ancient tragedy in both the old west and the modern world, and a spaghetti western without the spaghetti

Dead Man's Burden: (2012. dir: Jared Moshe) God, how I love a Western that's like a Greek Tragedy (the Furies!), and this one is, like the Oresteia, only the war which has decimated the land is the Civil War and the family homestead is on the border of New Mexico. The curse on this low-rent House of Atreus involves the sins of the father, brother, sister, and interlopers, and blood must be paid for with blood. It's a great story and a decent script, the acting is good enough, although I salivate to imagine what someone like Fassbender would have done in the role of the husband, and to what heights a dose of charisma might have hauled this movie up.

It's good, but, sadly, it might have been great. I lay the fault down to the pacing, which has partly to do with dragging-places in the script but more fully, I think, to the bulk of it being set more by the sometimes intrusive orchestral score than by trusting the editor. There are other greenhorn glitches: creative camera angles counterintuitive to the scene (a showdown between potentially deadly enemies is shot from knee-height), a confusion about when to use close-up or medium shot.

I'd like to see this film remade with a heftier budget and a second party overlooking the script (Moshe, a long-time producer specializing in documentaries, wrote his own), along with the Stalking Moon.

Shotgun Stories: (2007. dir: Jeff Nichols) And speaking of Greek Tragedy transported forward in time...

Michael Shannon is often something spectacular to watch, as he is in this independent film about two feuding sides of one family. Jeff Nichols began with this quiet near-triumph, then went on to work again with Shannon on the breathtaking strangeness of Take Shelter. His latest is this year's Mud, which I have yet to see but from which I expect great things.

Like Take Shelter, Shotgun is not an easy ride; Nichols is a director who demands your full attention. The really fascinating writing is in the trickster called Shampoo (G. Allen Wilkins), sort of a Thersites character: not a family member, but it is he who keeps feeding a war which might otherwise smoulder down and lapse into attrition. It is he who first goads Kid (Barlow Jacobs) with news of his half-brother's taunts, then later rats out the same half-brother as the killer of a beloved dog. It is he who informs Son (Shannon) that the younger half-brothers were also involved in his brother's death, and he who shows Boy (Douglas Ligon) how to use a shotgun.

The mother is woefully miscast. There's a bold scene in which Son confronts her about her wrongdoing in raising them full of patricidal hatred, a scene during which she refuses to respond, does not speak at all. It might have been a wonderful piece de resistance had the actress communicated the kind of ice-cold and hot-with-hatred fury which would power such a lifelong vendetta, but all she brings to the table is a sort of bemused silence.

Still, Nichols and Shannon combined create a massive presence. Shotgun is, at its weakest, arresting, and occasionally ventures into low-budget magnificence, a bellwether pointing to brilliance to come from both men.

the Last Hard Men: (1976. dir: Andrew McLaglen)

*SPOILER ALERT*

Hollywood is trying to import the amoral brutality of the Spaghetti Western without simultaneously bringing its style and panache. Needless to say, the experiment doesn't work. McLaglen seems clumsy and uncertain at the helm, James Coburn and Charlton Heston are playing not humans but characters who never fully come to life, the plot is contrived and meandering. As in Ulzana's Raid and other Hollywood oaters from the time of the war in Viet Nam, the main thrust of the story seems to be the loss of a moral compass. The days when right and wrong were obvious to the man in the white hat are long gone, and no choice is ever entirely good in its repercussions. Barbara Hersey, still in her apprenticeship here, has not yet broken her cultural bindings, and so feels like a hippy amongst the outlaws. Her rape scene is brutal, arguably gratuitous, and because the "message" of the movie is vague, the scene feels filmed with an intent to pander sidelong to a leering, voyeuristic Schadenfreude.

big brother, a barbarian horde, and a search through the red-light district

the Anderson Tapes: (1971. dir: Sidney Lumet) Although no better than a mediocre film itself, it wears the honor of being one of the first of the Paranoia Films of the seventies, emerging in the same year as Klute, the French Connection, and Day of the Jackal, but preceding the other greats of the genre.

Apparently uncertain where to take it, this one was played for laughs, --albeit at a subdued chuckle,-- and it doesn't really work, although Dyan Cannon has a successfully dry and witty delivery. The "heist" parts don't work because of the slow pace, a result of forty ensuing years of ultra-acceleration. More damning is that Sean Connery is utterly miscast; it was a role designed for somebody much schlubbier. The characters as written remind me some of the Hot Rock, do you remember that one? "Afghanistan bananastand"? It seemed rompingly funny and suspenseful when I was a kid, and then a weirdly stubborn non-starter when I saw it again in late adolescence. (Mostly I remember the Mad Magazine satire. A lot of movies from the '70s and late '60s I remember that way. I never saw Love Story, but in the Mad version, the Ali McGraw character dies of a disease only found in Hollywood in which she becomes increasingly gorgeous until her final breath.)

The running "joke" in the Anderson Tapes is that many different private and governmental agencies are monitoring these criminals, with no two communicating with each other, and most of the taps are barely legal, if at all, resulting in more chaos than justice. That's the theme, albeit clumsily done, which keeps it interesting in the long run. Without it, it'd be forgotten as the Hot Rock.

Except that it also boasts Christopher Walken in his film debut, and he already has the skills and Intangible X-factor which set him apart from the rest of the pack.

Conan the Barbarian (2011. dir: Marcus Nispel) Khal Drogo and Daxos from Game of Thrones partner up to wreak Cimmerian vengeance on a father-daughter Axis of Evil (Stephen Lang and Rose McGowan; they're so good) who are determined to conquer the world through sorcery and deviltry. Whether you want to label the movie "epic in scope" or "pedestrian and interminable" will depend largely on whether or not you cared about the books. Although I hold a fond spot eternally in my heart for Arnold's old Conan movie, this one, this guy, Jason Momoa, is Robert E. Howard's warrior. ("I know not. I care not. I live, I love, I slay. I am content." CLASSIC.) Personally, I found the first third, with its backstory (poor Ron Perlman), pretentious narration (Morgan Freeman, naturally, who has officially inherited the Voice-of-God mantle from James Earl Jones), and yawningly predictable roller-coaster through hysterical melodrama, swelly Bombast-Musik and bathos, to be a pretty tough ride. As soon as the Sandmen attacked, though, I was glad I'd stuck with it.

Hardcore: (1979. dir: Paul Schrader) THIS is the follow-up to Taxi Driver? Thematically, sure, with clunky rendundancy. But the same guy wrote this lame-assed script? George C. Scott tosses himself in headlong and mines some nuggets of gold (or, anyway, pyrite) from this story about a religious man who loses his daughter to the Los Angeles porn industry and will burn down the world if that's what it takes to get her back. Mostly it comes across as contrived, removed, and trying to shock us with "truths" about the seedy underbelly of the city, and, like most things about porn, it suffers from an only half-acknowledged sense of the ridiculous. Because porn appeals not to the brain but to the, well, under-brain, its mechanisms always look embarrassing from the outside. One of the great things about Boogie Nights was that this, the main and over-riding "truth" about porn, was fully embraced.

The best part of the script is in fact when Scott's searcher (and he does have something in common with Ethan Edwards) describes the tenets of Calvinism to Season Hubley's "industry worker", then tells her she wouldn't understand, looking in from the outside. She replies, "Anything makes sense from the inside. A pervert one time came that close to convincing me to do it with his German Shepherd." And then, equal parts cynical and forlorn: "At least you get to go to Heaven. What do I get?"

two fritz langs and a walter wanger

Ministry of Fear: (1944. dir: Fritz Lang) Right now, at this moment, this is my favorite Lang film of all. Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from a madhouse (we don't know why until later; Lang is wonderfully coy with his exposition) during the heaviest part of the Blitz, and immediately steps into a chain of unsettling events. Milland has so amiable and capable a presence that we don't doubt all will turn out well, which assuages some of the bale from Graham Greene's book, for better or worse, but allows us to follow the very dark war-time spy-tale with confidence.

I was going to say that Lang unfolds his eerie story at an easy pace, but it's not easy, not at all. There are stuttering stops in it, dread-filled ebbs and pauses, emphasized by a master's use of shadow and light, but there is nothing easy about it. The war was not over when this was made, and it feels almost as if it's from a later time, a Red Scare "they're-under-our-beds" movie, only the Nazis are the ones who are suddenly everywhere in England, wearing English masks, speaking with posh, BBC diction. The innocent parts of life, --a cake won at a charity fete, a favor done for an elderly bookseller, minutes passing on a clock's face, the scissors of a tailor,-- twist into the darkest possible dangers, and the distinction between good guys and bad guys is nearly impossible to decipher. It's marred by a whimsically twee tag-on end-scene, but that is thankfully short, and the rest is marvellous.

Moonfleet: (1955. dir: Fritz Lang) It feels less like a Lang film than one of those Disney movies they used to show on Sunday night television when I was a kid. A little more violent, a little sexier, but just a little. I kept expecting Elsa Lanchester to emerge in a funny hat and bat someone over the head with an umbrella. It's charming, all the same, with Stewart Granger as nobleman Jeremy Fox, suaver than humanly possible while breaking hearts, running a gang of smugglers, fighting a duel with a rapier against a fellow wielding a halberd, and finding a wrench thrown into his works when the son of an old lover turns up on his doorstep. There's a spooky churchyard, the legend of a lost diamond, a pair of obvious aristocratic fiends (George Saunders and Joan Greenwood: you can tell straight off by the honey-tongued voices), also the hellish fury of a woman scorned (Viveca Lindfors, with funny hair and sultry gaze; see above), and a little boy's journey, not quite into manhood, since he's still very much in the dark when we leave him at the end, but a journey which anyway catalyzes Fox's own belated entry into adulthood.

Tap Roots: (1948. dir: George Marshall) A poor man's Gone With the Wind, with Van Heflin sporting both Rhett Butler's moustache and his particular brand of romantic cynicism, while Susan Hayward is the one having her bodice cinched tight whilst clinging to the bedpost.

As talk of secession mounts, the wealthy Dabneys, lords of Lebanon Valley in Mississippi, refuse to serve any masters at all, yank or reb, and send out a call that any who want to secede from both North and South should join them in their stubborn outpost. The story was ostensibly inspired by Newton Knight, a Mississippi rich man and Confederate deserter who refused to hold slaves and lived openly with his black wife, declaring his land holdings a free state, but poor Newton is betrayed by Alan Le May's screenplay, which is instead a pandering attempt to recapture the old GWTW magic, including fair-to-middlin' replicas of Mammy, Scarlett, Rhett, and Ward Bond as the family patriarch, who winds up wandering half-mad through the battle he's instigated in a near dead ringer for Thomas Mitchell's mad Mr. O'Hara.

It's a doomed project from the outset, because what can compete with the original? but Heflin and Hayward are good company, and it's given a racy understory, with the faux-Scarlett's faux-Ashley (in this version, he's paradoxically both far blander and far more villainous) betraying her with her sexy sister (Julie London) while she's confined to a sickbed.

loups-garous, siamese twins, and the siren call of oil

the Grey: (2011. dir: Joe Carnahan) As a contemplation on death and how to die with dignity and grace, the Grey is a lovely film, with good actors, photography, and use of sound and editing all interweaving to form a gorgeous memento mori. As an action film about unarmed men in the wilds fighting wolves, it is less successful: the wolves act (and look, and sound) more like monsters from a creature-feature than true predatory animals, and often they are deployed to jump-start the action when a new plot turn is needed. Liam Neeson, in the end, is the reason we watch: he wields both the chops and charisma to carry off the difficult final scene and, indeed, he is a perpetual magneto at the film's center, emitting magnificent pulses of electrical current throughout.

Sisters: (1973. dir: Brian De Palma) Yeah, there's Hitchcock in it, but also, interestingly, a slight portent of the approaching Cronenberg. De Palma's creative use of split-screen, drug-induced dream sequence, and a constant playfulness with his central motif of voyeurism gives this early venture an ageless vitality alongside its lodged-firmly-in-the-70s look. The performances and script veer wildly across the scale from pretty good to kind of silly, the vicious blood-letting scenes are made plain weird by blood thick like orange-red paint, and the final scenes are kind of a let-down, although I do love that shot of the cow standing next to the sofa in front of the railroad tracks.

Mostly, this is a piece of cinematic history, and should be viewed as such, from a time when De Palma was still fresh and his flaws were balanced and sometimes outweighed by his berserker levels of enthusiasm.

Day of the Falcon: (2011. dir: Jean-Jacques Annaud) The best thing about this movie is Mark Strong. The second best thing is that the editing is sufficiently smooth that we never have to linger long on any of the endless string of cliches from which the story is assembled. The third best thing is that it is beautifully colorful.

This is the putative story of how the Arab desert became the wealthy distributor of oil that it is today. If it has a remarkable virtue, it is that the only Westerners in it are the Texas oil-workers who instigate the trouble, and that their part is largely played off-screen. Everything else about it seems a little dubious (one comes away with a sense that it's been absurdly simplified and many evils shunted into unseen corners), outlandish (the army just happens to arrive at the stretch of strand from which they can see the fresh water bubbling up off-shore?), and, ultimately, dull. The lead character, a bookish boy grown into an unlikely military leader, is seriously boring.

The role of women is depressing to the point of inducing nightmares. Although Annaud tries to feist (and sex) up these (all drop-dead gorgeous) gals, every woman here either dies in childbirth, retreats into her bedroom to die of despair at her man's choices, peers out at the world with increasing frustration from behind the walls of a harem, or works shackled as a slave.

mykelti williamson good times potsherds and muck double feature

Lucky # Slevin: (2006. dir: Paul McGuigan) Remember that guy Josh Hartnett? The first time I saw him, in the Faculty, I thought, man, this cat is going to be a MOVIE STAR, and made a mental note to keep an eye on him, observe his ascension into the heavens of cinematic immortality. Then he made the Virgin Suicides and I was like, yup, yup, here we go, hold on tight.

And then? Nothing. I mean, he was in Black Hawk Down, but so was everybody else, and everybody else didn't make Pearl Harbor the same year, a maleficent blot on the resume which spreads its spoiling stain across many an otherwise redemptive virtue.

I mean, this kid had everything: talent, looks, charisma, sex appeal, subtlety, chops. Was it a bad agent? an inability to cope with the crippling demands of good fortune in Hollywood (which, I believe, are many and often unbearable to those unfortunates born with talent and ambition but without a particular rhinosaurus-hide gene)? The killing blow came when he made, back to back, the appalling 40 Days and 40 Nights and Hollywood Homicide, a movie with a title so lame that I wouldn't watch it if it was serving a full all-you-can-eat buffet of all my favorite actors including Peter O'Toole when he was 25 and the long-dead Zbigniew Cybulski and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

My hopes, then, were slim for Lucky # Slevin, particularly since I tend to harbor suspicions towards the too-clever and too-hip cinema. This one, it turns out, is pretty good. It resides in the Usual Suspects category of trickster ventures, movies in which narrators may be unreliable and so the writer has to be very, very generous towards his audience to ensure that we do not feel duped in the end, but pleasantly surprised. This one was, and I was indeed pleasantly surprised.

It's chock full of good performances, my favorite being by Mykelti Williamson, almost unrecognisable in a small role as a simple-minded thug.

*SPOILER ALERT*

the First Power: (1990. dir: Robert Resnikoff) Forget 1990. This schlock has '80s written all over it, from the dread-filled Stewart Copeland synth-track to the cute-instead-of-sexy heroine with the massive shoulder-pads to the satanic-panic plotline. And, within those claustrophobic bounds, it is enjoyable. The plot makes no sense, none, and the characters never spring into life. There is not a single set that does not feel like a set, rather than a real place where real things happen, from dwellings to crime scenes ("We'll have a guy trampled by a horse-drawn carriage on Olvera Street, and they gotta find a crucified body suspended in the girders above the Los Angeles River") to the bar they stop into so the too-twee heroine can establish herself some street cred as a heavy drinker.

The thing it's got are some interesting performances. Williamson, for whom I watched it, sees his talents utterly wasted but is good-natured in his attempts as the cop's partner in the red shirt, doomed from the word "go" by his friendly disposition and lack of darkness. Poor fellow has to say things like "kiss my black ass," all the stuff the cop-partner had to say back in the '80s, and then he suffers an awkward and ignominious death scene.

One of the best performances is by Jeff Kober, hard-working journeyman actor who would later feature in Joss Whedon's stable in a rare, two-character run in Buffy: first as the mad vamp Zachary Kralik whom Buffy tricks into drinking holy water, later as the magic-pusher Rack who leads Willow down the slippery slope deeper into her addiction. (He's still working: he's been a regular on Sons of Anarchy recently.) In this, he plays the evil serial killer who is so beloved of Satan that he has been gifted with what the Catholic Church (allegedly) terms The First Power: the power of Resurrection. You see where I'm going with this? Once super-cop Russ Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) captures him and sees him executed, he returns, more powerfully than ever, and seeking vengeance against our hero! The Church, in fact, plays an interesting role in this movie, a role that was common in the 80s but has since mellowed. It begins with a (visionary? or plain nuts?) nun warning the cynical cardinals that Satan is afoot in these murders, and, later, when push comes to shove, she steals a "treasured religious icon" --a dagger disguised as a crucifix, I kid you not,-- with which the mad demonic entity can finally be sent to hell where he belongs.

The other very fine performance is a one-scene wonder by TV actress Julianna McCarthy as the dead killer's grandmother. In an excruciatingly badly-written five minutes, we discover that the killer was the seed of his grandfather's rape of his mother, all embarrassingly badly done, except for this woman, whose dignity and clarity of choice convey not only truth but a certain enigmatic creepiness.

truth and fiction at the ok corral part three

(...the last mile in my search for historicity in Hollywood's portrayals of the beloved American legend...)

Wyatt Earp (1994. dir: Lawrence Kasdan): Costner's Earp, following so closely on the heels of 1993's widely-beloved Tombstone, is over-long, over-serious hagiography, way too bloated for its own britches, and it certainly slammed the door shut on any credibility either Kasdan or Costner still enjoyed among the viewing public. A slow trudge on a treadmill of fetid mediocrity, it chooses the (factual) premature death of Earp's first wife as the thing that made him The Man He Became, and the story becomes not about Wyatt Earp but about Hollywood cliché and its continual settling for simplistic answers to complex questions. Kasdan's big mistake is made at the outset in choosing to cover several decades of Earp's life, rather than focusing on one or two important moments and thereby revealing the man, and his result is a ponderous and unending meander. And to be clear, many of the episodes he gets wrong are through reliance on Stuart Lake's legend-spinning ("largely fictional," according to Amazon) Frontier Marshall, such as the "largely fictional" attempted assassination of Wyatt during an Eddie Foy performance, which is where Kasdan whimsically has Earp catching his first glimpse of his future sweetheart Josie.

The central issue for Costner and Kasdan seems to be: how do we make this half-bad, half-dark-hearted guy into a hero for today’s audience? And the only answer they can find is to make him a Hollywood-"normal", high-spirited kid who is poisoned by tragedy, which makes in turn for a long and absolutely predictable Hollywood-Western boyhood overseen by iron-jawed but fiercely-loving Pa Gene Hackman mouthing nothing but platitudes. The only interesting scene in this interminable early section is when the boy witnesses his first gunfight, a wonderfully true gunfight, awkward and ungainly, both fellows flailing and missing the first shot at close range and winding up writhing in agony. The rest of it you can fast-forward through until Costner has a moustache, which is when the interest is upped a tad, although the interesting bits are still thin and sparsely-located and bedraggled when you find them.

You have to sit through blatant (and, worse, badly-told) lies, like this bit: Wyatt is teaching the young Masterson brothers to be lawmen (ridiculous; he was their peer, not their mentor). They are trying to talk the guns away from a pair of drunkards when Wyatt loses patience and buffaloes the men into unconsciousness to disarm them. The Mastersons protest his methods until they see that one of the men had the gun in his hand, and so everyone apologizes to the vindicated Wyatt. The scene as told truthfully would have showed us a Wyatt who didn't give a rat's ass about whether that smokewagon was skinned or no; an Earp rarely hesitated to knock a fellow unconscious if he thought he was in the right, and rarely did he pause to wonder if he was. (Here's a detail they DID get right, and it films extraordinarily well: Ed Masterson's clothes were indeed set on fire when he took his death-wound because of the close proximity of the shot. Wyatt, though, wasn't in Dodge at the time, but was summoned back a month or so later.)

There is one reason to watch this movie. They got one big thing right, a thing which has never been captured before or since, and that is Dennis Quaid's Doc Holliday. Much as everyone wants to believe in the veracity of Val Kilmer's charming, handsome and witty Tombstone Doc, this one is the real mccoy.

A shiver of recognition will travel down your spine when Quaid's Holliday first offers his hand to Wyatt, daring the lawman to accept his friendship. Later, when we watch this twisted, Georgia-drawling (and a true Georgia drawl differs from the generic-southern softness of speech most give him), evil-faced gambler sit down on a barstool, peering with earnestness, intelligence, and just a hint of defensive malevolence into Wyatt's face, it's like looking on a revenant risen up from the pages of history. Also perfect are the way his genteel garments drape over his emaciated frame as if on a wire hanger, the passionate hate-games he plays with malicious joy against Kate, and his unswerving courage, which springs clearly from a complete disregard for the value of life, his own and others', which in turn (or so historians, almost to a human, have always romantically assumed) arises from a perpetual awareness of the presence of Death, lingering constantly at his shoulder. This Doc is nobody's chosen companion. In life, nobody liked the man, even Wyatt's brothers, nobody except Wyatt, who, for all his shadiness, held to an iron-clad code of loyalty.

AND THE WINNER:

Tombstone: (1993. dir: George P. Cosmatos) ...with hands down, is the most historically accurate. The gunfight itself, in particular, is scrupulously researched and revivified, with near-perfect lines and timing but with an added piece of comedy for Kilmer.

The things it got wrong were done for the shape of the story. The biggest (announced in voiceover by Robert Mitchum) is making the "cowboys" into an organized gang with a leader (Curly Bill) and, God help us, an Outfit: a red sash, always worn, so that Wyatt and his boys when on the war-path don't have to face the moral ambiguity of shooting an innocent man. The search for vengeance after the maiming of Virgil and the killing of Morgan is, in fact, the loosest bit in its verisimilitude, but that's because the real story isn't story-shaped. And Tombstone, for all its flaws and virtues, is a rollicking good story.

There is no possible way to watch it and not love Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday, and there's enough of the real Doc in there (the torment, the coughing, the poker, the dying words, the pretension to gentility, even some of the lines: "You're a daisy if you do,") to make it just feasible... but not really, I'm sorry to say. Way too much charm and sex appeal. His final showdown with Johnny Ringo is one of the movie's great scenes, but, oddly enough, Johnny Ringo's death was actually far more interesting and mysterious than even this movie makes out.

(This has nothing to do with accuracy, but this movie has some great, great lines, and here are a few of them:

To Wyatt: "I never met a rich man who didn't have a guilty conscience."
Wyatt: "I already got a guilty conscience. I may as well have the money, too."

Wyatt: "You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"

Billy Clanton: "You're so drunk you're probably seeing double."
Doc: "I've got two guns, one for each of you.")

There are some great characterizations. Flawed as they are, I love Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo and I love watching Powers Boothe have fun (when does he ever get to do that?) as Curly Bill. Stephen Lang, that wonderful and underrated actor, has no flaws, not a single moment of flaw, as Ike Clanton. His line deliveries are perfect; he even looks like the old daguerrotypes.

There are authentic, tiny details they got right, like the terrible, overdone maquillage painting the corpses on display under a sign that read, "Murdered in the streets of Tombstone." Curly Bill's shooting of Marshall White is a wonderful depiction, and Curly Bill's own death is accurate enough, although Wyatt's heroism is played up to giant-sized. The bulk of the love story between Wyatt and his Josie is stupid schmaltz, but even there they play with bits of truth: at one point she is shown in Fly's Photography Studio having a portrait made which is very similar to a semi-nude which for many years passed as Josie's until it was recently discredited. Although she wasn't actually there during the shootout, the filmmakers are correct that the studio was right next to the action and that Sheriff Behan took cover there, followed by Ike Clanton.

**********

In summation:

Bat Masterson is reported (by Stuart Lake, so it might easily be so much malarkey) to have said, "The real story of the Old West can never be told, unless Wyatt Earp will tell what he knows, and Wyatt will not talk."

Wyatt himself was quoted by Adela Rogers St. John, late in life and after dipping into some Shakespeare, "That fellow Hamlet was a talkative man. He wouldn't have lasted long in Kansas."

Stuart Lake ventured out to corner the man himself and came away with a book full of rubbish, opening the floor to debate about why the arch-luminary of the Wild West would go to all the trouble to lie, or, anyhow, to allow the lies to be published.

Never mind. Cinephiles know why. As the man says, "Print the legend."

a knife-thrower, unruly satanists, and cuban rebels

the Girl on the Bridge: (2000. dir: Patrice Leconte) This is a romantic fantasy for men suffering midlife crisis. Sex, for which Gabor (Daniel Auteuil, mesmerizing as always) seems to have lost the knack, is replaced by the throwing of knives at a nubile, writhing, highly-sexed and much younger woman who eventually forgoes her emotionally unsatisfying but passionately constant sex life in order to devote herself to life as his pin-cushion. The girl in question is played with oh-so-French-innocent-but-really-not charm by pop-star/actress/WAG Vanessa Paradis.

Calling it a venture in Style-over-Substance is misleading in two ways: first, it suggests there is some substance in it to be overshadowed, and secondly, the style is accomplished so gorgeously and with such charm that to many, the cotton-candy-melt-in-your-mouth emptiness at its core will surely not matter. In some slight, unpretentious way, it pretends to be an examination of the wily workings of Luck as a force in our lives, but, with an insouciant, Gallic wave of the hand, it does not really care. (Its single "insight": "Find your soul-mate; there you will find your luck.")

For a truly fascinating examination of the vagaries of fortune, I highly recommend Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intacto from around the same time.

Drive Angry: (2011. dir: Patrick Lussier) I tend to enjoy Nicolas Cage when he's being droll, turning away when he gets serious. If I'm going to watch him as an action hero, he's damn well going to be returning from the dead with a demon-accountant on his trail, looking to save his infant grand-daughter from Satanists who want to sacrifice her at the next full moon. And, hey! Here's that movie!

It's got beautiful old muscle cars, all of which get utterly destroyed, and it's got the silliest violence you'll ever see, including one protracted shoot-out that happens DURING a similarly protracted sex act. Strangely, it's also got stand-up performances: Amber Heard, for one, is very good as the formidable side-kick. William Fichtner and Billy Burke are kind of brilliant as, respectively, the Hellish Accountant and the Evil Satanist Cult-Leader (who, in an inspired choice, talks with a Cajun accent, which always makes an evil cult-leader sexier). Tom Atkins is on hand for a few scenes, too, as the cop in over his head.

Outside of that, it's a lot of explosions and gratuitous maimings and bare-legged sexy girls.

*SPOILER ALERT*

We Were Strangers: (1949. dir: John Huston) It might have been an examination of how well-intentioned rebels descend into the same evils as the fascist regimes they fight, and Huston does dip a toe or two into those interesting and muddy waters. On the whole, though, it is far too respectful of its subject to be successful as a movie, its subject being Cuban rebels fighting a burgeoning dictatorship in the pre-Castro '30s. The acting is good: John Garfield, Jennifer Jones, Pedro Armendariz, Gilbert Roland, and the dark, noir-chiaroscuro lighting is terrific. The script is only fair-to-middlin', and in the end, takes itself too seriously. These poor kids spend the whole movie digging a tunnel into a graveyard and kill a well-loved national figure in order to pull a Guy Fawkes at the funeral, taking the President and the whole cabinet, too, only to find the funeral is moved to a different city and the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley. The most interesting roads the film might have trodden are the ones it did not; the road it did take ends in predictable machine-gun fire and a sappy Tom-Joadish speech forced on poor Jennifer Jones which sounds very much like it was written by Barton Fink.

Movie trivia time: They say that Lee Harvey Oswald watched it some six weeks before the fateful day in Dallas. They also say that Huston's first choice for the female lead, a Cuban girl named "China" Valdez for her "slanted eyes", was allegedly the unknown starlet Marilyn Monroe, whom he would cast more aptly in his next film, the Asphalt Jungle.