Jane Eyre's Dixon Dewdrop

Bad Company (1972)
directed by Robert Benton
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from B. Sweet (in spirit, anyway)



I love Days of Heaven almost as much as anyone out there, but when I dream of Treasure Island, I guess I'll think of this.

That's Where I Met My Ramona

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
directed by Russ Meyer
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Maybe the perfect companion piece to Roger Ebert's infamous review of Blue Velvet. For all the sexual brinksmanship in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" - for all the bare breasts - there's almost no emotional investment in anyone. Which makes it, by way of a badly edited headache, almost as rough and as tiresome as Ebert's one-star pan. And don't tell me that's the point, because if it were, the movie would at least be fun.

"Guns" Doniphon

Donovan's Reef (1963)
directed by John Ford
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Ford's technique is one thing, but any biography about his life with John Wayne begins here: Irish inflections, easy days in the tropics (right down to the Araner docked in the bay), the ceremony of celebration and remembrance. There's the casual racism and casual misogyny, never malicious but somehow central; Duke gawking at the take-charge beauty; Duke spanking her; Duke tenderly watching out for the "half-caste" kids. Even Jack Ford's occasionally liberal nature gets a moment of earnest Native American contemplation, just before a hallowed homage to the Great War. Yes, it's as much Ford/Wayne 101 as this is, with eighteen times the broken bottles, and only a rental away.

Merchant Ivory

Extras - Season One (2005)
directed by Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at JL's

So much of the poignancy in The Office came from a central anonymity in its characters' lives, a smallness that enlarged small actions towards revelation. But because "Extras" depends, in part, on upending the public's perception of recognizable celebrities, the funny parts stay separate from instances of real emotion. Warm, yes, and often very funny, but only sporadically sincere.

Long Term Parking

The Sopranos - Season Five (2004)
dir. by Tim Van Patten, Alan Taylor, John Patterson, Rodrigo Garcia, Allen Coulter, Steve Buscemi, and Mike Figgis



& introducing guest director Joe Torre
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Electric Light Orchestra

The more distance "The Sopranos" puts between its current season and an interesting premise, the closer it comes to something general and essential: drama as an exercise in acting, direction, picture and sound. Which I guess means they make it look easy without making it a case of expectations raised or met. Each show its own creation: intro, rising action, climax, and fall.

Also: best dream sequences since Twin Peaks.

Mr. Goddamn Brownstone

Guns N' Roses: Welcome to the Videos (1998)
dir. by Nigel Dick, Sante D'Orazio, Del James, Louis Marciano, Duff McKagan, Andrew Morahan, Josh Richman, W. Axl Rose, & Slash
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Andy Morahan's epic video triptych - "Don't Cry," "November Rain," and "Estranged" - shot from skyscrapers, oil tankers, the Sunset Strip and the Hollywood Hills, says more about music and movies - palace room giants from the glory days, square-dancing My Darling Clementine, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny at breakfast in the sun - than a century of biopics and musicals dreamed of.

Water-Cooled Sub-Machine Guns

Wild at Heart (1990)
directed by David Lynch
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from JL

In the end, "Wild at Heart" isn't quite Lynch because it isn't his strange world you "can't go into" otherwise. Instead it's a road "that seemed so real in the book." Unlike Lost Highway, Gifford didn't just help with the screenplay; he's the source. Someone else's book, someone else's movie, however funny, furious, and fair.

Movie Review - Black Angel

Black Angel (1946)
directed by Roy William Neill
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from Black Lodge Video

Solving the case by winning the big audition is a little too much like the plot of a musical or teen comedy I can't think of right now. And alcoholism really isn't that neat of a plot twist, unless it's a western and the firewater's flowing and I'm expecting a lot less from my average inconsiderate screenwriter. But at least Peter Lorre gets to relax a little, play the casual nightclub sleaze, his legs akimbo and a cigarette dangling from that weary, cynical kisser.

Movie Review - Volver

Volver (2006)
directed by Pedro Almodóvar
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Studio On The Square

What I like is that Pedro Almodóvar will never make a war movie or an allegory about war or a parable on man's doom or redemption. Give that stuff to the Trix rabbit and get out of here.

Movie Review - They Live

They Live (1988)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Black Lodge Video

Less an indictment of the Reagan era than Carpenter's thinly disguised frustration at his own growing irrelevance (and, presumably, accompanying decline in material comforts), "They Live" is also funny enough to make the unintentional nature of that humor relevant to both the strangeness of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper's starring performance and the inescapable dismay of digressions stretched much too thin over an hour and a half that ends with a stalwart middle finger but no real plot in sight.

Movie Review - Utamaro and His Five Women

Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna (1946)
directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from Black Lodge Video

From title to closing image, this is probably as close as the Japanese ever got to the earnest innocence of loving women completely and without adulation, putting their happiness and ruin in the path of a man whose hands are literally tied.

Movie Review - The Yakuza

The Yakuza (1974)
directed by Sydney Pollack
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

When Quentin Tarantino started talking about the Shaw Brothers in the nineties, I wanted to watch martial arts movies all the time, even when I sort of thought that one went a long way towards exemplifying the rest. "The Yakuza" never came up in any interview I heard, probably because Paul Schrader's mopey Robert Towne pal-around became outdated the moment teenagers realized that the key ingredient in samurai entertainment is fun.

Movie Review - Suspiria

Suspiria (1977)
directed by Dario Argento
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

A color palette that looks like it invented Crayola, and no film genre benefits from a good soundtrack quite like horror.

Movie Review - The Good Guys and the Bad Guys

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969)
directed by Burt Kennedy
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

There's a part of this movie (directed, sort of jokingly, by former Budd Boetticher screenwriter Burt Kennedy) that looks forward to David Webb Peoples' 1970s screenplay for Unforgiven: an awareness of change and of truths done little justice by history and storytellers. The flip side of that generosity is acknowledging the full seven years between Liberty Valance and 1969. Plus "The Good Guys and the Bad Guys" is supposed to be a comedy.

Movie Review - The Sundowners

The Sundowners (1960)
directed by Fred Zinnemann
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

The line between heartwarming Oscar bait and heartwarming TV special is so thin that nothing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated in my lifetime is really any worse than the movies they nominated fifty years ago. Were it summer, Peter Ustinov's performance as Rupert Venneker would be just enough of a highlight to remind me to watch dear Matt Hooper in Jaws.

Movie Review - Home from the Hill

Home from the Hill (1960)
directed by Vincente Minnelli
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

If you replaced bigger than life patriarch Robert Mitchum with a giant green sponge there still wouldn't be enough absorbency power to soak in all the sap.

Movie Review - The Bird With The Crystal Plumage

L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970)
directed by Dario Argento
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Each time it looks like too much of a by-the-numbers serial killer shakedown, Argento fronts a little flash and style, including transvestite line-up comedy and the mounting tension of a murderer whittling his way through a fat oak door. But it's still a police procedural, and I don't get to ask which witch is which. Which, frankly, is a letdown.

Movie Review - Macao

Macao (1952)
directed by Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

It doesn't quite suit Robert Mitchum to play the comedic straight man to William Bendix's fish-out-of-water naïveté, Jane Russell's busty impertinence, and eight screenwriters worth of thematically inconsistent material. In part because the whole thing seems to want to be smarter, in part because no one really tries.

Movie Review - Mad Love

Mad Love (1935)
directed by Karl Freund
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

When David Denby trots out that old chestnut about seeing Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen a long time ago ("With a groan, I tried to suppress memories of a camel train making its stately way across a seventy-foot-wide screen"), you find yourself wondering if Hollywood's golden age was really as boring as people who hate black-and-white movies say it was. Maybe it all only works as nostalgia - some displaced affectation for well-tailored tuxedos and snappy goodbyes. Then you watch something like "Mad Love," and realize that old movies are great for, among many other things, being terrifically fucked up.

Movie Review - My Neighbor Totoro

Tonari no Totoro (1988)
directed by Hayao Miyazaki
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

More than a director who's always happiest giving children the benefit of the doubt (and instilling his adult characters with a skepticism that always defers to that pre-adolescent sense of wonder), Miyazaki makes movies that reassure. Even on a dark and rainy night in the forest, you're never really alone.

Movie Review - Idiocracy

Idiocracy (2006)
directed by Mike Judge
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from As Seen On TV

Unfunny, and worse, all from an ivory tower. When did Mike Judge become the dad with Mornings On Horseback on the nightstand and a pull for the Republican ticket on Election Day?

Movie Review - Girl with a Suitcase

La Ragazza con la valigia (1961)
directed by Valerio Zurlini
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Nothing the kid learns here is anything he wouldn't have learned in time on his own, but because it's Claudia Cardinale who lets him down - and Claudia Cardinale who effortlessly carries so much of our sympathy - the disappointment is heartbreaking when, after awhile, it won't be. Big and lit like a dream, it's just the kind of Italian melodrama that feels as much a part of an unreclaimable movie past as the Western, and as such, invaluable.

Movie Review - Angel Face

Angel Face (1952)
directed by Otto Preminger
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

If noir conventions demand a Walter Neff to play sucker to the femme fatale, how does a man as cynical as Robert Mitchum take the dive? In "Angel Face," he never does. Frank slips out on the girl at home, but the rest is a series of machinations he's helpless to prevent and unwilling to blame, maybe because Jean Simmons inflicts most of the harm in spite of herself.

Movie Review - 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle

4 aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (1987)
directed by Eric Rohmer
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from the vaults

When each episode of "The Sopranos" feels like a movie in look and execution, it's nice to get back to a movie that looks a lot like something on TV. Nice because it seems so easy, like all you need for a great day at the theater is a pair of pretty girls and an early start.

Movie Review - The Black Room

The Black Room (1935)
directed by Roy William Neill
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Way overrated as an underrated classic. Of course, it supports my theory that Jeremy Irons and Boris Karloff share a psychic bond that extends beyond the kind of roles they take (and took) to a more general (but always clearly annunciated, those Brits) career in deeply mediocre B pictures.

TV Review - The Sopranos

The Sopranos: Season Four (2002)
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from EO

HBO's "mobster as everyman" theme works so long as the show's writers don't get bogged down in too much of the real-life drama that makes it a relevant series: divorce, addiction, day-to-day. Season four is lightest on its feet when the bad is at its worst, proof that there's no point in playing dress-up if no one's having fun.

Movie Review - The Fallen Idol

The Fallen Idol (1948)
directed by Carol Reed
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at JL's

All of the tension from The Third Man is here, and all of the same technical polish. So what's the difference? "The Fallen Idol" is about a kid but doesn't say much about childhood, except that kids get confused when adults ask them to lie. And "The Third Man" is about, well, everything worth getting behind a camera for. But certainly not about being a kid.

Movie Review - 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1967)
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
rating: 3 or 4 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from Black Lodge Video

Ha ha. I'm always inclined to defend Godard in conversations, but I hate that he's the kind of director that always demands defending. There's no more capable French shithead with a penchant for anti-American screeds than Jean-Luc, so if he isn't your cup of tea, I'm not the one to sway you. Let's just watch Platinum Blonde together instead.

What I like about Godard is that he can be both funny and warm. Even as late as 1967.