Reeling

The Shining Part 2?

A sequel to The Shining sounds like a terrible and contrived idea to me. I don't really care what Danny Torrance is up to as a fortysomething, or how his psychic powers have developed over the years. One of the great things about the book is that Danny's clairvoyance turns out to be a kind of MacGuffin - an excuse, really, for the ghosts that haunt the Overlook Hotel to cut loose and seriously mess with the minds of the poor Torrance family.

Stephen King is a radically different writer today than he was back in 1977. Even though I enjoyed his latest novel, his books no longer have the snap and pace that made reading The Shining such a compulsive experience (I don't know anybody who didn't devour that novel when they read it). Besides, let's face it: The Shining doesn't really belong to King anymore anyway. It hasn't, for decades.

Now and forever, The Shining belongs to Stanley Kubrick, whose film adaptation left such a seminal footprint, the movie has grown to eclipse the book that spawned it. Everybody knows Danny's encounter with a rotting corpse happens in room 237 (like in the movie) and not room 217 (like in the book). Everybody knows the Overlook's garden contains a giant maze (like in the movie) and not topiary animals (like in the book).

Even a passing mention of The Shining makes me think immediately of Wendy Carlos' sinister score - music laden with all sorts of ominous things to come - and the film's opening credits, which manage to make helicopter vistas of a scenic mountain range seem scary. And I haven't even mentioned Jack Nicholson's performance as Jack Torrance, one of the most iconic pieces of acting ever committed to film.

I don't see how anything King could come up with anything striking enough to overcome our memories of Kubrick's Shining, which made some fairly radical departures from the book and has become the de facto version of the story. Even King's proposed title for the sequel, Doctor Sleep, already feels like a let-down.

During the book reading in Toronto where he discussed the sequel, King said he wasn't completely committed to the new novel. "Maybe if I keep talking about it I won’t have to write it." Keep talking, Stephen. And leave The Shining alone.

  

Scientists conclude I am the most reliable and trustworthy movie critic in the entire universe

Scientists at NASA, in collaboration with research analysts at Miller-McCume, have crunched a decade's worth of stats and numbers and reached the following conclusion:

If you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist but can only read one review, you might prefer Rene Rodriguez, whose low standard deviation from the mean review score makes him very nearly a living critical average.

 In other words, instead of combing the Internet for hours each Friday to get a consensus of what critics think about the week's new movies, just come here and read what I have to say, because I am never ever wrong about a film, ever. (Well, OK, I may have overrated Reality Bites just a tad. But I was young and impressionable then.)

The brainiac David Sparks, who conducted the study, took the 25 most prolific movie reviewers from Metacritic.com (and not Rottentomatoes,com, which treats crap like this as criticism) and created a chart based on two factors: The favorability with which the critics rate the films and the degree to which their reviews tend to agree with other critics.

Here is the chart detailing Sparks' findings (click on it to make it bigger and readable). Among other interesting tidbits: Michael Wilmington (formerly of the Chicago Tribune) is the easiest-to-please critic on the list, giving more positive reviews than anyone else (Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was second). The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov was deemed the biggest grouch.

The San Francisco's Chronicle Mick LaSalle was the biggest contrarian, meaning if everybody likes it, he'll probably hate it. I wonder where the late, great Pauline Kael would have ranked on a chart like this one.

The study, which I first read about on the newly revived (and consistently great) Movieline.com, also revealed the films starring Elijah Wood have garnered the best reviews of any other actor from 1998-2008, although that may have something to do with the fact that he's only made five or so pictures, and three of them were Lord of the Rings movies. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viggo Mortensen (there's that LOTR factor again) came in second and third.

 Reading this study for some reason reminded me of an encounter I had walking out of the former AMC Fashion Island after a screening of Saving Private Ryan. This seemingly sane and nice-looking woman came up to me and said "You were so wrong about Titanic. That movie was the biggest piece of s--t I have ever seen in my life!" This was, of course, after Titanic had already won 820 Oscars and grossed $9.5 trillion worldwide, so the backlash had kicked in.

Then the woman, who was growing increasingly agitated even though I was just nodding politely and not saying a word, proceeded to go on a rant about how she always made a point of not going to see any film that I liked, because she knew if I thought it was good, that could only mean it was bad.

 "Well, at least I'm consistent," I replied, which only seemed to make her angrier. "Also, you must have really hated the movie we just saw, because I thought it was pretty great." At this point, she called me a very bad word and stormed out of the theater.

From now on, I'm carrying a copy of this report everywhere I go, so I can whip it out the next time I get accosted by an angry reader.

 

 

 

 

The worst horror movies of all time

 The editors at Moviefone have compiled an amusing list of the 25 worst horror movies of all time. Comprising a list like that is a Sisyphean endeavor, because no other movie genre is stuffed with more turkeys than horror. But the list includes some unexpected choices, such as Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror (no. 20 on the list), "with 'cribmaster' Snoop Dogg starring as the Hound of Hell."

The list includes lots of certifiably wretched dogs. Uwe Boll's House of the Dead (no. 16) has to rank as one of the worst films of any kind ever made. Feardotcom (no. 22) is the kind of soul-crushingly bad that sours you on watching movies for at least a month. And Neil LaBute's disastrous remake of The Wicker Man (no. 9) is so awesomely awful that I think of it as a comedy more than a horror film ("Not the bees! Noooo, not the bees!").

But I disagree with some of the other choices, like Lawrence Kasdan's adaptation of the Stephen King novel Dreamcatcher (no. 7), which I am aware everyone hates (it was such a flop, Kasdan hasn't directed another movie since), but I rather enjoy for the sheer loopiness of the plot.

I also think their choice for the number-one slot, Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween, is a little exaggerated. Yeah, the movie doesn't really work, and I've heard his version of Halloween II is even worse. But I can think of a thousand other well-known horror films that are infinitely worse. Like this one. Or this one. Or this, which is one of my favorite bad movies of all time.

Check out Moviefone's complete list here.

I've seen fire and I've seen rain

That's the crummy final poster for John Hillcoat's The Road, courtesy of comingsoon.net. The poster achieves the singular feat on conveying absolutely none of the mood and tone of the actual film. All it does is remind me of this:

Life after ''The Road''

 I finally saw The Road this morning, which I had been anticipating for a long time now. I'm not supposed to write too much about the film until the release date gets closer (it is due in theaters Nov. 25) but I will say this: Any film adaptation of The Road lives or dies by the ending. Whatever other details you change, you simply must duplicate the amazing emotional feat Cormac McCarthy pulls off at the end of the novel, or else you're left with a pointless, depressing film.

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And despite the movie's flaws, director John Hillcoat nails the ending so well I was fidgeting in my seat, trying hard not to blubber so other critics wouldn't make fun of me. The publicist who handled the screening did not fare as well: She was in all-out sob mode by the time she emerged from the theater.

I can see why some critics dismissed The Road after it screened at Toronto and Telluride last month. This is not the kind of movie that would fare well when viewed during the exhausting crunch of a film festival. I don't agree with that over-the-top rave that ran in Esquire in May, either. But that ending is going to stay with me for a while, just like the book did. I'll be writing a lot more about The Road next month.

Even the people who worked on the ''Fame'' remake admit the movie sucked

 Roger Ebert has posted a fascinating letter he received from a crew member of the recent Fame remake "reinvention" who concurs the new version suffered from the constraints of its PG-rating (the original was rated R) and a Disney Channel-friendly running time of 100 minutes (the original ran 135 minutes).

"Name Withheld" wrote Ebert: "The movie had such a good vibe in the early stages before we actually started to shoot it ... it was a pity it ended up being cut-up/chop-chopped and as you said, 'sanitized'. There were a lot of scenes that unfortunately did not make the final cut. These scenes showed stories about true friendship, love, passion, relationships, sexuality, disappointments and successes in detail thru character development. Though the locked version was 'tamed down' because of the PG rating, a DVD directors cut would probably show the actual stories of the 10 different characters."

The overly bland tone of the new Fame was one of the main things I complained about in my review. The author of the letter hopes that a fuller, PG-13 rated cut of the film will be released on DVD. But considering how poorly the movie fared, I'd be surprised if distributor MGM puts much effort into its home video release.

 The weekend the new Fame opened, I exchanged e-mails with Barbara Leshin, who lives in Weston and is the mother of Laura Dean, the actress who played the role of the dance student who contemplates suicide in the subway in the 1980 original (a scene I mentioned in my review). I asked Barbara if it would be OK to post her e-mails here. This is what she wrote:

My daughter, Laura Dean, played that part; and, even though she was sitting next to me at the 1980 preview, the scene was so realistic that I was scared to death she would be killed.  By the way, she actually said "F--k it,"  not screw it; and, since she was only 16, I had to give permission for her to say the word.

Lee Curreri, who played Bruno in the 1980 Fame and the TV show, is married to my other daughter, Sherry, and Wednesday night they went to the Los Angeles premier of the new Fame. Sherry sent me her review after seeing the film and it was basically the same as yours.  So again, I really appreciated your review.

The only part of the new Fame that was as good as the original was when the MGM lion roared at the beginning of the film. The most emotional part of the 1980 Fame, for me, was seeing my daughter standing on the stage as the orchestra warmed up for the graduation song, and then hearing and seeing  her singing the first few bars of  I Sing The Body Electric.

 I was afraid that seeing somebody else in that spectacular scene would upset me. However, it never happened in the 2009 film, and the music for the graduation scene was so awful that it had no effect on me at all. The only music I enjoyed was Out Here On My Own and of course Fame which was treated so badly in this film.

I think this movie would have been better as a Lifetime movie of the week or an ABC Afterschool Special.

Replacing I Sing the Body Electric with some stupid generic song  turned the Fame remake from a weak two stars into a one-star enterprise for me. Why would you not want to use the original song, which is eight shades of awesome?

Things that make you think ''Why?''

Director David Cronenberg is in discussions with 20th Century Fox to remake his own remake of The Fly. The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik reports Cronenberg is intrigued by the prospect of the creatures he could create with contemporary special effects, which have gotten a lot better since 1986.

This is so wrong on so many different levels. How could Cronenberg, who got career-high work out of Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis the first time around, be interested in recreating those characters with other actors? With the possible exception of Jeremy Irons' twisted twin brothers in Dead Ringers, The Fly's mad doctor and his suffering girlfriend are the most memorable protagonists in Cronenberg's canon.

All these years later, The Fly remains one of the grossest and most visceral horror films I've ever seen. I still have trouble watching the sequence in which the monkey teleportation goes seriously haywire, or the scene in which Goldblum's teeth and nails start falling out. The makeup and creature effects in that movie are already awesome. Why redo them with annoying CGI fakery?

The Fly is also a standalone master class in the various tones and tactics horror filmmakers use to scare us. Depending on the scene, the film is a beautiful example of dread and tension (Davis' discovery of those odd hairs on Goldblum's back), sudden shocks (the armwrestling scene, or the baby-delivery bit) and, of course, the old-fashioned gross-out (here, let me vomit some acid on your ankle for a second and see what happens!)

The prospect of Cronenberg returning to material he has already executed so well is disheartening, especially coming from one of the most brazen and iconoclastic genre filmmakers to work within the studio system (anyone who could con Hollywood into releasing films as bizarre and discombobulating as Videodrome and Crash has to rank amongst the all-time greats).

I hope the negotiations between Cronenberg and Fox break down and the project goes kaput, or that someone else directs it. Leave The Fly alone, Mr. Cronenberg. If you want to remake one of your old movies, try Shivers or Rabid. I wouldn't mind seeing new versions of either of those, especially Shivers. That movie is nutty.

On ''Dune,'' ''Shadowland'' and trying to film unfilmable novels

Actor-turned-director Peter Berg (Very Bad Things, The Kingdom, The Rundown) has told MTV News the Dune remake that was announced last year is really going to happen. Writer Josh Zutamer has turned in a script that is a whopping 200 pages long.

Berg said he must now figure out how to whittle down that screenplay into a manageable, feature-length film "without offending the purists ... filmmakers have struggled [in the past] because it's a very complicated book to crack."

Berg also promises a radically different Dune than we've previously seen on movie and TV screens.

"My experience with the book was different than David Lynch's experience or the people behind the Sci Fi Channel's experience," Berg said. "I found it to be more of an adventure tale, more of a muscular action/adventure story. I think that's my approach, not as an R-rated film, but as a pretty hard PG-13 film about a young man dealing with issues of vengeance over the death of his father and wanting some payback and having to come to terms with his destiny along the way."

Ted, one of the friends who went with me to see the awesome Springsteen show on Sunday, is a hardcore Dune/Frank Herbert fan. On the way to the concert, we happened to be talking about the book and what he liked best about it, and none of what he said bears any relation to what Berg is describing. Maybe that's why Ted said he has no interest in ever seeing a Dune film adaptation, because the movie that is in his head will always trump whatever an actual filmmaker comes up with.

That's the same way I feel about Peter Straub's 1980 novel Shadowland, which I first read while in high school and remains one of my favorite books, all these years later. I read that book obsessively. I carried it with me everywhere and secretly read while my 10th grade English teacher, Brenda Feldman, was going on about dangling participles and other such nonsense.

 I've always thought Shadowland would make a sensational movie, except it would have to be R-rated and about four hours long (also, I would need to be the one who directed it). Shadowland also deals with teens and magic, so a film made today would forever be compared to Harry Potter, except this one is much, much darker. Although the novel was unfilmable 29 years ago, it would be a cakewalk with contemporary CGI. Still, I don't think a Shadowland movie is ever going to happen, post-Potter. And I'm totally fine with that. 

I got to interview Straub at his home in Manhattan's Upper West Side a few years ago. Even though I was there to talk about his new book, I immediately started babbling about Shadowland and asked him why no one had ever turned it into a film. He told me many had tried but they all eventually gave up, because no one could lick the screenplay, which is pretty much the problem with Dune.

Then Straub asked his wife to bring him a copy of a just-published new edition of Shadowland and he signed and dedicated it to me. That's one of only two times in my career I have accepted an unsolicited autograph from someone I was interviewing. It was awesome. I also think Straub liked me immediately because we both stutter when we speak.

Patrick Swayze RIP

Patrick Swayze, who died Monday at age 57 after a long and much-publicized battle with pancreatic cancer, became a big star after the huge success of two romantic dramas, Dirty Dancing and Ghost. Those films also turned Swayze into a sex symbol.

But I much preferred the grace and poise Swayze brought to his tough-guy roles: The exasperated older brother of two poor Tulsa orphans in The Outsiders; the defacto leader of a gang of youthful rebels fighting off Russian invaders in Red Dawn; the bouncer hired to clean up the toughest honkytonk bar on the planet in the guilty pleasure Road House; the mastermind behind a pack of surfing bank robbers in Point Break.

There was a nobility to Swayze that came across in his screen performances, and his choices of roles - including a drag queen in To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar and a pedophile in Donnie Darko - were indicative of a confident actor willing to take chances with his People-anointed mantle of "Sexiest Man Alive." I don't know anyone who would describe Swayze as a great actor. But he enjoyed a popularity and public good will talent alone cannot guarantee.

The Polish are better at movie posters than anybody

Regular readers of this space may have noticed I am a huge fan of movie poster art. For some reason, Poland makes the most striking film posters of any country in the world, although they make every single movie look like a demented and nightmarish horror film.

It's kind of comical. For example, here is the American one-sheet for 1989's Weekend at Bernie's:

 Here is the Polish poster for the same movie:

 The U.K. Guardian has posted a preview of an exhibition of Polish film one-sheets opening this Friday in London's Cinephilia West. I have posted a couple of my favorites below. Go here to check out their full preview. For more awesome examples of Polish movie poster art, go here  and here and especially here.

Might a little less "Funny People" have been funnier?

Every single review of Funny People that appears between now and its July 31 release is going to mention that the film runs a whopping 140 minutes, which is a lot of Adam Sandler for one sitting - too much Adam Sandler for most people.

 

But the weird thing about the movie is that even though it is clearly too long for the story it tells, I can only think of one sequence - the Thanksgiving dinner, which runs about three or four minutes - that I would have cut outright.

I suppose if I were president of Universal Pictures, the studio releasing Judd Apatow's new movie, I might have also asked him to at least shorten the scene in which the characters watch a videotape of Apatow's oldest daughter performing Memory from Cats.

But after that ... well, you wouldn't be hitting bone, exactly, but you'd definitely be carving prime beef. I mean, sure, you could take out the Eminem cameo and shave a couple of minutes off the running time. But then you'd lose the Eminem cameo, and it's really funny.

Both of the movies Apatow wrote and directed before Funny People also ran long (The 40 Year-Old Virgin was 116 minutes and Knocked Up was 129 minutes) and they were even longer in their "unrated" DVD incarnations. Apatow likes to kick back and hang with the characters he creates, and he encourages actors to improvise madly, resulting in comic riffs (like the "You know how I know you're gay?" scene from Virgin) that may not add anything essential to the movie, but are too good to lose.

Curiously, Funny People feels shorter than either Virgin or Knocked Up, perhaps because the story has a distinct three-act structure that keeps the film from overstaying its welcome, the way the Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall did (I liked that movie overall, but man did it dawdle).

Funny People's first two acts may have been already ruined by the film's overly detailed trailer. But the third act, which puts the characters in a completely different dilemma than they were in during the previous 90 minutes, has been left unspoiled for audiences to discover.

 

It will be interesting to see how the public responds to Funny People, which is Apatow's least genial and emotionally darkest film to date. It also casts Sandler in the role of a guy who turns out to be a bit of a jerk, and not the kind of jerk you like, either. Basically, he's an asshole.

But those who worried Apatow had pulled a James L. Brooks and gone all Terms of Endearment on us can rest easy: Funny People is many things, but a tearjerker is not one of them.

Is "Public Enemies" do-or-die time for Michael Mann?

The Daily Beast's Kim Masters has posted an interesting story claiming that Michael Mann's future as a maker of big-budget studio movies is riding on Public Enemies, which opened today.

The story takes a negative slant toward Mann and the movie, quoting a "former studio chairman" who has not seen the film that "it’s going to take itself too seriously, it’s going to be way too long and it will not focus on entertaining the audience. Michael Mann, in the past 15 years, has not made one movie I’ve liked.”

What, Masters couldn't find anyone in Hollywood who had actually seen Public Enemies to comment?

The story also claims that "Johnny Depp disliked Mann’s chaotic style of filmmaking to the point that he ultimately refused to speak to the director."

I'm guessing the vibe on the sets of those write-them-as-we-go-along Pirates of the Caribbean movies was a lot calmer and more orderly. And even if the gossip is true, and Depp stopped speaking to Mann altogether, it certainly didn't hurt his performance. So who cares?

I'm not a studio executive, but I can't imagine any of the higher-ups at Universal Pictures saw what Mann was up to during the shooting of Public Enemies and thought "This is gonna be bigger than Transformers!" They knew exactly what they were getting into, especially considering this is the same studio that distributed Mann's last movie, Miami Vice, which was even more aggressively uncommercial than Public Enemies.

There is no shortage of Hollywood movies that "focus on entertaining the audience." But the number of serious film artists like Mann who get to play on a large-scale canvas continues to get smaller. I can't imagine that, when you add in home video and cable TV revenues, the $100 million Public Enemies won't at least earn its costs back.

In the process, Universal gets to distribute a film that qualifies as a work of art - and that some people will still be thinking and talking about long after the summer movie season has receded into a hazy memory.

RIP Michael Jackson

I'm a Generation Xer, which means I learned to shuffle-skate (shut up) at the old Midway Skating Rink at Midway Mall to Don't Stop Till You Get Enough; tuned in along with millions of my peers for the world premiere of Thriller  on MTV and never thought about music videos the same way again; caught the Victory tour in Miami when the Jacksons played the Orange Bowl; happened to be at Epcot the weekend that the Francis Coppola-directed Captain Eo premiered there; and danced to a sped-up remix of The Way You Make Me Feel while celebrating my 21st birthday at the former China Club on South Beach (now Jerry's Famous Deli).

But when I heard the news today that Jackson had died, I realized I had only thought of him for the better part of 20 years as a performer turned bizarro eccentric by his own fame.

It's a testament to his artistic legacy that today, I haven't really been thinking about Wacko Jacko, but about the man who was such a big part of the soundtrack of my youth. Rest in peace, Michael. 

The return (or, "Where the hell have you been?")

(Warning: Unusually long blog post ahead)

I'm back on the job after a doctor-ordered month-long leave. I spent most of that time in bed, due to the heavy-duty meds I was taking. I attended my first screening in more than a month on Saturday, when I saw Star Trek, which is lots of fun (it's the first Trek movie that didn't bore me at some point or another).

But I did watch an average of two DVDs a day while I was out, so I have a month's worth of old and relatively new movies swimming around inside my head I need to purge.

For example, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Martyrs, director Pascal Laugier's horrifically violent French-language thriller, which caused a few disgusted walkouts when it screened at the Toronto Film Festival last year. Laugier shows up to introduce the film on the DVD, and he seems to be a sane and amiable fellow. But although he warns the viewer that some people may hate the movie they are about to see, he doesn't tell you it might make you puke, too.

Making even the worst moments in Hostel and Saw seem like an episode of Teletubbies, Martyrs is one of the most viscerally punishing films I've ever seen - enough that I actually had to look away from the screen a few times, and I have a high tolerance for gory flicks.

What kept me watching to the end was not the violence, which would have become boring and tiresome in and of itself, but the film's intriguing and unpredictable structure, which pulls the rug out from under you in a major way five minutes in, then repeats the trick an hour later. Laugier is obviously talented (the film is exceedingly well-shot), but he overestimates the viewer's tolerance for brutality, and he overreaches in trying to invest that brutality with meaning.

There is an interminable sequence in the film, lasting 10 or 15 minutes, that consists of nothing else but the systematic abuse and torture of a young woman. As it turns out, there's a "reason" why so much screen time is devoted to her suffering, but it's not enough to justify having to sit through it. Martyrs is part of the ongoing French new wave of horror films (and may well top them all in terms of graphic violence), but unlike most of its counterparts, which aim to do nothing other than scare you, this one aspires to a profundity that is far beyond its reach. The only thing worse than a bad horror picture is a pretentious one.

Another French thriller that fares infinitely better is Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne), which I missed during its brief theatrical run last summer, but which would have certainly made my year-end top ten if I had seen it. The term "Hitchcockian" gets thrown around a bit too easily by critics sometimes, but this one genuinely deserves the compliment. French actor-turned-director Guillaume Canet preserves the fiendishly tricky twists and turns of Harlan Coben's source novel without once ever making you think "Oh, come on..." 

The potential for preposterousness was great in this story of a doctor (Francois Cluzet) who discovers that his wife, who was murdered eight years earlier by a serial killer, may still be alive. But although the complicated plot wobbles a bit in retrospect, there isn't a moment while you're watching the movie when you're not utterly engrossed. A Hollywood remake is already in the works, but there's no need to wait for that when the original is available now. The Blu-ray edition boasts a fantastic transfer, along with an excellent hour-long documentary not found on the regular DVD.

I was a big fan of Danish director Ole Bornedal's Nightwatch when it was shown at the Miami Film Festival in 1994, and I even enjoyed the neutered Hollywood remake he directed himself in 1997. But I had forgotten all about Bornedal in the ensuing 10 years, so I was pleased to find not one but two movies directed by him in my always-towering To Watch pile of DVDs.

 

The first one, 2007's The Substitute, is a horror movie made for children, or at least family audiences, although just because kids are the target demographic doesn't make this one any less intriguing. Aided considerably by Paprika Steen's lead performance as the sixth-grade substitute who may be - OK, is - an alien from another planet, The Substitute is terrific, fantastic fun, with enough dark wit to render the obvious comparisons to The Faculty pointless.

The movie was obviously a low-budget affair, since it appears the filmmakers ran out of money while shooting the climax (there are some noticeably choppy edits and missing bits of continuity during the last five minutes). But those flaws are not enough to detract from the film entire, which features the kind of completely believable kid actors too often missing from Hollywood pictures.

The other Bernadel film I saw was 2007's Just Another Love Story, which just hit DVD this week (the front of the DVD jacket uses a photo that contains a gigantic spoiler; they should have gone with the original poster art, shown at left). Kind of like Vertigo in reverse, the movie centers on a forensic photographer (Anders W. Berthelsen) who becomes obsessed with a woman (Rebecka Hamse) involved in a car accident he inadvertently caused.

Rendered amnesiac and nearly blind by the accident, the woman is easy prey for the lovestruck photographer, who passes himself off as her boyfriend in order to get closer to her. Bernadel tricks out the movie with lots of stylistic tricks and ingenious cross-cutting between unrelated scenes to amp up the suspense, and the ending is as inevitable as it is satisfying. In film noir territory, happily-ever-after endings are a rarity. 

After watching No Country For Old Men again in the new two-disc "Special Edition" Blu-ray that recently came out, I was inspired to revisit the Coen brothers' canon - specifically the movies I didn't like the first time around - and see if time had changed anything.

Maybe it's just that some movies work better on video when you're watching them from your couch at 2 a.m., but I've completely turned around on The Man Who Wasn't There, which I found tedious and monotonous when I reviewed it eight years ago, but which I now consider to be one of the Coens' best efforts.

I was particularly impressed by Billy Bob Thornton's lead performance as the cuckolded barber: Rarely has an actor conveyed so much while doing so little. Roger Deakins' cinematography adds immeasurably to the film (he deserved an Oscar just for the way he played with shadows in the prison scenes). The movie is so beautifully shot, you could watch it with the sound turned off and still be entranced.

I also warmed up to The Ladykillers, arguably the slightest and least memorable of all the Coens' movies, but a lot funnier when viewed with lowered expectations. It helps, too, to watch the DVD with the subtitles turned on, so you can understand everything Tom Hanks' ostentatiously verbose thief is saying. The movie is ultimately too mild for its own good, but there are a couple of priceless sequences in it, and I appreciated the way the Coens make sure every subplot and character thread pays off by the end.

I discovered I still don't like Barton Fink (too hermetic and self-consciously odd) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (too precious and erratically paced). The Man Who Wasn't There left me in a film noir mood, so I watched Sunset Blvd. again for the first time in more than 20 years and came away unsure whether or not it qualifies as a true noir. The story elements are all there, and it certainly looks like noir. But the fatalistic mood that is a requisite of the genre isn't there, and Norma Desmond isn't so much a femme fatale as she is a kind of decaying Hollywood gorgon. This is probably still the best movie ever made about the film industry, though.

 

Qualifying as a textbook example of noir was 1946's The Killers, which encapsulates every distinctive element of the genre into an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story. Director Robert Siodmak does some radical things with his use of light and shadow (that first shot of the killers outside the diner is a stunner) and Ava Gardner's maneating schemer is one of the most formidable villainesses ever, in part because she seems to do so little for so much of the film.

The folks at the Criterion Collection recently started releasing their films on the Blu-ray format, and one of their first titles happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time. Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 masterpiece The Wages of Fear (La Saliare de la Peur), about four men driving nitroglycerine-laden trucks through the jungle, is so suspenseful it still makes me gasp every time I watch it (the bridge sequence in particular makes me squirm).

The transfer on the Blu-ray is fantastic, with the movie looking sharper and more detailed than ever before. The film is accompanied by an informative host of extras, including a detailed list of all the supposedly anti-American content that was cut out of the movie during its original U.S. theatrical run. The only thing that would have made this disc better is if they had been able to include William Friedkin's infamous 1977 remake Sorcerer, which I am now jonesing to see.

Another of Criterion's Blu-ray releases, 1976's In the Realm of the Senses, was new to me. Highly controversial in its time (and still banned in its native Japan), I was expecting the hoopla to be much ado about nothing, the way decades-old controversies usually are. But this one definitely lived up to its billing - and then some.

It took me a little while to get used to the graphic nature of the film's sex scenes, but once I did, I was able to focus on what director Nagisa Oshima is doing, which is to use those scenes to chart the destructive relationship between his two lead characters. Here, finally, is a film in which the sex and nudity really are an integral part of the story (hell, the sex is the story). The eyepopping transfer on the Blu-ray boasts some startling colors, although this probably won't be a disc you'll reach for when showing off your home theater to company.

 

I finally caught up with The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, in which Francis Ford Coppola reinstates more than 20 minutes of footage he was forced to chop out by the studio the first time around. I first read The Outsiders in the seventh grade and remembered the movie fondly, but had always wondered why Coppola had left so much stuff out.

The reinstated footage does make The Outsiders a lot more faithful to the book, although I didn't care for Coppola's decision to replace much of his father Carmine's lush score with period rock-and-roll tunes. The new music dramatically changes the tone of some of the movie's critical scenes, and it also diminishes the larger-than-life, Gone With the Wind-sized dimension the movie was designed to have. Coppola's widescreen compositions remain awe-inspiring, though: This is a beautiful-looking movie.

I tried watching Sidney Lumet's 1981 drama Prince of the City eons ago, when I bought my first VCR and was renting VHS tapes like mad. But I remember not understanding it and pulling the plug after 10 or so minutes. This time around, I was able to follow the plot, but just barely: This is one dense, complex policier, a precursor to the storytelling style used in TV shows like The Wire and The Shield. The movie itself, a fact-based story on a New York City police corruption scandal, is OK, but it's got nothing on Lumet's Serpico, maybe because Treat Williams is no Al Pacino.

I could go on, but I think I'll stop here. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make it out to the theater very much, which means I still haven't seen Watchmen. It's still playing at one theater in Hialeah: Maybe I'll head over there and check it out Thursday after I slog sit through a screening of Angels and Demons.

Remembering Stanley Kubrick

  I'm a day late with this, but in honor of yesterday's 10th anniversary of the death of Stanley Kubrick, check out this vintage episode of the Charlie Rose Show in which Martin Scorsese, Kubrick's widow Christiane and his long-time producer Jan Harlan discuss the excellent documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures.

The older I get, the more I think Kubrick may be my favorite filmmaker of all time. Later this year, art-book publisher Taschen plans to release a gigantic coffee-table entitled Stanley Kubrick: The Napoleon Film documenting all the work he put into the never-made project.

The book is rumored to clock in at 1,900 pages - yes, 1,900 - and will be one of Taschen's super-deluxe, limited-edition releases, which means a price tag of somewhere around $500 (gulp). I'll have to settle for reading thumbing through it at the bookstore.