. It's the same in most of Hitchcock three or four prior films, where a political underground lurks to undermine the "honest" British population.

You can watch his last few films and accuse him of fearmongering and xenophobia, though that would be from a non-1930s viewpoint. In my view that decade mostly sucked. Just go read "Human Smoke" to witness the sick buildup to WW2.

To alleviate all this tension, "Lady" has its comic moments, particularly in its dances around censorship around sex. The innocent young female has a Walt-Disney-looking male cavort around her hotel room, then eventually believe in her individual vision of the actual lady actually vanishing. Sex games leads to truthtelling? Or perhaps the looser morality of the fictional Euro country they're in loosens up the Brits just enough?

Meanwhile, the conspirators would pretend to be nuns in order to deceive. How satanic!

I've never found this movie as captivating as you all have. The first 20-30 minutes plays up the goober comedy of the continental zone, with annoying travel problems that probably hounded Brits back then and perhaps still resonates -- just swap the train delay for typical plane delays today.

And then, it's apparently obvious that the young woman is correct in believing that the old woman disappears. Later movies played up better the question of perception being fundamentally ambiguous and unresolvable, potentially. That's not the aim here of course -- the good Brits *know* and are conspired against.

As it stands a director can do well by looking at the basic formula here and some of the editing. I just like other later movies that do what "Lady" does better -- the benefit of hindsight. Klute, The Game, Frantic, Shutter Island, Night Moves, Prisoners, Missing, etc.

But Mountainhead, from whichever ideological or political lens you look through it, disdains the transhumanist beliefs of its characters. This is where it shines brightest, and might for some time to come.

The movie’s four rich guys ascend their own magic mountain to pretend to be a “Mount Rushmore” of world-changers. They exit it no different than the fools and schemers in Machiavelli’s plays, whirlwinds of vain desires within “an arrangement of carbon,” as one of the gurus calls the human body.

They won’t and can’t create a system to stop them from wanting, and the attendant question of why they want what they want. As usual, philosophy always trumps your attempt to rule the universe.

Nobody can escape death, and nobody, prior to death, can escape that.

Full review here: learningaboutmovies.substack.com/p/mountainhead

Hitchcock in the 1930s vacillated between "Wrong Man" and "Right Man" scenarios, often putting foreigners in the "right man" category, as invasive hidden would-be killers. By contrast, the "wrong man" types are British men falsely accused, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I can give nothing away, though why I must be spoiler-free for grumpy types is beyond me, when Wikipedia often gives you the spoilers without warning . . . Anyway, a premise here is the mystery of the lead being possibly "wrong" and "right." A young woman senses he might be innocent of the murder of a woman on the beach, but she's not entirely sure.

Is he guilty and hot, or innocent and hot? As usual, if he's hot, it doesn't matter.

Anyway again, the "right" man offers a twist on Hitchcock's previous films where foreigners are bad. He's "out of rhythm," a joke that enters into the editing, beginning with the opening scene, a marital spat between a middle-aged couple.

That spat resolves into a beach scene, reminiscent of Vertigo and The Birds, in which the "wrong man" type finds dead woman on beach. Or did he kill her?

Throughout, the young innocent woman harbors the wrong man, possibly against her good conscience and the notion of an orderly British society. This invades the countryside, ala "The 39 Steps." No spot is safe from modern-day paranoia. Not even the countryside, which is old, is innocent.

But "Young and Innocent" often goes in comic directions, with rural types acting bumbly and the main characters caught in awkward but not-too-threatening situations where they might be caught or not. There's a screwball comedy rhythm to this movie, instead of noirish tones which it could've leaned into.

I think this one is charming mostly, with much good direction -- Hitchcock's voice is pretty strong at this point, with a bravura shot of the reveal of the killer near the end.

So I'm at a loss to describe why my friends on here are between 1.5 and 3 stars on this one compared to others. All I can say is that, chronologically, this is pretty interesting development, as I quickly mentioned in the first few paragraphs above. I'd think if you run into this on TCM in the middle of the night, you'd be reasonably pleased. One point of this movie is for Hitchcock to try to be faster-paced in everything and to try to shockingly entertain the audience almost constantly, with nearly every shot. That wasn't happening in almost any movie prior to this, perhaps besides "The Lodger."

These days, those model sets won't have the same effect. Too bad this couldn't get a Hollywood budget.

However, the premise and basic plot arc could work today. I could even see this being turned into a miniseries. What I'd want out of a remake is more mystery and darkness to the main male lead.

Though there's moments and shots in his early filmography that resemble those in his later and more well-known works, "Sabotage" is the first in Hitchcock's filmography to feel thoroughly like a HITCHCOCK movie, at least as the guy who made the stuff in the 40-60s that everybody knows.

This is possibly his darkest to this point as well. I assume growing WW2 worries help, as does the espionage plot, based on Joseph Conrad's novel "The Secret Agent." I think this is the second, besides "The Lodger," to use the "killer in your own home" plot problem.

In this case, the killer is a movie theater owner, too!

On the "own home" question, 'Sabotage" exploits domestic fears of civilian terror and points to continuing worries in the most civilized places that have no stopped. Here, rogue underground agents plot to undermine British civilization. The opening four shots show us a still-legit fear: the attack on electrical infrastructure, which knocks out all the lights in London.

No light, not even in the theater. The saboteur, a foreigner married to a nice average British woman, is the theater owner. He effectively undermines himself by stopping the electrical grid. He's a man at odds with himself -- by day, a nice-guy husband; in secret, a terrorist.

Probably nothing could be clearer than the movie's allegorical aims, which is likely a wink at censors of Hitchcock's movies. The theater, via the theater owner, can undermine society. All too literally, film can be explosive.

On the domestic front, nobody knows about the secret underground world operating around them -- a network of terrorists and Scotland-Yard spies who would catch them. "Saboteur," like "The 39 Steps,' develops many of the social and political consequences of modern civilization, including globalization and the free-flowing movement of anybody. I think this movie is easily read as paranoid conspiracy thing that would push you to the Right, though it doesn't have to be watched solely that way.

I mention that because Hitchcock is one a role in depicting "foreign men" as nasty killers. Like Peter Lorre in his last two movies, the terrorist in this one is of uncertain ethnicity. Today, they do that so as not to offend anybody in particularly. But it works the other way; in "Saboteur," the terrorist is a stand-in for just about any foreign continental type. If I were watching this movie just for the interchange of character types, I'd call it "xenophobic" or at least world-weary about international intrigue in the 1930s. Lord knows if I lived back then, I would be sick to death of national and international news.

Hitchcock's an orchestrator here, probably best seen in the bus scene. Long before Keanu Reeves exclaimed "There's a bomb on the bus!," there's a bomb on the bus in "Sabotage." That's no spoiler. The bomb is paired with the clock towers to create an effective countdown clock. Will Hitchcock really allow that bomb to explode?

This is his boldest cinematic move yet. Though then he uses a Walt Disney character later in the film!

The leads of this movie are far less interesting that Hitchcock's orchestration. Had he casted dynamite actors, which he would eventually do, this might be one of his most arresting movies. As is, the second act just goes nowhere. But that's overcome by at least two massive surprises in this one.

Sadly, the movie's still topically relevant enough, in a general way.

The current state of Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" is rather abominable. Although you can find alleged "HD" and "digital remastered copies," they really are no better than 360p with hideous sound. I haven't located anything that looked and sounded able.

That alone makes the movie tough to watch, though it *requires* remastering just because of the use of light and shadows, as well as the soundscape needing the popping and hissing removed. The final factory scene requires sonic textures that aren't here in this poor quality copy.

As for the story, Hitchcock here first uses the combo of marriage/romance with spy stuff, though the main male and female character aren't married -- they are "married" via their secret-agent gig. She of course is a blonde whom we see in a towel in the first shot of her. I'm only in 1936 and Hitchcock's horniness, or his belief that I am, is wearing thin.

Now the great potential of this movie is in the threesome and foursome of the agents, particularly with straight and handsome John Gielgud, just 32 years old, and the wild-eyed Peter Lorre playing a nationality nobody could discern. (He's "Mexican," but that's part of the disguise.)

These pre-war Hitchcock suspense tales are lighter in tone at times, with obvious humorous scenes. Lorre's cast exactly for this reason. My hypothesis is that the war changed the mood for Hitchcock to darker and more disturbing. The presence of spycraft, hidden yet woven into normal life, caused ramped up paranoia, political blowback, and extra sin in the world -- or it reduces the world down to intrigue.

In this one, set in WW1, Gielgud's British character gets "killed" so he can be assigned a continental op. He teams up with Lorre and the blonde he's supposed to be married to.

There's a strong case that all of Hitchcock is within his first 12 years of moviemaking. Witness the church and bell-pull scene, which anybody will notice as a precursor to "Vertigo." But I am also seeing bits of Notorious and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There's a "wrong man" subplot, effective train scenes here, and a dog who knows more than it should (ala "Rear Window").

There's no way this movie can sing in its current state until it's restored and projectable onto a big screen.

If anybody knows of the real HD/Bluray copy, please send me the link!

Likely there aren't two more unlike movies made in one year by a single director than "Waltzes from Vienna" -- Hitchcock's standard Johann-Strauss period piece -- and the espionage romp "The Man Who Knew Too Much."

All of the energy is in the latter movie, which is in a few ways an Ur-Movie. Until I can find better, older examples of tense assassination scenes in ordinary crowded venues, this movie will be my named origin for the lot of latter movies that do this. "Mission Impossible" depends on everything here, including copying (and bettering somewhat) the Royal Albert Hall sequence in which an ordinary woman knows that a major European diplomat will be assassinated during a classical piece.

The movie almost dares to be comic. If you consider the ending as it is, perhaps it is comic. The "dare" part is that a child is kidnapped and somebody's assasinated early on, not exactly laughing matters, especially when the normie main characters get sucked into a spy plot that could start WW2. (I say that because in dialogue the 2nd assassination plan is likened to Archduke Ferdinand's that catalyzed WW1, a recent memory in 1934.)

This movie plays up the sometimes hidden fact that espionage films do their own version of what other genres do, e.g. science fiction and fantasy. They take the ordinary world and twist it into something new, some new feeling and vision for the normal.

Here, the dentist becomes a site of espionage and danger. As does a religious worship service, with its over-the-top and funny sequence of hypnotism and chair-throwing fight. The Royal Albert Hall sequence is the ideal example. Everybody in it is there to enjoy the ordinary, the musical number. The assassins transform it into a place of intrigue. The blonde heroine gets sucked into that.

In back of normal reality is a deadly game of conspiracies and plans. Mostly for Hitchcock, that's fun at the movies. Occasionally it's a greater statement of something seriously wrong in the 20th century. My sense is that this movie is less serious and more playful than "The 39 Steps," which has pricklier political depictions and a more concerned stance about espionage and the paranoic effects on the general population.

The least HITCHCOCK movie there is, based on a musical. Not for casual viewing unless you turn on TCM one night and are trying to fall asleep to it.

To watch "Wonder Boys," I had to violate my dictum which says, "Never watch a movie that portrays your profession."

As expected, the English professor is having an affair. All English professors in all movies with English professors have affairs. Moreover, the Michael Douglas character could also have another one with Katie Holmes, if he weren't involved in mildly zany mishaps.

"Wonder Boys" centers on the Douglas character, a creative writing prof, with scenes that have about a dozen characters each go in and out of the movie. All literally centers on this character, a middle-aged sadsack, his wife having left him, who had one successful novel but can't complete another in seven years.

Cue Neil Young in the soundtrack. Also Leonard Cohen. And Van Morrison. And Buffalo Springfield. And Bob Dylan.

Directed by Curtis Hanson, this one has "American Beauty" flavor, though more funny-melancholy than tragic. It's not that this movie was influenced by "Beauty" -- it was likely in production or post- when "Beauty" came out -- it's just in the zeitgeist moment. Can a bourgeois American male, falling apart, pick himself back up or will he continue to fall apart, thanks to being bourgeois?

I really like Douglas in this role, bringing some gravity and not falling into the trap of leaning into this movie's mild zaniness. I can almost believe that his professor character exists. It's similar to what he did in 'The Game," a movie so ridiculous in premise and yet Douglas makes it all seem possible.

Everybody else, an "all-star cast," does orbit the character too much for me. Tobey Maguire's sadsack writing-student character does not distinguish itself from Maguire's other roles in Oscar-nominated fare. I cannot what the differences are between his "Ice Storm" performance, "Cider House Rules," and this movie. Probably there really is nuance there.

A chief sin here is the voiceover, probably a leftover from the Chabon novel. It has no need to be here because we can already clearly discern that the movie's from the Douglas character's perspective, plus it undermines Douglas' acting a bit.

How quaint it is that the movie emphasizes the need for the lead characters to produce writing and to write well. That seems like the distant past. I'm motivated to read the novel, which I think is likely to be much better than the film, though I'll miss Douglas in it. I'll just imagine him as the lead character.

As an A24 movie, the tonal s in this run the gamut from mock-hipster, to wink-wink college humor, to sensationalistic stupidity ala Saturday Night Live.

I found none of it particularly funny. Granted, I have never seen Robinson in anything before, though he’s an SNL alum. There’s no John-Candy loveableness within him, as there needs to be for his character.

We’re left with enduring Robinson’s Craig as a fool whom we have no reason to root for.

The lack of human pathos in this character upends the film’s possible attempts to saying anything meaningful about the title in its topic. Craig vainly longs for human community that he can’t possibly belong to, because primarily of his lack of “cool enough.” He’s the hanger-on in eighth grade who sits on the outskirts of a clique, accepted just barely by them and always mocked by them.

Is that worthy of the title “Friendship”? Of course not.

Full review here: open.substack.com/pub/learningaboutmovies/p/friendship-mocks-what-it-portends?r=6yku1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Watching through Hitchcock's films chronologically, I come to "Number Seventeen" and find that this is the first one that looks like a general impression of what a HITCHCOCK movie is.

Everybody's down on it besides J. Rosenbaum, so that's worth trying this one again. What Hitchcock develops here is a sense of quick editing, cutting between showing objects and perspectives and faces. The seeds of "master of suspense" stuff starts here, with the sequences in this film.

Which is funny, because this movie feels darkly comic, at times a ridiculous sendup of murder mysteries, which I believe it is. I never laughed, but deliberate inanities are everywhere, including obvious plot illogic.

Formally, this one's a limited-locale movie in a creepy big house. Prominent use of the house's staircase is involved. Hitchcock had to get clever with this set. He's working with a play script, but no play looks like this -- you can't cut to six different faces in three seconds in a play!

I can't rant enough about the 2.7 rating on here. That is wrong entirely -- the movie's pretty neat throughout just by its visual elements. I freely it there's little to no charisma regarding the acting, but the set, the way its shot, and the chase scenes are the star. For an hour of your time, you could do a lot worse -- like just about any franchise movie made in the last five years.

The Anderson style for acting is to show little emotion, possibly to highlight repression and trauma, or possibly because he’s still too in love with late 1980s Peter Greenaway films.

Whatever the case, he once again juxtaposes the delight of his visual forms with the undelight of the characters he creates. Cold emotions, warm colors. He remains possibly the director with the greatest flare for beautiful typography, and The Phoenician Scheme might be his best effort in that category.

I exit this film like almost all of his others — confused as to what plot points I missed, cold at the seeming lack of human warmth, stunned at the design and construction. I confess that I don’t care for most of his movies, yet Asteroid City grew on me and I think The French Dispatch might be the closest to a living Orson-Welles effort that we will ever witness.

Because the film has two toes dipped in the espionage genre, with the strangest praise for rogue business dealings that, as the daughter says, may end up doing some good in the world, despite their flawed origins, The Phoenician Scheme may end up growing on me as well.

Full review on Substack: learningaboutmovies.substack.com/p/wes-anderson-serves-up-another-weird

I must be watching a different movie than letterboxd raters. Compared to Hitchcock's earlier features, with a couple of exceptions (The Lodger and Blackmail), this one is a real leap in of technical direction.

It's like he went to Eisenstein University and graduated from it.

One of a few Hitchcock boat movies, this is his second one, the first being the lame "Champagne" which had no plot.

This one's a marital sex-comedy with some zest. A British couple has lackluster love and a lackluster bank . Beginning with shots that resemble what "Modern Times" would do, he gets off work and then can't get it up . . . his umbrella, that is.

This flagging umbrella, unable to be opened, is a Hitchcockian metaphor for the couple's sex life. When she says "you'll like me in this dress," the umbrella's canopy falls off. This sign of possible impotence seems right out of "Rear Window"!

He dreams of being rich, and getting funds from his uncle, they take a whirlwind trip around half the world, including a cruise. The cruise is an obvious fantasy environment in which the couple, and everyone else, can play-act roles. The couple gets to act out the "strange" part of being rich, which means a high-falutin lifestyle that abandons their middle-class values and humdrum life.

And that means they each take lovers, and then separate briefly. But this is a comedy, in the narrative-arc sense, so don't worry.

The impotence symbolism and the boat material has me thinking that "Rear Window" really is another Hitchcock boat movie in a way. I know he's got a lot of limited locale movies, but the tight container of a boat pressure-cooks a person's desires, and I suppose it's even better cinematically when it's a couple's desires.

I find she and he cute enough to make this movie watchable by itself, nevermind the Hitchcock ties. Everything here, script-wise, was already pretty cliche. You can imagine all this playing out on the Hallmark Channel today, as it probably does.

The filmic interest is in Hitchcock working out how to show off erotic desires through various techniques, while skirting censors. I mentioned the umbrella, and everybody knows he's trying to find attractive blonde women, which he's got here as a lead. In his silents, he's got a lot of 4th-wall effects shots that show you, via overlaid ghost images, what a person desires. In "Rich and Strange," it's more of cutting to close-ups of some object or POV, skewed, so that we know how the erotic desires of a character are playing out.

All the while, the British couple goes from humdrum England to Sri Lanka and finally China. I suppose this makes the movie imperial with a political angle, if you are inclined to look at it that way!

Only a special person won't be bored by this early Hitchcock talkie, which is slower and duller *because* of sound.

The ideas in this movie are patently cliche at the high-school level. A "progressive" family, represented by cars and the desire to transform the country landscape, finds opposition in the long-time other rich family they live near by, who have been there "since Elizabeth" and ride horses.

You cannot miss the progressive v. conservative angle. And then the families have a mini-battle, as only the ultra-rich can: trying to outbuy each other and play social games to one up each. I ended up rooting for no one.

Or did I fall asleep? No, I never fall asleep during movies, but if I had just one to pick, this one could easily sub for ZzzQuil Ultra.

Nevertheless, there's a precursor to "Vertigo" in here, a shot of a woman feeling dizzy and seeing visions of weird men come at her. That's at 28:20. The auction scene also plays with point-of-view. This is about the only reason to even endure this slow, dull thing.

This title of an early Hitchcock film now looks like a joke, as the most cliche Hitchcock title you could think of.

The barebones elements of "Murder!" are not only worthy of consideration for your next script, they *have* been repeated, and yet remain repeatable. In a theater company, a young actress is killed apparently by another. She's put on trial and found guilty.

But a juror, the most well-spoken and dapper of them, a man, an artist, starts to think she's innocent. Does he feel guilty that he voted "guilty" and sentenced her to death? He was the only doubter on the jury. But maybe he just has the hots for her? Or something else?

The "something else" angle could be fun. The dialogue derides Freudian psychoanalysis, with characters in reaction shots making faces when a woman on the jury goes on and on about "dissociation," but the fact is the psychological aspect is foregrounded. The movie doesn't have to be about the facts or the truth, just the ways that the main character feels about the situation. *Why* does he begin to re-investigate the crime on his own?

That's the second half of the movie, which has less cinematic fire to it, shot more like a stage play. The first act, by contrast, allows Hitchcock to make his artistic voice heard, via shot types and camera moves. Regarding the latter, he's finally developing on that front -- I suggest at this movie as some of his first major efforts to be clever with camera movement, whereas before this he'd been playing a lot with 4th wall breaks and montages.

The cinematic trap at this point, for whatever cultural reasons, is that the medium of theatre is invading the cinema too much for my tastes. Quite a lot of this film might have well have been staged, a problem (my opinion of course) lingering in the prior Hitchcock films as well. Which is why I suggest watching "Blackmail," which he made two movies earlier.

Soundmixing is also a problem here, with the score being too loud to hear the dialogue at points. We take this for granted but I'm sure when this was new it was easy to make rookie mistakes!

I think if we could edit this movie, it might zing and pop. Long pauses at the end of shots with the dialogue could be cut -- for the purpose of pleasing the faster-paced sensibilities of us all today. In fact, this seems the most accessible feature I can think of to edit for amateurs, just to practice changing the pacing of this film. I would think 15 minutes could be cut and we'd all enjoy it more in 2025.

Everybody should know that they got two movies out of this, still among the best works of playful parody ever.

That's because the commentary track, recorded by the actors who play Spinal Tap, reinvents the original documentary. They comment on the entire movie, as if Marty DiBergi railroaded them in the film, making them look terrible. I find this track about as good as the original movie, though you have to watch the original movie first to understand what they're talking about.

That commentary track really is the first sequel to this.

The track includes their recurring gags, such as trying to who the bit players are and whether they are still alive or dead. My favorite of those involves a "Cole Slaw" sign that you would never notice in the film until you listen to this track!

Some things I had to search for after watching this yet again:

-- "Why would Metallica make a black album if a black album is being made fun of here?"

-- "Why do Slipknot and other "serious" bands wears masks if that's being made fun of in this movie?"

-- "When did rock stars start and stop wearing Spandex?"

--"Which other females besides Yoko Ono reportedly wrecked a band?"

-- "Is spontaneous combustion real?"

Unless you have to watch all Hitchcock movies, avoid this one. No fire, charisma, and little visual interest. It watches as if it's a staged play, which is truly what it is.

However, for a Hitchcockian political vision, this one probably does have to be endured. He co-wrote this adaptation of a famous play, which is set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War.

This post-9/11 film took place in a time when the sitting President, eventually deciding to invade Iraq, told us all not to worry -- that we were at war and that we should still spend a lot of money!

Also when the Patriot Act was enacted. Just the other day, with an , I ran into a multi-week annoyance because of this massive legislative bloat that increased surveillance on you and me.

And also the TSA, taking off your shoes at airports, putting your hair gel in a plastic bag...

Now about the "go spend!" command. While the movie takes a quick run at the TSA and Homeland Security early on, plus airport terminals -- in which the only thing you can do if you are stuck like the main character is "spend money!" -- it then proceeds to place products in front of our face the entire movie. Was Spielberg oblivious to this contradiction?

When I mean product placement, I mean that this movie would get an NC-17 rating if we cared about such things.

I found this movie charming in moments, appalling on the whole. What could've been a sharp criticism of the Homeland Security apparatus turns into a weak ET/Forrest Gump romcom that cares more about being a romanticized fantasy than having anything to do with anything in real life, in spite of feints at criticism at US immigration policy and the enhancement of the Federal government bureaucracy.

No matter what you think of it, though, please it that it plays so fast and loose with the main character's linguistic abilities that it makes up new rules for him in every scene. In the first scene, he can't understand a damned thing, saying "yes" to the question "who?" repeatedly.

But then when the Tucci character tells him, in a bunch of idioms only a master of the language could understand, that he cannot leave the terminal, he (Hanks character) does seem to understand. And then in the next scene, he doesn't understand stuff. In the next scene he does. And so on. In about a week, he's fluent in the language.

The clear point is that the main character is a "man without a country," a human alien whom we cannot understand. That could excuse both the impossibility of comprehending his linguistic abilities, and Hanks' made-up accent. This terminal of his is not lost, post-industrial space ala the dystopic writer J.G. Ballard, who has more guts to call things as they are. It becomes a playground where good-hearted government workers catch the can-do, Pollyanna spirit of this man.

He's from Krakozhia. Of course there is no such place. Thus the movie can be utterly stereotypical without typecasting anybody in particular.

Meanwhile, the surveillance state seems decent, a little sly, a little pigheaded, but more empathetic overall than pigheaded, carrying about the stranger in a strange land. Behind them, in most shots, are the images of infinite camera feeds, the stuff of total nightmares in Gilliam movies (e.g., 12 Monkeys).

Therefore I believe there are plausible viewings of "The Terminal" that justifying everything that happened post 9-11, including the drastic security shift at airports which the federal government took over. If you've ever returned to this country and have been grilled by red-eyed jerks at the Homeland Security booth, think about how happy this movie is, and wish it were real life, because it will never be.

I'm going to promote this movie with one caution: its major flaw is pacing.

Of course, anybody who ever complains about pacing -- and I've seen it a lot on here -- is doing so with something relative in mind. You bring up a contrast with the word "pacing." Contrast with what?

With later features, the last 90 years of cinema, which Alfred Hitchcock at the time did not have access to. Therefore, a pacing complaint is necessarily anachronistic. If you want, please recut this to be quicker in certain spots. It will then watch like an early Hitchcock masterpiece.

It's nearly that, containing all the seeds of later Hitchcock, including what I think is his first cameo. We've got a wrong man accused, a cliffhanger ala "North by Northwest" and "Vertigo," a hot blonde who's sort-of guilty and sort of not, and a kind-of shower scene involving a really long knife. I also counted three undressing scenes -- no nudity but definitely women's underwear.

"Blackmail" is about the unexpected guilt of the seemingly innocent or beautiful, in part. A girl who's the love interest of a policeman also has longing eyes for an artist. She goes up to the artist's apartment one night. After a really long scene involving pre-foreplay and seduction techniques by the artist -- a meta-commentary on cinema for sure -- the artist tries to r*pe the women. Commence the scene with the knife.

We the audience watch everything besides the murder/killing. That's behind a curtain, but everything else, including the woman undressing twice and the drawing of a nude, is not. The scene is intercut with another man, a possible peep/onlooker, watching.

We're that guy. He's gross and looks like a lecher. That's us, a beginning of Hitchcock's theory of watching and showing off his disturbing views of the audience's wants.

Ironically or not, he's the one accused of the crime, while the guilty woman lives with her guilt, which is ambiguous because of course she killed the artist out of self-defense. The entire last hour of the movie is psychologically tense, complete with a lot of really thoughtful shots that are as artsy as the artist's attempted seductive drawings. Note the shot that would be a classic noir cliche -- a bird's eye looking down a spiral staircase. Both the pursuit of a suspect in the introduction and the chase scene near the end are extremely clever.

I'd say that Hitchcock leaped, maybe exploded, in aesthetic ability with this movie. Just compare it to "The Manxman" or anything earlier, besides "The Lodger." Casual Hitchcock viewers should start with that one and possibly also this one. And pacing ... if you want dirt slow, watch his bad silent movies and by comparison "Blackmail" flies.

This is his first sound feature, though it's constructed to be a silent as well. Music, effects, and dialogue were added in with the new sound tech. But this one, like a lot of 1929 movies, has a few scenes of mouthing but no dialogue. This was standard at this very moment.

The most-liked review on here says of this early Hitchcock movie that it’s “perhaps inessential Hitchcock viewing for being so utterly unrepresentative of his larger career trajectory.”

Nope. Witness the scene where a lovely blonde, who has mugged sexually for the camera several times already, is isolated in a watermill with *one* of her love interests, played by an actor who looks closer to 50 than 30. Cut to them making out, then cut to the water mill spinning, an elongated pole within a very large gear, spinning.

Yep, that represents their sexual encounter.

Hitchcock is thinking about the sexual desires of the three lead characters, two brothers competing for the love of the blonde, and what exactly that feels like. He then attempts to communicate that to the audience in multiple ways, including the watermill scene and about 150 4th wall breaks.

The plot is taboo eroticism, though like most other Hitchcock movies, being based on a popular written work. One of the brothers goes off to Africa to make his fortune, a lower-class guy. Meanwhile, his lawyer brother, the older-looking one, gets to seduce the blonde. That’s because they both think the younger brother is dead.

But he’s not. He comes back and . . . oops . . . marries the blonde. That gives Hitchcock the opportunity to present a wedding party scene and dinner, which he did in several of these silent movies of his.

The story’s the stuff of soap operas for sure. As a film exercise, “The Manxman” is an opportunity for the director, who’s interpreting the story, to make the story look sexy. The audience, Hitchcock always assumed from here on, was a pretty lustful bunch. You can play to that, even with scenes as seemingly innocuous as waterwheels spinning. (Later, he will get to winkingly call out his audience as lustful, though I don’t see that here.)

I’d say therefore that this film has *some* interest to “essential Hitchcock viewing,” as I think it’s in the top-3 most interesting of his silent films, at least watched for what comes later. In and of itself, “The Manxman” is a fine but not too fascinating silent.

I have seen this movie before, a lot, which is why I'm disappointed.

Having no knowledge of modern India, I assume it has its weird particularities, idiosyncracies that nowhere else has. Mumbai, one of the world's largest cities, with -- as the movie tells us -- a plurality of itinerant residents -- should be uniquely Mumbai.

Thus I might expect a formal kind of revolution in order to capture its spirit, and certainly its female spirit, which is largely what this movie is about.

Yet it's a familiar kind of film that they didn't stop making in the 20th and 21st centuries -- "I'm alienated in the modern city and while I kind of hate it, I kind of love it!" See about a third of my reviews in my book "The Great Unknowns."

A history of cinema is a history of depiction of alienation in gargantuan cities.

So maybe modern Mumbai has the exact same existential feelings as these other places, and other movies. I'm doubting it, but "All We Imagine as Light" presents that to me -- via a heavy blue-colored filter.

To wit, the movie begins with a Kiarastomi-like shot outside a car window that views the blurry cityscape street scenes. This shot will be repeated a couple other times in the movie. Over the top of it, several unknown narrators tells us about their experiences. These boil down to these exact quotes:

--"I've been here for 27 years ... I'm afraid to call it home... I may need to leave"
-- "it has a bad smell, but it's great for work and money"
-- "you could just vanish into thin air here and nobody would know"
-- "Mumbai is nice but I never go t used to it."
-- "it's the city of dreams and the city of illusions"

Two women feature here, middle-aged roommates. One had an arranged marriage but her husband's in , for reasons, which makes her hanker after other guys. The younger roommate, in debt, is pursuing a Muslim guy. The main character's a nurse.

So it's love and longing in Mumbai, an artier and angstier "Sex and the City," though with not much sex -- though I think it's implied, and thus forbidden in a moral way.

What else am I missing? My problem as movie-watcher is that I am not very suggestable, not easily hypnotized, so I can't see what 100% of Rotten Tomatoes critics see at all. In fact, what I see is an Antonioni sort of film that isn't particular enough for me, as a realist depiction of feelings that Mumbai generates specifically, to gain insight into what it's like to be these women. They might as well be in Paris or NYC. Replace a few of the sights and it's sort of the same movie.

And thus the same movie, in a broadstroke way, that was made in the 1960s or '90s.

Then again, as I itted, I know nothing about modern Indian women's plights in the urban darkscape of this movie. But I do know that a good portion of the critics who laud this one also do not know anything about that. We're left to put our interpretative frameworks on this one, which gestures towards physics and/or religion with its grandiose title, but it neither gets there nor gets descriptive enough journalistically to offer what I prefer out of a movie like this.

At this point in Alfred Hitchcock's career, his seventh feature in five years, the odds would be about +891289 that he would become one of the all-time great master directors. Double that for the odds that he would become an iconic visual figure and TV personality.

Other than "The Lodger," none of his early works up until this point clearly signal what would come later.

Of all of those, "The Farmer's Wife" is probably the *least* like any of his most famous works, making it an odd curiosity, maybe something even to pursue for being so ridiculously different.

It's a rural British comedy. For the day, the plot is standard stuff: a single guy seeks to get married because he misses his wife and is instructed to remarry. As in so many silent comedies, he pursues a great variety of women, only to lead to rejection.

But there's that one woman whom we all know he should go after, yet he doesn't think about until the right moment.

Hence this is "Cinderella," though realist and quaint, parochial and country-cute. I think all Hitch movies to this point had some element of terror or dark matter -- such as the lecherous looks of possible lovers in "Champagne" (that came out later in the year) or the boxer's foes in "The Ring." If there's any sin in this movie, it's gluttony, with a lot of hungry types looking for food, but that's all done in fun.

If you pursue this movie, watch for the attempts to capture point of view. First are the fourth-wall "YOU!" moments, when you the viewer become a character and another character looks at you. This is, again, standard stuff at the time, but I sense a young artist experimenting with doing it in the right moment, and probably here doing it too much.

Sometimes even the camera becomes a kid looking for sweets, or the farmer thinking about a female he's after. The main character isn't being analyzed for the complexities of his desires, but the formal elements that set up that exploration are being tested here. The ghosts of the main character's imagination haunts him throughout.

Prior to viewing, I might've searched for the following: "at 3x speed, how long is Satantango"?

I wouldn't recommend watching at 3x speed, but you could, while probably missing the movie's core element, which is viewer hypnotism through meditative plodding via realist cinematography.

"Plodding" comes up as a topic, as does the notion of experiencing time non-linearly, as if the movie's talking about ways to view itself. At one point the old guy in the bar rambles on and on about the differences between plodding and plodding along. Both this and the discussion of spiders -- how they wrap everything together in a silky web, perhaps somehow like the narrative and the images -- are gestures towards frameworks of viewing.

Now as a Midwesterner, I find it extremely odd that a 7.5 hour film has no images of a farmer working. This is a farming collective! Nobody interacts with animals either, except the girl and, um, the cat.

What is being said with that depiction?

And then there's the mudhole of the farm. Because of its length, "Satantango" might be the muddiest movie ever, though "Hard to Be a God" probably has the unbeatable mud-per-minute record.

Both movies are about the total sickening drudgery of rural peasantry. This is the kind of depiction that advocacy groups would complain about, if there were a Hungarian Farmers' lobby. "Uh, your honor, Bela Tarr is calling us a bunch of drunk, boring assholes. He even tripled the runtime of a regular movie to do so. That's three times the hate that Satantango has for us!"

Our farmers in this movie are greedy, at the opening, sleeping around, slobs, yet hopeful about a new collective opportunity that requires capital. They lay their hopes on "Irimias," the actual name of the bearded man who might have a heavenly vision two-thirds of the way through the film. He's the prophet leading them to the Promised Land. AI tells me the name "Irimias" means "Jeremiah," so prophet of capital and future wealth he is.

Probably he's a shyster. Probably the grubby farmers are going from one dead end of a mudscape to another.

That is close to a description of the movie's entire plot, which is not what the movie's completely about. But at 7.5 hours long, I won't blame you if you turn on the 3x speed. As most people testify, this is a masterpiece. It quotes "Stalker," which I don't think is one, because the book's far superior to the film in of aesthetic complexity. I wonder if the novel "Satantango" is similar.

This watches like "Jeanne Dieleman" to me. It exposes the paltry lives of somebody, describing it for us through experiential toil that we viewers suffer through, so that we feel what it's like to be them. Tarr's lack of cutting this movie down leads me to think he believes that you need seven hours of experential toil to feel the life of these farmers.

I get it, though the Strugatskys, who wrote the novel based on "Stalker" and "Hard to Be a God," are far funnier and cleverer in articulating Eastern European post-WW2 drudgery and apathy. I have felt the feelings of "Satantango" evokes many times while reading Russian novels, which take about as long to experience as this film.

Bonus points of this film depicting a village surveillance operation, undertaken by the doctor, in the most slob-like, boring depiction of a doctor's life ever. As much as Tarr might hate Hungarian farmers, he really takes a run at parochial Hungarian doctors, who probably also don't have a lobbying group.

I am not sure if this movie should be taken as a universal statement. Yet the "Irimias" depiction gestures towards that. A "prophet" of capital leads people to a lame promised land, from mudhole to scattered collective. This could be a sociopolitical vision that is about dispersal and, ultimately, despair. As philosophical universal, the movie might as well be offering us a cyanide capsule. Nature sucks here. People don't get along at all. Among the worst in life happens in this film, and people treat it horrifically.

But maybe it's just about 20th century Hungarian farmers? About this I know nothing. Regarding the depiction of farmers as farmers, I think the film couldn't be more wrong and, to be totally honest, stupid. It's an anti-Georgics, which is anti-European to the core. The second you find farmers like those in this movie, it's the second you don't eat anymore. You and I depend on the opposite ethos of these characters.

That doesn't bother me. Ultimately, the runtime does. I have strong doubts about the notion that this movie couldn't speak prophetically to us in half the runtime. One thing about nihilism is that will try to steal your life by wasting your time, because it thinks all is meaningless, at least in the long run, so that is its view of your time. I am 100% against life-theft, which is the greatest crime of mediocre to bad movies.

I liked parts of MI8, but only the parts that went VROOM! Two big showstopping scenes are included, with one, the last, being Cruise’s crème de la crème, as far as the action stunts he’s performed himself.

My total count for MI8 went like this:

Two nuclear bombs needing to be stopped

Three countdown clocks

Four sprinting scenes

Five shirtless Tom-Cruise scenes

That’s likely the most important stuff. Otherwise, MI8 utters countless fortune-cookie sayings, which the franchise has piled on as it’s went.

Those sayings amount to existentialism writ-large, the philosophy that supposedly will combat the A.I. takeover of the world. Dead Reckoning: Part One had strong Christian themes, what with a character named Grace, a cross-shaped key as the MacGuffin, and several instances of adoption and deus ex machina salvation.

However, Part Two tells us that Ethan Hunt is the one good person in the world who can be trusted with the deadliest weapons and most fearsome choices. Unlike Tolkien’s view in Lord of the Rings, in which no one can carry the Ring of Power because it corrupts all, Hunt is such a good man that he can handle MI8’s own version of the Ring. You’ll know it when you see it.

Full review on Substack here: learningaboutmovies.substack.com/p/mission-impossible-8-gets-old-looks

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

The truth is that this movie’s genre, the action-thriller centered on the search for mythical nonsense, needs to find its own Fountain of Youth. That might be done, frankly, with younger actors who are closer to 30 than 50. What this movie longs for is what the entire movie industry in America needs, a true revivification towards something fresh.

learningaboutmovies.substack.com/p/fountain-of-youth-is-your-2025-national

If there's such a thing as History-Porn, I just watched it. It feels as if the Revolutionary War just took its shirt off and gave me a lap dance.

There's even a couple of moments where the movie nearly does this. E.g., Mel Gibson turns from pacifist to badass killer, wasting a couple dozen redcoats with hatchet, emerging from that hackfest with his shirt dropping off his body, bloody-white, and hot.

Partly what I mean is that this thing simulates history as a moral-political play, but it's a Roland Emmerich carnival. Emmerich had just come off of making Independence Day and Godzilla. "The Patriot" is closer to those than "Drums Along the Mohawk" or whatever 1930-50s historical film it could be imitating in spirit.

In a way, this movie returns to those older epic historical romances of mid-century Hollywood, just with bigger sets, costume, and horrific CGI that attempts historical recreations of setting. It is a moral discussion about its present-day values for sure, circa 1999. (E.g., some late '90s political movies tend to be about how America should fight global skirmishes and wars in the name of "freedom".)

But historically, it is partly atrocious, including the depiction of the British way of fighting. Anybody could discern this with the way it uses women as hotties, blacks as happy free people, and Heath Ledger as a teen hottie ready for his "Teen" mag cover shoot. Even Lucius Malfoy gets to look evil while shooting little kids, representing all badboy Brits as lobsterbacks. So much for any British invasion! ("Get back, back at you, Paul McCartney!")

No moment isn't pumped full of syrupy melodrama by John Williams, his sonic specialty, or hammed up to masculine perfection by Gibson and even Ledger, growing up here. We learn that South Carolinian swamps are magically beautiful at night, and plantations are stunningly pictureseque in the golden hour. I imagine this movie improved tourism down there.

Emmerich's art here does more to destroy the notion, if you read about this movie's relationship to actual history, that historical dramas have anything to do with a real historical past. I should appreciate weirdo, angular stuff like "300" and Alex Cox's "Walker" much more, knowing already that almost none of this type of movie resembles past reality.

Thus this movie gets sexier the drunker you are.

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

Tarsem's "The Cell" is one of those Bridge Movies, which are the last gasp of one kind of movie that, by the time of the movie's release, has been overdone to death, and the new breath of the kind of movie to come.

Movies I include in the "bridge" category are "The Great Escape" and "First Blood," but I've only thought about this for two minutes.

"The Cell" seems like, and really is, a bad copy of serial-killer fare, ala "The Silence of the Lambs." Nothing isn't stereotypical, which isn't all bad, but it does mean the movie's in some ways a pale imitation. E.g., psycho-sexual killer needs to be pursued by cops, including young lovely female cop, who will get warped and will be the object of perversion by the male psycho.

And I draw the representational line in the movie's depiction of -- yuck -- necrophilia. As Poe said, some perversions aren't humorous or beautiful. Tarsem is not the one to depict sins of perversion, since he will make them look as elegantly in his style as possible.

Once the movie gets into its second act, going with its science-fictional premise that a cop can enter another person's pscyhe -- that's creepy in "1984" but apparently here there's no ethical issue at all, given that the killer is, I repeat, a necrophiliac -- once it's into this act, it opens up into Tarsem wonderland. A critic like Ebert, dazzled by unique visuals, is going to gawk over this. A critic like Rosenbaum is going to remain pissed by the film's politics and social messages.

That second half of the movie is a sign of things to come. The 2000s, more or less, developed into a span that depicted the blend of fantasies and realities. It's magic-realism plus, where characters rather seamlessly veer from a fantasy world into reality and back. See "Pan's Labyrinth," "Finding Neverland," and Tarsem's own "The Fall."

You'll find a bunch of these types of films in the middle of the decade, possibly influenced by the paranoid conspiracy-thriller simulation stuff of the late 1990s. So of course "The Cell" gets hammered as a "Matrix" clone, though the simulation of the movie is a psycho killer's brain and not a full-blown virtual world.

So choose your critic: Ebert or Rosenbaum.

As a Tarsem lover, I want to pick the former. But with Rosenbaum, I feel like not only have I seen this movie fifty times before, but that it has nothing to say besides aesthetics. Oh, well, it does seem to be in touch with theories of childhood trauma creating schizos. Much as it tries to humanize the killer by depicting his sorry imagination, I liked him even less than when he was acting out his necrophilia.

(from forthcoming essay in a book)

Regarding the depiction of the Anglos, centered from my point of view on the cool American actors, The Great Escape chooses to depict them as rascal engineers. They deflect and deceive, while crafting the ultimate tunnel. The movie’s effectively a prison-break film with a touch of the spy and spycraft genre.

Why, in so many famous American films, do the Americans depict themselves as trickster underdogs, with a strong whiff of Tom Sawyer and Bugs Bunny? One has to note that at this time, as was noted above, that they possess the most powerful empire in world history, at least by money (the dollar as the global reserve standard) and weapons (aircraft; the H-bomb).

In reality, they aren’t exactly “the little guys,” as the main character-heroes are in The Wizard of Oz, the Star Wars franchise, E.T., Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Avatar, The Sound of Music, The Ten Commandments, and Doctor Zhivago — nine of the top ten of the highest grossing films of all time (inflation-adjusted).
McQueen’s character imbibes and reflects all of this. Four times he’s sent to solitary confinement for playing the camp raccoon, the wily and imaginative American animal that gets into such delightful trouble. The raccoon should be our national mascot, and it should be named McQueen.

Three times he endures the Cooler without a look of pain, regret, or even anger. McQueen himself helped initiate the “Man With No Name” look, the blank stare of the tough-guy onscreen, an alpha or sigma, which Clint Eastwood developed and ran with. That’s “The Cooler King,” the moniker given to Virgil Hilts at the end of the movie. That word “cool” already meant “intensely awesome,” a character trait that jazz musicians and effortless-looking athletes possessed. Hilts isn’t just cool, though — he’s “cooler” than anybody else, the king of cool. In my view, he’s the model for the Easy Rider motorcyclists that embodied counter-cultural Boomer cool in the 1969 film.

If the movie is about one thing at all, it is whether the Anglo prisoners will behave or submit. That’s put to them early, when the Nazi officers claim that the prison is inescapable. To a wily raccoon of an underdog, no, it’s not. Neither Tom Sawyer nor Bugs Bunny submits. Cowboys wouldn’t. Groucho Marx would hurl anarchic quips at such an authority figure at lightning speed. “Good behavior,” or accepting what the authorities tell you, isn’t in the American character, according to this movie. The long celebration of the 4th of July in the middle emphasizes this point; the colonials didn’t give a damn, and still won’t. They lead the Anglo-American camp in this anti-authoritarian spirit, while the British officers claim that they are doing their “duty” by trying to escape.

The Brits are still behaving according to code. Meanwhile, McQueen rides his motorcycle roughshod over the German countryside, wherever he damn well pleases, hoping to find a way out into wide open territory. You’d better believe that, when the Nazis tell him to “Halt!,” he’ll kick them in the ass, rev his engines, and ride anywhere he pleases, even outside the confines of the boundaries of the road.

Woody Allen's "Small Time Crooks" has a promising start and a dissatisfying direction, veering into a typical marital-breakup story in Allen , instead of pursuing the inherent goofiness of the initial premise.

"Crooks" is an imitation of a parody, a play on the movie "Big Deal on Madonna Street" that was making fun of 1950s noirs back in the mid-1950s. I initially thought that Allen's "Crooks" was messing with "Rififi," but then he literally shows the "Madonna" movie in this one.

Thinking of Allen as a bank robber, helped by numbskull bro characters played by Jon Lovitz and Michael Rapaport, seems like a feature in and of itself. Allen's schmoe character here, with just $6k to he and his wife's name (Tracey UIlman), proposes to rob a bank by drilling under it through an abandoned shop. He brings his bros together and tries.

As a cover, the Ullman character creates a cookie shop above the site where Allen and company are drilling. But the cookie shop turns out to be a wild success!

That means the protagonist couple vault from lower-class to NYC elite. The second act shows her as living it up, pursued by a Hugh-Grant suave rich guy, while Allen's schmoe is trying to escape the high lifestyle.

That second act abandons the middle-aged brat pack that I was enjoying, as they rather ineptly attempt to break into the bank. Allen had no patience for specific humor about drilling and quixotic theft -- he's still stuck here in thinking about love in NYC. Moreover, he casts himself, the weak link in my view once again, quite possibly because he worked cheaply (I speculate).

In spite of all that, I still like this movie. Ullman shows chops in playing what turns out to be the star, the cookie magnate who runs the gamut of high-society scenes. This is just basic "fish out of water" material. It's lighthearted Allen, which he didn't do enough of after the early 1970s.

A Hitchcock comedy, this one probably should've been remade, with its first parts (act) reconfigured into a different story.

Nevertheless, Hitchcock works hard to *mess around*. POV and fourth-wall breaks galore, with dizzying POV shots of people confused, seasick, or possibly drunk. He may want us to feel both like the female protagonist and the men who ogle her.

There's just not enough of that edgy stuff. The story changes what it's about every ten minutes. At first, it's about a wealthy young heiress in a possible love triangle on an Atlantic cruise ship. Then it's about her high-class American lifestryle. Then her father loses his millions in a market crash, so they go from rich to not-so-rich. Through some of this, there's a mustached man, a kind of lecher figure, who may be sinisterly pursuing the girl, one of Hitch's lusty old men seeking young blondes.

Ostensibly the movie's really about the rich/poor contrast, as the protagonist goes from heiress to pauperess. But then again, in the long middle, that's an excuse for some of the attempts at comedy, a few of which are vaguely sexual.

A reminder that "champagne" was illegal in the US at this point -- Prohibition -- so it's always fun when movies mock that and also simulate the experience of alcohol consumption for the masses.

I'm lower on this movie than you all, and here's why:

first, though, it's iconic in a way that almost no movie ever has been. "Ferris" still is the go-to example for fourth-wall-breaking, which works, because Ferris is manifestly the cool high-school bro who's bringing you, the audience, into his friend group. Every character in the movie except his sister accepts this; thereby, with the Social Proof principle, you probably will love this invitation to buddy up with Ferris.

I think writer-director-producer John Hughes had zeitgeist tensions pulling him in two directions. One was the cornball 1980s comedic fare, such as "Sixteen Candles," and another was the serious Gen-X therapeutic fare, such as "The Breakfast Club." I strongly prefer the latter over the former.

In "Ferris," he deploys the character of Cameron as the therapeutic fare, but sidelines him for Ferris' Tom-Sawyer exploits and the principal's Looney-Tunes-like slapstick attempts to catch Ferris. Most of this movie is in the latter mode.

Like all of the characters in "Breakfast Club," Cameron feels like his home life is wrecked. The solution here is to "free" him by having Ferris screw around, most obviously with the forbidden Ferrari. This can be touching -- and that moment in the art museum is pretty great, where Cameron confronts his own textures in the Seurat painting. Yet the movie is intercutting that with the Jones character getting his shoe stuck in mud and attacked by Ferris' dog. It's like if "The Breakfast Club" was interrupted by a live-action Looney-Tunes cartoon.

Ferris is affective as the traditional American Rascal character, which goes back over 200 years. As in other Hughes' movies, school is the modern prison system which budding charismatic types need to free themselves from. Ferris, like Tom Sawyer, plays "hooky." There's no American in the last 150 years who hasn't understood that in their heart of hearts.

Yet Ferris and company do *learn* -- and as in other Hughes' movies, there's a nascent case for homeschooling. Effectively Ferris schools himself. He learns how to use synths to manipulate social systems, particularly phone lines, he manipulates restaurant systems, and he becomes the life of the party of the entire city of Chicago. Also, Ferris and company go to the Chicago Museum of Modern Art.

As usual, the youth are masters of modern communication that adults suck at. Ferris is king of the phone lines and answering machines. This is funny because Broderick played the lead in "War Games," about a teenager who almost starts WW3 thanks to his ability to master computers and phones beyond the Defense Department's capabilities. Why haven't we had a winsome movie in the last ten years where teens are shown to run laps around adults by their use of texting, etc.?

I find that last part fascinating -- that Ferris and friends elect to spend time at an art museum, a Hughes idea through and through. The movie might be saying that the American school system pretty much hates the study of art, so kids have to find out how to school themselves. I say this because I just drove my son, who took an AP Art History course online, to a test facility three hours away so that he could take the AP Art History test. There wasn't a school within three hours of us that offered an Art History course that prepped for the AP test!

Meanwhile, of course, had he wished to play football or basketball, every school around us throws infinite money at those. They really worship sports around here, perhaps the most ephemeral pastime of all, while art has the best chance of lasting forever (e.g., "Cave of Forgotten Dreams").

I feel like I'm talking myself into this movie, except only the parts I appreciate. Ferris remains a grown-up Bart Simpson, a Dukes of Hazzard "good old boy" who's got the goober Boss-Hog sheriff after him. The movie hints that he might become a fun-loving investment banker, a more worldly-wise version of his father. But I prefer the possible future of Bender from "The Breakfast Club," the other great Hughes "rascal" character.

I just feel like these are two different movies in one that do not pair well or make sense together. Is this a Gen-X commentary or just a yuck-yuck teen comedy? Is it an Americanized Godard-like romp (e.g., "Band of Outsiders")? Is Ferris just a modified Chevy Chase character for kids? I guess I just don't like that I can watch this movie as a dumb, ephemeral comedy, which is sometimes what it seems to be going for.

Last week I heard a chorus of cheeping coming from a window well. Peering into it, I saw a whole band of newly hatched wood ducklings, frantically bouncing against a window screen in the well. They couldn't get out. Turning around, I then noticed Mother Wood Duck, running in a semicircle around me and squawking.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I turned to my 16-year-old daughter.

She had dealt with errant wood ducklings before. Each year they hatch and fall out of our trees, the tallest in town. In a previous year, she rescued one and tried to raise it. It didn't make it, though somehow she kept it away from our three cats.

When I saw the ducklings in the window well, The cats were right above, peering down from a window above the action.

I guess "Fly Away Home" has something to do with all of that, though it's a pretty strong response to darkly pessmistic environmental tales, such as "Ferngully," and others that contrast technological invention with ecological preservation, such as "The Mosquito Coast."

I was really reminded of "Coast" here. The main character invents a novel fridge device and shows it off in the first ten minutes of the film, just as in "Coast." But the Daniels character here, a Canadian, is much happier and pluckier than Harrison Ford's grumbly, quixotic American.

The mission is to help a group of baby geese migrate. They can't because they weren't raised by their parents. He, the inventor, is a Canadian "Wright Brothers" type, building his own flying machine. Thanks to his daughter, who has raised the geese after their woods was bulldozed, he begins to appreciate the birds.

I have never appreciated Canadian geese, which is what I think these are. They are a bit of a menace, as golfers know. But they don't mean any harm. They just eat grass and poop it out endlessly. This movie loves them. It wants them to thrive. The main character will use his tech and risk his life, sort of, to make that happen.

I must say that most environmentalist films have been dark and dreary in the last 30 years, including those I was subjected to in school. Had they show this to me, I would've bulked as a teenager, for its apparent schmaltz. But director Carroll Ballard is good with the camera, good enough, to make my middle-aged brain appreciate this movie to overlook its cornier elements, which it doesn't have as many of as I would expect.

It's impossible for moviemakers to avoid what this movie sort of does, which is to make Paquin's character one who needs to heal because of her mother's death. The mother dies in a machine in the opening shots, a car wreck. The father will possibly save the adopted "children," the geese, via another machine. Paquin's character will learn to be a mother, the mother she never had, to the animals.

This semester I read a bunch of ecological literary criticism, and my guess is that they'd balk in bulk at the humanization of the issues here, and some dumbing down of the economic aspects versus the environmental. The birds are birds, not pseudo-children.

At the end I feel pretty good, but then again I wonder if those geese are going to fly to my local park, where they will hiss at me when I get too close.

At least this movie believes in something, and something beyond its own commercial value.

Exiting "Things to Come" yet again, I feel quite uncomfortable about the future. Who knows whether H.G. Wells and anyone else associated with this production intended that? Perhaps they wanted to encourage everyone, feeling out the coming second great war.

No matter. Like all visions of a possible future, "Things to Come" posits as many drawbacks to "progress" -- a favorite word and much-debated idea in the film -- as there could be benefits.

Chief among those is the idea that we must progress or, very likely, die. The antithesis to progress in the first act, set in 1936, the year of the movie's release, is war itself. But later, the enemy to progress is political tribalism. In the third act, it's a naysaying conservatism.

Against the naysaying is the Cabal family, the scions of Everytown, the stand-in for any British city circa the 1930s. In 1936, John Cabal doubts the great war to come. Later, he will lead an advanced aerospace civilization of engineers in 1970 to stop the growing Mad-Max tribalism caused by three decades of war. By 2036, the year of the movie's last act, his great grandson, Oswald Cabal, is leading the human race into space, using a "space gun" to initiate a lunar colony.

That family name of "Cabal" is our first tip-off that all is not necessarily right with the concept of Progress, as typified by the heroic, order-bringing family. The Cabals have to use force to quell dissident factions. At one point, John Cabal leads a colonial invasion of Everytown using "the gas of peace." That weapon just knocks everybody out, so that the aerospace-engineer race can conquer the wartorn world and bring harmonious order back to human civilization.

Cabal calls this his plan for "active and aggressive peace." But what is "aggressive peace"? It's not the Christian ideal of "peace on Earth" brought by a baby Savior, as represented by Christmas time in 1936. When the movie opens Christmas is juxtaposed with war-fever threats -- as possibly Wells and others felt in the actual mid-1930s. War mobilization obliterates Christmas and Everytown's celebration thereof. That kind of peace on Earth -- through traditional religion and commerce -- cannot stand up to the real struggles that order and progress need to make.

Instead, the Cabals represent a heroic engineer breed who can bring about true progress. Part of that is amazing: an end to war itself, with concomitant results in medical progress, such as the end of diseases and ailments.

However, they are still using guns and gas at the end, needed to stop forces that would thwart their vision of progress, which is space colonization. Moreover, they've escaped the natural world almost entirely. Everytown has turned into a plastic-looking sleek city of early/mid 20th century science-fictional dreaming -- the kind of ecological escape pilloried by more modern tales of faux-progress such as "WALL-E." The Cabals basically long for the dream of living on the Axiom spaceship.

I have no doubt that Wells himself longed for some of this. As a utopian realist of sorts, with socialist positions that ebbed and altered throughout his life, his ardent wish to end war make sense in a 1930s context. The Great War was behind everyone. It caused what the movie calls "social disparity," including a worldwide epidemic. In the movie, the epidemic is the "wandering sickness," which results in half of humanity dying and the survivors shooting the infected like it's the zombie apocalypse.

In a weird way, that act of violence is progress, the necessary eradication of a nasty disease caused by this movie's vision of the second great war, which did in fact happen not long after this movie's release!

I have discussed almost no characters and no human elements. That's because "Things to Come" is quite experimental, with a Wellsian wondersweep. What matters to this movie is historical change. The main character is the setting, Everytown, and the other main character is really an idea, the struggle of Progress to actually progress. "Things to Come" did not have 130 years of movie history to draw from, as today's movies do, to realize that focusing on individuals and their stories helps an audience absorb a film's big ideas.

Instead, the movie's highly experimental, to sometimes great effect. When the film transitions from 1970 to 2036, it shows us a remarkable and stunningly long montage of "development," which consists of machines mining the Earth to build the space civilization of the movie's third act.

In fact, the star of the movie might just be its special effects, primitive compared to today's CGI, and yet some viewers may forgive them because the aesthetics are often quaint, clever, and irreplicable. Anybody who has played the “Fallout” series has seen this movie’s sights many times. The war scenes in the film forbode the harrowing Blitzkrieg of German tanks to come in just a few years. The discussion of a lunar colony in the 2036-section predicts the 1960s Space Race.

So viewers online discuss “Things to Come” in of the prophecies it gets right. That’s fascinating for sure, but we should that science fiction like this always has one foot in the future, and yet also one foot in the present. The movie’s about its own day, the 1930s, as much as it is what might happen later, as the title clearly suggests. As such, it describes various 1930s desires – the hope to end epidemics, economic depressions, centralized states that can use powerful weapons to harm and subdue vast populations, and perhaps also the total control of human enviroments and even the entire cosmos itself.

Is that progress? Every viewer is invited to think hard about the movie. This one is not about empathizing with individuals, as most movies are, but about invoking better cognition in you. And if the movie does that, maybe the “things to come” won’t be so bad as they were before.

While I think this is better than most 30+ year-old horror movies that cinephiles might reassess, "The Exorcist 3" still has humongous problems.

It's dirt slow. Nothing sexy, or horrific, happens, really for the entire movie -- even though there are some cool angular cuts and shots here. The plot descriptions that say this is a true sequel to "The Exorcist" should not lead viewers to expect a 30-minute Linda-Blair head-spinning tour de force. Even the original was pokey, in its opening act. But it didn't wait until the last 3 minutes to do something.

Slow isn't bad necessarily, but really this is a serial-killer narrative, not "horror" besides a couple of scenes. George C. Scott plays the world-weary, atheistic police lieutenant who, by encountering Satan, may experience the power of God or something. If he hangs around the Catholic Church enough, he might just convert.

Actually he encounters "Legion," the name of the demon in the subtitle, presumably the same one that Jesus Christ cast out of a guy into pigs, as described in the New Testament.

Oddly, *WE* become Legion in a few shots, arguably in the whole movie! Early shots show us what I think is the demon's perspective from the first-person POV. The movie is never sure when it wants to return to these. To spice things up, possibly because nothing's happening, the Scott character has a couple of bonkers dreams, in which Fabio and Patrick Ewing show up in his conception of heaven.

Scott has so much charisma for me that I could watch him in anything. That's a taste preference. Pauline Kael didn't like his "overacting." Add Brad Dourif as a pre-Anthony-Hopkins version of Hannibal Lecter -- though I presume this movie borrows from the setup of "Manhunter" and/or the novels that stuff is based on -- and this movie watches decently as an arresting exercise in making the dullness of the scenario come to life.

The movie's solution is telegraphed from the beginning. As usual, the "unexpected" person is IT, which has turned into the biggest horror-movie cliche of all, if it wasn't already in 1990. And it's the type of person you don't expect. This follows the Catholic Church's doctrine of original sin, which views kind old ladies as perverted murderers in their secret hearts at times. (Alas, the picture on letterboxd at the top gives away the ending of the film!)

Probably some of you could write a thesis or dissertation on why the late 20th century enjoyed movies featuring imprisoned killer-types outsmarting cops and pulling one over on the good guys -- e.g., Silence of the Lambs; Se7en; Primal Fear; arguably The Usual Suspects, etc.

The entire problem of this movie is reducible to plumbing.

The main character's apartment keep flooding, about a half-foot of standing water resulting from a clogged drain. The movie just keeps coming back to this.

He's a teenager in an early '90s movie, so he's full of ennui, kind of like French rebel-youth types in '60s movies or early listless American teens in the 1950s. The modern world caught up with southeast Asia here, clearly, according to first-time director Tsai Ming-Liang.

Now once again, a plot summary of this film not only won't suffice, it's downright misleading, almost immorally so. Almost nothing happens. Shot after shot shows listless teenagers in a paved modern city. It's all traffic, no nature, all video arcades and bad plumbing, no ecological flourishing.

That about sums up a great bulk of cinephilic 20th century fare -- the modernist conundrum of spiritually alienated people in packed urban environmentalist hellholes. Some directors rescue their characters from that via aesthetics, such as "Chungking Express," or give their characters humanist dignity within the cityscape, such as "Chungking Express."

Others, as in this movie, just leave their boring characters in dull spaces that offer no meaning except boredom and alienation -- the kind of thing artists have been complaining about for close to 200 years, or maybe forever.

I found this movie rather dull, even in HD, though it's always a bit inexplicable as to why some of this fare hits and others do not. Edward Yang's work seems wiser and lovelier to me. This one repeats like the lame ditty of eight or nine notes that doesn't stop playing -- I mean the one played on the bass keys of the synth.

Would this have been less dull if they fixed the plumbing? Maybe these people need Harry Tuttle to come to their rescue, the De Niro character in Brazil. At least Sam Lowry can dream of flying away in that movie; he's got his imagination. These characters in "Rebels" have no imagination that I can spot. Their lives are as cramped as their minds, and flooded via stuffed drains.

Can a movie be stupid and atmospheric at the same time? On the scales of critical justice, which side weighs heavier?

I see people actually calling this movie "stupid," a female version of "Dirty Harry," though Ebert more wisely noted that it's decently close to "Halloween." That horror movie as a description of "Blue Steel" makes more sense to me. This one's signaling in every frame that it's a dream, in the vein of Bigelow's "Near Dark." It's a successor to Michael Mann's "Manhunter" and a gateway to David Fincher's "Se7en."

The plot is nothing but cockamamie. A newer female NYC police officer stops an armed robbery by shooting Tom Sizemore in the chest. But he drops his gun, which is picked up by an innocent victim on the floor. Thus the weapon of this armed robber wasn't found. She's accused of being delusional.

Meanwhile, and this is where everything gets so ridiculous that I can't believe I'm writing this, the innocent victim becomes turned on by the gun. He becomes a psycho killer, complete with a schizophrenic scene where he talks to himself while pumping iron. Of course he's a Wall Street trader.

Actually, I couldn't tell if the villain was already a psycho or if he became a psycho due to the armed robbery event and the gun he takes as a souvenir. The movie, it seems, is completely open to the latter.

Thankfully, the film is Bigelow-dreamy. Had it been striving for any realism, such as Alex Cox's "Highway Patrolman," which also replaces the typical white-guy cop role with another race/gendered person, this would be one of the dumbest films of the 1990s.

But Bigelow really has vision, including in the soundscapes. I would hire her as a cinematographer, only she's replace me quickly as the director. "Blue Steel" would've been revolutionary in 1982. In 1990, it's a good-looking and good-sounding movie, in the vein of Mann's earlier films and "Blade Runner." The latter parts of the movie play out in the shadows at night.

That's when Curtis character is hunted and yet hunts. The psycho killer woos her, she falls for him, and then he clearly shows that he's a really sick dude. The main character's relative helplessness, the attempts to hunt but the movie making it seem futile, strongly reminds me of Fincher's material. I have to wonder how much he studied Bigelow, or if they're just of the same generation with similar sensibilities.

For those reasons, I enjoy experienced "Blue Steel" aesthetically. It absolutely requires me to turn my brain off, but the movie's not about reality so much about its own moody dream-logic.

If you want a thousand-hour project, count the bullets shot in this movie. You'll find out what 10 to the 8th really means.

I once called a John Wick movie "barbarian ballet," and yet I think John Woo's is a slight upgrade from that. This is "Mortal Kombat" ballet, that game coming out in the same year.

Regardless, I do not have to wonder what Genghis Khan's Letterboxd four-favorites would be -- this movie, its predecessor, a Conan movie, and probably something weepy, like "Tears of Endearment." Surely old Genghis had a quarter of a heart?

Okay, I disagree with Taratino that film and reality are completely separate, making it okay to just shoot a trillion rounds and kill a million people on-screen. But I don't agree with the "Mortal Kombat" crowd that this movie would turn me into a guntoting killer. And yet there's surely something to the desensitization to violence caused by media consumption, both good and bad. (the "good" being that certain difficult movies prep you for experiences you could or will have.)

I do not claim the moral high-ground at all. I it that last night I played "Aliens: Fireteam Elite" for 30 minutes, and it looked close enough to this film, though I was blowing up a million xenomorphs, which is basically a bug infestation gone wrong.

Some movies wear me out. Anything "Lego" is so manic and maniacally edited that I'm spent 45 minutes in. Such is the case here, though I don't blame either Lego or Woo for my exhaustion. At the same time, if I ever needed to film an action scene, this movie would be an ur-text for me to draw from. Any five minutes would inspire.

Did I care about this movie's plot? Should I? Does it have anything to do with real life, or is it like my endless "Street Fighter" battles and "Far Cry" raids? My tribal blood pounds, I prey on others and feel preyed upon, I am back with my ancestors in paleolithic Europe hunting dire wolves, the call of the wild searing through my nerves and brain. I am at my most alive. I am also hallucinating.

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

I commend this relatively unknown film to you because, more than most any movie I can recall, it's quite humane about a particular cop's plight.

That's a surprise to me given director Alex Cox's punk-anarchic sensibility in "Repo Man" and "Walker," and his portrayal of people of punk-anarchic sensibilities in "Sid and Nancy."

It's also a surprise to me given other formalistic leaps here on Cox's part.

No, they are not leaps -- they are legit sky-jumps from one skyscraper to another.

Cox films this one in Mexico, all in Spanish, featuring all Mexican actors. His protagonist is a skinny runt of a dude, the opposite of the beefy, chiseled-jaw American cops in typical cop movies. Other characters, ordinary citizens, see him this way.

Moreover, Cox uses an unusual style, one I can't recall at all before 1998, though somebody had to do it. Welles did somewhat in "Touch of Evil," for example, but not all the way through. That's the long-take, handheld shots that look like Inarritu or Cuaron were involved.

That's combine with a typical Cox-ian surrealism, in spots. The main character gets shot in the leg at one point, and all of a sudden his father appears. They are great transitions, into and out of the father, a man who the protagonist thinks is alive but actually is not. Like the lost Repo Man character of Emilio Estevez, this character has his errant dreams of the beyond. Only unlike Repo Man, sort of, he takes up a vocation on the right side of the law.

Okay, no, he's a touch more "repo" than I'm describing. His estatdos has quotas for traffic tickets. He's supposed to collect revenue from normies, unjustly. Too bad, because he has a heart. A lot of this movie features thirty seconds here of one of his traffic stops, thirty seconds there, in order to add up in a vision of what a Mexican cop's life might be like -- for Cox, it's much closer to be a social worker. Those end up culminating in a spectacular long-take shot two-thirds of the way through, involving a police chase and shooting -- you'll know it when you see it.

I note this movie comes out two years after the show "Cops" made its debut, one of the longest running TV shows that tries to realistically depict real cops doing real (mostly boring) work. That show has documentary, handheld cams. In the early days of "Cops," most of the officers were white guys in ghetto neighorhoods. "Highway Patrolman" replaces the place and ethnicity, I presume deliberately so.

Mexico is the setting?? I mention Welles because he's one of very few American film artists to try to depict Mexico, that south-of-the-USA border country that seem to be nowhere on film. How many films about Mexico has Hollywood made? Still perhaps the greatest movie about immigration from Mexico to the US is a 1980s movie ("El Norte"). You'd think, given the impact and political rancor of immigration, that there's be a ton of movies about that. Yes, there are tons of movies about drug trafficking in those parts, but not less sensationalistic people and events. Were movies true to reality, you'd expect a land of 100+ million people to have more interaction, in normal ways, with the land just north of it of 330-million.

Why the Englishman Cox cares about Mexico here is perhaps weird on the surface, although he has always been interested in what's south-of-the-border, e.g., "Walker." I suppose it would be like an American-based director interested in contemporary Irish society, which has happened.

Thus, with this film, you at least get a humanistic "Cops" show featuring the current plights of Mexican policemen.

The movie is about more than that, though, because Cox also likes to show how "the grass isn't greener on the other side," as it were. He made a rock biopic ("Sid and Nancy") that was about as scuzzy and anti-glamorous as such a movie could be. "Repo Man" shows that repo man might seem cool, but that job sucks, more or less. Here, the Mexican highway patrolman goes through training school in the opening minutes of the movie, and it sure seems cool. He's established in his vocation. And then the rest of the movie happens -- one life soul-sucking event after another.

Possibly because of the relative lack of score, or the long-take shots, all of this feels less melodramatic than typical cop fare (e.g., 1996's LA Confidential). There's an artistry to Cox's choices but no sexiness, even if his main character immorally visits a prostitute from time to time (he being married with a baby).

Almost no job, experienced realistically, is sexy, least of all a Mexican cop's.

If I were making a superhero movie, "Darkman" would be one of five movies I'd screen over and over for myself.

Watching it casually, I think the movie's too cartoony and hammy, especially whenever a villain's on screen.

Granted, "Darkman" is much closer in time to the '60s Batman TV show than we are to "Darkman." They showed that Batman show regularly back then. In the wake of Tim Burton's "Batman" and alongside "Dick Tracy," Raimi's "Darkman" came during a pretty cartoony age.

Yet it does have higher ambitions within it, in moments. The figure of Darkman is essentially a tortured soul, a Victor Frankenstein who accidentally gets turned into the monster, then basically becomes The Invisible Man. Topping that premise is his ability, thanks to his tech, to turn into anybody. Physically he's too disabled to appear in public; he's got the ultimate plastic surgery machine, though. He can turn into any bad guy he wants, infiltrating them by pretending to be one of them.

But he feels evil doing so. He feels incomplete. He's an Elephant-Man freakshow, sort of.

That alone, plus Raimi's various visual flourishes -- channeling both comic books and some of the wilder 1930s-esque montages -- make "Darkman" almost palatable.

But then you get the villains, all of whom act more cartoony than Sid Caesar in a Joker costume, while Raimi predictably tilts the camera 45 degrees.

I didn't feel treated as an adult by this movie, and so that usually revolts me. Surprising is that this one earned an R-rating. That's unjust; besides two f-bombs, this one's not too far from Burton's Batman and Dick Tracy, both creepy enough for a kid like me back then.

I suggest "Darkman" as a prime candidate for a remake. Probably we missed the possibility for a remake? If superhero movies are on the wane and 80's nostalgia overdone -- I know this is 1990, but close enough -- somebody should've remade this six years ago.

If I were going for an Iranian Studies degree, they could show this film. It perhaps would work best with ample historical and academic frameworks to explain its self-referentiality, which makes "Close-Up" watch like a melodramatic opera by comparison. It's essentially a making-of a film, only it's a film, so the kind of Kiarostami hybridity is amped up.

No doubt this is all quite personal and political, for the filmmaker and for Iran, which banned it. That likely is a positive reason to watch. Nevertheless, I felt more like I was watching a making-of movie than a movie. By contrast, "The Mirror" is more a fascinating and seemingly spontaneous filmmaking experiment.

In the last two weeks, I've been working on editing a collection of LB reviews. About half of the films that made it are in the of "Maborisi" -- existential moodpieces on melancholy and grief in the modern world, almost all set in pretty cold, machine-dominated urban environments.

"Maborisi" may even be the apotheosis of that. I just watched "An Autumn Afternoon" by Ozu, to whom this film is often compared, and at least he had formal elements of brightness involved. He pictured sad factories and empty, rectangular hallways, like "Maborisi" does, but with notes of joy.

You need to wait at least halfway through this movie to get those. For the first half, much of it is very dark, including the opening sequence of shots.

I begin that way because, once again, we have a movie that's been very poorly described. Summaries of this movie suck. They give the main plot in the first two sentences, which Wikipedia does, but that plot problem appears *20 minutes in*. And then Wikipedia offers two paragraphs on this majestically shot tonal poem.

Plot summaries often don't suffice because plot is not what some films are about. Almost all of them ever made, plot-heavy or not, are lyrical. "Maborisi" is a complex of moods centered around alienation in a modern Japanese environment, and grief.

While Ozu comes up as a strong influence here, and correctly, I must say that I thought Antonioni's was stronger. Consider the plot now: a woman's husband dies, leaving her alone with their baby. He mysteriously gets hit by a train.

His absence is everywhere in the movie, powerfully, in the empty spaces of nearly every frame -- I suppose the title is even invoking that possibility. That's an Antonioni special: have a seemingly primary character disappear, and their loss is a focus. They can never appear again in the movie; therefore they always are appearing, invisibly.

Loss in the modern world, I think, is actually not easy to depict. It's easy to discuss but not captivating necessarily. Director Kore-eda announces here that he's a master. This is done through not just cinematography but the juxtaposition of cinematographic moments. In one shot, the main character (the female) sits in a cold empty rectangular space after learning about her husband. The next shot is a train on the exterior, in the upper left, ing behind her apartment complex. That's a reminder of what happened to her husband, what's in her head, almost literally.

The movie wisely changes settings, moving towards a coastal space in the long middle. This evokes the main character remarrying, a fact that sneaks up on viewers and is far too prominently announced in plot summaries. Why did she remarry? What did she feel like when remarrying, given that her grief for her first husband never does stop?

That's evoked through the shots and editing and sound -- the formal elements that combine to evoke her complex of emotions. Nobody can really describe them well. The words for them don't work: pain, loss, grief, despair. What is the sensation of those? I think through what "Maborisi" depicts, I get a sense of what Kore-eda and his crew think they feel like.

By this point, 1995, Japanese urban society is 35 years past Ozu. Would Ozu think things have gotten more alienating than in 1960, when he made "An Autumn Afternoon"?

Possibly, but to me another influence here is Miyazaki himself, a director who combines much joy and much pain. This an adult-Ghibli movie, though I'm not saying Ghibli's not for adults -- it's just a harder, more middle-aged-type of mood in "Maborisi" for me. Nevertheless, like in some Miyazaki fare, the routines and lovely spaces in ordinary life, particularly in the countryside, offer some healing . I think they do for this movie's main character, a stand-in for anybody who needs healing, which I presume is everyone.

Watched on Thursday April 24, 2025.

Now that I've watched "t Security Area," I may be able to finally watch it.

All movies have to teach us how to see them. I could not lock in on this one much at all. At first it's a detective story featuring the first female to set foot on a guard station since 1953. Thus I thought it would be somewhat feminist, or anti-feminist, at least centering around that concern.

But then, after several investigative Perry-Mason moments, flashing back to the same incident from multiple false perspectives, the movie dives into a long drama rendering of North and South Korean soldiers' interactions in the Area of the title. Clearly this is a political movie about various Korean longings, something I have no knowledge of.

And then it switches back to the investigation, though that's been quite altered by the middle drama portion.

My sense is this movie is "Few Good Men" -esque, although without the acting charisma that that movie has , which is no slam, since few movies ever have. Director Chan-wook flashes his great transitional styles with many killer cuts and transition effects. But all in all, the structure was unwieldly, the score often pedestrian, and the visual clarity of the cinematography far off from his later features. I wonder what would've happened had the middle story, about the interactions of the soldiers, been more crosscut with the investigation?

Original review from 2019:

The most striking aspect of Sam Mendes’ new World War I movie, 1917, is the backgrounds. Rare as it is for the backgrounds to shine brighter than the actors and foregrounds in movies, Mendes has achieved it. The film uses techniques from Cuaron and Inarritu's most recent movies to great effect.

Although it has some CGI, 1917 is an ultra-realistic-looking tour through the battlefields of WWI. I think that it ought to become a staple of high-school and college classes because of its profound depiction of war and its history. such classes would benefit from how amazingly the film recreates the world of early twentieth-century trench warfare.

The plot of 1917 is so simple that even if you can’t hear what the characters are saying—due to quiet speaking and thick British accents—you’ll still figure out that two British soldiers must go on a mission to stop another British company from assaulting a German position. They have to travel over enemy lines, through a ruined town, and into a forest—a journey of several miles—in less than a day. This proves nearly impossible, although it keeps the film within the time element of Aristotle's classical unities.

Those two soldiers—ably played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman—walk, crawl, and sprint through a number of landscapes while encountering nearly everything you think of when “WWI” comes to mind -- trenches, rats, barbed wire, ruined buildings, and aerial dogfighting (think “The Red Baron”).

The movie has a formal style that could be labeled a gimmick: 1917 looks like it is shot all in one take, with no cuts except one obvious fade-to-black moment in the middle.

This is a technique occasionally used in recent years but also an old one, dating back at least to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 movie, Rope. The careful viewer will spot dozens of transitions; yet, the effect of the single-take look makes 1917 look something like a videogame. In a primitive way, viewers are getting a 3-D virtual-reality experience.

The choice of making 1917 look like a single-shot movie is a severe formal limitation, hampering the usual capacity of a movie to cut to other scenes and show other perspectives. Throughout 1917, we are never sure where the characters are headed, although we’re told that they are trying to find a forest behind enemy lines.

The formal limitation makes this movie surprisingly slower than most blockbuster war-movies. In fact, there’s a leisurely arthouse pace in a good portion of 1917, which I was happy to see but which might put off casual movie-viewers.

As I mentioned, the background of 1917 stands out the most. For me, the movie is about the ecological devastation of war. As the characters wander through varied landscapes, signs of wreckage and destruction are everywhere. The first shot of the movie depicts a lush field filled with flowers, where the characters are napping under a tree. But then the camera ever-so-slowly moves back into the trenches, and eventually it goes over those trenches, through a wasteland of dead bodies and mud and craters—a place where there is a total absence of life.

Yet, viewers can tell that that wasteland was once a lush field in , fruitfully multiplying flowers, grass, and crops. At the movie’s beginning it is April, recalling T.S. Eliot’s opening-line of his famous post-WWI poem “The Wasteland”: “April is the cruelest month.” It certainly is the cruelest month for the two main characters in 1917.

The theme of ecological destruction continues when, about a third of the way through the movie, the characters come up to a small farm where all of the cherry trees have been chopped down. Those trees, blossoming with white flowers, signify both the characters’ nearly obliterated sense of heroism and manhood, as well as the ecological devastation caused by the armies. These armies destroy the land by digging trenches, planting mines, and obliterating all vegetation to make space for their artillery and other weapons of war.

1917 offers some glimpses of hope that maybe these characters will survive, or that the war will end. Four times there are awakenings where characters seem asleep or dead, and yet wake up. These pseudo-resurrections occur in key spots, mirroring the stated possibility, as one character puts it, that the cherry trees will not only respawn but will also grow back so that they will be more abundant than they once were.

I did not feel that 1917 achieved more than depicting the vision of the WWI battlefields of . It is good for one viewing—and make sure you watch it on the largest screen possible. It does not approach the top-tier of WWI movies, such as All Quiet on the Western Front or Paths of Glory, or the sad tragedy of Gallipoli.

Yet 1917 solidly depicts what people do to nature when they try to kill each other.

Thanks to untold numbers of unexploded munitions planted during WWI, innocent people still die from the war when they accidentally dig up an explosive or run over a landmine. Every year, even in 2020, at least 20 tons of such munitions from WWI are found and detonated. The estimates are that it will take 700 years to get rid of all of them.

1917 might seem like it’s in the distant past. But, the war’s horrific effects will extend long into the future, making Mendes’ movie relevant for a long time into the future.

It's almost a truism that if you are considered a "great director" from the mid-20th century, you have massive problems with its cultural development. There's a decently strong strain of conservatism in the film canon of, say, Criterion.

Take Ozu's last film, "An Autumn Afternoon," though you would never know it's autumn in the movie. That's because the film's framed by the factory, seen on the poster here, and in the first several opening shots. I don't think there's an exterior shot that has a touch of natural greenery in it in this movie, saving a few bushes here and there.

These normie Japanese in the film live not so fruitfully in that world. They may be productive, suggestive of the factory and business images, yet they are fairly quietly feeling alone. So much talk in "Autumn Afternoon" about old guys getting married or remarried. Some of their conversations are about younger 20-something women, who may represent springtime youthfulness in aesthetic and reproductive . But their neighborhoods and dwellings look naturally sterile.

These guys, mostly middle-aged to a bit older, are lost. I take the main character, played by Chishu Ryu, who has the gentlest face of maybe any actor ever, to feel lost and lonely enough. First, there's the sake. In an early line he and his buddies it that sake brings about honesty. They usually drink too much. The main character's daughter checks in with him every time he comes home. "How much sake did you have?" This is no sign of psychological stability. It's not alcoholism, seemingly, but it's troubling.

Honesty is maybe what they need? Ozu is among the politest directors, or at least he showcases Japanese as socially polite, though we know somewhere in there is a person who's really struggling. That manifests itself occasionally in the film.

Nevertheless, the movie has its refrains, which tend to be happy -- too happy perhaps. There's the plucky main melody, played during establishment shots of exteriors of bars and restaurants where the men frequent. Sometimes, as well, there's the sound of children playing outside. The sound effects seem quite at odds with the modernist visuals and the men's difficulties.

Children might be a sign of fruitfulness, so why don't we see them here as we do in 'Good Morning'? A student asked me about some other film, I can't which, why it doesn't have children in it. An obvious answer is the great difficulties of child actors. A thematic answer is that the film says much through its absences. Children, young ones, are missing here because these people are aging difficultly, struggling for purpose, though the sake and the public displays of politeness cover that up.

One risky topic shows up here: why did Japan lose the war? In one scene, the main character meets an old naval buddy. They ask this question, recalling their troubles circa 1945 upon return to Japan. They were broke, their houses burned, jobless. Society seems to have recovered, yet the industrial factory and non-natural exteriors are the recovery, plus the booze.

What they turned into has a threat, a debtor society. The younger man in this wants golf clubs, but he can't afford them, so he wants to finance him. His wife reads him the riot act, but then she wants a designer purse. Pointedly, there's no *golf course* in the movie, just a Top-Golf-looking driving-range that the character mindlessly hits balls into, a screen with a target with the factory as a backdrop.

But of course, Ozu's directorial choices should humble viewers, in comparison to standard film counterparts. It's always refreshing to get a look at things from the floor. Also, his characters regularly face us. We're in this society with them, not much better off. By contrast, some directors would put their camera above the action, or would frame it more distantly or coldly. Ozu still likes people, the humans in his movies, who aren't swallowed up by their modernist settings.

But they are pretty limited. I don't know if this all means some kind of ennui inevitability results from war, and here, for Japan, defeat in war.

To return to marriage, it's possible that these characters, speaking of young women, are trying to restore relationships. Nearly all of the women are servile here, yet we know Ozu did focus on them and their plights in earlier films -- "Late Spring," as commenters have mentioned, is pretty similar to "An Autumn Afternoon." It could be that their servile place in 'Autumn" is an older-male POV.

The best they can do is return to family creation. It would drive Ozu crazy, I'm betting, to realize that family and social time has been replaced by online interactions -- apparently in the current day, people spend *half* or more of their day online, where at least in 1961 they interacted with each other their entire day.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 15, 2025.