We made a special effort to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Paramount Theatre last night. It is one of those movies that should be seen only on the big screen. We've seen it at the Paramount before, but this is a newly-restored 70mm print with six-track stereo sound.

Roger Ebert heightened our interest to see it again by publicizing the controversy over the rerelease. Unfortunately, his remarks have now vanished into the ether of the internet, leaving us only with his review.

Tears rolled down my face in the opening scene as the heavenly bodies align to the now famous, and often-parodied, strains of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". The moment conjures a vision of the future from the past. It's 30 years ago and I'm in junior high school and the year 2001 is so unimaginably in the future that I doubt that I'll even live to see it. Now suddenly it is 2002 and the future has passed; the future is past.

If you have the opportunity to see this rereleased version in the theatre, do so. If you have never seen 2001 before, understand going in that it is a very slow movie. Nothing happens and when it does you don't understand what's going on anyway. Understand with your heart, not your mind. Approach the movie through the music and watch, amazed, the waltz of the universe.

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Robert Altman is the master at directing ensemble casts and in Gosford Park he seamlessly knits together the stories of more than 20 characters in a British period piece with a pace less Masterpiece Theatre and more West Wing. The camera glides as quickly and silently as the serving staff through the vast halls, upstairs and downstairs, ever observant, catching glimpses and snatches, pieces of a crossword puzzle that the audience is left to put together.

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"Do you want to watch...?"
"Oh. I've seen it."

I don't understand people who watch a film once and dismiss it from their lives. Do they turn off the radio when a song they've heard before comes on? Do they never reopen a book they enjoyed, or reread a line of poetry?

I experience intense pleasure in losing myself again and again in certain films. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Roger Ebert has recently named two of my favorites in his list of The Great Movies.

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You are happily married. One day your husband dies suddenly in what appears to be an accident. You are grief-stricken and lost without him. Then you are told he committed suicide. How do you react?

This situation is explored in two foreign films: Maboroshi no Hikari/Maborosi (Japan 1995) and Sous le Sable/Under the Sand (France 2000). Both films are slow and painful, the tone echoing the character's grief. Neither film wraps up neatly, acknowledging that the complex emotions caused by the suicide of the person closest to you, affects you for years.

Maboroshi no Hikari
In this early film, Koreeda Hirokasu (the director of Afterlife) illustrates the unanswerable questions facing the young wife left behind. Why did he do it? I thought we were happy. Is it something I did? Is there something I don't know. A mistress? Debts? At first she is so distraught that she cannot take care of herself or her infant son. In time, she begins a new life, but the pain remains.

Under the Sand
In Under the Sand, the couple is in their fifties. Married for 25 years, they live in the harmony of well-established habits. Every summer they vacation at the beach. On one such vacation, the husband disappears into the sea while the wife sunbathes on the beach.

Not only is Marie unable to cope with the idea that her husband committed suicide, she refuses to accept that he is dead. She continues to refer to him in the present tense. When she is at home, she talks to him as if he is there.

Charlotte Rampling, still sexy in her fifties, gives a stunning performance as Marie.

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I love the chaotic messiness of films with too many ideas. The director seems to generate ideas as the film goes along and can't seem to edit any out. Probably grew up on Monty Python. These films defy a one-line description.

* Being John Malkovich
* Zardoz
* Fight Club
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Brazil
* The Big Lebowski

My brother sent me Dancer in the Dark for Christmas. I found it difficult to watch, and yet, I could not stop watching it. Some images stuck in my gut for days. This is a list of movies that likewise affected me, disturbing but intriguing.
* The Reflecting Skin
* The Young Poisoner's Handbook (If your disturbed teenage son rents this, be afraid.)
* Breaking the Waves
* Boys Don't Cry.
* Heavenly Creatures (If your disturbed teenage daughter rents this, be concerned.)
* Leaving Las Vegas
* To Die For (This movie is actually quite funny. I liked it even more on second viewing.)
* The Last Seduction
* Suna no Onna (Woman in the Dunes)
* The Cell
* The Fly (Really a sweet romantic story, but David (master of goo) Cronenberg makes it hard for you to keep your eyes on the screen.)
* Twilight of the Cockroaches (An anime where the cockroaches are the heroes. I hated cockroaches before I saw this film and I still do. The film is pretty interesting though, but the final cockroach battle still gives me nightmares. Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!)
* Ponette An incredible job of acting in a story about a very young girl who has lost her mother. The scene in which her father tells her that her mother is dead leaves an indelible impression.

Some movies have a beauty that disturbs. They are not diffficult to watch, but they are odd and haunting.
* Walkabout
* The Piano
* My Own Private Idaho
* Oscar and Lucinda
* Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

About a Boy is really about two boys: Will (Hugh Grant) a 39-year-old man who doesn't want to grow up and Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) a 12-year-old boy who has had to grow up too fast. Both characters come with voice over narratives which enable us to hear what they're thinking even during scenes with dialog. The fact that both characters, in their polite, British way, rarely say what they're thinking provides most of the film's humor. The effect is sweet, without being saccharine.

The character of Will is an continuation and extension of Hugh Grant's characher, Daniel Cleaver, in Bridget Jones's Diary. Will is nicer (he hasn't started sleeping with other men's wives), but blanker. The two movies make interesting companion pieces--the state of the modern British couple told in "he said, she said" format. I like About a Boy better, perhaps, because I identify more with Will than Bridget (having produced offspring at an early age, I've just never suffered Bridget's desperate urges brought about by the winding down of her biological clock). Besides, Will is confident to the point of arrogance; he lives an organized and well-planned life. And Hugh Grant skillfully manages to our invoke our sympathy for a man characterized by shallowness. We know that Will is a manipulative cheat, but we see that the only person he has really fooled, really hurt, is himself.

Bottom Line: Recommended to everyone except those dating committment-phobes.

Spoiler Alert Ahead

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I admit that the theater conditions during Minority Report put me in a bad mood, but the glowing reviews by Roger Ebert and in The New Yorker simply floor me. To the screenwriter's credit, the plot had enough twists and turns that even when I thought I knew where it was going, I didn't quite. And the twist and turns are plausible within the logic of the story; that is, the movie doesn't cheat.

But Minority Report also had a lot of those Spielbergian excesses that I've hated in every one of his films since E.T. And I feel I've been CGI'd to death. The hollowed eye-socket. Fakey. The fight scenes. Fakey.

I didn't hate the movie: there were some fun things to watch: the UI at PreCrime; the talking ads at the mall (scary enough to make me shop online 100%); the garden of poisonous delight (great stolen kiss there, Lois). But so many other scenes seemed lifted from other movies: Bladerunner, Brazil, Robocop, The Fifth Element, and Groundhog's Day.

I think the elements were blended by the same kinds of minds parodied in The Morning News Behind the scenes: the Minority Report Trailer. Watch trailer 3, read the story, and then let me know whether you agree or disagree with Roger Ebert that this is a 4-star movie.

Slate's Tim Appelo offers another dissenting view, questioning the film's noir classification.
Alert: Spoilers Ahead

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In Doctor Zhivago David Lean reflects the horror of a massacre in the mirror of Omar Sharif's face. M. Night Shyamalan relies heavily on this technique in Signs, betting that feeding our imaginations with the look of horror on another human being's face creates far more terror than showing the monster. He knows years of video games and CGI monsters have deadened our sense of fright of anything he can create in the film lab. Like an old Twilight Zone episode, or John Carpenter's The Thing, real fear comes from our own weaknesses, our loss of faith, our harbored resentments, our mistrust of each other. True suspense comes not from without, but from within, from the tension in our hearts. Although the beginning credits, especially the score, sets a the tone at Hitchcock, the movie's message is all Graham Green.

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The Kingston Trio dominated my Dad's record collection (which included Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, the New Christie Minstrels, Peter Paul and Mary, the Brothers Four, the Smothers Brothers, Harry Belafonte, and even Joan Baez and Bob Dylan).

My Dad was never without his guitar at parties and such, and the Kingston Trio's songs were the ones he played. I especially remember him singing "Worried Man" and "Greenback Dollar"--always censoring the "damn" when my mother was around.

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The Philip Glass score was not the only thing in The Hours to evoke Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Both movies are structured as three intercut narratives; both concern writers, their lives and their works.

In The Hours one story focuses on Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), the author of Mrs. Dalloway. The second, on Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a 1950s housewife who is reading Mrs. Dalloway. And the third, on Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), who shares Mrs. Dalloway's first name and the circumstances of preparing for a dinner party. As one day in each of the three lives are intercut, one sees the echoes between them.

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Exotic women and exotic countries reflect a man's love so that he sees only his own longing and desire. The more he gazes on the object of his love, the less he sees of the mirror. He is lost in his own image.

In The Quiet American, two men have lost themselves in the desire for the same woman and the same country. Each man thinks he is the one to save both. But neither man really sees or understands either.

Michael Caine plays the older man, representing the imperialistic, old world view. Brendan Fraser plays the affable young American, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed but just as dangerously paternalistic. He's one of those men who thinks he knows what's best for you and runs your life accordingly. His sincerity makes him all the more difficult to resist. He's so convincing, he's probably convinced himself.

The story is the story of these two men; the object of their desire remains elusive, mysterious, and unexplained. For this reason, although I liked The Quiet American and recommend it, I prefer Indochine. Told from the woman's point of view, the object becomes the subject. Indochine is about Viet Nam seen through the lens of two womens lives. The Quiet American is about the differences between two men moral choices silhouetted in the backdrop of Viet Nam.

Watch them both.

Last Christmas, after years of being pestered by the blurb in A Common Reader, I finally bought I Capture the Castle. I read it all Christmas and all Boxing Day and I fell completely in love with it. It's rare with me for a new discovery to become an instant favorite, but Dodie Smith's classic so perfectly captures the delights and dashed hopes of a girl's first love that I've recommended it to everyone that would listen, since.

And then the BBC made a movie. And the movie is pitch perfect, especially the performance by Tara Fitzgerald as the artiste stepmother, Topaz. Usually, when you love a book, the movie is always a disappointment. This case is one of those rare instances where if you read the book first, the movie brings it to life, and if you see the movie first, the book will still be filled with little unexpected pleasures.

The movie is intelligent, and amusing, and literate. It's a wonderful movie for any teenage girl and any woman who remembers what it felt like to be a teenage girl. Sadly few American girls will see this movie because the MPAA has rated it R.

There are no explosions, no bullet-riddled bodies, no slashers, no decomposing corpses, no decapitations, no foul language, no sexual acts (a couple of kisses), no lewd posturing, no smirking double talk. There is nothing as offensive as the smirky lasciviousness found in the PG-13 rated Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, or Lara Croft movies. There is nothing, nothing that should keep a pre-teen or teenager from watching this film. This is an English comedy of manners where the characters spend most of their time in fancy dress clothes talking at dinner parties.

So why is it rated R? Because in one short scene, the stepmother Topaz goes out at night in a rainstorm and communes with nature in the buff (although even in that scene, you only see her naked from the waist up). The scene is completely innocent; there is absolutely no sexual connotation. I can't imagine being offended by anything in this movie, but since this is America, I could see the movie getting a PG rating. But an R? The people at the MPAA have gone completely bonkers. If American sensibilities continue at this rate, it won't be long until we're all wearing burqas.

And yes it makes a difference. Our local paper hasn't even reviewed this movie. Only one theater is playing it on one screen. And when we went to see it today, only about 12 people were there, mostly couples in their forties and fifties--a couple of older women alone. And not one single teenager or child. What a loss. Along with Whale Rider, this is probably the best young person's movie of the summer.

Go see it. And take your daughters.

Thirteen is an "Afterschool Special" in an R-rated outfit. Initially the ads put me off, but then I read that Evan Rachel Wood was in it and did a little investigating.

The most interesting thing about Thirteen is that it was written by Nicki Reed, a 13-year-old, who co-stars in the movie. The characters and the dialog are raw and real, projecting the pressures of modern, urban adolescence. Like most children, Tracy is turning into her mother unknowingly. Her most rebellious acts, her most dangerous attempts to define her individuality take her down the same murky road her mother is trying to climb back out from Like her mother, Tracy is at the mercy of freeloaders she mistakes for friends and attempts to numb her pain and self-loathing by losing herself in her addictions. And like so many mothers of this generations, Melanie is unable to control or discipline Tracy, because she is unable to control or discipline her own child within. Melanie is too close to the remembered humiliations and slights of her own adolescence to do anything but empathize.

The most distracting thing about Thirteen is the film color. The film has a ghastly bluish tint much of the time, jitters into black and white, seems sometimes in color. I know the effect is to make it look raw and real, too--amateurish and immediate, not a big Hollywood production. But it doesn't really work. The camerawork and film-editing are great otherwise.

Continued...

Bob Harris can't sleep. Unable to rest before facing the next day, unable to find peace in dreams, he manages his waking life stuck on auto-pilot. Or maybe this life is the dream and he's sleepwalking through it.

Bill Murray plays Bob without a smirk or wink. Although aware that he's on the downside of his life's arc, he is not a man of quiet desperation, or even resignation. His sadness doesn't weigh heavily on him. His humor is just beneath the surface in a self-deprecating awareness. Obviously bemused by his surroundings, he's just too tired to care, too tired to respond. And yet, you know he could, and as a younger man, did.

Evelyn Waugh appears briefly and makes me wonder if Sofia Coppola is hinting at the passage from Brideshead Revisited.

...something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and [I] felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster.

Then Bob meets Charlotte. Charlotte can't sleep either. Where Bob is on the descent, just waiting for his life to be over, Charlotte hasn't begun her ascent. She's waiting for life to start. They have little in common save the bleary-eyed dislocation that people feel when they are on long plane flights, between destinations, neither here nor there, uncomfortably awake, unable to sleep.

Tokyo provides the texture of the surreal dream. The movie is not about being in Tokyo, though. Las Vegas or New York City could have served the characters as well. But Tokyo provides a counterpoint of comic relief that keeps Bill Murray from giving into the tempation to provide it himself. And it provides easy access to the state of mind of the two characters, the feeling of being lost in a waking dream, of being overwhelmed, of sensory overload. Bob pegs Japan perfectly. "It's not fun." he tells his wife over the phone. "It's just very, very different."

Bob's spark is dying and Charlotte makes it glow more brightly, so he feel his warmth again. But Sofia Coppola wisely chooses not to let their passions burst into flame, believing, perhaps, Milan Kundera's idea that true intimacy is found, not in sex, but in shared sleep. Charlotte is too young to understand this. But Bob is obviously past his midlife crisis. Rather than seduce Charlotte and feel for a moment like a younger man, he treats her with a fatherly gentleness and affection, a tenderness without sentimentality that I can't imagine anyone but Bill Murray being able to pull off. He cannot give her hope. He tells her that life and marriage do not get any easier, but one learns to cope, to know oneself and not be bothered. He tries to tell her that there is "nothing more than this" and I like to think he told her, "but it's enough."

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Our Love Actually experience didn't start out too well. This was no fault of the movie, though. The ticket line moved like a snail, and was populated with the an obnoxious group of whining, screaming elementary school boys waiting to see "Brother Bear". (I asked one of their caretakers which movie they were going to, because I'd have walked out of line right then if it had been Love Actually.)

Finally inside, finally through the slideshow ads, the commercials, the 15 minutes of movie trailers, and the theater welcome clip, the movie begins. And then about ten minutes into it, sirens go off, lights flash, and a voice comes over the loudspeaker telling us to calmly head toward the emergency exits. Which, we do. I'm pleased to say that the lifetime of fears at being trapped in a crowd in a burning theater were completely unfounded. There was no panic at all. People simply ambled out in "What the @#*!" disorientation. Oddly, people were still buying tickets and going into the front of the theater. Finally the place cleared out and a fire truck arrived. The displaced movie watchers grudgingly moved aside to let it into the red-striped fire zone parking. The firemen walked unhurriedly into the theater and came out a few moments later. Burnt popcorn had set off the fire alarm. So, back to our movie.

The movie's structure is like a Christmas party sweets table, full of enticing confections without any substance or connection. You nibble here. You nibble there. You indulge because it's only once a year. Then one nibble too many and you realize you've overdone it.

Which is not to say that some of the tidbits Love Actually aren't wonderful. They are. Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson give nuanced performances as a married couple on the brink of adultery. Hugh Grant is, as usual, affably charming. The movie brightens a notch every time he's on screen. But Arnold Schwarzenegger playing governor of California is a hundred times more believable than Hugh Grant playing Prime Minister. On the other hand, Billy Bob Thornton as US prez is a perfect melding of George W.'s oily Texas facade over Richard Nixon's cruel, manipulative eyes. And Bill Nighy's aging lecherous rocker is also fantastic.

My favorite performance is by Thomas Sangster, who plays Liam Neesom's step-son. They have the most wonderful talks, conversations between equals, between men hurt by love. It's rumored that he's Hugh Grant's cousin. If so, talent certainly runs in the family.

There's just a few too many stories. And although almost all of the characters are connected in some way, some aren't at all. It might have worked better if none had been connected; if they were, as the movie first implies, the varied stories of an airport arrivals at a given point in time.

Bottom Line: Good, but not great. Rated R for a British sense of humour.

First, let me say that I'm not a big Russell Crowe fan, on or off screen. He's not my type, at all. So the fact that he's in Master and Commander, did not predispose me to it; if anything it might have swayed me against it. That said, it's interesting to realize that as a woman, I'm not attracted to him. But if I were a man, I'd follow him to the far ends of the earth.

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I don't remember being impressed with very many movies as a small child. I knew my mom loved Shirley Temple movies when she was child, but unless they showed one on TV, there wasn't any chance to see any. My parents took us to the annual Disney flicks, but the only one I really liked was the dark and unpopular "The Sleeping Beauty". ) I saw "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" at the end of term in the second grade; and it haunted me for years. Since I grew up before videotape, most of the movies I saw were on TV. I was always thrilled when the theme for NBC Saturday Night at the Movies appeared on the screen. What I watched over and over depended a lot on late night TV: "The Time Machine", "The Great Escape". But for some reason, I always hated "The Wizard of Oz" as a child. Maybe because they showed it every holiday--as if there weren't any other great children's movies.

When my son was a child, VHS was the new technology. I knew any movie I took him to might end up in the family collection. So I knew it was important to watch only movies that I would enjoy watching over and over. My measure of a bad kid flick is this: if I can't stand watching it over and over as a parent and an adult, why would I want my kid to see it?

Kids movies these days are designed not so much to spark the imagination as to firestorm over it. If you're tired of taking your children to a two-hour ad for the latest franchise, try one of the movies below.

• National Velvet
• The Princess Bride
• The King of Masks
• The Secret of Roan Inish
• Wallace and Gromit: The First Three Adventures
• Babe
• The Miracle Worker (1962)
• Homeward Bound
• Tonari no Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service
• Back to the Future
• Chicken Run
• The Little Princess (Shirley Temple)
• Toy Story
• Master and Commander
• Bend it Like Beckham
• Whale Rider
• The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
• The Yellow Submarine
• Anne of Green Gables
• Sleeping Beauty

What movies did you love as a child, movies that you want to share with your children? Or (if you a bit older) what movies did you share with you child that someday you want to share with your grandchildren?

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I admire the The Return of the King for its technical execution and artistic achievement. There's no denying that it's a very well done movie. Grand and epic it is, but the epic scale leaves me cold.

Peter Jackson has done the best he can with the material, I suppose. In "The Fellowship of the Ring" I was impressed with his use of extreme closeups to balance the majestic landscapes, to keep us focused on the individual. Epic and personal stories were woven together, involving the audience in the struggles of the fellowship and providing an urgency, an immediacy to the action. But in The Return of the King, as Gandalf, says "The board is set; the players are in motion." And each player falls into place according to destiny. The inevitability dulls any emotion. All the character development occurred in the first two movies, and this last one maintains the mood of a grand finale. As it goes on for 200 minutes, it rather begs the curtain to fall.

Even evil lacks the focused presence afforded in a character like Darth Vader. The doom, gloom and dread provide that pervasive Cold War it's-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it hopelessness, but it isn't enough to rally the audience to heroic battle. Evil attacks as mindlessly as machines, relentless and soulless, without personality. And without villains, without the Adolf Hitlers, Osama bin Ladens, and Saddam Husseins, how can we have heroes? The heroic actions of the individual muffled by the general chaos and confusion of great battles. Regardless of the visual cleverness of the effects, I was not part of the action any more than any single character seemed a part of the action. Watching these great battles was like watching a very good video game playing itself. There is no one to care for and our love is wasted, spent on shadows and dreams.

The only characters facing a true struggle of self-determination are Sam Gamgee and Gollum. Sam is there for a personal, not epic, reason: the loyalty to his friend, Frodo. When his loyalty is doubted, and his friend casts him aside, then Sam's faith in himself and all he's believed and fought for is tested. Gollum, is the richest character of all, providing far more depth and conflict of emotion than any of the human actors in the film.

This year seemed so short, but when I look back over the movies I saw in 2003, I can hardly believe that I saw the Quiet American and the Hours in the same year as two Lord of the Rings movies and the Matrix Reloaded.

As usual, the list is ordered from most to least favorite. As such, it's not quite a "Best of 2003" list. I saw a lot of movies I liked this year, and they are so different that it's hard to rate one against another. The way I do it though is I imagine this, "If I had to watch A or B right now, which one would I chose?" Keeping that criteria in mind, choosing Master and Commander for the number one spot was easy. I've already seen it three times and I've tried to convince everyone else I know to see it too. We've watched Identity and The Two Towers a second time this year (on DVD). I was pleased that I enjoyed Identity just as much (and it has a good commentary) and that I enjoyed The Two Towers even more on DVD than I did in the theater.

Recommended

• 2003-11-16. Master and Commander. With AJM at the Gateway; 2003-11-21 with JQS. 2003-11-28 with AJM and Boy S.
• 2003-05-10. Identity. With JQS at the Cinemark.
• 2003-08-02. Pirates of the Carribean. With AJM and JQS Gateway Cinemas 16.
• 2003-09-28. Lost in Translation. With AJM and JQS.
• 2003. LOTR: The Two Towers.
• 2003-09-21. Rivers and Tides. With JQS at the Dobie.
• 2003-12-13. The Last Samurai. With JQS at the Alamo Drafthouse*
• 2003-02-17. The Quiet American. With AJM at the Westgate 11.
• 2003-04-16. Bend It Like Beckham. With AJM and the Boy S. and the Westgate.
• 2003-08-24. I Capture the Castle.
• 2003-07-16. Whale Rider. With the Boy S at the Westgate 11.
• 2003-01-17. The Hours. At the Westgate 11.
• 2003-12-25. LOTR: The Return of the King. With AJM and JQS at the Alamo Drafthouse.

• 2003-11-15. Love Actually. With AJM at the Westgate.
• 2003-09-12. Thirteen. Barton Creek Cinema. (Cinemark)
• 2003-06-22. The Italian Job. With AJM at the Gateway Cinemas 16.

• 2003-12-06. Honey
• 2003-06-01. The Matrix Reloaded. With AJM at the Gateway Cinemas 16.
• 2003-07-16. League of Extradordinary Gentlemen. With the Boy S at AMC Barton Creek Square.

Critic's Choice

If you like top ten lists, check out MCN Critics Top Ten: The Big Chart.

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We opened the 2004 summer movie season with Shrek 2, going with the office gang (Dan, Trevor and Stacy) after beer and dinner at NXNW. Shrek 2 isn't the movie er would have chosen. In fact, we hadn't even bothered to see Shrek 1. Yet we found ourselves being dragged to the sequel, though not before sharing a few scornful remarks. So we sceptics were surprised ourselves laughing out loud from start to finish. Shrek 2 is fast-paced and clever--sort of an animated The Princess Bride. I liked it better than the two other animated features I've seen lately: Finding Nemo and Lilo and Stitch. Like The Simpsons it has enough gags, verbal and visual, happening in the periphery to make watching it over and over interesting.

Ebert says "Shrek 2 is bright, lively and entertaining, but it's no Shrek.". He is so unable to shake the ghost of the first movie from his review of the second, that I'm really, really glad I saw the second one first. And Ebert gives short shrift to my favorite character, Puss In Boots, voiced by Antonio Banderas.

Bottom Line: Recommended for the whole family (even my Mom).

Three Kings surprised me by being so much more than another action movie. I've been tempted to get it on DVD, not only because I liked the movie, but because it has excellent commentary tracks. So reading that Warner Bros pulled the documentary from the new special edition makes me mad. Their reason?

Warner Bros. spokeswoman Barbara Brogliatti said the studio made the decision after seeing the completed documentary, which features interviews with Iraqi refugees and veterans of the current war in Iraq. "This came out to be a documentary that condemns, basically, war," she told the newspaper. "This is supposed to be a special edition of `Three Kings,' not a polemic about war."

The people at Warner Bros. must have never seen Three Kings--it's a pretty scathing anti-war movie. In the beginning, the Americans view the Gulf War as a big party where they get to blow things up. They don't understand anything about the politics of the region and can't distinguish between one Arab or another. As one character rudely puts it, "They're all just sand-niggers to us." As the movie progresses and the three main characters are separated from the Americans, they meet individuals who educate them on the real conflict in the Gulf.

Watching "Sky Captain" gave me the same thrill I got all those years ago when I watched "Star Wars" for the first time. "Star Wars" has been so sequeled, franchised, and parodied that it's difficult to remember or express the pure joy and amazement I felt then. And I've never felt the same since. (No. Especially not with "Raiders of the Lost Ark", Mr. Ebert.)

Well "Sky Captain" gives me the same thrill and for the same reasons. First of all, it doesn't look like anything you've ever seen, but at the same time it reminds you of all those wonderful old comic-book inspired films from the 1930s. In a reverse of "Final Fantasy" where the imaging technicians tested how close to real life they could make animation look, "Sky Captain" tests how close to animation it can make live-action actors look.

Second, it's just plain rousing fun. The plot is part Saturday matinee serial, part comic book, and part Wizard of Oz. Both Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow really seem of the time rather than modern actors playing a part. And they have the same great sparring chemistry of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, or Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. Favorite line, "Can't we die just once without bickering."

On the down side, I suppose "Star Wars" turned the country away from the cynicism and shades of gray of the previous two decades. It paved the way for Reagan's simplistic world view where everything was black and white. To hell with the bad news! We Americans want to feel good about ourselves again. Defeat the evil empire. Rah rah. Blah blah blah. If George W. Bush watches "Sky Captain" he's likely to come away feeling even more inspired to save the world single-handedly with his secret, mercenary military.

I was expecting deliciously wicked. Instead, I got loud and dull. Bright Young Things was funny sometimes, it just wasn't funny enough. It reminded me of either a serious Jeeves and Wooster, or a Brideshead lite. I left the theater wanting to go home and watch either one of them.

I'm going to read the Evelyn Waugh's book "Vile Bodies" to see if the problem is with the film or the story. P.G. Wodehouse writes about the shallow, self-absorbed, wealthy celebrities too, but he makes them brilliant. Even though Wodehouse exposes the shimmer as champagne sparkle and rhinestone glitter, his amusement outshines Waugh's moralizing.

I'll be interested in seeing how Stephen Campbell Moore develops. He looks like a younger, and more handsome Hugh Laurie.

If Sin City was the most convincing live action portrayal of a comic book I've seen, then Kung Fu Hustle is the best live action portrayal of a cartoon. It's Looney Tunes come to life. I can't remember the last time I laughed this hard during a movie. Maybe it was the first time I saw the toast scene in the original La Cage Aux Folles. Kung Fu Hustle is an entire movie of toast scenes.

Kung Fu Hustle pulls scenes from all genres and recreates them with energy and a real sense of fun. My favorite is a chase scene that's pure Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. Or maybe it's the scene right before that; the scene that leads up to the chase. I watched it and my jaw dropped. I could not believe what I was seeing on the screen.

The movie is filled with homage (parody?): "He's the One." and "With great power comes great responsibilty." One scene even mirrors the Matrix 2 where Neo fights hundreds of Agent Smiths. Both were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, but when you watch this version you don't think of it as a retread as much as you think, "This is how they should have done it in the first place." Kung Fu Hustle does the scene with verve and exuberance and with none ponderous self-importance that ruined "The Matrix". In comparison "Sin City" seems static and flat. Even with all its action, I remember "Sin City" in still frame, just like a comic book. Kung Fu Hustle is in constant hyperdrive.

I'm not going to describe the plot because it is completely irrelevant. It provides the elements for an action movie: gangs of bad guys terrorizing poor townfolk and a few good guys coming to the rescue. The joy of this movie is in the how, not in the what.

Kung Fu Hustle is rated R for stylized violence and it is a very violent movie. But it's so different in tone from "Sin City", that it's hard to believe that they have the same rating. Not for the kiddies. But definitely enjoyed by video-gaming teenagers.

Every once in awhile a film will take me so completely by surprise and I have to run around asking everyone I know, "Have you seen this? No? See it!"

I was expecting another ultra-violent kung fu/gangster shooter when AJM popped the Hong Kong made Infernal Affairs into the DVD player. Instead we were treated to a slick and brilliantly convoluted psychological thriller. The setup is explained in the first few minutes of the film, so I'm not giving anything away here. Two young recruits are planted as undercover spies in the enemy camp. One is a police cadet who is apparently drummed out of the academy so that he can pose as a small-time gangster and infiltrate a gang. The other is a gangster who joins the police force in order to warn his boss of any police activity that would threaten gang operations.

Fast-forward ten years and the two men are still undercover. After all this time, even they seem to be unsure of where their loyalties lie. Early on there is wonderfully entertaining confrontation that in a lesser movie would have been the big climax. The cinematography and film editing are so slick and modern that it gave me the feeling that New York City is quaint and old-fashioned compared with modern Hong Kong.

The action never lets up and yet "Infernal Affairs" manages to be a character-driven movie, an exploration of identity and choice. Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, not surprisingly, are big stars in Hong Kong film, and they provide depth and subtlety to their roles that elevates "Infernal Affairs" to the level of "Pulp Fiction" or "The Godfather". Our sympathies lie with both men and so we are drawn into the conflict, unable to cheer for either side against the other.

Also Recommended

My initial reaction to "Infernal Affairs" was similar to my feelings for "The Usual Suspects". If you like this kind of film you might also like these. (Just doing my part to support The Long Tail).

• Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
• Snatch
• The Limey
• Sexy Beast
• Jackie Brown
• Fight Club
• Run, Lola, Run

I share Joss Whedon's opinion on character development, first put to me most vividly in Alexei Panshin's Rites of Passage, "There are no foot soldiers." Each of us is the hero of our own story.

As Whedon explains, ...the biggest thing for me is that everybody--and that includes "second thug from left"--has perspective that they bring with them to the piece... But just respecting everybody, and knowing that the whole point of the thing, the whole point of any dialogue, is that it's two people with completely different points of view trying to find a space in the middle. That's where the conflict comes from, that's where the humor comes from, that's where the humanity comes from. That's the biggest thing for me when I'm writing, and I think it's also what makes people respond to all the characters, is that they're all very present all the time.

The tension among nine different people surviving together in cramped quarters of what is science fiction's equivalent of a leaky boat is what gave Serenity's progenitor Firefly its appeal. It's also what's lost as Firefly moves to the big screen; the movie format is at once larger and more compressed than a TV series. Whedon is forced to tighten his focus on few characters and rev up a storyline he had planned to weave languorously over several seasons.

Whedon did this purposely, he say, ...we need a giant, epic story that is not the kind of thing these people usually get involved in on the TV series. It�fs more mundane. We need a reason for this to be a movie and to be a big, for me anyway, budget movie, and a Universal film in particular.

The result left me feeling empty. The movie provided closure which I discovered afterward I didn't want. Despite the martial arts veil thrown over his worlds, Whedon's strength has always been in his characters, not the action. His shows are not so much about what happened, but how everyone reacts to what happened. I liked that Firefly focused on the mundane. It puts the future on a human scale, a personal scale, which enables us to envision it and ourselves in it. On the plus side, if you've never seen Firefly, you don't have to worry that you won't understand the plot or the characters. Serenity is self-contained.

For those who equate science fiction with action movies, Serenity has enough explosions and fist fights to satisfy. But there are no bug-eyed monsters and relatively little futuristic technology. Human beings continue to be their own worst enemy, more destructive than any aliens or robots run amok.

Firefly/Serenity is more Western than SciFi--from the clothes people wear, the guns they carry, and most interestingly, the way they talk. There is a 19th-century frontier poetry in the manner of speech which is the one thing that will probably confound newcomers. The cadence takes some getting used to, but when you do, you can't imagine the characters speaking any other way. The old-fashionedness of it provides a sense of formality and chivalry that becomes the characters, especially the hero, Malcolm Reynolds. Oh, yeah. They also cuss in Chinese, which allowed the writers to interject all sorts of colorful speech on prime time TV without running afoul of the censors. It makes for much more interesting expletives. Now that we hear them all the time, our standard four-letter words have been drained of their value.

The mix of genres is a logical development. I've always thought that America's love of both Westerns and Science Fiction during my formative years was a result of our pioneer inheritance, that itching desire to explore new frontiers, and to (as Serenity does) fly under the radar, always a little out of reach of those meddlesome do-gooders who want to crimp our independence in the name of civilizing us.

I came to the Chronicles of Narnia quite late in my childhood reading. Unlike Middle Earth, Narnia was a place I felt immediately at home in, perhaps because it relies so on "simple, creamy English charm" as Anthony Blanche would say.

I haven't figured out why American fundamentalists are so anxious to introduce Narnia to their children. Although it is a Christian allegory (a story of death, resurrection, and redemption), the emphasis is on the allegory. Aren't these parents afraid to let Narnia opens up the world of myth to children who have been taught that the only truth is literal?

Narnia is a parallel world with portals into our own. So the first lesson Chronicles teaches us is that we earthlings, and indeed our entire universe, are just a tiny part of creation. Other worlds and other gods abound. And if God is God by any name, if he can take the form of a lion and be called Aslan in the world of talking animals, why can't he take other forms and names in our own world?

Our first glimpse into Narnia we see snow falling in the glow of a gas-lit London street lamp (incongruously stuck in the middle of a wood) and a faun. The vision of the movie is very true to the book. I held my breath a bit at the beginning, because the opening credits filled in the backstory of the war-time evacuations of British children to the countryside. And it took me awhile to decide if I liked the children. Peter and Susan seem a bit too old. And for some reason, I expected Lucy to be blond. Of the four children, she has the most complicated part, and 10-year-old Georgie Henley does the best acting, despite being the youngest. Mr. Tumnus, the faun, is perfectly realized. And I couldn't imagine anyone but Tilda Swinton playing the White Witch. Overall, the movie is well done, indeed.

One detail that did annoy me was that when Father Christmas appears, no one called him by name. Were the screenwriters afraid American children wouldn't know the anti-papist British term for the patron saint of children and prostitutes? And another scene confused me, for I have no memory of such dramatic crossing of the ice river. For the most part, the film avoids grandiose CGI-centered scenes and remains true to the scale of its protaganists and their small island nation in the tradition of "The Wind in the Willows", Beatrix Potter, and AA Milne.

Between Lewis, Tolkien, and Rowling, American children are getting exposed to new worlds of wonder and myth. Who knows where that will take them.

Continued...

Match Point came as a complete surprise to me. Not only was I expecting a tennis-related love story (that's apparently another movie), I didn't know it was a Woody Allen movie until the credits rolled. When it arrived all I knew about it was that my Netflix friend had just watched it and rated it one star: she hated it.

So I watched it with curiousity and I'm pleased to say that it had me completely baffled from beginning to end. I never knew what was going to happen next. I came away incredulous--which made me think--which made me rate it four stars--not because I liked it but because I liked that it made me think.

When I had lunch with my Netflix friend I had to ask why she hated it. She couldn't connect with any of the characters and so ended up watching the scenery--a sure sign that she's bored with a movie.

While it's true that absolutely none of the characters is sympathetic, I find that doesn't disqualify me from being interested in them. Sometimes quite the opposite. I became so interested in the gorgeous Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Jude Law, watch out!) that I was chiding him to focus on his ambition to marry for wealth and not get distracted by a tawdry lust.

Now isn't that a strange movie?...how does Woody Allen make us want the cheaters to get away with cheating? Although it's the most fantastic of the three, I think I ended up liking Match Point better than Closer or Carnal Knowledge. And I've learned that a movie doesn't need to have sympathetic characters in order for me to like it. Obviously, I was trending toward this when I named The Proposition my favorite movie of the year so far.

One tactic of science fiction is to show us our own world in masked fantasy so that in seeing our folly committed outrageously by strangers we might recognize it in ourselves. The future of Children of Men is not so distant that we can't immediately recognize all its elements as part of our current lives. Indeed, if you asked a resident a Baghdad twenty years ago to imagine his city and life in ruins today he might have thought it as improbable as the Alfonso Cuaron's imagined London of 2027. Children of Men remixes current events in a way that brings them home to Western audiences more successfully than the 2-minute nightly news clips do. Anti-immigration hysteria. Terrorist bombings. Conspiracy theorists. National IDs. Constant video surveillance. All of this is part of life in 2007. We hardly notice how we've traded liberty for security, as we stop for our morning latte and become engrossed in the latest TV celebrity death.

In 2027, it is not Princess Di but the death of the youngest person on earth who captures the hearts of Theo Faron's (Clive Owen) countrymen. Human society has devolved because human beings are no longer able to procreate. Without children there is no hope. And without hope we might as all be our worst selves.

This is not a conceit that I buy into, particularly. The majority of my friends, married or not, are childless, and I don't see them languishing in hopelessness. If the only thing keeping society going is our ability to pass part of ourselves down to future generations, then we are doing a strange job as custodians of our legacy to them. This argument seems to me in the same category of philosophy that posits that the only thing that keeps us civil is the promise, or threat, of an afterlife. I think that if we believed this moment was the only moment we had, we might try harder to make the most of it. However, the conceit does give humanity a chance to be redeemed by a child; Children of Men opened on Christmas Day to underscore the obvious.

Cuaron, thankfully, does not spend a lot of time on backstory. He simply explores the world as a given and shows us a world, that for many people in 2007 is the given. The movie's reluctant hero, Theo, is dragged (literally) into a plot to help a resistance/terrorist group get a young refugee to safety.

Visually the movie is very interesting with layers and layers of images mirroring contemporary culture. As an antidote to the quick-cut chase movies, Cuaron includes some extremely long takes. (One 9-minute shot, it's rumored, was actually stitched seamlessly together from several shorter takes--Cuaron explains it wasn't. CGI was used but only to remove the blood from the camera lens.) Another chase sequence gets off to a very slow start and is at the same time tense and ludicrous. You want to laugh but you're too involved in the moment and the danger to laugh. Cuaron shows us that everything we've learned about action thrillers in the 1990s is old and tired.

In a scene early in Children of Men, Theo visits his well-connected cousin to try to get safe passage to the coast. As he is driven into the imposing Battersea Power Station the strains of King Crimson's "The Court of the Crimson King" swell and I'm floored. I'm so distracted by this music that the movie takes on a surrealistic air; I can't tell where Cuaron's visions end and my begin. And the song goes on and on. I try to get AJM's attention but I don't think he knows the song. That song. I built worlds around it, too. What it reminds me of more than anything is a drive in 1973 away from Las Vegas, through the mountains near St. George, Utah and on to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. The next time I made that drive, the song replayed in my head with its attendant memories.

How could I not like a movie when the director has such agreeable taste in music? Pink Floyd fans might be equally thrilled to see a visual homage to Pink Floyd's "Animals" album cover a few moments later.

Children of Men Trailer

Postscript.
iTunes doesn't have any other King Crimson but does carry the soundtrack album for "Children of Men", including "In the Court of the Crimson King". You have to buy the whole album. It is a great soundtrack but I'd prefer the choice. Oddly, it's labelled "Explicit"--all the songs in the soundtrack are, I guess because one of them is and you can't buy them separately. I don't remember anything explicit about it and, my poor parents (who listened to it a zillion times on the car ride from Nevada to Florida and back to Texas) didn't seem to notice it either.

I wonder why Cuaron chose this track from "In the Court of the Crimson King". On the surface, "21st Century Schizoid Man" seems more appropriate. And thematically, the lyrics to "Epitaph" fit better.

The wall on which the prophets wrote
Is cracking at the seams.
Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams.
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams,
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
As silence drowns the screams.

Confusion will be my epitaph.
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back
And laugh.
But I fear tomorrow Ill be crying,
Yes I fear tomorrow Ill be crying.

What cheery jingles I listened to in my youth!

The moment the preview of Pan's Labyrinth started rolling, I knew I was going to see it. Visually, it's dazzling. It just won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, and Best Cinematography (the latter I believe really deserved to go to "Children of Men").

As JQS said at lunch, it's unfortunate that Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men came out back-to-back. Each movie delivers such an intense visual, aural, and emotional punch that I want to spend time mulling over them and sorting out my feelings. Now my experience of them are woven together by comparisons.

Both movies deal with responses to fascism. Children of Men is set in the near future where hope has died along with the children. Pan's Labyrinth is set in Franco's Spain, where both sides are willing to die and to kill in order to vouchsafe their vision of the future for their children. Children of Men is relentlessly grim. All I remember is gray. Pan's Labyrinth is uncompromisingly brutal. The colors glow in brilliant jewel-tones, with strong contrasts between light and dark and flashes of blood red.

Pan's Labyrinth has a double intertwining narrative--two stories that swirl around the fate of a young girl, Ofelia. Ofelia's life provides plenty of "scope for the imagination" as Anne of Green Gables would say. Unlike Anne's, both Ofelia's life and her imagination are nightmarish. The line between reality and fantasy is purposely blurred. Distinguishing between real and imagined, facts and dreams is irrelevent. The truth is not literal; it is allegorical. Mere literalness is superficial.

As I was researching Candlemas and Setsubun for another post, I came across a quote from Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, which helped explain the usefulness of the supernatural and the symbolic in infusing meaning to a chaotic and violent world.

"History", [Eugene Ionesco] said recently, "is a process of corruption, it is chaotic, unless it is oriented to the supernatural." The candle-lit procession in black garments, the symbolic encounter between chaos and light which it represents, should remind us of this truth and give us courage to see the supernatural, not as a waste of time, distracting us from the business of ameliorating the world, but as the only way in which meaning can be brought to bear on the chaotic side of life. -- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

I think that Guillermo del Toro is also using the supernatural to bring meaning to the world--a world where torture and murder no longer shock us. I'm so tired of the current American fetish with literalism that I'm glad that Mexican filmmakers are demonstrating the power of myth to alter our perceptions and enrich our understanding of the bald facts.

There is one scene in Pan's Labyrinth which reveals the moral--we must not be blindly obedient. The doctor has disobeyed an order from the Captain and put a prisoner being tortured out of his misery. Vidal is shocked that the doctor has disobeyed him. "I don't understand--Why didn't you obey me?" The doctor thinks a moment and replies. "To obey without thinking--just like that--Well, that's something only people like you can do, Captain."

In the end, Ofelia, too, is faced with the choice whether to obey or to follow her conscience. In her case she is listening to the advice of someone whom she has disobeyed earlier with horrible consequences. She knows this is a test yet her only choice seems to be the wrong one. To obey without thinking, that is the real evil. And unlike the message we get from American shows such as "24", the ends do not justify the means.

Pan's Labyrinth is a very difficult movie to watch because the scenes of war and torture are realistically violent, not video-game violent. I would watch Children of Men again in an instant...but I don't know if I could ever watch Pan's Labyrinth again. And yet I think it is a very good movie, a very special movie. I'm not at all sorry I saw it once--but I'm still trying to think of who I'd recommend it to. (Bug, if you're reading this, I recommend it to you.)