I review “Moon,” an indie a science fiction film from director Duncan Jones, for the Seattle PostGlobe.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is on the verge of unraveling. Counting down the days until his three-year contract as the lone operator of a moonbase operation mining the new moon rock wonder fuel that has solved Earth’s energy, with only a computerized robot named Gertie (voiced by Kevin Spacey in a dispassionate HAL-9000 tone with just a hint of human concern) for company and pre-recorded messages keeping a tenuous connection to home, he’s getting ragged around the edges. But when he wakes up in the infirmary after a bad crash, he’s suddenly much more focused, alert, healthy. And soon he’s talking to himself, and his other self – physical double, supernatural doppelganger or desperate vision of a man slowly going mad with isolation, we’re not quite sure – is answering.

Essentially a one-man, two character piece, “Moon” could be an old “Twilight Zone” episode nurtured into a feature.

Read the complete review on the Seattle PostGlobe here.

The Steel Helmet is Samuel Fuller’s third film as a director and his first masterpiece and it remains one of the greatest war movies ever made. I write about the film and its history for Turner Classic Movies online.

Shot in ten days, with only a couple of days of exteriors and the rest on studio backlots and sets, on a budget of just over $100,000, The Steel Helmet isn’t a paean to surface realism. Battle scenes were filled out with only 25 extras, students from UCLA who doubled as both American and Korean soldiers, and Griffith Park stood in for the Korean jungles. But what Fuller lost to budgetary restrictions he gained in the freedom to portray the experience of men in war. Where other directors who came out of World War II made films that intently explored the grim face of battle, Fuller’s war movies were about madness and meaninglessness, and that theme began here.

The film opens on a close-up of a banged-up infantry helmet, which rises to reveal a grim, grimy American soldier, staring out from under it with almost dead-eyed desperation. The soldier, his arms bound behind him, his leg wounded, writhes through the corpses of a massacre until he freezes as another approaches. All we see are bare feet, peasant pants and a dangling rifle. Is it friend or foe? That question hangs over almost every incident of the film as the soldier, gruff World War II retread Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans, an unknown in his first starring role), tries to make his way back to the American lines, with a Korean orphan tagging along like a puppy (Zack nicknames him Short Round, “because you’re not going all the way”; Spielberg borrowed the name for the cute tagalong kid in the second “Indiana Jones” film) and ragtag platoon lost behind enemy lines. …

“This story is dedicated to the United States Infantry,” reads the onscreen legend at the opening of the film. It ends with a far less comforting thought. In place of the traditional “The End,” Fuller leaves the audience with “There is no end to this story.” In between, Fuller confronts the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II (it was the first American film to address the issue in any form) and the Jim Crow laws in the South, explores racism within the ranks of the American army and shows an American soldier shoot an unarmed prisoner in a blast of pure rage.

Read the entire feature on TCM here. The film plays on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, January 3 and is available on DVD in the the Eclipse box set The First Films of Samuel Fuller.

I review Michael Mann’s Public Enemies at the Seattle PostGlobe.

An honest to goodness grown-up epic in the season of adolescent fantasies and overpriced empty action spectacles, “Public Enemies” is Michael Mann’s take on the gangster glory days of the depression, when the most flamboyant and notorious bank robbers became the outlaw heroes of the day. That makes Johnny Depp great casting as John Dillinger, whose spree of daylight bank robberies and daring getaways between May 1933 (when he was paroled after serving an almost nine-year prison stretch for armed robbery) and July 1934 got him branded “Public Enemy Number 1″ by the FBI and made him a folk hero to many Americans.

Mann plays on that mystique in Public Enemies. Depp’s Dillinger is a charmer and a cagey media player. He targets banks not just because that’s where the money is, but because in the depths of the Depression, many dispossessed Americans saw banks as the enemy and Dillinger as a kind of Robin Hood figure getting some back for them. And while he has no compunctions about taking civilian hostages as human shields, he acts more like a host than a kidnapper, sharing jokes with his temporary captives and turning their ordeal into an adventure that they’ll be able to tell the papers and newsreels. Depp gives Dillinger a natural geniality born of confidence and courage that borders on thrill-seeking. He seems to thrive on the charge of executing a heist, whether it be a bank or a prison break. He’s cool and cagey, keeping his emotions in check on the job but for a cocky little grin that he lets slip when things are going his way, while off the job he lets himself fall for Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful hat check girl that becomes the love of his outlaw life.

Read the complete review at the Seattle PostGlobe here.

In Eastbound and Down, Danny McBride is former Major League pitcher Kenny Powers, a washed-up superstar who bought in to the hype and is now despised by who are, simply put, sick of his crap. Blissfully free of self-awareness, Powers doesn’t let the crash and burn of his career put a dent in his raging ego. “That is why I am better than everyone else in the world,” is his mantra, even as he moves in to his brother’s middle-class home and takes a job as a junior high school gym teacher in his home town. Not the best career choice for an arrogant jerk with anger management issues. Created for HBO by McBride with Ben Best and Jody Hill and co-produced by Will Ferrell (who co-stars in two episodes) and Adam McKay (who also directs a couple of episodes), this is a cable series created with the same collaborative spirit and improvisational approach of Will Ferrell’s movies, and it’s funnier and sharper than Ferrell’s last couple of pictures. Note that David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) directs three episodes as well. The limited series numbers only six half-hour episodes, but they make for a pretty tight story that even allows Powers to grow up a little. But not much. Also features deleted scenes (the extended “Stevie’s Dark Secret,” which apparently was too much even for HBO, is so perverse that it’s given its own supplement), commentary and a 12-minute featurette that offers the best description I’ve heard of the show: “It’s like if Dennis Hopper shot The Natural.”

Hal Ashby’s 1982 gambling comedy Lookin’ to Get Out, directed from a script co-written by star Jon Voight, was a critical and commercial flop on its original release. Seen today, in a longer cut than was originally released (Voight was pressured to edit it down by 15 minutes by the studio), it looks better, if not quite great. Voight is Alex, a hopeless gambling addict with unflagging optimism in his own abilities who sets off to Vegas with his schlub of a best friend Jerry (Burt Young) for a “big score” to settle a gambling debt. Alex is flamboyant, effusive, a perpetual motion hustler racing with out-of-control momentum. Jerry is constantly worried and unceasingly loyal, but at root he’s a good-hearted romantic who takes everyone at their word until they prove their word isn’t worth anything. The plot is a completely unconvincing series of coincidences but the dynamism of the characters and their friendships is marvelous. Voight and Young are like kids when they get excited, immature but utterly devoted to one another, and Young delivers the defining line with such unforced conviction that it won me over completely: “I don’t want your money. Alex, he does. I can’t help that, but he’s my friend and you take the good with the bad. Ann-Margret is touching as a woman from Voight’s past whose romantic idealism is tempered by her growing realization that her old lover is completely unsuitable as a father to her daughter. Ashby’s indulgence allows the film get lost in comic chases and brawls (not to mention the crazy plot involving mistaken identity and a washed up gambler played by Bert Remsen) but he always returns to the characters, who are the real story of the film. You can tell what footage has been restored by the speckling on the film (it appears to be from a workprint, but the wear is minor and the footage is otherwise sharp and has strong color) and it’s all character stuff, the very thing that makes the film work. But, lordy, is that eighties synthesizer score painful.
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The full story has still not been told but, simply put, Dennis James has been ejected from his seat at the Mighty Wurlitzer, where he has accompanied the silent movie series at the Paramount Theatre for the past 11 years. James has spent his career as a professional organ player and composer largely accompanying silent films in the traditional style, both in solo performances and in collaboration with orchestras or guest musicians, and promoting the lost art of accompanying silent films as part of the silent film experience. He helped the Seattle Theatre Group launch the Silent Movie Mondays film series in 1998 and has been active in the continued restoration of the theatre’s Wurlitzer organ. (The Paramount is one of the few preserved movie houses in the country that still has its original silent film organ.) And he has used his contacts with the studios and film preservation houses to secure the best silent film prints around. He has been essential to nurturing the series and one of the primary reasons for the success of the series.

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[Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.]

Spike Lee’s vibrant, vital, thoroughly accomplished third feature opens on a call to action — “Fight the power!” shouts Public Enemy in the credits — and ends with a call to “wake up!”

Rosie Perez pumps out an aggressive shout of a dance in the opening credits, staged in front of a tenement set bathed in fiery red light. Not merely an evocation of the heat wave (literal and figurative) on this scorcher of a summer day in New York’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, it anticipates the incendiary drama to come: Confrontation will end in conflagration.

As a private citizen, Spike Lee is aggressively outspoken and provocative. As a filmmaker, he is remarkably inclusive and egalitarian. Do the Right Thing gives every character in the bustling ensemble a voice, a sensibility and a dignity, from ranting would-be activist Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) to philosophical neighborhood drunk Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) to pizzeria proprietor Sal (Danny Aiello), who displays his American-Italian pride on his ethnic-exclusive “Wall of Fame.”

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In anticipation of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, I surveyed the gangster movies for the bad and beautiful of anti-heroes of the genre for MSN Movies.

Kiss Me Deadly: Hollywood’s Baddest Screen Gangsters

From Robin Hood to Jesse James, we’ve always had a soft spot for outlaws, idealizing them as folk heroes and romanticizing them as rebels. But gangsters hold an allure all their own. When their exploits exploded across the media and burned up movies screens during the depths of the depression, the country became entranced by these rebels without a cause. That they were killers, sociopaths and ruthless opportunists with a gang and a gun was beside the point. They were rock stars with a tommy gun: sexy and savage, dapper and dangerous, seductive and explosive.

Read more about James Cagney, Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, Chow Yun-fat, Alain Delon (the most beautiful of the screen gangsters) and more on MSN here.

My feature piece on Last Year at Marienbad, the film and the Criterion DVD/Blu-ray release, is running on the Turner Class Movies website.

As the old joke goes, in the dictionary, next to the phrase “art cinema,” is the poster for Last Year at Marienbad. Characters without names, played by actors who barely change expression, walk through the lavish but coldly alienating vacation castles reserved for the rich and aristocratic. One elegantly poised man (Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi), identified as “X” in the credits,” tries to convince a beautiful but impassive woman, “A” (Delphine Seyrig, in a hairstyle as coolly sculpted as the film itself), that they met last year and had an affair and made plans to run away together. She tells him, with a preternaturally restrained sense of calm, that they have never met. He persists. She resists. Scenes shift through time and space and perhaps reality. Any “objective” perspective is rendered meaningless in the abstractions of the storytelling, the enigma of the characters, the blurring of past and present, memory and fantasy, even space itself.

Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig

The second feature film by Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad defies and confounds audience expectations of cinema narrative. The film is a true collaboration between “Nouvelle Vague” director Alain Resnais, who sought to challenge the conventions of cinematic storytelling, and novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, a leading author in the “nouvelle romain” movement, which favored elaborate observation and surface description of events without character analysis or psychological perspective. Robbe-Grillet’s script is filled with detailed description and even suggestions for camerawork, but features no indications of emotional or psychological states of the characters. Resnais helped guide and shape the story but did not participate in the actual scripting beyond notes and suggestions, and he was very faithful to the individual scenes and the overall structure while bringing his own distinctive authorial presence in his exacting direction, his acutely stylized scenes and mise-en-scene sculpted out of actors, décor and theatrical lighting.

The effect is a film that defies emotional connection. It holds story and characters at arm’s length, playing out as part mystery, part intellectual exercise, yet the very enigma is spellbinding. The scenes are stiffly formal, with actors positioned in space rather than directed, reciting rather than acting. They are stripped of backstory or psychological inner lives and have no ties to a world outside of this world. (Resnais originally wanted the politics of the day to infiltrate their lives but Robbe-Grillet convinced him otherwise and Resnais, in the end, realized he was right.) X tells A their story in the form of second person narration, always saying “you,” never “I.”

Read the complete piece on TCM here.

I review Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the bigger, longer, more expensive and completely unnecessary sequel to the amusing 2007 blockbuster about giant alien robots that transform into cars and trucks while causing epic amounts of property damage, for the Seattle PostGlobe.

Revenge of the Fallen picks up a few years after the first Transformers movie. The Autobots (they’re the good guys) have teamed up with the American military on a strike team hunting down the last of the Decepticons (they’re the bad guys determined to kill the planet, out of spite, apparently) still lurking on Earth. The opening scene, where all the mecha-aliens transform back and forth between giant robots and various makes of automobiles and heavy trucks, becomes so abstract it looks like a Jackson Pollock canvas in motion screeching through the middle of a Hollywood action movie.

Read the complete review on the Seattle PostGlobe here.

The very definition of art cinema, Alain Resnais’ 1960 Last Year at Marienbad defies audience identification, narrative clarity, even any assurance that anything we see is "real" in any sense. Characters without names, played by actors who barely change expression, walk through the lavish but coldly alienating vacation castles reserved for the rich and aristocratic, lost in time and space. One elegantly poised man (Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi), identified as "X" in the credits," tries to convince a beautiful but impassive woman, "A" (Delphine Seyrig, in a hairstyle as coolly sculpted as the film itself), that they met last year and had an affair and made plans to run away together. She tells him, with a preternaturally restrained sense of calm, that they have never met. It could be a ghost story (the church organ score is appropriately eerie and ominous) in a European castle, the foreign equivalent of the Overlook Hotel. Or it could be film of memory, or perhaps dreams of a wished-for past, filled with flashbacks/memories/stories, but which are themselves full of elisions and gaps and even, at times, contradictory. It’s strange and surreal, full of odd humor and games, the most elaborate of which is the very tale that centers the narrative. Did something happen last year at Marienbad (Friedriksbaad or whatever lavish castle vacation spot was in fashion that year)? Or is it simply an elaborate tale, a seductive promise cutting through the stifling existence of social decorum?

Criterion’s new edition comes out on both DVD and Blu-ray in a superb transfer from a rich fine-grain master print that has been digitally cleaned and fine-tuned, supervised and approved by Alain Resnais. At the director’s insistence, Criterion includes the original, unrestored soundtrack along with the remastered, cleaned-up version. "By correcting so-called flaws, one can lost the style of a film altogether," he writes in the liner notes. Like The Seventh Seal released last week by Criterion, the Blu-ray edition is the a sight to behold and the closest I have come to seeing a beautifully preserved film play on my screen. The image felt alive, like perfectly restored celluloid projected from a well-tempered projector, and pulled me through the image. The DVD also features original half-hour documentary Unraveling the Enigma: The Making of Marienbad, a new, generous 33-minute audio-only interview with Alain Resnais and two early the short documentaries by Resnais: Toute la memoire du Monde and Le Chant du Styrene.

"I lost my memory. I can’t remember anything about the Lebanon war. Just one image." Waltz With Bashir is both art and autobiography from Ari Folman, a filmmaker with a deep interest in psychoanalysis. The memory gap was real ("It’s not stored in my system," he explains) and attempted to reconstruct those missing memories with the help of friends and fellow soldiers. Those conversations on his odyssey back in time and memory (a couple of them reconstructed with actors for the film, the rest recorded with the actual subjects) are the foundation of the script. "The memory is dynamic," explains psychiatrist Ori Sivan. So is Folman’s film, which uses animation not just to illustrate but explore the subjective quality of their remembrances, a mix of mind’s eye first-person observation, dream, fantasy and the exaggeration of emotional memory. Executed in bold lines and slow but fluid movements, it’s never sensationalistic but always striking vivid and immediate. What begins as an introspective odyssey into the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative expose on the Sabra and Shatila massacres, events that sent shock waves through the Israeli men who were made inadvertent collaborators. But the final word is not their emotional trauma, but the stark reality of the event itself. The film was nominated for "Best Foreign Language Film" at the 2009 Academy Awards (its absence in the “Best Animated Feature” nominations caused a minor outbreak of outrage). Ari Folman provides commentary (he introduces himself as "writer, producer, director and main protagonist of the film") and a press conference Q&A (in English) and participates in a 12-minute featurette (in Hebrew with English subtitles). Also available on Blu-ray.

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Zed and Oh are ostensibly members of a pre-civilization tribe of hunter/gatherers, but despite the caveman hair and animal skin fashions they are simply Jack Black and Michael Cera slipping their familiar schtick into a historical lampoon. They’re the self-aggrandizing blowhard and the sweetly shy man-child as the goof and the geek of prehistoric man, where tribal politics is curiously similar to playground pecking order.

The exact positioning of Year One on the historical timeline is a little vague. Or perhaps imaginary. When Zed takes a bite from a golden apple from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, they are banished from the bubble of Eden and left to wander the Holy Lands of Biblical lore: sharing a meal with Adam and family, traveling to the twin sin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with Cain (David Cross) as their predatory travel guide, slipping in and out of slavery and servitude and prison as they try to free the women they love from captivity. Along the way they debate the meaning of life and the existence of God like a adolescent raunch comedy reworking of vaudeville philosophers Didi and Gogo in a Samuel Beckett rewrite of Mel Brooks’ History of the World by way of Teenage Caveman.

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The Francis Ford Coppola of old is back, or at least that’s what Coppola kept telling us in his barnstorming media blitz of the past month and what the reviews keep repeating. Tetro is Coppola’s first original screenplay since The Conversation in 1974. It’s the second film in his return to “personal films,” after Youth Without Youth. It’s cinematically adventurous and visually entrancing, and the Greek drama by way of Tennessee Williams story of brothers, father and sons struggling for acceptance and affirmation is inspired by (if not actually drawn from) his own family. You can feel Coppola reaching for the personal expression he grasped for throughout the seventies and gave up after the financial disasters of Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart. I really want to love this film as much as he does.

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