It's Harold and Maude's Illusions, I Recall...

I used to like this film a lot more when I was younger. But you know, you grow. You mature...

Seriously, I did love this movie when I first saw it in my mid-20s. Yet when I saw it again when I was much older, I found it a bit cartoonish. It wasn't so much that the movie had changed; it was more that my perspective was different.

When I first saw this movie, I was flirting with the idea of suicide. When I saw it much later, I had long ago put paid to any notion that I would ever deliberately kill myself. I still wonder sometimes if I'll die an early death due to my many health issues. But I'm no longer flirting with the idea of killing myself the way I used to do back in my mid-20s.

I still like the movie nonetheless. And though I can't help feeling a bit sorry for Harold's various "dates" throughout the movie -- most of which end up being scared away by Harold's attempts to use special effects to duplicate suicide attempts -- I must admit that I have more respect for the movie's ultimately pro-life message than I do the positive messages of most mainstream movies. Even Ruth Gordon -- an actress I usually find annoying in other movies -- came across very well in this flick -- even though the role she played (that of an eccentric old woman) was the first of many similar roles that she would play during the rest of her acting career.

Just the same, I'm glad they never made a sequel to this movie. Or worse yet, a remake.

One Girl in All the World: Brian De Palma's The Fury

Poor Amy Irving. She finally got a chance to play both Sue Snell and Carrie White in the same movie and she got stuck with a role that required her to do stuff that even a young Meryl Streep would have had difficulty with.

Then again it says something about the 1978 movie The Fury that Amy Irving wasn't exactly listed at the top of the cast list even though she was one of the two main characters. That honor went to actor Kirk Douglas who played CIA agent Peter Sandza. The late John Cassavetes played Ben Childress, the villainous former co-worker of Peter who arranged a phony terrorist incident in an effort to both get rid of Peter and to provide cover for the kidnapping of Peter's son Robin (played by Andrew Stevens).

The whole plot pretended to be about psychic powers but actually it was just an excuse for various scenes of bloody mayhem. Granted, the movie seemed a little tame by modern standards. There was one episode of really bloody violence in which an unfortunate woman was turned into a human fire sprinkler but for the most part, most of the violent scenes are surprisingly conventional. Then again, the movie ended with what at the time must have seemed like the bloodiest display of FX that one was likely to see outside of a Romero film.

The one thing that kept the movie watchable for me was Amy Irving. The poor girl fared far better when asked to play an ordinary girl than when she had to play a super-psychic teenager who had an unfortunate gift for making the people she touched bleed. In the beginning of the movie, we saw Ms. Irving in a surprisingly skimpy leopard bikini walking with her gal pal La Rue and discussing homework.Later on, we saw her in ordinary clothes -- though there seemed to be times when Ms. Irving's character (Gillian Bellaver) spent more time in a white nightgown than in anything else.

It was interesting to note that though Gillian was one of the main characters, far more attention was paid to Robin and Peter. Moreover, the movie had a scene in which another girl implied that Gillian and La Rue were lesbians. Interesting enough, though Peter and his son indulge in their share of physical horseplay, the movie never once had anyone imply that either character was anything but heterosexual. Indeed, Robin was even provided with an older female companion who made no bones about the fact that she and Robin were sleeping together.

Yet, despite it all, I could not help wondering what happened to Gillian after the movie was over. Did she go home? Do she go to prison? I'd like to think for her sake that she did okay and went on to lead an uneventful life. But that might just be wishful thinking on my part.

What's Race Got to Do with It?

When I first saw the 1993 movie What's Love Got to Do with It?, I found it sadly amusing how much they played down the influence of racism in the life of Tina Turner as if the average moviegoer was supposed to believe that it was possible for a black woman in 1960s America to go through life without meeting one white person who was mean to her.

However, I did not realize how ridiculous that assumption was until I started adding up the number of white women I have known who have been beaten by white men (either husbands, boyfriends or whatever) -- and found that number to be depressingly high. (And I'm an introvert. Just imagine how many women in that category a more outgoing person would know.)

Yes, I realize that even the best movie in the world can't cover every pov in view in the space of two hours but there seemed to be something obscene about the way the script seemed to imply that white men -- as opposed to non-white men -- were above that type of thing. As if it somehow improves the problem of domestic violence if we can "prove" that it's their problem and not our problem.

Then again I guess I'm biased because one of those women I mentioned above was not only my best friend but a woman who later on saved my life.

It's Hard to be a Gentleman and Still Prefer Atomic Blonde

It's tempting to say that I liked the 2017 movie Atomic Blonde movie much better when it was called No Way Out but then I remember that many of the things I most hated about that 1987 movie -- the arbitrary death of a female character, the pointless twist ending, etc, -- were the same things I hated about this movie.

It did not help that I saw Salt soon after I saw this flick. As tempted as I was to quibble about various plot points in that movie, I still liked that movie better than Atomic Blonde -- and for good reason. It was the "Cold War" thriller that Atomic Blonde should have been but wasn't.

Anyway, I can see why so many critics were so disappointed in this movie. I expected more from it myself -- and now I feel foolish for doing so. Oh, well.

Charlize Theron put on a game performance but in the end, the movie didn't exactly go through new territory. When it was not borrowing from No Way Out, it was borrowing from movies like The World Was Not Enough. The most novel part of the movie was the revelation that Ms. Theron's character was bisexual. Yet it said something about this movie that as nice as the scenes between Theron and her female lover were, it did not change the fact that the rest of the movie was all too predictable. (And as other critics have noted, the fate of Theron's lover was one of those things that was all too predictable.)

I know that perhaps I should not be so quick to pass judgment on this movie -- after all, Ms. Theron did appear to be trying her best to be a convincing female James Bond -- but darn it! Salt faced many of the same problems and dealt with them in an interesting manner. Atomic Blonde did not. I could watch Salt over and over again. Atomic Blonde, by comparison, seemed hard enough to sit through once. It was not really a bad movie but in the end, it was a disappointing movie.

So Much for Wise Men: Three Kings

History has not been too kind to this flick. Although it was no doubt originally meant as a subtle attempt to encourage American military involvement in the Balkans back in the late 1990s, this film seems like a sick joke if you interpret it as an equally sincere plea to go back into Iraq and finish what the first Gulf War started. No doubt director David O. Russell and company meant well, but thanks to the Second Gulf War, their good intentions seem kinda questionable nowadays.

Besides, you know what they say about where good intentions lead -- and what kind of roads use them as paving stones.

His Aim Was Not So True: Gotcha!

A lot of your reaction to the 1985 movie Gotcha! will depend a lot on your gender, your age and your sexual orientation. For example, if you're a heterosexual male, you'll probably like it more than most movie goers and even then, your appreciation will depend a lot upon you're young enough to see Linda Fiorentino's character in this movie as a glamorous older woman or whether you're old enough to see her as a cute young thing. Needless to say, the younger males will probably like it better than the older, if for no other reason than they're likely to be more patient with the movie's shameless bouts of "ugly Americanism."

On the plus side, it was one of the few films I've seen in which Chicano bikers proved to be on the hero's side. But then you got that weird fetish scene at the end of the movie in which we the audience were supposed to admire the hero's willingness to shoot a pretty lady in the butt. Then again, it's nice to see that Linda Fiorentino has since gone on to bigger and better roles. Come to think of it, leading man Anthony Edwards has since done pretty well for himself as well but for some strange reason, I don't care that much about what happened to him.

Thoughts About The Omen (1976)

Mrs. Blaylock seems like such a happy person at the beginning of the 1976 version of The Omen. A trifle sad, perhaps, but still she looks like such a nice person.

So what could possibly happen to make her go from this...

...to this?

For that matter, why don't we ever hear about Mr. Blaylock? Is Mrs. Blaylock a widow? A divorced woman? Did Mr. Blaylock ever exist or was he just a figment of Mrs. Blaylock's imagination?

At the very least, Mrs. Blaylock seems to be a far better nanny than her immediate predecessor...

Apart from the whole "killing people to protect the Antichrist" thing.

Reflections on the Revolution in Brazil

George Orwell has been referenced by both sides of the Anglo-American political fence so often that if he had never lived, he probably would have been invented. I have always found it especially interesting how often both sides ignore that side of Orwell which is most politically inconvenient. For example, conservatives don't like to remember that Orwell was often as stern a critic of capitalism as he was a critic of communism while the liberals don't like to remember that the incident that ultimately turned Orwell against communism was the destruction of Orwell's Socialist kindred spirits in Spain by Stalinists who were supposedly on the same side of the Spanish Civil War as Orwell and his comrades.

Needless to say, you don't see that side of Orwell depicted in many popular movies. Indeed, most movie adaptations of Orwell's work tend to focus around his classic novel 1984, which is about a futuristic dictatorship whose control over its subjects is so complete that not even death can free them.

Unfortunately, 1984 is so familiar to most Anglo-American moviegoers due to its having been taught in so many high school and college literature courses that it would be hard to make a movie adaptation of it that most adults would not find predictable. Indeed, when I had the chance to watch the 1984 film version of 1984, I remember finding its first few minutes so predictable that I turned it off right away -- and it did not help that the movie itself came across as a thinly disguised campaign ad for 1984 U.S. Presidential candidate Walter Mondale.

Fortunately, Terry Gilliam's 1985 movie Brazil was not so predictable. Indeed, I could argue that its plot owed as much to author James Thurber as it did to George Orwell because its protagonist -- Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) -- spends so much time having the type of fantasies that Thurber describes in his short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." In fact, it is tempting to argue that Brazil takes the usual Walter Mitty story to its darkest conclusion because so many characters -- including Sam Lowry -- suffer such dire consequences as a result of Lowry's attempts to act out his fantasies. That is not exactly the type of conclusion I expected to find in a movie made so close to the "don't dream it, be it" era of the 1970s, much less in an era when it was popular for filmmakers to wax nostalgic about the various dreams of the 1960s.

Nor was its Aesopian moral as predictable as I expected. It took me quite a few viewings of the movie to catch on to the fact that Gilliam was not content to promote the same old "fight the power" clichés we have seen in so many bad science fiction movies. Instead, his political message was more complicated. On one hand, he obviously did not expect his audience to approve of the dictatorship for which Lowry worked. Nor did he expect us to approve of Lowry's politically neutral attitude. Yet when Lowry became romantically obsessed with a female lorry driver named Jill Layton (played by Kim Griest) and tried to help her by joining in "the revolution," it was not entirely a coincidence that Lowry's actions not only led to the death of an innocent man but ultimately made things worse for Jill, one of the most sympathetic characters in the movie. Indeed, I have long suspected that the true reason for Lowry's breakdown toward the end of the movie was not so much fear of torture but the suspicion that his actions throughout the movie not only failed to prevent the tragic fate of a woman he loved but actually hastened it.

Of course, it might have been easy for Gilliam to give Lowry a more crowd-pleasing story arc but that was not the type of tale he wanted to tell. And in an age which has seen all too many revolutionaries succeed in making things worse for the people they were supposedly fighting for, I don't know that it is a bad thing to remind people who would fight against the powers that be to be careful what they wish for lest they end up like Sam Lowry.

Of course, Brazil is noteworthy for other things besides its political commentary. For example, it is difficult today to watch the various scenes in which Lowry's co-workers watch old movies on their computers and not be reminded of how often modern office workers use the Internet for similar purposes. Indeed, their use of computers as just another source of entertainment always seemed more realistic -- even in the days before the Internet became so popular -- than the usual "evil computer" movie that was so popular back in the 1980s.

For that matter, I loved how the director threw in a visual reference to an old Marx Brothers movie by having it show on the TV set that Jill was watching while she was taking a bath. Given the frequency with which Brazil is referenced by both liberals and conservatives, I can't help but wonder how much of a coincidence it was that he had the most likable character in the movie watch a movie starring the guy who took pride in not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him for a member.

Gilliam used so many visual details to make the world of Brazil believable that it seems depressing that it was not more of a hit at the box office. But then the most popular movies are not always the most deserving movies and it could be that Brazil hit too much of a nerve to be popular with all but the most serious of moviegoers. Then again many potential fans could have been scared away by its length. After all, not everyone likes long movies. And of course, some of the moviegoers who were less than impressed with it could have been like the blonde art student I met at a local book store in the late 1980s who -- despite looking like a long-lost twin of Kim Greist -- admitted that she fell asleep during the movie. It could be that Brazil -- like most very long movies -- works better on DVD or VHS because the viewer always has the option to turn it off at a certain point and then return to it at a later time the same way one would return to a beloved novel that one just can't finish reading in one sitting. But that could just be wishful thinking on my part.

In any event, I find it amusing to note how much the movie seemed to have anticipated the recent War on Terror and the propaganda that accompanied that. Indeed, the opening sequence in which a government spokesman accuses the masterminds behind the latest terrorist incident of displaying bad sportsmanship was much on my mind during many of the months after the 9/11 attack in New York City -- especially whenever I spent too much time watching the Fox News Channel.

However, I don't find it so amusing to note how little most people in power seem to have learned from it. Then again the lessons it has to teach are not the type of lessons that are likely to appeal to a person in power. Indeed, like most great satires, Gilliam's Brazil seems destined to be deliberately misunderstood by those who most need to learn from it. But then such lessons are never easily taught so it is just as well that the movie exists to reach those few who will learn from it. And perhaps those few will be enough to make a difference for future generations.

Beware the Equinox!



The 1970 film Equinox can best be described as one of those low-budget horror films that works a lot better when you are ten than when you are twenty -- and even then, you can't help watching it as an adult and wondering, "What was I thinking when I saw this as a kid?"

It does have a memorable last scene. But whether it is memorable in a good way is yet another matter altogether.

For that matter, the opening sequence involving a car with no driver seemed pretty memorable to me when I first saw this movie -- but that probably says more about my inexperience with horror movies back then than it does the craftsmanship of the movie's director.

If I had to pick the saddest thing about this movie, it is that it featured a brief appearance by the famous horror writer Fritz Leiber -- who was not at his best here and who really deserved a better showcase for his acting than this movie. If I had to pick the best thing about this flick, it is that it probably inspired director Sam Raimi's first horror movie The Evil Dead -- though I somehow doubt that Mr. Raimi will ever acknowledge that.

Anyway, I remember liking it when I first saw it at a very young age. But why I liked it? I have no idea. Perhaps it was the Claymation sequences that impressed me. Or all the references to demons. The movie did tend to work better when it focused on the nonhuman characters than when it focused on the human characters -- though there was one kissing sequence involving a demonic being who looked human that seemed to my adult eyes to be more laughable than scary.

I suspect that some of the animated sequences haunted my dreams for many nights after I first saw the movie but I somehow doubt that I would be affected the same way if I saw it for the first time today. And I for one would like to think that is a good thing. Right?

Working for the Osterman Weekend

It would be nice to think that there was no way a poster like the above image could be used to advertise a dull movie like the 1983 film The Osterman Weekend, but alas, such a thought would be in vain. Indeed, that poster is most than a little misleading. After all, most of the film has little to do with any Soviet plot -- indeed, the film itself has little to do with anything mentioned in the Robert Ludlum novel which allegedly inspired it -- and though that female archer on the poster does eventually appear, she does so in such an anticlimactic way that all but the most desperate action movie buffs are bound to be disappointed by her appearance.

It is even more disappointing to realize that The Osterman Weekend was directed by the great Sam Peckinpah, the director of the Western classic The Wild Bunch. This was the last movie Peckinpah directed before his death and it would be nice to say that it was a classic for just that reason. But it is not. For that matter, it would be nice to blame the whole mess on studio interference since Peckinpah had a reputation for ticking off producers. However, that still does not change the fact that the final film is so tedious as to be almost unwatchable.

It is a shame, really. You do not exactly see actors like Burt Lancaster, Dennis Hopper, John Hurt and Rutger Hauer appear in the same movie every day. Then again, even the best actors need good material to work with, and the screenplay for this flick is not exactly a classic. Moreover, The Osterman Weekend aspired to be yet another movie about evil CIA agents despite its being made at a time when such movies were already a drug on the market.

Oh, well. At least the poster is nice to look at. Indeed, the poster is a lot more memorable than anything that happens in the movie. ¡Qué lástima!

The Weariness of the Mean

Ah, 1993. The same year that The X-Files debuted on TV and proved that there was a market for smart, witty science fiction and horror on the small screen. Unfortunately, it was the same year that saw the release of Leprechaun, a movie that would prove there was still a market for astonishingly dumb horror movies on the big screen.

It would be nice to say that Leprechaun was not as bad as the above poster suggests, and that it was in actuality one of those undiscovered horror classics that was never fully appreciated by the critics of its day. But no, I saw it more than a decade after its release and it was still as stupid as the day it was conceived. If anything, the film itself is even worse than the above poster suggests. The film seems to begrudge its audience any bit of humor that might have made its premise bearable. Even the inevitable reference to Lucky Charms cereal -- which, of course, includes a leprechaun on the cover of its boxes -- goes over as flat as a set of whitewall tires in Carrie Underwood territory. As if that were not enough, the film's title character (played by Warwick Davis) is just plain unlikable. Apart from a few quaint poems recited near the beginning of the film, the Davis character is generally directed to act so mean and nasty that even director Wes Craven of Nightmare on Elm Street fame would find his antics a bit excessive.

The movie is best known today for the feature film debut of American actress Jennifer Aniston, who is best known as the former star of the NBC comedy series Friends. The most charitable thing that can be said about Ms. Aniston's performance is that it is not as memorably awful as a lot of lines given to Mr. Davis. Indeed, this is one of those movies where it seems better for an actor or actress to be merely forgettable than memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, the story, as slight as it is, revolves around a leprechaun who is tricked out of his pot of gold by a mere human and who swears vengeance on whoever stole it from him. The leprechaun ends up trapped in a crate that has been sealed by the magic of a four-leaf clover. After a decade, the house where the crate has been placed is rented by an unsuspecting family and the leprechaun is inadvertently released by a mentally disabled friend of the family. As if that is not enough, said friend stumbles upon the leprechaun's pot of gold and accidentally swallows a piece of the treasure while biting into it. There is also an unbearably mawkish bit concerning said friend but that is a relatively minor complaint compared to what happens later in the film.

Eventually the leprechaun finds out his pot of gold is missing. Immediately, all Celtic hell breaks loose. The leprechaun ends up killing a lot of people and of course, almost every one who gets killed gets killed in the cruelest way possible. People try to kill the leprechaun but of course, every attempt to kill him fails until the very last, and even then the film makers can't resist leaving room for a sequel.

In any event, this movie eventually produced five sequels, most of which are rumored to be even worse than the first movie. But that seems to be the way with horror film sequels; few of them are rarely ever better than the original. And when you consider how often the original is a bad film to begin with, that is saying a lot. One might even suspect that there was a curse involved. But alas, the only pot of gold to be found inevitably belongs to the people who make these crummy movies.

Trying to Believe the Unbelievable Truth

No one made me believe in the power of the nuclear disarmament movement more than Audry Hugo, the lead character of director Hal Hartley's 1989 movie The Unbelievable Truth. For Ms. Hugo was not just content to echo the latest propaganda about the threat of a nuclear war. She was obsessed with it the way fundamentalist Christians are obsessed with the Rapture. Indeed, given the way she was always hearing bombs that no one else seemed to hear and reciting nightmarish scenarios of post-nuclear destruction the way some girls recite nursery rhymes, she made the average Christian who was obsessed with the End Times seem like a mere slacker.

And yet Audry was believable in a way that most characters in anti-bomb movies were not. For example, I do not remember being particularly moved by the Ally Sheedy character in WarGames or nor by any of the characters in The Day After. I did not wish them ill but I do not remember feeling especially concerned about their fate, especially since they were so obviously walking propaganda devices.

However, I do remember being moved by the character of Audry Hugo -- perhaps, because, unlike most such characters, Ms. Hugo was not just mechanically reciting lines from a Hollywood script designed to make us fear the latest right-wing evil. She was actually living her emotions from the moment she got up to the moment she went to bed. And because Ms. Hugo believed what she was saying so passionately, so did I.

Of course, there was much more to The Unbelievable Truth than just Ms. Hugo. There were also a mysterious Man in Black, an obnoxious photographer, a small town mechanic (Audry's father, natch) who was obsessed with money, and a waitress named Pearl who knew far more than she let on. Nor was the movie just about nuclear war. Indeed, Hartley aimed at a number of subjects including small town life and the fashion industry. At times Hartley seemed to be deliberately defying his audience to stick with the movie by including such cinematic gimmicks as having his lead actress Adrienne Shelly (the woman who played Ms. Hugo) deliver her lines in a potentially annoying deadpan style. And yet despite such gimmicks, I found the movie to be very watchable and at times, visually interesting.

For example, one of the more pleasant scenes in this movie happened after Audry and Pearl left a local birthday party to take a night time ride on Audry's bike. The two women chatted with each other but no sounds were heard. Instead we just saw Audry and Pearl smiling and the whole scene was shot in a way that indicated something special was happening. Yet by the standards of most movies, that bike ride was just an ordinary event. Of course, by the next day, Audry and Pearl were still hanging out together until the inevitable happened and Audry started thinking about bombs again. But nothing more dramatic than conversation actually happened within the scene itself and any melodrama to be found would occur within later scenes. Anyway, I rarely see scenes like that bike ride in movies nowadays and it is especially rare to see them in a self-proclaimed social satire like The Unbelievable Truth, where characters like Audry and Pearl are more often treated like objects of ridicule than actual people.

Then again, it seemed obvious to me that director Hal Hartley was not interested in making fun of Pearl and Audry but in helping us in the audience to understand and appreciate them. I also saw a lot of religious symbolism in The Unbelievable Truth starting from the above-mentioned man in black to a backyard swimming pool that could easily have doubled as an outdoor baptismal font. There was even a brief speech on the nature of truth that could have been pretentious but was not.

If The Unbelievable Truth had one flaw, it was that its conclusion was not quite as imaginative as its beginning, and you could be forgiven if you wished that Hartley had found a more original way to wrap things up. Indeed, if you are looking for an especially suspenseful climax, you might want to watch another movie.

Then again The Unbelievable Truth has lingered on in my memory long after more popular films had passed out of it, so I would like to think that there is something good to say about it. Besides, I always thought that it said something good about Hartley that he was not content to end the movie with the traditional happy ending, but rather a more ambiguous finale that hinted that Ms. Hugo was always going to be hearing bombs, no matter how many problems got resolved in her personal life. And indeed, if Ms. Hugo existed in real life, she might be still hearing bombs today.

But let's not think about that right now. Let's just lie here -- and not think about that.

Ten Reasons to Love The Unbelievable Truth

1. The Poster.

2. Adrienne Shelley.

3. Edie Falco.

4. Conversations Between Women.

5. Conversations Between Men and Women.

6. Religious Imagery.

7. Water Imagery.

8. Cosmetology Lessons.

9. Public Displays of Affection.

10. Bedroom Scenes.

Reflections on the Revolution in Hollywood: Part II

One would think that a film released in 1970 would be more progressive than a film released in 1938 but the 1970 French Revolution comedy Start the Revolution Without Me makes it hard to tell. Granted, the later is supposed to be a comedy -- and therefore not likely to be historically accurate -- but even considering that, there is something about StRWM's take on history that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

For one thing, there is an air of hypocrisy about the 1970 effort which makes it hard to take seriously as either a comedy or a social comment. The film does not really identify with the aristocrats -- apart from one exception -- but it does not identify that much with the common people either and the main glimpse we get of the French revolutionaries is so lacking in either humor or humanity that one would think that this film was commissioned by the French monarchy. Indeed, the most sympathetic character in the movie, believe it or not, is King Louis XVI, who is depicted as a unfairly maligned cuckold who could have readily solved this whole "rights of man" business if he had just been given a chance.

To be fair, the movie's other two sympathetic characters are fictional in nature and not all that likable themselves. Indeed, the main virtues of the characters of Claude and Charles Coupé (played respectively by Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland) are that they are not quite as cruel or haughty as their aristocratic counterparts Phillipe and Pierre DeSisi (also played by Wilder and Sutherland). Add to that a royal conspiracy involving King Louis XVI's wife Marie and her villainous consort, the Duke d'Escargot, and one can't help sensing the basis for what could have been a very intriguing Alexandre Dumas parody which unfortunately never quite gets off the ground.

Part of the reason the movie ultimately does not work is that it is too busy trying to execute an awkward political allegory. In this allegory, the French Revolutionaries are obvious stand-ins for the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the French Revolution a metaphor for the campus upheavals of the late 1960s and poor Louis XVI an obvious symbol for former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. Unfortunately, the idea of Louis XVI as a misunderstood do-gooder just does not seem all that believable and the hamhanded attempts to relate the actions of the movie to current events seem more embarrassing than emotionally moving. Indeed, the movie's idea that the French Revolution could have been "solved" if the masses had just gotten out of the way and allowed the King to sign the right paperwork seems intellectually idiotic even by humor standards. And yet such are the movie's politics that one rarely sees any signs of sympathy for anyone rebelling against the status quo -- just sympathy for people like the Coupés who get caught up in the crossfire.

Nor does it help that none of the movie's villains get an emotionally satisfying comeuppance. Indeed, even the film's conclusion proves unsatisfying. Instead of an emotionally satisfying finale, we get a parody of an ending -- a parody which might have worked if the rest of the movie was more humorous but alas, it was not. To be fair, Wilder and Sutherland have some funny scenes but not as much as one would expect. Heck, even narrator Orson Welles can't save this movie. Fortunately, Wilder and Sutherland will do far better work in more recent movies but not, alas, in the same movie.

In any event, I wanted to like this movie far more than I did. But I guess I was too rebellious to appreciate it.

It Was Never Just About the Mall

It begins with the sight of a red shag carpet wall. And then we see a young blonde woman leaning against the wall while she sleeps. But her slumber is not peaceful. It becomes obvious to even the least observant viewer that she is having a bad dream and when she finally gets woken up, it becomes obvious why she is having them.

The place she awakens to is a TV news studio. The woman's name is Francine Parker and she is part of the crew that works there. Currently the crew is trying to film a talk show in which the latest guest is a doctor talking about the latest epidemic. However, the epidemic in question is not AIDS or swine flu. It's zombism and it seems obvious to the casual observer that the doctor's society isn't exactly controlling this epidemic very well. The whole station is in chaos with the doctor being heckled by some of the very people filming him and the station manager preferring to send out false information about rescue stations rather than risk bad ratings. People are already starting to abandon the TV station and when Francine's boyfriend Stephen comes by and suggests a similar plan, she does not need much persuasion before she too agrees to abandon her post and head for the hills. After all, society is falling apart all around her. So why should she stay? Why not take off and seek sanctuary from the growing zombie plague?

Thus begins director George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a movie released in 1978 that has been often interpreted as being little more than an empty-headed horror film with pretensions to social commentary. As far as most critics are concerned, Dawn of the Dead begins and ends with the abandoned shopping mall that Francine, Stephen and two other characters end up occupying partway through the movie. And to be fair, the movie's somewhat heavyhanded comparisons between mall shoppers and zombies do tend to prove the critics' point -- especially if you choose to ignore the rest of the movie.

But George Romero's Dawn of the Dead is not just about shopping malls; it is about society. American society. And the brief glimpses it gives at the beginning of the film of the America surrounding the mall are as scary and intriguing as anything that takes place within the mall itself. In this bizarre world which looks so similar to our own, inner city apartment dwellers fight over the right to retain the bodies of their dead neighbors and loved ones, a racist cop feels free to use the chaos of a SWAT raid to conduct his own private war against minorities, and rural folk treat the whole zombie epidemic as little more than an excuse for a hunting party.

When Francine and Stephen leave the city in a stolen TV news helicopter, they are in the company of two SWAT team members named Peter and Roger and are not inclined to trust anyone else. A simple request for cigarettes from a fellow refugee goes ignored and a simple stop for fuel almost proves to be the death of them.

Tension grows within the group. Stephen's lousy marksmanship nearly proves to be the death of one group member and by the time the group comes to the abandoned shopping mall mentioned up above, the group members are quite eager to use it for a temporary resting place. Then they discover the abundance of consumer goods that are available in the mall and Roger and Peter decide to take to help themselves to some free goodies. However, the mall is crawling with zombies and the quartet has to work together to both get rid of the zombies and avoid getting killed in the process. Then things get even more complicated when they discover that one group member -- Francine, of course -- is pregnant.

Even when the gang finally achieves a victory over the mall zombies, there is an air of sadness to said event. Romero films the final view of the dead mall zombies not so much as an act of triumph but as an act of tragedy. Realistically, there was perhaps no way the humans and the zombies could have co-existed in the same mall, but the quartet is nevertheless reminded all too often that they are not just killing zombies but also killing former human beings.

In any event, the relief said victory gives them from the zombie epidemic proves to be only temporary. One group member succumbs to a bite he received during the battle against the zombies and news programs from the outside world become increasingly rare. Pretty soon the television and the radio are only broadcasting static. Francine and Stephen fight over an attempted marriage proposal and life seems very bleak indeed. Then a band of fellow humans discovers the mall and the quartet-turned-trio is forced to face an enemy that is even worse than the zombies...

It would be easy to concentrate just on the blood and guts that are frequently displayed in the last ten minutes of the movie and just see the flick as a simple-minded horror flick. But it seems obvious that Romero didn't want it to be seen just that way. After all, it is no accident that the film begins not in the shopping mall or in the helicopter but in the TV station. The story starts with one character, moves on to another and then yet another until we are back to the character we started with. The movie gives us ample glimpses of a society in chaos with no signs that things are likely to get better.

The last scene in the film appears to be one of triumph. The helicopter takes off with the surviving members of the quartet and the zombies are left behind to take over the shopping mall. However, it is pointed out that the helicopter is low on fuel. And that the zombies outside the mall are still far more numerous than the humans.

Thus the ending seems both hopeful and grim. Yes, the survivors have accomplished their escape from the mall. But where do they go next? And how will they manage to get there?

Mercifully, Romero never shows us the answers to these questions.

Six Feet Under and Could Have Been Kissed

Necrophilia is admittedly not a common subject to see in the movies, even in art films. Female necrophiles are even rarer a subject -- perhaps because like female exhibitionists, they seem like too much like a guy's fantasy -- especially a weird guy's fantasy -- to take seriously. Or perhaps it's more likely that we would like to think women are above that kind of stuff. After all, there's relatively little one could write about a man's sex life that one would not believe, no matter how weird it is. But women, of course, are supposed to be different. And anyway, if we have to explore such fantasies, wouldn't a film like Eyes Wide Shut or Nine and a Half Weeks seem like a safer direction to go?

In any event, the 1996 movie Kissed does attempt to go in such a direction -- though for a while, it seems determined to shadow the far darker movie Heavenly Creatures. It starts out with a young girl named Sandra Larson (played by Molly Parker) who is obsessed with death to the extent of devising her own private rituals to deal with it -- rituals so weird even her would-be friend gets freaked out by them. Eventually, she grows up and gets a job in a funeral parlor where she learns to subliminate her obsession with death by "kissing" the bodies of young dead males.

Of course, she does a lot more than just kiss them but alas, there is no verb in English one could use as an adequate substitute. "Embrace" sounds like way too mild an euphemism and a more sexually explicit term would imply that mere lust was Ms. Larson's sole motivation. Indeed, while the film does not pretend that Ms. Larson's horizontal activities are exactly normal, it does not pretend that mere sex is Mr. Larson's sole motive either -- unless one prefers to argue that Ms. Larson's obsession with death is merely a substitute for a more "normal" obsession with sex. And even then one would have to ignore the quasi-religious overtones of Ms. Larson's obsession -- though one might argue that Sandra would hardly be the first person to confuse sex with religion...

Anyway, Sandra eventually gets the chance to have a conventional sexual relationship, only to frustrate her would-be boyfriend with her apparent lack of interest. Then her boyfriend discovers her real secret and decides upon the ultimate solution to their relationship problems...

If there's one flaw in Kissed, it's that in the end, it settles for an all too conventional ending. Granted, they had to end the movie somehow but it still seemed strange that a movie originally focused upon a female character ended up being centered on the fate of a male character.

For that matter, I can't help feeling a bit uneasy about the film's efforts to portray necrophilia as a "natural" impulse. After all, it's easy to argue that such a practice would be harmless if practiced by cute young women like Molly Parker but it's usually not women like Ms. Parker who go in for such a practice in real life. More often than not, such women are the victims of would-be necrophiles, not their kindred spirits. And it can be argued that necrophilia is the ultimate form of sexual assault since there is no way the victim could give consent even if he or she wanted to. And even if one were to make an airtight legal case on behalf of such a practice, there would still be something sad about a person who voluntarily chose to embrace the dead instead of the living. Even if the living are a bit hard to put up with these days.

Spinach Cinema Revisited

This is scary. For years I had jeered at the 1980 Robert Altman movie Popeye for being such a bad movie. And yet when I watched a little bit of it the other night, I actually found myself liking it.

Granted, there was always a little bit of me that found it hard to hate the movie altogether. After all, when Robin Williams made this movie, he was just beginning his career as a movie actor which meant he not only put an effort into his performance but was actually quite pleasant to watch on screen. Plus he and Shelley Duvall had a chemistry that I readily took for granted at the time yet find myself missing all too often in many of today's movies. Paul L. Smith made for a convincing Bluto and of course, many of the movie's songs were not only quite good -- especially "I'm Mean," "He Needs Me" and "I Yam What I Yam" -- but hold up quite nicely compared to some of the tunes issuing from more recent movie musicals.

But when I was younger, I used to love to proclaim my dislike for that movie. Who needs a Popeye movie so obviously aimed at the type of people who hate Popeye? I thought. And indeed, the biggest black mark against Popeye back in the day was that it was so obviously not made for the type of people like me who had grown up watching the old Paramount and King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons.

But that didn't mean it was bad. And though I remember waxing nostalgic for those old Popeye cartoons back in my twenties -- not so much the King Features Syndicate cartoons of the 1960s which were pretty primitive in their animation but the Paramount cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s which seemed a bit more sophisticated -- a more recent viewing of said cartoons convinced me that they don't hold up as well as I had thought they did. Indeed, few cartoons from my youth which were not made by Disney or Looney Tunes hold up as well as I would like -- and yet I never thought of myself as being particularly choosy when it came to cartoons.

However, tastes do change even when you don't want them to and the older you get, the more they change. I can't pretend I entirely hate the Popeye cartoons of old, but I also can't pretend that such cartoons are as emotionally satisfying as Robert Altman's film. Sure, bits of that movie are corny and scriptwriter Jules Feiffer seems an odd choice for a Popeye movie. Given the current political climate, I can't help but think it's funny that most of the gags revolving around the evilness of tax collectors would most likely face more criticism today from political southpaws than from cultural conservatives while said cultcons would be more curious as to why director Robert Altman chose to include a whorehouse in a so-called family movie -- especially one which starred his own grandson! And of course, most young Popeye fans would be curious as to why it took so long to get to the climatic battle between Popeye and Bluto -- and why Altman went to such an effort to make such a fight seem so anticlimatic.

Oh, well. Popeye might not have been the type of film I would have appreciated in my youth but now that I'm older, I appreciate it quite well. The romance between Popeye and Olive Oyl seems quite sweet compared to modern-day movie romances and though the movie is not always as funny as it could be, Altman's comparatively subtle approach to comedy seems more interesting to an older moviegoer like myself than a more conventional slapstick approach would have been. 'Tis a pity that it took me so long to realize this. I guessed I could have used more than a few helpings of spinach in my younger days as well.

What a Revelation!

If nothing else, the 1991 movie The Rapture deserves credit for being the one of the few films critical of Fundamentalist Christianity that dares to ask the question: if such a religion is so bad, why are so many people attracted to it?

It promptly gives at least one answer in the opening sequence in which we view Sharon (played by Mimi Rogers) doing a customer service job that requires her to mechanically give the same information over and over again to different customers. In other words, Sharon works in a dehumanizing environment.

Every so often, Sharon goes off with Vic, a male friend, to blow off some steam by picking up strangers for casual sex. But even this doesn't satisfy her.

Then one day Sharon witnesses a group of people in the company cafeteria who appear to have a special bond. She soon finds out that they are in a special church and she finds herself being drawn to them more and more even though she doesn't consider herself a religious person.

Sharon hears talk of a mysterious black pearl but she is not allowed to join the group until she has seen the pearl herself. Soon afterwards, she goes into a near-suicidal depression and just when she is at the darkest part of her dark night of the soul, she sees a pearl.

She joins the group soon afterwards and becomes so enthusiastic about it that she converts her latest boyfriend, Randy (played by Fox Mulder himself, David Duchovny), into the group as well and eventually marries him.

For a while, life goes better for her. Her husband gets a better job. She quits her job to become a stay-at-home mom. She leads her family in daily prayer sessions. In short, religion seems to work for her.

Then one day a disgruntled office worker kills Randy in a tragic scene which unfortunately includes some of the worst acting in the movie. (For what it's worth, Duchovny is quite adequate but the actor who plays the homicidal maniac is just awful.) Sharon is heartbroken and eventually turns her back on her church when none of the religious people prove up to the task of consoling her.

Instead, Sharon becomes obsessed with seeking her own means of salvation by going off into the desert to make a Kate Bushian deal with God. Unfortunately, it is never quite clear whether such a deal actually exists or whether Sharon merely imagines one in her mind. Ultimately, she makes the Supreme Being an offer she thinks he can't refuse -- only to find...

Ah. But that would be telling. But surely it's not much of a spoiler to note that the movie does not exactly end on a happy note.

It says something about how well The Rapture works -- apart from the one scene I mentioned above -- that both religious people and confirmed atheists can draw lessons from it. Indeed, despite a quite literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations toward the end, the movie remains quite ambiguous as to who actually is to blame for Sharon's final situation. If you're an atheist, you wish to believe it was God. But if so, why weren't all the pearl-worshippers out there in the desert imitating Sharon? If you're a religious person, you wish to believe that it was Sharon. But you can't help but wonder whether it was a cruel joke for Sharon to find more senseless cruelty pursuing what she believes to be the path of religious virtue than she ever did pursuing the path of secular vice. Either way, the answer to Sharon's dilemma is up to the individual viewer. And, of course, the most obvious lesson of the movie is not to go out and do likewise.

Not Much of a Movie But Nevertheless a Novel Experience

As much as I like Jude Law and Gretchen Mol, I can't deny that the two of them cannot save the 1998 romcom Music from Another Room from being one of the most dubious romantic comedies ever made. Then again, this is a movie that starts out with a younger version of the Jude Law character (Danny) literally helping his physician father deliver the infant which would grow up to be his future soulmate Anna Swan and then has him fall in love with her at first sight. That's right. The movie shows a young boy falling in love with an infant girl who has just been born. And it goes downhill from there.

To be fair, the movie is not all bad. There is a nice bit halfway through the picture where Danny starts reading passages from Anna Karenina to Anna's blind sister Nina (played by Jennifer Tilly) in order to ingratiate himself with Anna's family. His scheme never quite works but it did introduce me to the Kitty and Levin characters in Tolstoy's classic novel and thus exposed me to a side of the book I never would have experienced had I relied on conventional literary critics. Indeed, it was because of this movie that I finally broke down and borrowed Anna Karenina from the local library after putting off such a deed for years. And of course, I eventually ended up reading this novel and enjoying it very much.

Anyway, Tolstoy is a hard act to follow, even for a good movie. And Music from Another Room is far from good. However, it did provoke me into carrying out a long-delayed literary vow so it can't be all bad. I just wish it was better -- and more worthy of its literary references.

Cinema Indocumentado

I have seen so many bad illegal alien movies over the years that it often seems like a miracle to come across one that is actually good. This is not to say that such films are rare. I could sing the praises of movies like El Norte and My Family all day but unfortunately, not all films dealing with Mexican illegal aliens are up to the standards of those films.

More often, they are up to the standards of the 1980 exploitation flick Border Cop, which starred Telly Savalas as a tough but kind border patrolman and which featured Michael V. Gazzo as a local crime boss named Chico Suarez who just happened to speak with the same accent Gazzo used for his Mafioso character in The Godfather, Part II. It says something about how bad this particular movie was that one of the most likable characters in this movie -- a Mexican female immigrant, natch -- ended up getting raped for seemingly no other reason than to give the Savalas character an excuse to show what a badass he was when he went after the rapist. In all too many such movies, the Mexican characters seemed to have little reason to exist apart from giving the Anglo heroes a chance to show how brave and noble they were and Border Cop was no different.

Granted, the USA does not have a monopoly on such bad movies. The 1985 Mexican exploitation flick La Tumba del Mojado presented such a downbeat view of the United States and the type of life awaiting those Mexicans who make it here that a Mexican acquaintance theorized that it was part of her government's plan to discourage illegal immigration. The only Anglos shown on-screen spoke with thick Texas accents and were depicted as being just a tad more friendly than the Wehrmacht. One of the few friendly faces the illegal immigrant of the title* met in the US belonged to a drug dealer who befriended the immigrant and eventually involved him in his business -- an involvement which, of course, had tragic results.

Ironically, one of the better movies I have seen concerning this issue is the 1949 drama Border Incident, one of the first American movies that dealt with this subject. Of course, this film was made during the heyday of the bracero program (a government program by which Mexican agricultural workers were transported to the US to help out American farmers). Back then, illegal immigration still seemed like a novelty and while the movie's writers expressed their share of sympathy for the Mexicans who choose to illegally enter the US, the movie still emphasized the importance of immigrating the legal way.

Nevertheless, the movie's villains were not the poor devils who crossed the border without government approval but the Latino and Anglo criminals who smuggled them across and then preyed on them. Indeed, the number of young Mexicans who fell victim to these crooks became so great that the Mexican and American governments teamed up to bring the crooks to justice. The Mexican side was represented by Ricardo Montalbán, who played Pablo Rodriguez, a Mexican policeman who went undercover as a Mexican peon. The American side was represented by future Senator George Murphy, who played Jack Bearnes, the federal agent who assisted Montalbán in his mission.

Contrary to American movie tradition, Rodriguez did not die the traditional early death Hollywood usually reserves for minority characters. Instead he ended up becoming the hero of the movie while Bearnes ended up becoming a victim of the bad guys -- quite a daring plot development when you consider that this movie was made at a time when many restaurants, theatres and public pools in the Southwest still discriminated against Mexicans and Latin heroes were far from the norm in American movies.

Could a film like Border Incident be made today? Not likely, given that the bracero program which partially inspired it no longer exists. For that matter, the idea of the Mexican and American government cooperating today to bust an international ring of immigrant smugglers seems highly unlikely as well. But it would be nice to pretend it was possible, if only in dreams.

* Mojado is a not so nice Spanish word for "illegal immigrant" which usually translates as "wetback" in English. It is often used in the titles of Mexican songs and movies and one relative of mine even claimed to have once seen a T-shirt that pitted a vehicle labeled "Mojado Power" against a vehicle labeled "Chicano Power." However, it is not a word that most Spanish-speaking people knowingly use in polite company.