Walter Reade's Ziegfeld Theatre, 1969-2016

The first movie I ever saw at Walter Reade's Ziegfeld Theatre was Gandhi.

It was Christmas break between my first and second semesters in college.  It was a sold-out show.  There were a lot of those at the Ziegfeld in the 1980s and 1990s.  I was not one of the first to arrive, and I found my way to a seat on the far right side of the theatre, fairly near to the front.  The theatre smelled of food; Gandhi was a very long movie, and people were prepared with more than popcorn.

The Ziegfeld and Gandhi turned out to be very similar to one another.  They were worthy.  You couldn't not like Gandhi, could you?  I mean, it was a long epic biopic about an incredibly important historical figure,  You could learn so much of such importance about such an important personage.  Of course, it wasn't actually a good movie.  It was a quintessential biopic. The actual filmmaking by Richard Attenborough was kind of plodding.

So it was with the Ziegfeld.  It was a single screen movie theatre with over 1000 seats, and a reasonably large screen.  But the rake was practically non-existent, making it difficult to see over the head of anyone sitting in front of you.  Long and narrow isn't the best dimension for a movie theatre, but that was the Ziegfeld.  A whole city block long.  From the raised mezzanine at the back, a very long way to the screen, which didn't dominate the field of vision from such a distance.  Four urinals, three stalls, two sinks for the men's restroom; imagine the lines after a full house.  Small lobby and concession area.  No accessibility for the handicapped.  There were lots of chandeliers, and some exhibits on the original Ziegfeld Follies theatre.  

The Loews Astor Plaza, built just a few years later, was much better.  Great rake.  Better dimensions.  Bigger screen.  Bigger lobby.  Nicer everything, just not as fancy.  I came to be very frustrated that many more people knew about the Ziegfeld, which got better press and was more often booked for Hollywood premieres and exclusive general releases.

As it turns out, I've likely seen more movies at the Ziegfeld than on any other screen (emphasis on "screen," because some multiplexes I've gone to more often, but spread out over many screens).  But going to the Astor Plaza always exhilarated me, and I never felt that way about the Ziegfeld.  I was often as happy to see a movie on the big screens at the multiplexes than at the Ziegfeld, and I never felt that way about the Astor Plaza.  Looking at the long list of movies I saw at the Ziegfeld, and at full lists of movies that played the Ziegfeld that are on Cinema Treasures, I'm as impressed with the list if movies I could have seen there and didn't.

When I read in 2004 that the Astor Plaza was closing, I cried.  When I read in 2016 that the Ziegfeld was closing, it was more "sigh, I guess I'll have to go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet again."

Nonetheless, an era passes with the closing of the Ziegfeld.  It was the next-to-last single screen movie palace to open in Manhattan, with the Astor Plaza the only that came after, and it was the very last large single screen movie theatre to close. I decided to treat the entire office to the final 2D show at the theatre so that they'd all have a chance to experience it before it closed for good.

The last show at the Astor Plaza, opening weekend for The Village, had a few dozen people on a Sunday night.  The Friday night show had hundreds and hundreds of people, but the quick falloff showed how difficult it was to make money running a really large movie theatre.  Of those few dozen people, no more than a dozen were there to bid farewell to the Astor Plaza itself.  And even as the opening credits were rolling, a few workmen came in to begin disassembling.

The last 2D show at the Ziegfeld, with three more 3D to go, had 200, maybe 250 (anyone on the internet saying 500 is lying).  Half of them were still in line to buy tickets.  Three ticket windows, but only one had an actual computer to sell tickets, because they rarely needed even that many.  People stayed.  They took pictures.  It was a scene.  And Star Wars: The Force Awakens, gets worse and worse with each viewing. 

At some point maybe I'll append a reasonably accurate list of the movies I saw at the Ziegfeld to this post.  But the bottom line is that I won't miss the Ziegfeld, while I miss the Loews Astor Plaza often.


The Paris Theatre is the last of the holdouts.  The link takes you to the Cinema Treasures website, which makes the Paris seem much nicer than it actually is.  Almost 600 seats, and it does have a balcony.  But the leg room isn't good.  The rake isn't good.  The screen isn't very big.  The lobby area is practically non-existent.  Some commenters on Cinema Treasures are trying to say the Paris isn't the last single screen theatre in Manhattan, but they are as wrong as the ones saying I saw Force Awakens with 500 other people.  The other single screen theatres like the Walter Reade aren't commercial theatres showing first run movies.  And if the Paris closes. I won't miss it very much, either. 

True Romancing the Danger Zone

What do you say about Tony Scott?

Well, I don't think you'll be hearing this too many times in the obituaries and reminiscences that are going to be out and about in the wake of his tragic suicide, but I think I'd compare him most to Martin Scorcese. Yes, Martin Scorcese.

Because I think the experience of going to the movies isn't just about if a movie is good or bad but about the memories it creates. There are directors who don't create memories at all, I can't rouse myself to like or dislike a Betty Thomas film, let's say, Beverly Hillbillies wasn't good but I don't dwell on it. But at both his best and at his worst, Tony Scott created great memories.

There's Top Gun, which I'm now watching on Blu Ray. It was made 20 years before Blu Ray and yet if you're wondering if it's worth upgrading from a regular DVD, Top Gun could be the test reel. It wasn't the first movie I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, but it was the first I saw after I started working in New York City, a few months before I moved to NYC, the first movie when the Astor Plaza was my hometown theatre. Like the best Tony Scott, it's got great special effects and lively music and an OD of testosterone. Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Christian Slater, Will Smith -- Tony Scott always loved his leading men. Many of the actors he worked with including Cruise, Denzel and Hackman, found the Tony Scott experience one worth repeating.

And there's the needless remake ot The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 which was memorably bad.

Scorcese has Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence, Tony Scott had Top Gun and The Taking of Pelham, and I'll give Tony Scott an advantage here because the bad Tony Scott films were never as excruciatingly dull and miserable to sit through as The Age of Innocence or The Last Temptation of Christ.

When I was in college, I saw a Scorcese movie I really really liked called After Hours, which I've never seen again.

That too has an almost analog in True Romance, which I saw in 1993 and didn't revisit for 18 years. It held up. I don't think I can call it a masterpiece, but it's full of charm and romance and spunk, it's fun. When I went to see Oliver Stone's Savages several weeks ago, with more recent memories of True Romance fresh in my mind, I sat through the movie thinking "wow, this is probably the best and funnest violent drug movie since True Romance." And the interesting thing was that the person I was seeing the movie with was thinking that exact same thing.

And then Tony Scott could come up with Man on Fire, a thoroughly entertaining and entirely reprehensible movie which tells us that all that is wrong in the world can be taken care of with a little bit of maiming and torture. Well, I did loathe and detest Man on Fire on multiple levels, but I'm never going to forget it.

There's the quintessential Tony Scott, movies like Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State that maybe aren't particularly memorable or particularly worth a repeat viewing but which were well done examples of everything Tony Scott could do well.

And when you have things that you can do well, you can sometimes make a movie that surpasses simply by being the best of all of your best qualities. I'd put Unstoppable in that category. It's just so unstoppably good at all of the good things it is. There's Denzel, again, no longer the young guy with a gleam in his eye but being oh so Denzel and sharing the stage with Chris Pine, who is everything the Tony Scott leading man could be. You can't help but think if Tony Scott were with us, probably someday he'd be back working with Chris Pine again. The special effects were quietly good, Tony Scott wasn't a Peter Jackson who can get lost in the joys of fake special effects. This is a train going down train tracks looking to make a real tight curve in a real midwest city. You can feel it rumbling down the tracks way more than you can feel anything that was going on in King Kong. Like a train slowly gaining speed, Unstoppable just chugs along and chugs along and then comes up with about as good a last 40 minutes as you can find in film, 40 minutes that won't have you looking at your watch or squirming in your seat or doing anything other than looking rapt at the screen until the final moment of release.

So ultimately, what I can say about Tony Scott is, that it would sure have been nice to have seen another Tony Scott film come along. I don't know if it would have been Top Gun or Man on Fire, but there's a darned good chance it would have created some kind of cinematic memory for me.

I mean, every time that Top Gun theme starts playing, Howard Faltermeyer's bah-da-da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum, I've got to look up at the TV and see what it's underscoring, and there's Tom Cruise beautifully lit and radiating the same kind of charisma that we'd get every single time from every single leading man in every single Tony Scott film being what movies and movie stars are all about.

As one Marvin Hamlisch song says "nobody does it better."

Passages

I'm starting to feel like one of those people who needs to check the obituaries first thing each morning.

Susannah York. She played Lara, Superman's Kryptonian mother (Marlon Brandon's wife) in Superman: The Movie, which is one ofd my favorite movies of all time. She was also in Images, which is one of the more interesting efforts by Robert Altman. The prof who taught my intro film survey in college was a big Altman fan, and in this film she played a possibly crazy housewife maybe or maybe not seeing images of men maybe or maybe not threatening her. It's a weird movie, hard to follow. Blessed with stunning musical score by John Williams and beautiful photography by Vilmos Zsigmond.

And then a few days before that, Peter Yates. When I finally caught up with Bullitt, with its famous San Francisco chase scene, a few years ago, I wasn't impressed. I thought the movie was on the long and slow side and a little implausible. There's that chase scene, but there's also a neverending scene at the San Francisco airport that doesn't make sense. But Yates also directed Breaking Away, a perfectly pleasant and well above average example of the coming-of-age sports movie. I liked, it doesn't linger. More importantly, he made Eyewitness, with William Hurt in his first role after Altered States, Sigourney Weaver, Morgan Freeman, James Woods. One of my first Christopher Plummer films in a non-Sound of Music role. And as I recall, a pretty good and nifty little movie that I'd like very much to see again in my adultage. The Dresser is an exceptionally well-acted British art film adaptation. I didn't see much from Yates after that, but for Eyewitness alone he's in my heart. Weird connection, Yates directed For Pete's Sake, which was the opening movie at the Loews Astor Plaza. William Hurt was in Altered States, which was the first movie I saw at my beloved and much sorely missed Astor Plaza, as well as in the underrated The Village which closed the Astor Plaza. And then the two hooked up for Eyewitness, which with Altered States is one of the first movies I have any real adult memories of.

Yates did both more and less than Irwin Kershner. Kershner did The Empire Strikes Back. Need I say more? I mean, Empire Strikes Back only gains in stature to me, when you compare it to all the Star Wars movies that came before or after. Kershner went on to do some less great films, like Never Say Never Again. His Entebbe TV movie was a good example of its sort. But if that was all he did, it was quite quite something.

Leslie Nielsen. Airplane would have been enough, that was and is and always will be a classic comedy, AMC Cinemas is showing it for a weekend matinee and an evening performance in a few weeks, and it will hold up. But he went on to do Police Squad and the Naked Gun movies and so much more. Also in Forbidden Planet.

I'm a little late to say something about Bob Guccione, who passed in October. Most people will think of him as the Penthouse dude, but to me he was the publisher of Omni. The path to my today started with the free samples of Omni I got at Boskone in 1979, which introduced me to Orson Scott Card and George RR Martin. And Omni in its heyday was a great magazine, filled not just with good fiction but with columns by important people and interviews with major figures in science and good articles and really in its best days just a pleasure to read in so many ways. Omni lasted less than 20 years, but it was hugely influential in the fields of science and science fiction. Ben Bova was the fiction editor at the start, Ellen Datlow at the finish, and Robert Sheckley in-between.

I commented separately upon Blake Edwards.

It used to be a rare and stunning and surprising thing when major influences on the culture of me passed away. Now, not so much.

Green Zone

When I re-committed to the blog three months ago after a post-less fall 2009, one of the things I said I'd try and do was limit the length of my posts, and on balance I think I've done that. There goes that goal. There's too much going on in Green Zone (see Wednesday evening March 10, 2010 at the Universal Screening Room) to keep it short.

The movie can be reviewed as a Bourne-like action movie. Green Zone star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass teamed on Bourne #2 and Bourne #3. And it can be reviewed as a polemic, yet another Iraq polemic after movies of highly variable success from Stop Loss as a very good and underrated one to In the Valley of Elah as a less successful one, or Rendition and De Palma's Redacted (watched one on HBO on Demand, didn't see the other) and etc. etc. And let us not forget Hurt Locker, which was photographed by Green Zone cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who worked with Greengrass previously on United 93.

I should probably start by talking about the film from the thriller standpoint, that being the more successful part of the movie. But I'm not. Let's talk politics.

In the lead-up to the Iraq war in late 2002 and early 2003, I was very ambivalent about the whole affair. I was fairly certain that Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Just a gut feeling, really. We were looking so hard for them, so very very very very hard, and we weren't coming up with anything, not even the Colin Powell address at the UN, that was looking very convincing to me. Seemed to me if they were there that all of our money and effort and searching would have come up with something. Maybe not a smoking gun, maybe just a smoldering soap sculpture thereof. But something.

At the same time, I didn't feel as if the war was necessarily a bad idea. Saddam Hussein was a very bad actor. We were enforcing sanctions on his regime with the weight of a six-figure troop deployment without much of a helping hand from anyone else. Either we were going to have to get some help in enforcing sanctions, we were going to have to give up on the idea because it was unsustainable to continue to enforce them unilaterally, or we were going to have to charge forward. Now, given those choices, which in the real world are we going to choose?

So I didn't dislike the rush to war, per se. I did feel as if we were being lied into a war when we didn't need to be, and that to me was a bad idea.

I recall at the time that the left-wing serious UK newspaper The Guardian did a major series exploring the question of whether or not Iraq had WMD. That kind of reporting was pretty much absent from the major US newspapers. The press defenders will find this exception or that, but the Guardian articles were long, major, front-page, well-researched, pro-and-con heavily reported articles. I don't think anyone can seriously point to a series in the Washington Post, NY Times, or Wall Street Journal, the three biggest opinion leaders in US journalism, that matched. Compare, let's say, how much ink the NY Times has given in recent months to errors in radiation treatment at US hospitals, and you'd have to look awfully hard to find something like that in 2002 or 2003 on the WMD question. No, the major newspapers were highly credulous. The poster child for this has become a former NY Times reporter Judith Miller who was a go-to conduit for planting the official US line on the WMD question.

And Green Zone is coming from a very similar place.

Matt Damon is playing a Chief Warrant Officer (itself a bit of a surprise, we don't have too many movies with Warrant Officers at the center, Andy Gudgel will like this!) who is tasked with searching potential WMD sites in the months after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. We come in as he's doing his third such search, and for the third time coming up empty. He doesn't like risking men to come up empty. He starts asking where the WMD are, where the intelligence is coming from, other questions that don't have answers. He's in such a high dudgeon about this that he ends up going off res to do his own side ops, ultimately trying to take in a possible source of the misinformation. He runs up against a buzzsaw of an obstacle played by Greg Kinnear, a Paul Bremer stand-in (for those of you who don't remember, Bremer was Dubya's appointee to pretty much run Iraq as head of the Coalition authority) who doesn't like people looking very closely at the sourcing for the WMD intelligence. The climactic scene of the movie is Damon going to take in source chased by special forces units tasked by Kinnear with getting the source before Damon does, and with doing to Damon whatever needs to be done.

The ideological climax of the movie is a confrontation between Damon and Kinnear after where Damon says words very much to my liking, that the reasons why we go to war matter.

But while the movie climaxes with a confrontation between its two leads that very much warms my heart, the movie has to hit too many wrong notes in order to hit the right ones. It isn't likely that the Damon character would self-generate so many of his own orders. There are more successful paranoid conspiracy films that might get us to believe the Special Forces unit would kill Damon in the climax if it came to that, but I couldn't buy into it here. That they might tussle with Damon to get a little black book, yes, that they might kill him, no.

I always felt that we could have been led into war in 2003 for better reasons than the WMD, but the movie doesn't have that ambivalency. That one reason wasn't a right reason, and the war must therefore have been wrong. There's no sense that the war might still have been a right one to wage for other reasons.

There's even the question of whether those who were lying us into war were lying about it, in the sense of purposely and knowingly giving us false information, and I'm not sure I'd go that far in every instance. The war was oversold, and some of the people who did that should take ownership of their lies and mistakes (greeted as liberators, y'all remember that?), but this is an area with more grey than black and white.

But I can't fault the movie too much for that, either. Fiction films don't do very well with greys. You don't put Matt Damon in this role in order to have him Hamlet-ized with inner conflict. I'm not sure what the right or better approach would be. God knows there isn't going to be much of an audience for an even-handed documentary that attempts to show the world the "truth" about the lead-up to the war. The sub-conscious reason of needing to go to war to escape the sanctions enforcement conundrum hasn't been aired very much at all, that's for sure. We don't have an All the President's Men that can serve as a way in to the story. We don't have the consensus we did 25 years ago that allowed All the President's Men to be seen as a genuine good vs evil story.

I will fault the movie because I think its efforts to bring in the "whole" story about the WMD lie result in some of its worst offenses as filmmaking. We have a Judith Miller stand-in. Here she's a reporter for the Wall St. Journal who pretty much printed the press releases from her government sources about the source named "Magellan" who was pointing us to WMD, and implied is the same source for the bum steers Damon's being given. She's not a very good character in the script, or not well depicted by Amy Ryan. She radiates oily journalism, and not much else. And then Matt Damon's guided from within the government by an old CIA hand who doesn't like these politicos like the Greg Kinnear character. This is a lesser performance by usually reliable character actor Brendan Gleeson, who performs here like he wandered in accidentally off the set of The Third Man or The Quiet American. Gleeson may not be entirely to blame. The script comes up short in explaining who this character is, what the does, and how he relates to the other characters. I had a hard time figuring it out for the entire duration of the movie.

All that being said, there are lots of things in Green Zone that are well worth praise.

Let's start with Matt Damon.

It's around twelve years and twelve weeks since I took a note to self that Damon could act, when I saw him, the week before Titanic opened, in The Rainmaker at the Loews Astor Plaza and in Good Will Hunting on the Loews Lincoln Square Imax screen. [As an entirely irrelevant aside, I saw Rainmaker with my old SMLA colleague Mark, who also joined me for Green Zone.] I'm tempted to say he was born to play the lead role in Green Zone, only problem with that is he's so talented that he was born to play an awful lot of things. His prior two films are Invictus and The Informant, he's every bit as good in those as he is in Green Zone, and the three roles are as alike as snow flakes.

Every note he hits in Green Zone, he hits it right. Physically, he walks around in the movie like he was born in the US Army, went to kindergarten at the Warrant Officer school. He utterly inhabits the role. The role as written is filled with implausibility, but the role as acted has none. You never question that he'd start to follow his own orders and that his reports would follow. Some credit to the script that not all of them follow unquestionably.

Paul Greengrass is capable of doing different things in his work. United 93 and Bloody Sunday are two different varieties of verite. This movie is in the fast-paced, fast-cut, vertigo-inducing hand-held camera style we found in the first two Bourne movies. It's brilliantly crafted, in a mirror opposite way to the surprising leisure of Inglorious Basterds.

I don't know what inspired me to do this, but in the climactic scene of Green Zone, I decided to count the number of cuts, and there were upwards of 200 of them in these few minutes when Damon is chasing the Iraqi he wants to bring in and being chased in turn by the evil Special Forces unit. Upwards of 200! Yet Greengrass and his editor Christopher Rouse make it cohere. One of the things I noticed was that you never lost even a fraction of a second picking up the action after a cut. The central human figure at the beginning of one shot is always to be found in the same place as at the end of the shot before, usually going in a direction that was followable. Because many of the characters were in uniform, and because some shot sequences would cut from a character being chased shot from the back in uniform to the character who was chasing shot from the back in uniform down the same alley way, it wasn't easy to count all of the cuts because you almost didn't realize you were with a different character. Sometimes this gives more of a general sense of chaos than of the exact specifics of the action. But when you needed to know the exacts, you knew the exact, and when it was sufficient to be caught up in the overall chaos of the scene, you were caught up in that.

This kind of thing doesn't happen without a lot of work and a lot of planning. You can't do this in the editing room without having the right shots on film. There needs to be a stunning level of coordination on set between the director and the cinematographer and pretty much everyone else in order to make all of these shots line up when it gets to the cutting room.

When Michael Bay cuts around like this in Armageddon, or when some other Jerry Bruckheimer acolytye does this fast-paced whirlybird editing, the word we usually use for it is "incoherent." Alas, I just don't have the stomach to go back and watch Armageddon to see if I can come up with the precise reason why their incoherence is Greengrass' brilliance, but I think I can guess that you won't see the same kind of exact placement of action from shot to shot that we see in Green Zone.

Should you see Green Zone? This is one of the reasons why I decided to do away with toad ratings for the movies I blogged about. As full-throttle military action, you can't do much better than Green Zone. All of the people complaining in the Hurt Locker backlash/whisper campaign how it had the wrong uniforms won't have anything to complain about here. Many of those same people will probably be more upset than I am with what the movie has to say about the underpinnings and politics of the Iraq war than I.

I got to see an advance screening of this, courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image, in the Universal Screening Room. The studio's Manhattan outpost is located in a historic publishing location, 666 Fifth Avenue. This building housed Bantam Books for many many years, and the flagship location of B. Dalton was on street level. As can be expected for a screening room, it wasn't particularly big. But it had very comfortable seats, sufficient ceiling height to all for a full theatre-sized screen, and an excellent sound system. The one problem was that there isn't much of a rake to the auditorium, so you have to hope nobody tall is sitting directly in front of you.

Save the Titanic

TCM had Titanic on Saturday night, and I watched large chunks of it. It's so much nicer to watch this three hour plus movie when it isn't interrupted with on toward an hour of commercials.

So if Avatar wins Best Picture a week from when this post goes live...

Well, not only will it be wrong on its own terms, but it will demean Titanic. Which is really everything that Avatar was not. Three hours, but oh, does it move. None of the toe-tapping of Avatar. When I turned to Titanic at around 12:28 AM, I was utterly rapt for the next 40 minutes; couldn't go for the dental floss until the movie was over at 1:32. Serious minded, but with a constant twinkle in its eye. Oh, the bad husband character played by Billy Zane is a bit of an unwanted buffoon, but there's a subtle pleasure to David Warner's performance as the valet that gives compensation. Kathy Bates is a joy, Gloria Stuart is a wonder, the music by James Horner is such a delight. No, the special effects aren't as good. The artificially inserted air vapor looks weird and artificial. But it has the biggest effect of all, which is real heart. It's like the song says, "my heart will go on." If there's a cliche, like "guy drops keys to lock, Jack must dive down, get key ring, find right key before he and Rose drown," you don't mind because your heart is in it. When Sam Worthington proclaims "at first, it was just a job, and then it became love," it's just a boring cliche in a boring movie.

It was a wonder to watch this unfold on the mammoth screen of my beloved Loews Astor Plaza, now 5 1/2 years gone but it will live in my memory forever, and Titanic is that kind of movie. Avatar doesn't hold a candle to it, it's not even a little teeny tiny Hanukkah candle against the brilliant lustre of Titanic.

So please, let's not have an Oscar for Avatar sitting on James Cameron's shelf next to the one for Titanic.

JTK meets IPH

Star Trek.  Seen Sunday evening May 10, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen #6.  3 slithy toads.

This is the Star Trek meets Star Wars movie that we've all been waiting for, the one where James T. Kirk lands on the Ice Planet of Hoth, is attacked by a Tauntaun, gets rescued by Obi Wan, but somehow misses the Imperial Walkers.

Or is it the movie where Sar-Ek saves his son Spo-ck from the destruction of his home planet Vulton (Kyrpcan?) by putting him into a rocket ship?

I'm kidding some, but only some.  A large part of the pleasure from this very pleasurable re-boot of the Star Trek movie franchise is in finding all of the lifts not just from the Star Trek series but from any other sf movie franchise that starts with an "S" that's been around over the past 30 or 40 years.  

I was never a huge fan of the Star Trek TV show.  It's not that I disliked it, but I wasn't part of the cult that surrounded it.  But I faithfully saw all of the Star Trek movies, from ST:TMP at the Cate Plaza Twin in Middletown, to the classic Wrath of Khan at the RKO Stanley Warner Route 4 Paramus Quad, then Star Trek 3 and Star Trek 4 at the old Loews State Twin in Times Square.  After that closed, it was off to the Loews 34th St. Showplace for Star Trek 5, then to the Loews Orpheum for Star Trek 6.  The first movie I saw at the Loews Lincoln Square was Star Trek 7, and then I was very happy when the series returned to Times Square in grand style for the next few movies at my much beloved Loews Astor Plaza.  With the exception of Star Trek 2, I can't say I was thrilled with any of them, but the sf geek part of me always compelled me to the theatre, and always on the nicest screen I could think to go to.

So yeah, goosed by the excellent coming attraction and the attractive young cast, Star Trek is the first movie in a while I was heavily anticipating, and I saw it at the biggest non-Imax screen at the AMC Empire, and I had a really good time.

It's a very energetic movie, a lot of fun, the casting is excellent pretty much all the way around, it's got good action, good humor, nice eye candy.  I liked the depictions of all of the young characters, and don't have favorites or an "I liked all of them but..." reaction.  The special effects might be expensive but they're human scaled.  The move to warp speed wasn't so hot; I don't know if there will ever be a match to watching them go to warp in Star Trek 2 on the gigantic screen at the Paramus Quad with then state-of-the-art 70mm 6-track sound bringing it to life, but that's about the only aspect of the movie that left me feeling at all flattened by what JJ Abrams had wrought.  And the villain is no Khan, but Khan was the one and only...

I don't know if it's a great movie, or if it's something I'll want to see over and over again.  But paired as it was with the coming attractions for some pretty dismal summer stuff to follow like the new Transformers movie or Land of the Lost.  Land of the Lost looks truly totally dreadful on any level.

It's fun.  And not overblown fun.  I like that in a movie.

this little piggy went to the cinema

Wherein I will do a wrap on movies I've seen in recent months without blogging about.

Pinky:  Pride & Glory,  seen Saturday afternoon Nov. 8, 2008 at the AMC Courthouse 8, Aud. #7.  1.5 slithy toads.  This is the kind of movie I've been going to less as I cut back some from 5 or 10 years ago on the number of movies I make time to see.  It had gotten mediocre reviews, and it has been awaiting release for a year, but I decided I should nonetheless see it because (a) it stars Edward Norton, whose generally impressed from Primal Fear on thru and usually makes good choices in the movies he makes and if not good ones then interesting and (b) co-stars Colin Farrell, another actor who is often interesting in his choices if not always good.  Alas, this was not an interesting choice for either of them.  Raise your hands if you've seen as movie about corrupt cop, loving wife, conflicted family, father figure on force, etc. etc. etc.  This is that movie.  I'm not sure why these two actors were attracted to the script, and they're pretty much the only interesting things about.

Ring Finger:  Changeling, seen Saturday afternoon Nov. 8, 2008, at the AMC Courthouse 8, Aud. #8.  2.5 slithy toads.  This is the other Clint Eastwood movie, or the other Angelina Jolie movie, or the other John Malkovich movie, or something like that.  It's based on a true story from the earlier years of the century,  when the LAPD was under attack and was happy to have reunited a mother with her missing son.  The fact that the mother didn't think the boy she was given was hers was not welcome news.  Jolie's performance was described alternately as a tour de force by some critics and a monstrous bit of overacting or dis-acting or mis-acting by others.  The movie as a whole was brilliant or too long, best for its willingness to look at the large context of things or worst for spending a half hour after the resolution of the underlying mystery of the boy to the aftershocks of the case in LA.  And to me, I guess the biggest sin is that I just don't care about the debates. I liked the movie well enough, but I can't muster any passion for arguing any side of it.  It's a better movie than Eastwood's other 2008 release, Gran Turino, but at least Gran Turino inspires some passion in me for undercutting it, while the best I can do ith Changeling is give a giant ambivalent "meh" and a lukewarm recommendation.  It's not as good as the other Angelina Jolie movie of 2008, Wanted, which is a ton u fun.  I mentioned in that post how I left with a smile on my face, and I still have one.

Middle Finger:  Valkyrie.  Seen Saturday afternoon January 24, 2009 at the AMC Empire 25, Aud. #8.  2 Slithy Toad.  Like Changeling, this leaves me with deep ambivalence.  Changeling was flat in my heart but at least had a little life on the screen while Valkyrie is flat in both places and garners half a toad less.  I've always been a Tom Cruise fun, at least since Top Gun, and there's nothing wrong with his performance but also nothing exciting about it.  Or really much of anything else in the movie.  It was interesting to see the mechanics of the aborted coup in Berlin.  Meh.

Index Finger:  Defiance.  Seen Saturday evening January 24, 2009 at Clearview's Ziegfeld.  4 slithy toads.  I'd been kind of eager to see Valkyrie, being that I'm a big Tom Cruise fan and a real Xmas event release and etc., I'd even tried seeing it a couple weeks before I actually did but gave up because the line at the box office was just too too long.  I ended up not caring so much for it at all. I was terribly ambivalent about seeing Defiance, but I've decided to give it my highest rating.  I'm not totally sure it deserves, part of me wants to knock it down to a 3.5, but to be honest I can't think of a good reason for deducting any points.  Why the ambivalence about seeing it?  A lot of that has to do with Edward Zwick.  His Blood Diamond was a pleasant surprise, much livelier and interesting than the all-over-map reviews would have suggested, and Courage Under Fire was a delightful pleasant surprise to see when it was sneak previewing at the Uptown in DC, but as a rule I've found his movies like Glory and The Last Sumarai to be worthy but not necessarily good.  And it was playing at the Ziegfeld, which I love and resent because it outlasted the superior Loews Astor Plaza as the only single-screen movie-going palace in New York City.  But at the end of the day, I decided I should give the movie some Ziegfeld points and be sure if I was seeing it to see it there, and I did get kind of a buzz when I walked in to see that there were actually going to be 400 or maybe even 500 people in the theatre's 1100 seats instead of 20 or 60.  And once the movie begin, it caught me up in its spell.  It's based on the true story of 3 brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schrieber and Jamie Bell,  who managed to keep a community of Jews safe in the Belarussian forests for several years during World War II, ultimately saving over 1000 lives from the Holocaust.  It's full of many of the usual "based on true story" things where you're wondering just how much is true and how much Hollywood; did the Liev brother really come to the rescue like the calvary in a Western the way it's depicted here?  But since it isn't yet another sports movie or underdog tale I was willing to cut it a little more slack for helping to bring a different chapter of the WW2 story to wider prominence.  It's made with the zestiness of Blood Diamond instead of the worthiness of Last Samurai.  David Denby's otherwise very favorable review in The New Yorker singled out the James Newton Howard score for special oppobrium, but I didn't mind it at all.  Well, I did, but for personal reasons that the lushly orchestrated violin-focused score here was a little too reminiscent of his score for The Village, which was the last movie to play the Astor Plaza, so I'm sitting trying to enjoy this movie in the Ziegfeld and the score just keeps dragging me back to my sad memories of the last picture show at my beloved Astor Plaza.  It's very well acted by all three leads, and if maybe not so much by the supporting cast I'm willing to say it's not so much the acting as the Hollywood-ese of the scripting.  When you're caught up in something, a book or a film or a TV show or a whatever, when you're really really really caught up in it, you can overlook things.  And when you're not you can pick nits.  This is one of those movies that caught me up in its spell, that succeeded at doing what a movie like this is supposed to do, that's probably the best Holocaust movie since Schindler's List, that had be on the edge of my seat wondering how some of the events would play out and then leaning back teary-eyed, and it gets my highest rating.

Thumb:  Revolutionary Road, seen Sunday morning/afternoon January 25, 2009 at the AMC Empire 25, Aud. #13.  One slithy toad.  Pleasant surprise, that management moved some movies around overnight so this was playing on a bigger screen on Sunday than it had been when I was at the same theatre for Valkyrie the day before.  Not a surprise, that I didn't really like the movie, though my reasons for not liking it ended up being somewhat different than I had anticipated.  From the coming attraction, I'd had the idea that this was going to be another Douglas Sirk melodrama look-alike, totally superfluous for traveling in the tracks of any number of other movies like that such as the 2002 release Far From Heaven.  So the good news is that this was aiming much higher than that, but the bad news is that it's one of those serious movies that pretty much drowns in its own pompousness and silliness.  Kate Winslet getting a Golden Globe for this?  It's like giving Best Actor to John Lovitz's Master Thespian, only here it's a thespianette in high heels.  Conceptually, why do you want to take the two great lovers from the wonderful Titanic and then put them back together as miserable lovers in a marriage so completely and totally failed that you can't understand why they ever got married in the first place?  Why give the couple two children who are then so conspicuously absent or conveniently present throughout the entire movie to the point that I thought it was a laugh line when Leonardo diCaprio says how nice it is to have a day without the kids when I've spent half the movie thinking they sure do spend an awful lot of time playing with the next door neighbors or doing community service after school or hiding in the basement or something?  Why name the movie after the street but then never put the house on that street within the context of the street as a whole?  There's one scene when Leonardo storms off and we see Kate in the door of the house and I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for a long shot which would show Kate and the house and the street and tie it all up in a nice visual bow, but after all that waiting we finally get only a medium shot that shows Kate in the door of the house from a bit of a difference but still with the house in isolation.  It's pompous, it's unpleasant, it's a shame.  If I might be overrating Defiance it's possible I'm underrating this, but I don't think so.  Because there's so much talent in this misguided movie that the opportunity cost of the movie is much higher.

With these five reviews I think I've covered pretty much all of the remainder of the fall/winter crop to date.  And reviewed the lion's share of the movies I've seen since commencing the blog almost a year ago.  I'd still like to do a more detailed post on Towelhead, but I feel as if I've done enough of the spadework that I can think in the days ahead about talking some about my thoughts on the Oscar nominations and otherwise summing up the 2008 film year.

Epic Movie

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Seen Thursday evening December 11, 2008 at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud. 1, part of the Variety Screening Series.  1.5 slithy toads.

Australia.  Seen Tuesday evening December 16, 2008 at Regal's UA Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14, Aud. 13.  2.5 slithy toads.

I'd say Benjamin Button was a disappointment except that I wasn't sure to expect very much from it.  With Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, others), this is an expensive big risk of the holiday season.  I doubt it's a worthwhile one, though you never know sometimes what award buzz might do, and the movie does at least have the good grace to have a better last half hour than first half hour, and is long enough you might leave with your fond recollections and have long since forgotten the less fond.  Brad Pitt plays a baby who is born as a small very old man, then grows in size as he grows "older," i.e., becomes younger even as he gets taller and bigger.  During the middle of his life he is Brad Pitt and has torrid Great Romance with Cate Blanchett, and then he grows up to become a small young man with Alzheimer's before ultimately dying.  His story is told via the lips of Julia Ormond, who doesn't yet know it (and takes far longer to guess than the audience probably will) that she's the daughter of the man whose diary she is reading to her mother (yes, Cate Blanchett in old person make-up that makes her look like one of the aliens from Close Encounters) who is the one and only Benjamin Button.

The screenplay is by Eric Roth, who hit the jackpot once upon a time with Forrest Gump.  That's a movie which to me was nice seeing once, especially at my beloved  Loews Astor Plaza, but which I don't think stands up much to the test of time.  For all the awards and the fuss and bother this isn't something that makes me watch when it's playing on TNT on a Sunday night.  I'm rather fonder of other movies Roth scripted like The Insider and The Good Shepherd, while Ali I remember mostly for inspiring me to get out an Analog to read during the brigher-lit scenes.  Fincher I've always found interesting, and I don't want to say that Benjamin Button isn't interesting, only that it isn't particularly good.

The essential problem for me is that there really isn't much to do with the Benjamin Button character between birth and the age of 40ish, coming or going, up or down.  So the movie introduces his family and sends him off to Paris and has him fighting the sea war during World War II, but I couldn't say I cared for any of it, and as the years slowly ticked by all I could think was "20 years down, and there are still 60 long years to go."  The great love story that finally emerges is a little better, though it's no Rose and Jack in Titanic, shall we say.  It ends tragically, and tragic ends to great romance are often worth a little emotional investment, but it ain't no Love Story, either.  There's a nifty running joke about lightning strikes, but there's also a framing device with a clock that runs backward which isn't sufficiently connected to the rest of the film to succeed as metaphor.  

The Q&A afterward was a "special" one with director Spike Jonze (Weezer "Sweater" video before going on to do movies like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation that are overrated to the extreme) interviewing David Fincher.  But why was Jonze there?  He didn't ask hardly any questions of his own, hardly seemed to have prepped, did they offer him free popcorn to come to the theatre?  So I found out that they had a really long script, which they needed to cut.  And then a really big budget, which they needed to cut.  And then a whole lot of film, which they needed to cut.  And since the movie was set in New Orleans and they couldn't decide whether to have it before Katrina or after Katrina they settled on putting it during Katrina.  

Australia is an in-between effort by Australian director Baz Luhrmann that on balance worked for me.  Lurhmann's first film as director was the delightful Strictly Ballroom.  If you're married, or dating, or something like that, rent this movie, snuggle up with your better half, and you'll enjoy yourself immeasurably and have a much nicer relationship after the two hours are up.  Then see Muriel's Wedding (not directed by Luhrmann) and you'll have a crash course in the new wave of Australian cinema that crested on these shores in the early 1990s.  That was followed by an offbeat Romeo and Juliet, the very very very very bad Moulin Rouge, and now this.  I might have gone to 3 toads with this if it had just a whiff more Strictly Ballroom to it, and a little less Moulin Rouge.

Because the thing I didn't like about Moulin Rouge was its artificiality, which is the same thing I don't like in Wes Anderson movies or Napoleon Dynamite (can that opinion be distilled to earn someone a million dollars?), and this movie starts out drowning in it.  Little planes flying around the globe in ways that make the little planes in the Indiana Jones movies look real.  Overdone acting.  Nicole Kidman prancing into Australia like a bride singing in the middle of an open pit coal mine.  When she and Hugh Jackman ride off to their home, a cattle station in north Australia called Faraway Downs, it's the most stylized car ride I've seen on screen since Kermit and Fozzie Bear started their ride to Hollywood while singing "Moving Right Along" in The Muppet Movie.  If Big Bird had said hello to Hugh and Nicole, it would've fit right in.

But ever so slowly the movie settles into a kind of grand Hollywood artificiality of the kind that works, or works for me at least.  CGI-gorgeous starry skies during the nighttime scenes.  A cute kid, in this case a half-breed Aboriginal whom Nicole Kidman wants to keep safe from the government-sponsored program of taking the half-breeds to be re-educated to serve white people.  Cattle driving across the Austalian wilderness.  A Gone With the Wind moment between Hugh and Nicole to be followed by the Cold Mountain 15 minutes.  Japanese planes bombing Darwin Harbor.  I can't believe as I'm typing that I can actually fall for this sort of stuff, but I did.  I wouldn't say this is interesting; Benjamin Button is more "interesting."  But I think Australia is funner and better.

Holy Tzatziki, Batman!

The Dark Night, seen Sunday July 20 at the AMC Empire 25, Screen #6, 4 Slithy Toads

Mamma Mia!, seen Sunday July 20 at Clearview's Ziegfeld. 3 Slithy Toads

After 44 years of waiting, I can finally say I've seen a good Batman movie. And in fact not just a good Batman movie, but a truly great one. Wow!

The first Batman movie of my acquaintance, the '60s one spinning off from the Adam West TV show, is not bad for what it is. It fairly faithfully replicates the considerable pleasures of the TV show. But it's more an extended TV episode than anything else.

The 1989 Batman wasn't very good. I remember it being the launch movie for Dolby Digital sound in New York City, and I saw it at the Toys R Us in Times Square, or the Criterion Theatre as it was known at the time. I've always been very fond of the Dolby Digital "sounders," those spikes being driven into the train tracks and then the train driving thru the theatre.

1992's Batman Returns, I'm pretty sure I saw it, but I can hardly remember a thing about it. Maybe also at the Criterion?

1995, Batman Forever? I guess I saw it?

Batman and Robin, 1997? Now that, my friends, was a true classic. So good that it didn't even get better for having been seen in my late lamented Loews Astor Plaza. It contends for being one of the worst movies I ever saw at the Astor Plaza.

Batman Begins (2005) was a huge disappointment to me. It had so many good ingredients and got so many good reviews but I thought it fell flat on pretty much every level. I particularly disliked Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow, which was Batman villain by way of Bugsy Malone.

Recounting this dismal history, I think I'd enjoy watching 90 minutes of the Dolby Digital Choo Choo Train more. Spike on the back left, spike on the front right, here comes the train. On a double feature or triple bill with SDDS and DTS sounders.

For all the good reviews for The Dark Knight, it is safe to say I went in with trepidation, and almost with duty-bound reluctance. And to say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement.

Two small quibbles: did they even attempt to explain the plan regarding Commissioner Gordon's death, and I don't think I've ever liked the way the Batman voice sounds in any of the Batman movies since the 1966, and this one is no exception.

Other than that, what's not to like?

When I commented on Sydney Pollack, one of the elements I praised in Tootsie and The Firm was the across-the-board goodness of the casting, and this has that. The earlier Batman movies had a lot of people doing villainy for a paycheck, and Christopher Nolan has gone well beyond that. If you look at Lucius Fox in an old Batman comic book, can you see anyone but Morgan Freeman in the role? Bill Cosby, maybe? Roscoe Lee Browne? Freeman is Fox, and his put-off when a Wayne Enterprises employee starts sniffing around the accounts that point toward Batman/Bruce, it's the definitive line delivered in a definitive way by the definitive actor for the role. Michael Caine as Alfred? Well, of course! The role of Bruce/Batman has always been an odd duck in these movies because there's so little for an actor to do when he's tucked in the batsuit, and Christian Bale was one of those interesting ideas last time around that didn't quite seem to work. Surrounded by a better movie, it works. However much I disliked Cillian Murphy last time around, the idea of casting him was better than the idea of casting Tommy Lee Jones or Arnold Schwarznegger (I don't dislike Murphy, by the way, I just didn't like him there). Here, the same idea is applied toward casting Aaron Eckhart, and the performance is boffo, bam, excellent. Maggie Gyllenhal, excellent. Eric Roberts and Anthony Michael Hall in small roles? I'm starting to warm to Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon. Enough has been said about Heath Ledger, and I don't need to add to it. This is a well-acted movie.

The music is instrumental. Yay! No superhero rap song over the end credits. See my comments on Indiana Jones.

The special effects are excellent. The movie always looks real. See my comments on SFX here.

But most important, the movie is dark. Batman has often been a darker kind of superhero in the comic books, and sometimes as with Tim Burton or even in Batman Begins, this darkness has played out on the screen as muddy cinematography. Sometimes, that darkness has been wedded to a campy homage to the old TV show. Show how modern you are by showing a "dark" batman, show how you remember Burgess Meredith as the Penguin and Tallulah Bankhead as Black Widow, and it's not a good combination. This is the Dark Knight by way of the Untouchables, and I'm surprised I haven't read more on the similarities. Al Capone gets his point across to other mobsters by killing with baseball bat, the Joker gets his point across by doing magic trick with pencil. You don't bring a knife to a gunfight, and Batman is challenged if he can really fight with the Joker on his level. But also like De Palma's Untouchables, this is suspenseful film direction with tick-tock precision. One good set piece after another after another, well-acted and well-scored and well-edited and well-photographed and nail-biting.

Maybe I should see it again in Imax!

A short time later I took in Mamma Mia. Talk about seeing two very different movies in one day. Mamma Mia isn't particularly well-crafted. I'm not quite as down on this as some of the other reviews I read, many of which sounded to me like critics who complain about choppily edited musicals with too many close-ups where you can't see the characters' feet now complaining about this for having too many wide shots where you just see everyone dancing. But there's one shot that's so egregiously bad with the sun coming thru a window and drowning out 10% of the image of the screen that does't look like intentional craft. The casting is up-and-down. I don't understand how you do an Abba musical without using Fernando. There was something in the air that night, the moon was white, the stars were bright, Fernando, and if I had to do it all again, I would my friend, Fernando. Though he does get a brief shout-out in the movie in a briefly glimpsed poster. Or were the stars white and the moon bright, and if I had to do it all again I should get the lyrics rght my friend Fernando. The casting is a little bit odd. Meryl Streep I thought was good. No doubt all of the critics who've been criticizing her just wish she'd be doing boring serious movies like Out of Africa or were back in the days when it seemed she just did accents. Pierce Brosnan can't sing. The daughter seems off. The boyfriend/fiancee doesn't have the right chemistry and spends too much of the movie seeming like a best friend, but Julie Walters and Christine Baranski are having the time of their life in their roles. But so what. The movie is fun. It is lively. The music is sweet to listen to. It's fun. And as with Wanted, fun is good.

The Happening

Seen Saturday evening June 28 at the Regal Kaufman Astoria 14, auditorium #13. 2 slithy toads? Or 0? Or 4?

So getting back to what I said about French films in my last post, here we have a movie from a genuine American auteur that's been totally dumped on and disrespected.

Is it a good film? Not sure that it is, or why anyone should see it. Is it a bad film? In an ocean of movies without craft or ambition this has plenty of both. Like A.I., it's a failed movie which no true student of American cinema should miss. It makes it very hard to know how many toads to give it.

So let's try and give this some of the serious (& spoiler-filled) analysis that too few of the reviews have had.

A. This is a clear departure for the auteur, M. Knight Shyamalan, whose Lady in the Water I have missed but whose work I've otherwise seen from Sixth Sense forward. There are no secrets at the end, no sudden reveals. The plants are doing it. It's a thing of nature. It can't entirely be explained. We're no more than a third of the way through and maybe even much less because all of this is made abundantly clear.

B. It isn't a horror movie, or is at least as much a horror movie as Kubrick's The Shining is a horror movie, only with even less blood. Kubrick bathes his masterpiece in the red stuff, while Shyamalan might even be too sparing with his. One reviewer I read commented on a line in the first few minutes "I think those people are clawing themselves," and hopped on the show v tell thing. Um, does this reviewer not notice that Shyamalan spends the entire movie showing less blood than he could? People kill themselves off the top of the frame or off-screen entirely. When it's established in one scene that the suiciders will pick up any gun at hand, all we get in the next scene similar is the sound of the gunshots. We can fill in the rest.

C. So as much as anything, it's a mood piece or a tone poem.

D. There's an entire other level of subtext beyond what everyone is noticing. On the main level, it's the plants. Humanity is getting to be too much for the plants, and they decide to do something about it, emitting something into the air that interferes with our self-destruction taboos. But... In the schoolroom scene in Mark Wahlberg's class, he harps on some matinee idol in the class. He's told to pay more attention in class because the nose will keep growing, the ears will keep growing, he might look perfect at 15, but what's he going to look like at 20? Is he sure he wants to just rely on his good lucks. This line is delivered by a totally deglamorized Mark Wahlberg. You know, Mark Wahlberg, aka Marky Mark, aka the guy in the Calvin Klein ads. Those were a long time ago, and he ain't gonna be that guy again, but does he have to look quite as common as he does here? The hair, the clothes, the hint of Rain Man. Wahlberg immediately hooks up with another teacher played by John Leguizamo, who was not too long ago a hot young Latino. Not here. It's like in Rocky, if Rocky had told Adrian to bun up her hair and put her glasses back on and reverse Pygmalioned her. Awful looking glasses, kind of like the ones Myke Cole told me I should stop wearing. And he spends pretty much the entire movie with his face all scrunched up as if he's trying to age himself even more than the attire. And then completing the triumvurate, Zooey Deschanel is a hot young actress who is totally not hot, who's also wearing less than flattering clothes with an expression that does indeed suggest "stilted." As do many of the line readings and actions of all of these people. This can't all be an accident. This 90 minute movie doesn't spend several minutes on the appearance issue for the heck of it. It doesn't take glamor men like Wahlberg and Leguizamo and totally deglamorize and have them sounding stilted and false like this was a high school play and the first five choices for the lead all got suspended for smoking pot in the principal's office. But for goodness sake, what? What! What is the connection between this appeance thing and the Plants Attack! centerpiece? I could probably think of lots of interesting suggestions, but I consider Shyamalan's failure to find a good tie between Thing 1 and Thing 2 to be the movie's biggest failing. Anyone have any ideas?

E. The Betty Buckley character is another something that I don't think is working quite the way it's supposed to. There are some connections I can see between her and the rest of the movie. When she slaps at Jess' hand for taking what isn't hers and then offers here a cookie a minute later, can the Mother Nature parallel be any more obvious? Mother Nature gives us all kinds of things, but we get a little greedy and the whole movie is in macrocosm what that slap on Jess' hand is in microcosm. But where do we go from there? Is Mother Nature as crazy as the Betty Buckley character? Was there a rewrite at the end, because I'd swear when Buckley goes out and talks to the plants in her garden that we were around eight seconds away from being told that this crazy bat had spoken to the plants and ordered them to attack, and then somebody said "no no no no NO, you can't do another one of those silly twist endings" and so the movie went off in some other different direction that really doesn't make sense.

F. And the movie doesn't make sense. We need to find out more about the attack. How many people are immune? There's the CNN lady who's doing news from NYC after the attack has started, so is she immune or just not infected yet? There are lots of hints that not everyone would be taken under by this. And does the attack really go down so far as to be on groups of only one? If not, the Buckley ending makes no sense. If, then the "off to school" ending makes no sense. Because who is going to live in any of these cities in the Northeast after everything that's happened, where every park bench and every street and every swath of sidewalk is a killing ground.

G. So it's a failure, but one that deserves a lot more serious attention than it is getting. It's a movie I expect to be thinking about for rather a long time to come, and most of the movies I see you can't say that.

H. & 3 Cheers to Shyamalan and James Newton Howard. As with Indiana Jones, this is a movie that relies on instrumental scoring entirely. It's not as good as the score for The Village with its haunting violin solos by Hilary Hahn, but it's a companion piece to it with some wonderful solo work on cello by Maya Beiser.

I. & seeing this movie on the last Saturday in June 2008 can't help but turn me back a little teary-eyed to that last Friday in July when I saw The Village on the final opening night at my beloved Loews Astor Plaza. A lot of people didn't like The Village; I liked it quite a bit and not just (I don't think) because of the circumstances of my seeing it. But that being said, I don't think there was ever a movie I saw at the Astor Plaza that didn't become a little bit better for being seen there. Shyamalan's Unbreakable was also the last movie to play the UA Syosset; I made a special trip out to Long Island to see the movie there because I liked to do that every once in a while, and didn't know at the time that it was the Last Picture Show for that modern movie palace. I only wish that The Happening were the last movie I'd see at the godawful miserably designed execrescence of a movie theatre called the Kaufman Astoria 14. But we're four weeks and a few days shy of four years that the Loews Astor Plaza left my life, and I still miss it terribly. James Newton Howard and Hilary Hahn let its tweeters and woofers go out with style.

Mongol Raiders

Mongol. Seen Tuesday evening June 3, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Aud. #9 (the Majestic). 1 Slithy Toad.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Seen Tuesday evening June 3, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Aud., #2 (The Kings). 2.5 Slithy Toads.

So to do the obscure movie first... Mongol is a Russian movie depicting the Adventures of Genghis Khan as a Young (and Not so Young) Boy, ending after he has united the Mongol empire but before he has conquered the world. It blames everything on the fact that Genghis lost his sled Rosebud (excuse me, his father) when he was a young boy. I hate not to like it because I got to see a preview screening via the Museum of the Moving Image, and the direct Sergei Bodrov was there and did a Q&A afterward, but I don't think it's very good. That being said, give the movie an extra toad if you liked Lawrence of Arabia. This movie is a real wonder to look at, filmed on exotic locations all over the world and picturesque in virtually every frame If you like watching camels ride across the dessert, how can you not like watching horses roam across the steppe? And give the movie another extra toad if you liked the abysmal 300. This movie too has the nicest digital specks of blood flowing during the many battle scenes. If you liked both Lawrence of Arabia and 300, you'd probably love this movie with every fiber of your being.

Why didn't I? Well, it has that generic historical movie music with male chorus. All Mongols look alike (at least a lot of the ones n the movie), so it was hard to tell who was who, and this was exacerbated by the jumps in time which meant you were just getting used to one look of the young Genghis when all of a sudden it was six years later and he looked six years older. It really does seem facile to try and explain away Khan on account of youthful trauma, and having him lose his sled probably would have made just as much sense. And you still can't root for the guy so much. There's also a farcicial romance which we are supposed to find deeply moving even though it mostly consists of very brief visits between captures or campaigns full of sweet words that don't mean much and one silhoutted sex scene that maybe we're supposed to find funny.

This is one of the last releases from Picturehouse, an indie-ish imprint of Time Warner that's just been killed. I will try and remember Picturehouse for the wonderful King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and not for this.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a good example of one difference between making a movie and writing a book. Books, you want to grab the reader quickly. Sample chapters are read on line, opening pages read in the bookstore, agents like me may read only a few lines or paragraphs before rejecting something. Movies, if you want to have one half of a good movie why not make it the second half so people will leave the theatre with fond memories. Once someone has gone to a theatre, paid to see a movie, sat in a comfy rocking chair, there's a reluctance to walk out, so if you're willing to take your chances that the audience will still be awake, have 'em leave happy.

Crystal Skull is OK in its first half, but comes to life in its second when Karen Allen makes her return to the series. More wit, more fun, more to the relationship between Mutt and Jones. There's a wonderful scene with cars racing along the edge of a cliff that manages, much to my surprise, to work. It's artificial but done just well enough to avoid the sfx overkill that marred the Narnia movie or Peter Jackson's King Kong. In fact, any critic who bemoaned the artificiality of this Indy movie while praising the Jackson Kong should be excluded from the critics circle. It was only in the closing scenes that I felt this movie went a little bit too far in showing off the technology. I'm not quite sure what little Ewoks were doing in this movie, or why they the extended capuchin relatives of the monkey from the first movie? Did Indy get in trouble for passing thru Cuba on his way to Peru? Or was this taking place before the embargo?

I'd like to give special praise to John Williams, and I would urge anyone who sees this movie to stay thru to the last notes at the end of the credits. We're nearing the end of a special time and era of film music that was best practiced by Jerry Goldsmith, who has departed, and John Williams, who is in his 70s and not working so much any more, and occasionally a Randy Newman or other composer. Movies that had instrumental music with powerful themes, hummable melodies, recurring motifs. In the best of these movies, the end credit score was a work of art unto itself, and Williams may be the best practitioner of all times. Yeah, the Williams end credit was and is somewhat of a formula in its place. Usually leading out of some kind of triumphant moment, reprising all the main themes and motifs, a bit of a quiet stretch in the middle with the softer stuff, and then building exuberantly near the end. One of the things I might like most about the Superman score is that it has more of a fade-out in the closing moments, the gorgeous music drifting away in the ear just as the Warner logo appears at the end. It's been almost four years to the day since I last heard a great John Williams finale, over the excellent final credit sequence of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azbakan, which was one of the final movies to play my beloved Loews Astor Plaza. Just long enough to have forgotten how good John Williams can be. Overall, I don't think this is one of his better scores, but those final five minutes are up there in any and every way. I guess you can experience it on DVD, but you can't experience it on TV any more with the end credits of a movie rushed and crunched and hidden behind ads, and music like this might do well on good home theatre but does way more than that in the large experience digital sound of your local theatre. I don't see anyone coming along who can do what Williams does.

I'd also seen Temple of Doom and Last Crusade at the Astor Plaza. My first experience with Raiders was at the Sack Cinema 57 in Boston. Bottom line on Crystal Skull ils that it's no more or less forgettable than Doom and Crusade were, and thanks to Karen Allen maybe a tad better. Seeing the original Raiders for the first time, which any of us can only do once, will always be the best Indy experience.

Sydney Pollack

In my day job, I usually find that the winning authors produce the goods consistently, book in and book out, year after year, and then sometimes come up with a novel that's truly and remarkably special, and every once in a while disappoint a tad, but by and large work with remarkable consistency.

Like many great film directors, Sydney Pollack represents a very different path that I have a hard time adjusting to. The one masterpiece. The many good films. The highly and wildly overpraised turd. And then so much that you have a hard time believing came from the same director who did everything else. If my clients were as up and down as a Sydney Pollack and a Martin Scorcese I'd be grayer and balder if I weren't already so much of both.

In Pollack's case, I consider Out of Africa to be Oscar bait, critics bait, the kind of turgid lugubrious epic that comes along every so often and which just isn't really very good. I don't think this one has stood the test of time. If it shows up all the time on cable, it must be some network I never watch. I can hardly remember a thing about the movie. I saw it at the Loews State, a glorious old theatre on the site of the Virgin store in Times Square. I don't think I rushed to see it. I have this idea I might have seen it some day after work at Scott Meredith in 1986, which would mean I might have waited even as long as three months. Or not.

But I should talk about his two masterpieces.

The first of them is Tootsie. That one I saw with my father and younger brother at the old twin in Chester, NY, with a very very full house that was enjoying itself quite thoroughly, and why not. Is there anyone who doesn't know the plot? Dustin Hoffman is a desperate actor rooming with Bill Murray. friends with Teri Garr, who decides to become an actress in order to get a job on a soap opera. There he falls in love with female lead Jessica Lange, captivates and then disappoints her father (Charles Durning) spurns the advances of the lecherous old male lead played by George Gaynes, and drives his agent played by Sydney Pollack himself to utter distraction in the Russian Tea Room. I'm not sure I'd call this the greatest comedy of all time as in this Boston Globe column from a few months ago, in part because I still don't appreciate some of the gushier romance stuff. But at its best it doesn't get better. II can still see 25 1/2 years later: Bill Murray at his deadpan best; Hoffman in drag coming to Pollack's table at the Tea Room; Pollack on the phone telling Hoffman why he's toast; the show-runner talking to Hoffman about his contract renewal; Hoffman slapping George Gaynes; the tender upstate interlude (didn't I just say I didn't like this part of the movie?); Hoffman's improvised monologue to explain how the nurse is really a he in the greatest soap opera traditions. Like many of Pollack's best movies, the film reflects an old studio era approach to casting in which the roles are filled from top to bottom with really good people who are invariably just right for what they are doing. Something which I thought Iron Man needed just a little bit more of.

Second, The Firm. No, I don't think too many other Sydney Pollack appreciations are going to single this out as his best work, but it's nice to go off on my own every once in a while. This is a great, great movie. As with Tootsie, it's cast top to bottom with a just right mix of stars and character actors and names who are all so perfectly right for their roles. Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Holly Hunter, Wilford Brimley, Ed Harris, David Straitharn, Hal Holbrook, Gary Busey, Paul Sorvino. What a cast. It improves on its source material. The Firm by John Grisham is a great novel because of its captivating beginning, but it has a bad bad ending. It drifts off to nowheresville without a good final confrontation between the good guys and the bad guys and with all the chess pieces somehow ending up on different boards. The screenplay by David Rabe, Robert Towne and David Rayfiel comes up with a much better ending that gives Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) a final scene with the villainous mafia bad guys that back Bendini, Lambert and Locke, the kind of good ending I wished to find in the book. Dave Grusin's jazzy piano score for the movie is fantastic and was a deserving Oscar nominee. There's nothing I value more than a movie that makes background music to the soundtrack of my life, that should always be turned on when it's on cable. This is one of those movies. And this one I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, which is one of my fondest moviegoing memories at this late lamented modern movie palace.

Three Days of the Condor forms with The Parallax View a wonderful diptych of political movies of its day. The Way We Were isn't really very good. There's good and bad to be said up and down his filmography. But these two movies put him in the pantheon, and his occasional supporting role as an actor (Tootsie, Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Clayton, more) is an icing on the cake.

Paranoid Park

Seen at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema; auditorium #1, Sunday March 16, 2008; 2 Slithy Toads, maybe

So I should have listened to Stanley Kauffmann on this one. Over the years, this long-time film critic for The New Republic has been my compadre; the one critic more than any other who speaks to my own tastes in movies. It was bitter solace when I was writing film reviews for The Michigan Daily in college, ran up in my final semester against an editor who did not appreciate me, and saw Stanley Kauffmann pick up on some of the same things in his review of Compromising Positions that I had mentioned in a spiked review of the movie. Which as I recall was replaced with one that ended with a line about seltzer in pants. And Stanley Kauffmann gave a thumbs-down on Paranoid Park.

But..., the reviews were all over the map, I kind of liked the coming attraction, the release broadened from theatres where I didn't have discount tickets to one where I did, there haven't been a lot of movies opening so The Bank Job (which I hope to see shortly) was the only other one on my list, theatre wasn't too far from the electronics drop-off day in Union Square where I was able to give up my old Epson ink jet.

I should have listened to Stanley.

The plot here is pretty simple. Kid goes joy-riding on train in Portland, OR. Security guard tries to club him off the train. Guard falls, gets sliced in half by another train, police think a skateboarder may have done it, kid isn't sure what to do. You can make great art from just about anything, but you've really got to beat those eggs something fierce to get this modest souffle to rise. Which it doesn't.

I haven't read the book, so I don't know if the big bad movie flare #1 is coming from the book or the screenplay by director Gus Van Sant, but the time sequence in the movie is nicely jumbled up. There are sometimes movies (Memento, anyone?) where this kind of gimmick is intrinsic and important, but a lot of times the main advantage of mixing up the time sequence is that it takes a very thin gruel and makes it seem thicker. If you told this story chronologically and without long languorous shots of skateboarding in Paranoid Park or of the lead character dressing it wouldn't stretch toward 90 minutes. Maybe he could have made the movie ten minutes shorter and padded it by double-spacing the end credits, like they did in Red Eye.

Maybe it's time to put Van Sant on my do not see list. I have to credit him for Good Will Hunting, but that was a long time ago now. Vaguely irrelevant aside: I saw Matt Damon in The Rainmaker and in Good Will Hunting in the same week in 1997. The Rainmaker I saw with my friend Mark, and I told him after I'd seen the other movie later in the week "this kid can act," and that's for danged sure. The Rainmaker was playing my beloved and much-missed Loews Astor Plaza before Titanic, and I saw Good Will Hunting (in 35mm but) on the Imax Screen at the Loews Lincoln Square at a very late show on a Thursday night so I could see it on a big screen before Titanic sailed on to all of them. It was a good week for seeing movies.