Month: November 2021

THE ARTIST (2011, France)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Cast: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, Missi Pyle, Malcolm McDowell
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 95% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A hugely popular silent film idol must adjust to culture shock when “talkies” suddenly invade the movie business.


Is there a movie more in love with the First Golden Age of Hollywood than The Artist?  I can’t think of one.  Sunset Blvd. comes close, but that was a caustic commentary on the heartless tendencies of studio executives to reject the Old and embrace the New.  The Artist covers the same ground, but in a much more comic fashion.

Not to say The Artist pulls its punches.  Not at all.  It tells the story of a silent film idol, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), who has a meet-cute with a fan, Peppy (the stunning Bérénice Bejo), outside of a movie theatre.  Long story short, she becomes a bit player in numerous silent films and eventually becomes a superstar when the talkies take over Hollywood.  And George?  He struggles, as so many other silent actors did, to acclimate himself to a brave new world where faces and title cards aren’t enough anymore for an audience who is always looking for something new.

And, oh, yeah, did I mention The Artist is itself a silent film?  Shot in black and white?  Filmed in the old 1:33 aspect ratio?  Yeah.  It’s actually pretty cool.  It takes a little while to get used to seeing modern actors moving their mouths and not hearing their voices, but after a while, my brain acclimated itself to this “new” way of watching a movie.

As I was saying, The Artist doesn’t pull its punches in exposing Hollywood’s appetite for the New (in ways I don’t want to give away here), but it is still far more whimsical and audience-friendly than Sunset Blvd.  I’d compare it more to Singin’ in the Rain, if I had to compare it to anything at all.  But The Artist is a singular achievement, and well worth the Best Picture Academy Award for 2011.

There are two scenes in particular that elevate The Artist. In one, Peppy, who has always adored George from afar, finds herself alone in his dressing room.  She spots one of his jackets hanging on a coat rack and embraces it, imagining his arms inside it.  She then slips one of her own arms into the jacket, and voila!  She has a brief love scene where it really feels like she’s interacting with another person’s arm.  It’s a little hard to describe, but the effect is magical.

The second scene is one of my favorite scenes of all time.  George has just gone to see one of Peppy’s new films, a talkie.  The audience loves it, but he is still resistant to the idea.  He retreats to his dressing room, but something bizarre happens.  Remember, up until now, the movie has been completely silent (except for a musical score).  But this time, when he puts a glass down on a table…it clinks.  He stares.  What the heck was that???  He does it again.  Clink!  What’s going on???  He picks up a comb and drops it.  Thunk!  What the hey?!!  He opens his mouth to yell…but nothing comes out!

It’s a wonderfully comic moment, and a perfect way to demonstrate George’s anxiety at what this new technology will mean for him.

The more I think about The Artist, the more I’m realizing that the only way to properly discuss it is to go almost scene by scene, and I certainly don’t want to go down that road, especially for anyone who may not have seen it.  I mean, there’s the dog, George’s butler, the release date for one of his movies (October 24th, 1929, oh dear), the auction, the fire, and the deliriously happy ending, the kind of ending that tends to only exist in movies.

That’s really all The Artist is.  It’s an efficient engine designed to pull at our heartstrings and deliver a feel-good ending after teasing us with darker possibilities here and there.  The fact that it’s black-and-white and silent is a bonus, especially for film buffs.  It may not be realistic, but when it comes to Hollywood’s Golden Age…I mean, who really cared about realism back then?  (Back then, they didn’t need words, they had faces.)

MONEYBALL (2011)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Bennett Miller
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The general manager of the Oakland A’s attempts to assemble a winning team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.


On paper, Moneyball should not work as a movie. What have you got?  A feel-good sports story about the 2002 Oakland A’s utilizing the science of statistics to assemble the right combination of players to get them into the playoffs.

I mean, really?  Specifics aside, a Cinderella story about an underdog sports team trying to make it to the big game is one of the oldest, most predictable tropes in film.  Shall I count them off? Major League, The Bad News Bears, Bull Durham, The Mighty Ducks, Little Giants, Cool Runnings, Hoosiers…need I go on?

And in Moneyball, we barely even get to see any baseball action itself.  The movie is more concerned with the behind-the-scenes action, beating the trade deadline, shaking up the scouting crew, trying to get the manager to believe in the new system.  We don’t really see any major baseball action until we get close to the finale.

[SPOILER ALERT…unless you’re a HUGE baseball fan, in which case you were already aware of this.]

And let’s talk about that finale, while we’re at it.  The A’s make it to the 2002 ALDS elimination game, and what happens?  They LOSE.  Say what???

So why, oh why, does Moneyball work the way it does?

…no, really, I’m asking.  Because I’m not 100% sure myself.  Let me just tick off my thoughts as they occur to me here.

  1. There’s the screenplay.  Here’s some good advice: when you want to make a movie about a potentially dry subject, get both Steven Zaillian AND Aaron Sorkin to write your script.  The pace of the movie is stately, even sedate, but the dialogue is crisp, clean, and precise, getting to the point as efficiently as possible without being flashy.  In one memorable scene, someone walks up to the General Manager’s office and says just one word: “Peña,” and then walks away.  The GM takes it in, says, “Okay”, and calmly stands and flips his desk over.  The whole thing is over in 15 seconds.  I can imagine another movie wasting a lot of time with extra words or edits, but not “Moneyball.”  (SPARTAN.  That’s the word I’m thinking of.  The dialogue is spartan.)
  2. There’s the editing.  The dialogue is sleek and uncluttered, but there is a lot of information that has to be conveyed to those audience members who may not know what a box score is, or what a DH is, or why Billy Beane (the GM, played by Brad Pitt) doesn’t CARE whether his new first baseman can even field the ball properly, as long as he gets ON BASE when he’s batting.  Rather than use flashy editing to generate false suspense or excitement, the Oscar-nominated editors use more of that spartan vibe, with occasional jumps to real-world film clips of the actual team or individual players.  This is especially helpful when the film’s middle section details the woeful first half of the season under the new statistics-based system.  Again, not flashy, but effective.  Very hard to pull off, and deservedly recognized.
  3. There’s the structure…which I guess points back to both the screenplay and editing, but I’m just saying.  As I said, it’s a classic, well-worn trope.  Good guys get knocked down for the count – the A’s flat-out suck for the first half of the season – but then they suddenly start winning games and crawling back into contention.  As many of these films that I’ve seen, I still found myself unwittingly getting caught up in the spirit of the comeback.  In actual fact, the 2002 season is the one where the real Oakland A’s threatened to break the American League record for longest winning streak.  And it all comes down to one at-bat in the bottom of the ninth.  Because of COURSE it does.
  4. …and that sort of brings up another point.  Is there another sport that has as much innate mythology as baseball?  Sure, football has its share of comeback stories, and so does hockey and everything else.  But with baseball…lemme tell you.  A few years ago when the Chicago Cubs were on the verge of winning their first World Series in a hundred-and-eight years, I watched Game 7, rooting for the Cubs.  For those Cubs fans who watched as well, you’ll recall: that game was unmerciful.  The Cubs blew a three-run lead, they ended nine innings in a 6-6 tie, and then there was a RAIN DELAY before the 10th inning started.  But I will never forget that moment when the Cubs made the final out, and they wound up winning 8-7.  It was glorious.  …well, watching Moneyball, watching that section when the A’s are creeping up to winning twenty games in a row, I found myself grinning and laughing spontaneously, without even realizing I was doing it, and I remembered what it was like to watch the Cubs win.  And a big part of it has to do with that unexplainable psychic connection we have to the game itself, that sense of the romantic when someone clobbers a game-winning homer, or makes a dramatic catch to save a no-hitter, or when a relief pitcher retires the side with bases loaded.  I’m not a true baseball fan, I’ll admit…but I know good drama when it happens.  Moneyball gets that aspect of the game just right.

(I haven’t even mentioned the sterling performances from the principal actors, particularly Jonah Hill, who nabbed an acting nomination for one of the most underplayed characters in history.)

In the end, Moneyball is exactly like the Oakland A’s in the film.  It’s an unlikely combination of talent that generated surprising results and was critically acclaimed, gathering six Oscar nods.  It failed to win a single Oscar…much like the A’s were eventually eliminated from the playoffs in 2002.

But in the end, it’s not the shutout at the Oscars that I remember.  It’s the fact that this is still one of the best sports movies I’ve ever seen, and definitely one of the top 2 or 3 baseball films I’ve ever seen.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Léa Seydoux, Michael Sheen
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A nostalgic screenwriter travels with his fiancée’s family to Paris where, every night at midnight, he inexplicably finds himself going back in time to the 1920s.


The best of times is now / As for tomorrow, well, who knows?
— La Cage Aux Folles

It’s currently 11:05 at night on a Sunday evening.  I’m getting older, so if I’m smart, I should get off to bed, owing to the fact I have to get up early tomorrow to get ready for work.

But I can’t.  I have just re-watched Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris for only the second time in my life, and I have revised my original rating of 9 up to a 10.  And I am just bursting to write about how wonderful this movie is.  I’m hoping that I can reach someone who has not seen it before, so I can convince them that, even if they’ve never seen a Woody Allen movie before, this is the one they should start with.  Yes, even over Annie Hall or Manhattan or even Match Point.  In my mind, Midnight in Paris captures the voice of the artist as he is reaching a certain age and has something important to say about nostalgia, and how sometimes it’s not always what it’s cracked up to be.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a Hollywood screenwriter trying to complete his first novel.  He and his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), travel to Paris with her family so he can perhaps get inspired by one of the all-time great cities of the world.  He is immediately smitten with the atmosphere of the place; the movie opens with a wordless montage of static shots of Parisian cafés, streets, museums, statues, apartment buildings, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower.  The sequence sounds simple on paper, but the effect is – I don’t know how to describe it.  It captures the ineffable romance of the place.  More so than any other movie set in Paris, Midnight in Paris really, REALLY makes me want to go there.

Gil and Inez seem happy enough, but he is a little more antisocial than she is.  He is star-struck by Paris, but Inez is not incredibly fond of it.  They bump into an old friend of Inez’s, a pleasant enough man who turns out to be a bit pedantic; during a museum tour, he presumptuously corrects the tour guide on details of the life of Auguste Rodin.  This is not the kind of guy I would want to be stuck with on an elevator.

One night, Gil goes walking by himself on the Paris streets and gets a little lost.  Long story short, he inexplicably finds himself transported back to Paris of the 1920s, when the cafés were full of American expats and frequent visitors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, etcetera.  As a writer, Gil is over the moon; it just so happens his unfinished novel is about a man who runs a “nostalgia shop”, so this pleasant turn of events is a welcome tonic to his vaguely unhappy days back in the present.

Watching the scenes of Gil rapturously conversing with Hemingway, or goggling at Cole Porter playing the piano, I was swept away by the audaciousness of this movie.  It’s illogical and steeped in fantasy and seems to be begging not to be taken too seriously.  But it is a pure joy to watch.  I immediately identified with Gil.  I found myself imagining how I would respond if I were somehow transported back to a time and place when some of my own idols walked the Earth: Hollywood, the 1940s, walking around and conversing with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Katharine Hepburn.  Or even not so far back: the 1970s, having lunch with young Spielberg and Coppola and Lucas, and Pacino and Streep and DeNiro, discussing film and life and getting insight into their inner workings.

From our perch in the present, it’s easy for us to look back at the past and say, well, those were the days.  Just earlier today, I was having an online discussion about the difference between CGI and practical effects in movies like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings and even Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.  We tell each other that older movies felt more real because the effects were made with real props occupying real space, whether they were miniatures or matte paintings or what have you.  And we say, “Man, they just don’t make them like that anymore.  They knew what they were doing back then.”

That’s Gil.  He looks around at the shimmering jewel of Paris in the 1920s and he’s convinced that this is “where it’s at.”  What can today’s world offer in comparison to sitting in a café and discussing art with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel?  Or the pleasure at hearing Ernest Hemingway tell you he’ll hate your book, even if it’s good, because that would make you a better author than him?  Or getting constructive notes on your novel from Gertrude Stein?

The story progresses.  Gil becomes infatuated with a beautiful woman from the past, Adriana (a luminous Marion Cotillard), and it becomes harder and harder for him to go back to his own present each night.  Inez’s father gets suspicious and hires a private detective to follow Gil during his midnight strolls.  You may ask how a private detective can follow someone who is traveling back in time.  Well, my friend, that is an EXCELLENT question, one which the movie answers in satisfying and gut-busting fashion in the final reel.

But the heart of the movie lies in the touching, revealing segment when Gil and Adriana go even further back in time, this time in a horse-and-carriage, back to the Belle Époque, the “Beautiful Age” of Paris, which lasted from about the 1870s to the 1910s.  Adriana, who lives — lived — in the ‘20s, is entranced with this even more bygone era.  She feels about the Belle Époque the way Gil feels about the ‘20s.  To her, the ‘20s are slow-paced, a drudge.  But, oh, to be back in the 1890s!  Dinner at Maxim’s, the Moulin Rouge, meeting Toulouse-Latrec and Gauguin and Degas!  How wonderful those days must have been compared to the Boring Twenties!

And there’s the message of the movie.  We can grouse and grumble about the modern world all we want.  The movies are dime-a-dozen.  The books even more so.  The music is crap.  Cell phones have turned us into tiny-screen junkies.  But, oh, to be back in the good old days of the 1980s, when the music was gnarly, and the movies were iconic, and the books were amazing, and everything was just better.

But we forget that, in the ‘80s, people were grousing and grumbling about THAT era, and they longed for the more sedate and rosy era of the 1950’s.  And in the ‘50s, people said the ‘30s were the BEST.  DECADE.  EVER.  And so on and so on.

It’s human nature for us not to realize what we’ve got going for us until it’s gone.  We are living in glorious times.  (Coronavirus and politics notwithstanding…gimme a break, I’m trying to make a point here.)  Look around.  Really SEE it.  Embrace it.  We don’t need a time machine to go back to our glory days.  We’re IN our glory days.  Just wait.  In 20 years, you’ll look back on the 2010s and say, “Man, wasn’t that a time?”

If you take nothing else away from the above review, remember this: Midnight in Paris is pure charm, is laugh-out-loud funny, and is the best Woody Allen film since Match Point.  So if you haven’t seen it, you really, really, REALLY need to make a point to do so.

BLADE II (2002)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman, Norman Reedus, Donnie Yen
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 57%

PLOT: Blade, half human/half vampire, forms an uneasy alliance with the vampire nation in order to combat a new breed of monster, the Reapers, who are feeding on vampires and humans alike.


Why don’t more people like this movie?  It’s like someone took the best fight scenes from The Matrix, removed the pretentious plotting, added a crapload of gore, and created one of the best villains in the history of vampire movies: the Reaper, an evil-looking creature whose lower jaw splits wide down the middle to reveal a blood-sucking appendage that might even give the Xenomorph nightmares.

Blade II is lean and mean.  Director Guillermo del Toro has gone on record as saying this was not exactly the movie he intended to make, as it doesn’t keep precisely to the Blade “canon” (in case you didn’t know, Blade is a lesser-known Marvel comics character who is scheduled to eventually make an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe).  However, despite his misgivings about this film, del Toro nevertheless created an action-horror masterpiece.

If you’re a fan of action films, what do you like?  Because it’s all here.  There are five great fight scenes, including a doozy in Blade’s own lair between Blade and two vampire ninjas wearing elaborate headgear that makes them look like humanoid bugs.  You like a great villain?  Here’s Jared Nomak, the vampire who carries the Reaper virus, whose wounds heal by themselves almost instantly, and who carries a dark secret.  His fighting skills are equal to those of Blade himself, who must learn to use more than brute force if he’s going to defeat Nomak.  (And let’s not overlook the cameo by Asian superstar Donnie Yen.)

You like a good story?  We got that, too.  Blade’s sworn enemies, the vampire nation, are forced to approach Blade for help when it becomes apparent they are no match for the Reapers.  Blade HAS to help, because who will the Reapers go after once they dispatch all the vampires?  Humans.  So you have the whole “uneasy alliance” going on, with no one more uneasy than Reinhardt, a vampire played by a deliciously malevolent Ron Perlman.  Reinhardt goes along with the plan, but can’t resist poking the tiger by asking Blade, “…can you blush?”  Blade’s response gives a whole new meaning to the term “kill switch.”  Game, set, match.

This is also a horror film, let’s not forget.  You like scares?  How about the part where a Reaper gets pinned to a wall with a ninja sword through its stomach…but escapes by crawling backwards up the wall, forcing the sword to slice through his body as he skitters away, unfazed by the damage?  YIKES.  We got gore, too.  Blade and company perform an autopsy on a dead Reaper.  I haven’t seen that much detailed gore since the autopsy in John Carpenter’s The Thing.

I mean, seriously.  This movie has everything I want in an action movie that’s also a horror film.  It covers ALL the bases.  (I could’ve done without the quasi-love-story, but it’s not dwelt on too much, so I can live with it.)  What more could anyone ask for?

(Also, it’s great to listen to on a bad-ass audio system…BOOMING bass and sound effects.  Great stuff.)

INCENDIES (2010, Canada)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Lubna Azabal, Maxim Gaudette
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Twins living in French Canada journey to the Middle East to fulfill their mother’s last wishes by discovering their family history.


A few years before French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve made a big splash in American cinema with Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, he directed Incendies [French for “flames” or “fires”…I had to look it up].   This is one of the best films I’ve ever seen.  It’s a mystery, a melodrama, and an urgent plea for peace, all at once.  It’s heartbreaking, engaging, absorbing, and beautiful to look at.  There are two directors currently working who I believe have successfully picked up the mantle left behind by Stanley Kubrick.  Denis Villeneuve is one of them.

(The other is Alejandro G. Iñárritu [Babel, The Revenant], but let’s not get sidetracked…)

A mother dies.  At the reading of her will, her twin son and daughter receive a mission: go to the Middle East and track down their previously unknown father and brother, and give them letters in sealed envelopes.  Only then will the mother allow a headstone to be erected on her gravesite.

The brother, Simon, is skeptical, owing to the mother’s strange behavior in her later years, but the daughter, Jeanne, dutifully follows her mother’s wishes and travels to an unnamed country in the Middle East and begins the laborious process of tracking down anyone who knew her mother and father.

We also get flashbacks of the mother, Nawal, in her younger years, paralleling the daughter’s search.  We learn that Nawal, a Christian, fell in love with a Muslim, Wahab, which is a BIG no-no, to say the least.  Soon, Wahab is out of the picture, and Nawal gives birth to a son who is immediately taken from her arms and delivered to an orphanage.

So far, this is standard soap opera material, but it’s depicted with gorgeous cinematography and spot-on direction.  Director Villeneuve uses a lot of wide shots that have a stark beauty; they reminded me of some of the memorable vistas from Bonnie and Clyde and The Deer Hunter.

When Nawal gets a little older, she decides to track down her son.  This is made difficult owing to the state of war that now exists between Muslims and Christian Nationalists.  Attacks and reprisals make it nearly impossible to find accurate records.  She travels alone from one burned-out orphanage to another looking for clues.  At a key moment, she flags down a bus, but is very careful to first hide her crucifix necklace and put on a head-covering.  Can’t be too careful.

At this point, regrettably, I have to abandon summarizing the story, because the less you know about what happens after Nawal gets on that bus, the more effective those events will be.  Suffice to say it’s a life-changing event, one that sends her on a wildly careening path from activist to assassin to political prisoner.

All of this, naturally, comes as a shock to her children, Jeanne and Simon, who are starting to think this search for missing family members may be a mistake.  At one point, someone makes an important statement: “Sometimes, it’s better not to know some things.”

So…what is this movie really about?  It’s not just about the mystery of the missing family members, which is enough of an engine to make a compelling movie on its own, especially when it’s intertwined with the mother’s past.  But there is a deeper, much more profound level to Incendies that is not apparent until the movie’s final sections, when the threads of Nawal’s past converge in a moment of shattering revelations.  The movie beautifully hides its real motives along the way so you get blindsided by its true message, its true heart.

I dunno, maybe I’m getting too mushy.  But that’s the effect this movie had on me.  I’ve only experienced this kind of emotional catharsis after a precious few films.  It’s impossible to fully describe it without giving away the secrets lying at the heart of Incendies.

DRAG ME TO HELL (2009)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Sam Raimi
Cast: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Dileep Rao, David Paymer
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 92% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Christine Brown has a good job, a great boyfriend, and a bright future. But in three days, she’s going to hell.


Re-read that plot description above.  That’s pretty much the movie in a nutshell.  And it was directed by Sam Raimi getting back into his grindhouse-y horror zone after five years of hobnobbing with Columbia Pictures and their Spider-Man franchise.

In other words, it’s a movie showcasing a director getting back to what he does best.  And it is nothing if not effective.

Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a loan officer at a bank, tries to impress her boss by refusing to extend the home loan of an elderly woman, Sylvia Ganush, who is facing eviction.  Later that night, Mrs. Ganush accosts Christine in a parking garage (one of the movie’s many exceptionally effective scare sequences).  As revenge for rejecting her loan extension, Mrs. Ganush bestows a curse upon Christine: in three days, a demonic spirit will come for Christine’s soul, and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

(We have already received a glimpse of what potentially awaits Christine during a horrifying prologue…and it is not good.  Helpful Tip for a Longer Life: Never piss off an old woman with a glass eye.)

Drag Me to Hell is not really trying to be “great”.  It’s a D-list story filmed by an A-list director.  It’s not concerned with the thematic dichotomy of good versus evil, or anything like that.  It is simply a delivery device for scares intended to jolt people out of their chairs every 5 or 10 minutes.

And, MAN, does it deliver.  There are sequences of poor Christine alone in her house, while something sinister prowls around outside, and eventually gets into the house…and I haven’t been that scared since I saw John Carpenter’s Halloween on VHS for the very first time.

There’s a creepy scene involving a single fly buzzing around Christine’s head while she sleeps, and then it alights on her face and crawls INSIDE HER NOSTRIL and then OUT THE OTHER ONE.  <shudder>  But then it moves towards her lips and starts to force its way INTO HER MOUTH…and it just makes your skin crawl in a way that’s hard to describe.  Accomplished with no blood or gore, just…eeyuck.

Mrs. Ganush herself makes a few encore appearances, just to keep things interesting, and then there’s a climactic séance at the house of a celebrated medium who once battled this particular evil spirit before.  This will certainly go down in movie history as one of the scariest/most gonzo séances EVER.  Without going into too many details, let me just say this: I could tell you the scene involves, at one point, a talking goat, and you might laugh, because what’s funnier than a talking goat, and it IS funny for the first couple of seconds…but that laughter will fade as soon as you see what happens next.  The word “bizarre” was invented for the séance in Drag Me to Hell.

That right there sort of encapsulates the general mood of this movie.  In all of his horror films, Sam Raimi’s sense of humor was always evident, most especially in Evil Dead 2 [1987] and Army of Darkness [1992].  In returning to the genre that started his career, he retains that gleeful, mischievous tone.  As horrifying as Drag Me to Hell is, it’s also pretty damn funny, even while we’re getting the bejeebers scared out of us.  (It’s hard to explain without getting into spoilers, but you’ll see what I mean when you watch it.)

So there you go.  It’s a horror movie that will make you laugh and shriek at the same time.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

…but I would advise checking your doors are locked before starting it. Just saying.

KNOWING (2005)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Alex Proyas

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Ben Mendelsohn (plus an early sighting of a young Liam Hemsworth in his first movie role)
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 33%

PLOT: M.I.T. professor John Koestler links a mysterious list of numbers from a 50-year-old time capsule to past and future disasters and starts to wonder…what happens when the numbers run out?


[SPOILER ALERTS…not that anyone is going to rush out and stream this, but whatever, still … SPOILER ALERTS]

Knowing is a polarizing film from Alex Proyas, the visionary director of The Crow (1994) and Dark City (1998).  It tells the story of an M.I.T. professor whose son is given an envelope that has been sealed inside a time capsule for 50 years.  Inside the envelope is a list of seemingly random numbers that appear to be meaningless, until he notices a pattern emerging.

I remember when this movie came out very well.  I was stoked to go see it because Alex Proyas is one of my favorite directors. But it got PANNED right out of the gate.  And most of the negativity stemmed from the movie’s ending, which turned off the vast majority of moviegoers who thought was the equivalent of someone saying, “It was all a dream!”

Knowing does NOT have one of your typical Shyamalan-esque endings.  The ending follows the strict logic of everything that has come before and arrives at an astonishing, awe-inspiring conclusion that left me gobsmacked.  But more on that later.

Let’s talk about how Knowing works.  First, everything about the movie sets us up for what appears to be a standard horror movie with Nicolas Cage’s son apparently in danger from mysterious pale figures in dark coats who show up at their house in the middle of the night and just stand there…watching the house.  Creepy.  At one point, one of them somehow gets INSIDE the house, a sequence that ends with the boy having a nightmarish vision of a raging forest fire.

These are, so far, basic horror tropes.  But director Proyas uses skillful styling and editing to create something that feels as creepy and suspenseful as any horror movie I’ve seen.  In fact, every time I watch Knowing, I find myself still on edge during certain scenes, particularly the ones involving the pale strangers.

Another feature of the movie that I feel elevates it is the visceral nature of the key scenes involving various accidents.  See, that 50-year-old list of numbers is actually a list of dates on which various catastrophes occurred over the last 50 years, along with the number of casualties…and Nicolas Cage’s character, John Koestler, can plainly see that three of them are coming up in the next few days.

So it’s a foregone conclusion that we, the audience, are going to see some sort of major accidents.  And, man…I have never seen, before or since, such astonishing, nerve-racking sequences of horrible accidents in films.  I don’t want to be a spoiler, but I CAN say that I guarantee this is one movie that will never be an option for in-flight movie channels on commercial airliners.  I mean…when it happens, it’s out of the blue, and it feels as real as these things can get with CGI.  It literally takes my breath away every time I watch, and I’ve seen it like ten times.  Easily.

So now that Koestler has proof the list is real, the question that keeps nagging at him is…what happens when the numbers run out?

And that’s where Knowing leapfrogs over other genre thrillers and actually becomes ABOUT something.  Before finding that fateful list, Koestler asks his students at M.I.T. to write a paper on determinism versus coincidence in the natural world.  That is, do you believe that everything up to this point has happened for a reason, or is literally everything we do completely random, with no purpose or design?  Koestler believes in the latter, even though he’s the son of a minister, a man with whom he’s had no contact for years.

Koestler has his reasons.  Years ago, his wife was killed in a hotel fire, an event which he perceives as a random accident.  But then he gets this list, and it seems as if someone has been able to accurately predict seemingly random events.  This list flies in the face of everything he’s believed for years.  If these accidents are predictable, is everything ELSE predictable?  Is there a REASON for the accidents?  Is life more than just the result of millions of years of evolution and genetic mutations?

Koestler cannot square this list with his personal beliefs, and it’s that conflict that’s at the heart of the movie.  Knowing forces its main character (and, by extension, the audience) to make a decision one way or the other.  Is there a plan for existence, or is it random?  How long can he ignore the evidence of his own eyes before he makes his choice?

And over all of that, there’s still the issue of the list running out of numbers.  What happens then?  The end of the world?  Is he destined to SAVE the world?  Or stand by helplessly as pre-determined events spin forward out of his control?

This is why the movie stands above other genre sci-fi thrillers.  It poses tough questions and forces us to confront our own beliefs.  And the movie does not take the easy way out by trying to have it both ways.  The finale of Knowing is as implacably logical as it is visually stunning.

Detractors of the movie decry this finale as a “deus ex machina” that cheapens everything that came before.  I even remember some mild laughter in the audience when I first saw it.  But seriously…given everything that happened before, what ELSE would have been a good ending?  Have Koestler wake up from a dream?  Have him discover that it was all really a government experiment?  A drug-fueled hallucination?

None of those would have worked NEARLY as good as the ending the movie DOES provide.  As I said before, it follows the logic of its own story to the bitter end, and gives us some spectacular visuals into the bargain.  It doesn’t cheat, it doesn’t pander or cop out.  We have gone from point A to point B, and the only way out is through point C.  When you think about it, isn’t that kind of audacious?  How many movies have had the nerve to follow the courage of its own convictions?  (I’m reminded of The Bridge on the River Kwai with its own fatalistic finale, combining spectacular visuals with an ending that was not a “happy” one by any stretch of the imagination.)

I stand behind this movie as one of the great sci-fi mystery thrillers.  Love the ending or hate it…I challenge you to come up with an ending that would have been better than the one presented in the film.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Paquin
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 92% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Two young brothers deal with the divorce of their parents in 1986 Brooklyn, specifically the Park Slope neighborhood.


I started writing this as a “conventional” review, and I found myself unable to make it more than a simple summary of the plot.  I have rarely seen a movie that has left me more inarticulate than this one.  I can tell you the movie works, and works extremely well, but I am unable to explain exactly why.

It’s a simple story of a husband and wife going through divorce, deciding on joint custody of their two sons, and the complications that ensue.  The husband, Bernard (Jeff Daniels), is a literature professor and a published novelist, but who hasn’t had anything published for some time.  The wife, Joan (Laura Linney), is in the final stages of getting her own first novel published.  This fact may or may not be one of the causes of the divorce, but Bernard is pretty sure it is.  Their sons, Walt (high school senior, played by Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (maybe 12 years old), deal with this news in a predictable manner: initial numb acceptance, then some acting out a little later.

Bernard, whose well-educated narcissism is impossible to miss, almost cheerfully informs the sons that he and Joan will share joint custody evenly during the week.  One of the sons asks, “How can you share us evenly?”

“I’ll have you every other Thursday,” Bernard explains helpfully.  This answers the question without making anything better.

Walt starts a relationship with a classmate whom he coldly describes as “cute, but not gorgeous.”  Bernard casually invites a female student to live in a vacant room in his new house.  Joan and Bernard fiercely protect their “days” with their sons.  Frank starts drinking beer and masturbating in public places (this is handled with much more discretion than that description would have you believe).

But the story itself is not what makes this movie such a pleasure.  It’s the movie’s style and editing that create a unique experience.  The movie clocks in at an unthinkable 81 minutes, WITH credits.  I learn from the bonus features on the Blu-Ray that it was shot on Super-16 film stock with a mostly hand-held camera, lending the film a low-budget, documentary look that enhances its “reality”.  Scenes last only long enough for us to get the point before a jump cut takes us to the next plot point.  Normally, this creates in me a sense of nervousness or anxiety, but for some reason it didn’t work that way.  I never felt cheated or short-changed.  It all just felt “right.”  It gave me the same sensation I get when I’m reading a really good short story with sharply-drawn characters and impeccable dialogue.

That may sound like more details than I had promised at the beginning, but it’s really just a clinical description.  Words can’t express how the film’s brevity, atmosphere, dialogue, and characters all combined to produce one of the most touching films about family and/or divorce that I’ve ever seen.

(No, I HAVEN’T seen Marriage Story by this same director, Noah Baumbach, but I will get around to it one day.  Today is not that day, though.)

QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Marc Forster
Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judy Dench, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, David Harbour
My Rating: 5/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 65%

PLOT: Super-spy James Bond investigates a mysterious organization that seems intent on cornering Bolivia’s water supply.  Yes, you read that right.


The trivia on IMDb for Quantum of Solace (Bond #22, for those keeping track) contains this revealing nugget:  “Editing this movie was so stressful that co-editor Richard Pearson was brought in to assist Matt Chesse, to speed up editing. Director Marc Forster only had five weeks to edit the entire movie. In his previous movies, Forster would take an average of fourteen weeks to edit.”

Right there.  That’s the biggest problem with Quantum of Solace, the reason it’s ranked among my least favorite Bond films.  The stunts are there, the wordplay is there, the Bond girls are there…I was going to add “good villain” to the list, but more on him later.

Anyway, most of the important elements are there, but the movie never really makes us CARE about what’s going on.  We do get the barest bones of a connection to Casino Royale from two years earlier, but that’s still not enough to bring this up to the level I’ve grown accustomed to with Bond films.  This film feels more like one of Vin Diesel’s old XxX movies.

One of the biggest problems is the aforementioned editing issue.  In Casino Royale, the fight scenes were clearly defined and visually exciting.  (Remember that fight in the stairwell?  BRILLIANT.)  In Quantum of Solace, the fight scenes are cut so rapidly I’d swear they were from a Michael Bay movie.  Rather than make the scenes more exciting, this had the effect of making the scenes feel like the trailer for the movie, rather than the movie itself.  It was distracting, and lessened the tension for me.

Another problem that kept me from caring what happened is the plot.  Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) is the villain this time around, and I’m sorry, but he does not exactly come across as a dangerous fellow.  He’s a little on the shorter side, he doesn’t dress impeccably (except when attending the opera), and his hair looks…greasy.  This is not a villain; this is a sidekick looking for a villain.

And his evil plot?  Using an environmental advocate organization as a front to…corner the Bolivian water supply.

The water.  In Bolivia.  After decades of James Bond stopping villains who wanted to do everything from steal nuclear submarines to kill literally every human on Earth, it seems to me this particular mission could have been left to the varsity squad.

There are other elements that were distracting.  David Harbour makes an appearance as a CIA agent whose character serves no real purpose other than to be the stereotypically obnoxious American.  One scene takes place during a beautifully staged outdoor production of Tosca that looked so amazing, I almost wished I could have left the movie just to finish watching the opera.  Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields (first name Strawberry…get it?), another in a very long line of female characters in Bond films whose sole purpose is to sleep with Bond and/or get killed…or both.  Usually both.  (In an interesting first for the franchise, Bond actually does NOT sleep with the main Bond girl…go figure.)

The movie’s showdown takes place in a location that looked very real, but was ALSO distracting.  What is a four-star hotel doing in the very middle of the Bolivian desert?  We get a clumsy exposition line about the hotel running on “fuel cells” that are apparently poorly protected indeed, given the building’s incendiary tendencies during the climax.

I’m making the movie sound like a BAD movie.  It’s not truly BAD, but it just feels so slipshod in comparison to its predecessor, Casino Royale.

So what happened here?  Well, another tidbit on IMDb quotes Daniel Craig as saying this is the last time he’d work on a Bond movie without a finished script.  I guess THAT’S what happened here.  Shooting a movie without a finished script can sometimes end well, but not usually.  It’s like building a 30-story skyscraper using plans that only go up to the 15th floor, with couriers bringing new blueprints for the floors already under construction as well as the unbuilt floors.

But…BUT.  There is one overwhelmingly bright spot in the film: the THEME SONG.  Performed by Jack White and Alicia Keys, it marked the first (and, so far, only) Bond song to be performed by a duet.  It’s called “Another Way to Die”, and it is a SCORCHER.  Words fail me.  It’s down, dirty, mean, and growling, complete with the occasional staccato brass flourishes so evocative of John Barry’s score from earlier Bond films.

Too bad the rest of the movie is unable to live up to the promise of its title song.  Alas.

BARAKA (1992)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Ron Fricke
Cast: N/A
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 81% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The rhythms of life and time are explored in this wordless montage of spectacular filmed images from around the globe, set to a haunting, ethereal score.


Some time ago, I wrote a post on Facebook about movies with an extremely rare quality: transcendence.  Movies that are so good that mere genre definitions are not enough to quantify them.  I’m not talking about perfect examples OF a genre (Aliens, Unforgiven, Young Frankenstein, et al.)  I’m talking about movies that wind up being more than the sum of their parts and take on a haunting, spiritual quality.

Film is an extremely subjective medium, so my list of such “transcendental” movies will likely differ wildly from your own.  For example: Breaking the Waves (1996), a meditation on the capacity for human suffering, forgiveness, and the definition of belief.  Or Cloud Atlas (2012), a mind-bending journey that poses the greatest “what-if” question of our existence.  Or Fearless (1993), a mainstream drama concealing life-altering truths at its core.

And then there’s Baraka, a 1992 film that premiered in Canada on the festival circuit before receiving its American release a year later.  I suppose it would have to be classified as a documentary, since it consists entirely of wordless images edited together into a feature-length music video.  It was directed by Ron Fricke, who had previously worked with director Godfrey Reggio on Koyaanisqatsi (1982), a groundbreaking film, similar in structure to Baraka, that introduced time-lapse photography to the mainstream; it’s hard to believe, but there was a time when time-lapse was a novelty.

But this clinical description doesn’t nearly do justice to the religious experience that is Baraka.  This is one of those movies that begs for the best viewing conditions possible, on the biggest screen and with the best sound system you can afford.  The cinematography simply defies belief.  There are monumental shots of Himalayan mountain ranges, ancient temples, an enormous graveyard of decommissioned B-52 bombers, the interior of a spectacular cathedral where the walls appear to be inlaid with millions of tiny mirrors.

The film’s score is credited to Michael Stearns, but it also includes existing musical pieces that lend certain sequences an exotic, global feel.  These music choices are absolutely essential to Baraka’s success. 

In particular, a musical piece called “Host of Seraphim” by Dead Can Dance brings unbearable sadness and pity to a sequence in which we see Indian families picking through massive garbage dumps, searching for food or God knows what.  The sequence shifts to showing homeless people, families, sleeping on city streets, next to sewer grates, under makeshift shelters, and there is an overwhelming sense of mourning that this kind of thing is happening today, right now, all over the world.

In addition to the sequence above, there are also sequences depicting members of various religions worshiping in their own unique way.  And oceans of clouds swirling and flowing over and around mountaintops.  And the horrible abandoned camps at Auschwitz and in Cambodia.  And majestic waterfalls.  Oil fires in Kuwait.  A vast, still lake that perfectly mirrors the sky above it.

Every time I watch this film (this marks at least the 9th or 10th time I’ve seen it), I am left at the end feeling hopeful, expansive, with the urgent need to show this film to other people.  Is this what they mean by religious fervor?  I felt this same way after watching Parasite (2019), for example, but for very different reasons.  Parasite is thrilling.  Baraka is transcendent.  It pierces through my sometimes cynical expectations of what a movie should be and presents me with a showcase of the human experience.  It makes me feel, however temporarily, more connected to the global population as we travel through the cosmos on our huge (and also tiny) planet.  It gives me a shiver of comprehension when I look at the ruins of ancient temples on the screen and realize the people who built them many thousands of years ago were just…people.  Like you and like me.  Humans on this uniquely life-sustaining chunk of space rock, hurtling through the universe.

You may disagree with my assessment.  You may hunt it down on Netflix or Amazon or wherever, and you may give it a shot, and you may turn it off after 15 minutes, thinking, “What was he THINKING???  This is boring as hell!”  I suppose that’s the beauty of this movie.  It’s like a Rorschach test.  It doesn’t tell a story, per se.  It’s more like a tone poem, where certain images are juxtaposed with completely different images, but which are nevertheless similar.  This kind of moviemaking doesn’t always work.  (See, for example, Naqoyqatsi (2002), also directed by Reggio, part of his vaunted Qatsi trilogy, but which I find insufferably cryptic.)  But when it does work, it’s quite literally magical.

So, if you can, go ahead and see if this is available somewhere.  Check your television’s settings so you get the optimal picture.  Turn your speakers up as loud as you can get before the neighbors call 911.  And open yourself up to the possibility that a picture truly is worth a thousand words.