Links To Dan & Jessica Schneider On The Internet!

251) Opening Night/DVD Review John Cassavetes’ 1977 film ‘Opening Night’ is what critics usually call the work of such a significant artist ‘overlooked’. It is an excellent film, in its own right, and one of the best portraits of a midlife crisis ever put to film. It’s not a perfect film, in that, at two hours and twenty four minutes it’s about a half hour too long, and there’s a bit too much emphasis on the drunkenness of the lead character Myrtle Gordon, played by Gena Rowlands....

Cassavetes in the groove.

252) Frenzy/DVD Review Have you ever wondered about what a famous artist's work would be like if they were living in the present age? Imagine Van Gogh living in Los Angeles, or Dante writing of the military debacle in Iraq. Well, imagine what Alfred Hitchcock - either of the early British thrillers or 1950s vintage era Hollywood classics, would be like if he were given a free hand in the 21^st Century. Fortunately, cineastes need not strain their imaginations too much, for his penultimate film, 1972's Frenzy - his first film made in England in over twenty years, gives hints as to what a 21^st Century Hitchcock would provide; and it's assuredly good. In fact, save for a too rushed last fifteen or twenty minutes, it would be the equal of his three or four greatest films....

Near-masterpiece.

253) Black Orpheus/DVD Review Marcel Camus's 1959 French film, Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), made in 1959, in Portuguese, is by no means a great film, but it is a landmark film; an odd amalgam of modernity and the worst stereotypes about black culture worldwide. The whole film is practically one long festival of song and dance, which while apropos for the setting- Rio de Janeiro's Carnival, nonetheless kills off any hope for a real story. Yet, despite the dancing, singing, and merrymaking, it is not a musical, per se, and quite a bleak film, in that it reinforces the notion, however true, that poverty is something that no amount of merriment can deny....

Enjoy!

254) Forbidden Planet/DVD Review When one thinks of 1950s science-fiction films, one thinks of the sort of schlocky black-and-white B-movies that were parodied on the old Mystery Science Theater 3000 television show. Yet, while there were a whole lot of films like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Robot Monster, the 1950s did have some very good, if not great, sci-fi movies....

Robby the Robot kicks ass!

255) The Decalogue/DVD Review Art that can claim greatness deals with complex issues in complex ways. If the answers or questions posed were simple they could be framed in a single sentence, or a ten second film, then the art would not be its own best explanation. This thought stuck with me as I watched Krzystof Kieślowski's complex and fascinating, if flawed, The Decalogue....

Kieslowski on keel.

256) The Bad Sleep Well/DVD Review Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 black-and-white Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well, is often compared to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that’s an inapt comparison. While Shakespeare’s play has a higher sense of poetry, Kurosawa’s film — though a high-class melodrama — has far more relevance, realism, and complexity....

Shakespeare with a topknot?

257) Two Poems/Jessica Schneider

258) Diary Of A Country Priest/DVD Review Robert Bresson's 1950 breakthrough film, Diary Of a Country Priest (Journal D'Un Cure de Campagne), is one of those films that is absolutely antithetical to everything a Hollywood film stands for. It is obsessive, detailed, slow, and opaque. This, however, does not mean it is a great film, as so many knee-jerk critics claim it is. It is not; but it is a very interesting film. Ostensibly, it may seem to be a film on religion and/or suffering, or, as film critic Fréderic Bonnard claims, in The Criterion Collection's DVD essay on the film, a film 'about imprisonment,' but it's neither, really. It's more cogently a film about masochism, guilt, and pathological privation, although it does touch upon religion, suffering, and imprisonment....

Hang the dog.

259) A Woman Under The Influence/DVD Review John Cassavetes was one of those rare artists of whom it could be said that his flaws were his strengths, and his strengths were his flaws. On a purely technical level, his 1974 film, A Woman Under The Influence, is not a very good film. It is often poorly lit, edited, and at times poorly acted, almost as badly as Cassavetes' own Minnie and Moscowitz. Yet, there are moments when its dramatic power rivals that of his first great triumph, Faces, or any other work of drama or fiction....

Interesting.

260) Amarcord/DVD Review Federico Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord has often been linked with Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny och Alexander / Fanny & Alexander as films made by old men looking back on their youth. While this is true, in the main Amarcord has a loose narrative structure in which the lives of many characters are detailed in comic vignettes, whereas Fanny & Alexander is a straight drama....

Gradisca rules.

261) Everyday People/DVD Review In 2004 HBO Films decided to try their hand at the polemical subject of race in New York. Usually, this results in ill wrought PC material like Spike Lee's 1989 fantasy, Do The Right Thing. Instead, they crafted an improvisational workshop concoction called Everyday People, about the closing of a fictive Jewish deli and restaurant called Raskin's in the heart of Brooklyn....

Solid.

262) The Jimmy Show/DVD Review In order to be a good critic one has to rise above one's personal biases. Period. If one cannot get past hating love stories or action films, then one should not practice the craft, because there are good films that are mere love stories or action films. It is the excellence of the film, and how it achieves its excellence, that is more important than what sort of a film it is. This basic lack of understanding how to separate one's likes from the objective ability of art to effectively communicate, is why most critics fail in their task....

Neglected film gets its due.

263) Fanny And Alexander/DVD Review Why Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 final ‘filmic film,’ Fanny och Alexander / Fanny & Alexander bears the appellation it does is a mystery — one of many in the film — since the first titular character, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) is at best a third- or fourth-level supporting character, and in the three-hour theatrical version she is not even mentioned by name for nearly an hour into the film. Fanny & Alexander should have been called "Alexander & Fanny," or simply "Alexander," since it most closely follows two years in the life of young, handsome, brown-haired Alexander Ekdahl (Bertil Guve) — the original ‘boy who sees dead people’ — from 1907 to 1909....

Great, yet overrated.

264) Downfall (Part 1)/DVD Review In the annals of film, the greatest screen portrayal of an evil world leader was undoubtedly Anthony Hopkins’ 1995 turn as President Richard M. Nixon in Oliver Stone’s Nixon. Within five to ten minutes of one’s first glimpse of Hopkins- a Brit who looked and sounded nothing like the 37th American President, one almost forgets what the real Nixon looked like. But, now there’s a contender who could knock Hopkins off his perch- or at least give him a good fight, and that is Bruno Ganz’s turn as Adolf Hitler in the 2004 Academy Award nominated Best Foreign Language Film from Germany, Downfall (Der Untergang- literally The Downfall)....

Hitler lives!

265) The Double Life Of Veronique/DVD Review The Double Life Of Véronique (La Double Vie De Véronique) is the 1991 French-Polish film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, written by himself and Krzysztof Piesiewicz that was the presage for the greatness of the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), and was an international sensation at both the Cannes and New York film festivals, for here is where the gilt-hazed camera work of Slawomir Idziak, the music of Zbigniew Preisner (although slyly credited to the fictional Van den Budenmayer in the film- a running joke within Kieslowski’s later works), and Kieslowski’s own vision first touched greatness- even if it is a conditional greatness, more of sensuality than sense....

Irene Jacob is yummy!

265) Marnie/DVD Review After his back to back commercial and critical triumphs of Psycho and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock decided to go ‘interior.’ By that, I mean he decided to get unfortunately Freudian in his approach to crime, as he had throughout his career. Unfortunately, all but a few of his films suffer from their reliance on the outmoded and simplistic approaches to psychology that he employed....

Rape?

266) Downfall (Part 2)/DVD Review Some of the weakest parts of the film come from the performances of the other lead characters- the ‘usual suspects’ of Nazi lore. There is Ulrich Matthes as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Matthes plays Goebbels as an almost insectoid parody of evil....

Hitler dies!

267) Signs Of Life/DVD Review No filmmaker’s career has been more defined and structured by the musical choices he has made than German film director Werner Herzog. This claim is evident from his first full-length feature, Lebenszeichen / Signs of Life (1968), which he made when he was twenty-four....

Werner gets going.

268) Downfall (Part 3)/DVD Review Much of this lack of the substantive inner circle of Nazism can be pawned off on the meager screenplay, by Bernd Eichinger, and director Oliver Hirschbiegel, rather than the actors. They adapted the material found in Junge’s memoirs, Bis Zur Letzten Stunde- written by Melissa Müller, and the book Inside Hitler’s Bunker, by Joachim Fest. The actors merely had to make do with what was tossed to them. Yet, the larger problem the film faced was not how to squeeze so many Nazis into the 155 minute film, but where to place the focus....

Germany razed.

269) I Am Curious/DVD Review Time is the great leveler of all things, but most especially so in the arts. This Ozymandian verity applies to the great and the petty. There are works of art and artists that go ignored in their own time, because they are ahead of the field- think Gerard Manley Hopkins, Franz Kafka, or Emily Dickinson, to name the obvious, and then there are works of art and artists that have great immediate success, but are forgotten by time....

Not really.

270) Even Dwarfs Started Small/DVD Review Werner Herzog's black and white 1970 film, Even Dwarfs Started Small (Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen) is one of those films that is beyond such grounded definitions as good and bad, and, like its American predecessor, Freaks, is simply one of the oddest films ever made. Bad critics have praised it for all the wrong reasons- such as being a statement on politics, the Vietnam War, the partition of Germany, against religion, and prudish ignorants have condemned it for similarly wrong reasons....

Oddball.

271) The Known World/Book Review Edward P. Jones wrote a terrific book of short stories in 1991, Lost In The City, that was justifiably critically praised, for nine of its fourteen tales are great, but it was forgotten until his 2003 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novel, The Known World, came out. Then his publisher, Amistad Press, rushed to reprint the earlier work, to cash in on the publicity, after years of pulping old copies....

Long on wind.

272) The Passings/Poetry

Long gone.

273) Gates Of Heaven (Part 1)/DVD Review Roger Ebert is perhaps the most famous film critic in America. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing. It should be noted, however, that that award was for the writing, not his analytical skills. What separates Ebert from most published critics is that he is better with words than most. A dozen or more of his reviews are classics whose words stick with me to this day....

1970s. California. Death.

274) Gates Of Heaven (Part 2)/DVD Review Not much else occurs in the film, although there is a montage, near the end, of animal plots, with engravings and photos, which is strangely moving- somewhat akin to seeing photos of the war dead from Vietnam or Iraq, or a listing of Holocaust victim names. Yet, the Morris of the later, greater films, is still in utero here. There is not much in the way of plot- just as the MGM DVD is bare bones, with only a few trailers....

The end.

275) Deliverance/DVD Review New on the Fox Network: When Good Movies Go Bad! Or, a review of John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, which he produced and directed, based upon James Dickey’s 1970 novel of the same name. Dickey also wrote the screenplay, which explains a lot, especially if you are familiar with his ‘poetry.’ The actual look of the film, however, is sensational....

Torpedo time!

276) Straw Dogs/DVD Review If there has ever been a more over-interpreted and stolidly misinterpreted film than director Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs, I’ve yet to encounter it. Films like Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey have had more ink spilled over them, but most of the ideas tossed about are on the money, and far less is read into them. Also, those two classics have one big thing going for them that Straw Dogs does not. They are great films....

Not again!

277) Late Spring/DVD Review If one were to think of an equivalent to the film style of director Yasujiro Ozu it would have to be long novels suffused with detail, but never superfluous detail. Books such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—with its descriptions of the whaling industry and vessels; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath—with its detailed rendering of the lives of migrant workers; and especially Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn—with its child-like view of a world that overwhelms fresh senses, come to mind, even though the film checks in at a mid-length range of an hour and forty-eight minutes....

Masterful.

278) Empire Falls/Book Review I first encountered Richard Russo earlier this year when I saw tv ads for a miniseries based upon his bestselling book Empire Falls. It looked little better than the atrocious Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven miniseries. A few months later I came across reams of his short story collection, The Whore's Child, in a book discounter, and was amazed at how poorly the tales' opening and closing paragraphs were- a sure sign of a writer's worth, or lack thereof....

Total crap.

279) Story Of Floating Weeds & Floating Weeds/DVD Review Yasujiro Ozu was perhaps the greatest obsessional filmmaker in history. Thus, it's no surprise that not only did he rework the same themes over and again in his films, but that he also redid earlier films of his own years later, such as 1932's I Was Born But... as 1959's Good Morning....

Ozu rules.

280) Clouds Of May/DVD Review I am usually very wary when people recommend art to me- be it a poem, a book, or a film. Usually they are in love with a certain work or artists, and are blinded to its manifest flaws because of some emotional attachment to it. It’s the first poem that ever touched them, it’s the first book that gave them the secret to life, or it’s the first movie where a girl ever allowed them to grope her breasts without screaming....

Ok.

281) Juliet Of The Spirits/DVD Review Federico Fellini's first color film, 1965's Juliet Of The Spirits (Giulietta Degli Spiriti), which was written by Fellini and longtime collaborators Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, is, simply put, the female and color companion piece to 8�. Unlike that prior film, often considered Fellini's best, Juliet Of The Spirits was a critical and financial failure when it came out. The criticism of the film was too harsh for, while it is not as great nor good a film as some earlier Fellini classics, it is still Fellini, which makes it better than the overwhelming majority of films by others, for even when Fellini fails he succeeds at more things than most....

Color!

282) The 400 Blows/DVD Review In 1959, a pair of newly released French films were instantly hailed as classics, going on to become the twin pillars of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. One, Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle / Breathless, was bad; the other, François Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents Coups / The 400 Blows, was good. But in fact, despite their reputations neither film can be called great cinema....

Hit'em again!

283) Maid Of Wilko/DVD Review Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda’s 1979 film Maids Of Wilko (Panny Z Wilka- also translated as Young Girls Of Wilko) shows that, like such filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, and Yasujiro Ozu, he is an artist more interested in endurances than mere ‘scenes.’ His characters speak as if philosophers, but in a naturalistic style. They are not the hyper-educated bourgeoisie of Bergman, the spiritual elitists of Bresson, nor the everyday philosophes of Ozu. Yet, there’s something more to them, and Wajda, than what is on the screen, even if the film, as a whole, fails to reach great heights....

Contemplative.

284) Theory: The Game/Poetry

Battle of wits.

285) Stan & Ollie/Book Review The one thing I’ve always wanted to know about the comedy team of Laurel And Hardy was, who was the straight man? If one thinks of all the other great comedy teams of the Twentieth Century, the answer is obvious. Moe Howard was the straight man for Curly Howard and Larry Fine in The Three Stooges, Zeppo Marx was the straight man for Groucho, Harpo, and Chico in The Marx Brothers, and Bud Abbott was the straight man for Lou Costello in Abbott And Costello....

Who's straight?

286) The Return Of The Secaucus 7/DVD Review Independent filmmaker John Sayles’s 1980 feature-film debut, The Return of the Secaucus 7, has the typical feel of the low-budget productions from that era — even those in the horror genre, such as Last House on the Left or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Indeed, prior to embarking on his directorial career Sayles had been a screenwriter and script doctor for Roger Corman’s cheapo horror fare. Unfortunately, the excellence of Sayles’s later films only points up the flaws of this first effort. Like many low-budget indies, The Return of the Secaucus 7 is long on talk and short on both action and visual razzle-dazzle. Worse yet, it is filled with amateurish acting and unrealistic dialogue....

Sayles' first time.

287) Belle De Jour/DVD Review There was something about the 1960s that brought out a playfulness in filmmakers which allowed them to not have to condescend to audiences and wrap up every little aspect of the film in a neat little bow. When the films' techniques and narrative strengths worked, as in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, or Ingmar Bergman's Persona, the result was a great film. When neither worked, the result was a pretentious mess, like Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby or Luis Bu�uel's Belle De Jour- his 1967 foray into color film, based upon the same titled novel of Joseph Kessler, released in 1928....

Passe.

288) Early Summer/DVD Review Early Summer (Bakushû) is the middle entry in what has been called director Yasujiro Ozu’s Noriko Trilogy (bookended by Late Spring and Tokyo Story). All three films feature women named Noriko (all played by Setsuko Hara), who are without husbands, and embroiled in family dramas. The names of many of the other major characters recur in the trilogy, as well, which gives the films a feeling of almost being alternate world versions of each other- ala the way comic books have ‘canonical’ superhero tales, and those set in alternate universes. Released in 1951, the 124 minute black and white film was written by Ozu and his co-writer Kôgo Noda....

Contemplative.

289) Diary Of A Country Priest/DVD Review Robert Bresson’s 1950 breakthrough film, Diary Of A Country Priest (Journal D’Un Cure De Campagne), is one of those films that is absolutely antithetical to everything a Hollywood film stands for. It is obsessive, detailed, slow, and opaque. This, however, does not mean it is a great film, as so many knee-jerk critics claim it is. It is not; but it is a very interesting film. Ostensibly, it may seem to be a film on religion and/or suffering....

On to something?

290) You Are All Desire/Poetry

You alone.

291) Native Son/Book Review Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son, violates two of the basic tenets of modern MFA dogma. The first is that it starts off very slowly, then builds up a powerful narrative steam (although not of the simplistic plot-driven variety), and the second is that it is a tale that overwhelmingly ‘tells’ what is happening, rather than ’showing’, which violates all the simplistic MFA workshop prohibitions against same....

Classic.

292) Through A Glass Darkly/DVD Review Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film, Through A Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel), is not one of his best films, although it is one of his most lauded, winning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. That said, it’s quite a good film that simply has not held up that well over the years as a de facto Chekhovian drama- partly due to the melodramatic acting of its lead character, Karin (Harriet Andersson), but more importantly because its handling of psychology and religion seems quite dated, in light of what we now know about mental illnesses and the structure of the brain....

Bergman off-key.

293) The Hidden Fortress/DVD Review Those film viewers who equate foreign films with pretense need to sit down for a couple of hours and watch director Akira Kurosawa's first widescreen (Tohoscope) film, the black and white The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi-Toride No San-Akunin — literally "The Three Villains Of The Hidden Fortress"), from 1958. While it is a very good film, it a great movie in the feel good sense of the term. Filmmaker George Lucas claims this film was the inspiration for his third-rate Star Wars films....

Better'n Lucas.

294) Blue/DVD Review Krzysztof Kieslowski was one of the more interesting filmmakers of the last quarter century, and the centerpiece of his claim to greatness is the Three Colors (Trois Couleurs) trilogy of films that he wrote and directed in the early to mid-1990s, filming them all at the same time. Blue, White, and Red represent the three colors of the French flag, and symbolize the three virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity respectively. Blue (Bleu) is the first film in the series, and was released in 1993. The color blue also resonates for its associations with depression and coldness, that are well demonstrated in the film....

Opus.

295) Hour Of The Wolf/DVD Review Vargtimmen / Hour of the Wolf, a 1968 film by Ingmar Bergman, proves the nostrum that even lesser work by a great artist surpasses the better work of lesser artists, for Bergman can get more from the prosaic than just about any other director....

Howling.

296) The Fearless Vampire Killers/DVD Review One of the overlooked aspects of most of the vintage 1960s and 1970s Hammer Studios horror films is that they were quite funny, often unintentionally so. Yes, Christopher Lee had a certain charm, but is it not true that he was also far more grandly silly than scary? Looking back on those films, they certainly do not hold up as well as even the Universal Bela Lugosi takes on the genre, let alone such superior vampire films as the silent F.W. Murnau classic Nosferatu....

Bravery undone.

297) Winter Light/DVD Review Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna- literally The Communicants) is the middle film in Ingmar Bergman’s Spider Trilogy (as it too references the God as a spider imagery), following Through A Glass Darkly, and preceding The Silence. Made in 1963, it represents a dramatic notching upward from the well made, but often melodramatic and symbolic, Through A Glass Darkly. Where the first film of the trilogy suffers from the overacting of Harriet Andersson, and some over the top displays of incest....

Socrates in ascension.

298) The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie/DVD Review John Cassavetes’ The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie is a film that is one of those overlooked gems that is not only a great film, but a great record of its time, even if it might have more properly been titled The Murder Of A Chinese Bookie. As much as I love the early raw films of Martin Scorsese — who reputedly thought up this tale with Cassavetes a few years earlier — no film I’ve ever seen so perfectly captures the mid-1970s underworld as I knew it as a child. There is a sense that one can even smell the cheap liquor and cigarette smoke that pervades its images....

Masterpiece.

299) White/DVD Review The middle film of Polish-French film director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors (Trois Couleurs) trilogy of Blue, White, and Red is a very black comedy, and generally considered the weakest of the three films. This is true, although, given the high quality of the tercet, White (Blanc) is still an excellent film....

Comedic intensity.

300) The Passenger/DVD Review Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 film, The Passenger (Professione: Reporter in Europe, and at one time called Fatal Exit), written by Antonioni, Peter Wollen, and Mark Peploe, is a terrific film that falls just shy of some of his truly great films like La Notte, L'Eclisse, and Blowup. That's because, despite Antonioni's usual visual brilliance, daring use of silences, and a unusually reserved performance from Jack Nicholson- one that is a bit of true acting, from long before he started phoning in performances....

Antonioni in quietude.

301) Brinkley's Beat/Book Review (2nd review down) David Brinkley was an important figure in the history of television news. But, that fact has no consequence on the fact that the man was not a particularly good writer. Before his death in June of 2003 he penned a slim book for Alfred A. Knopf called Brinkley's Beat: People, Places And Events That Shaped My Time, which consisted of minor essays on topics that concerned his career in journalism. Although divided into three sections- People, Places, and Events (real creative, eh?), and featuring essays on topics such as Bobby Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover, Normandy, and the Kennedy Assassination (Jack, not Bobby), the book is a dull and tedious read....

Yawn.

302) Smiles Of A Summer Night/DVD Review Ingmar Bergman's 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens Leende) was the film that first garnered him international recognition. It would be a couple of years before The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries cemented his reputation as an international film auteur, but looking back on this film half a century later and half a world away only shows how different tastes in humor can be....

Bergman laughs.

303) Good Morning/DVD Review Of the Big Three Japanese film directors from last century, who were known in the West, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa, and Yasujiro Ozu, Ozu is by far the least well known, and this is because he was probably the least technically innovative of the troika. But that is not the same as saying he was the least accomplished. In fact, his 1959 social comedy of manners, Good Morning, set in a modern Tokyo suburban subdivision, is in many ways far more relevant than the more famed period pieces the other directors made for it has a definite Western sensibility. Ozu seemed to be obsessed with documenting history, but history as it was lived, not re-imagined....

Ozu farts.

304) Gertrud/DVD Review Apologists for bad art almost always speak of ‘intent’, and, in a similar vein, bad critics always try to justify their ‘liking’ a bad film by praising it obliquely, often using words like ‘abstract’ in place of ‘dullness’, or calling a boring film an ‘etude’, even if it is trite. Such is what one will find if one reads the reviews for Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s final film Gertrud....

Bad and dull.

305) The Life Aquatic/DVD Review Screenwriter and film director Wes Anderson has made a career out of quirky films that have an avid following, even while offering little depth. He rarely pushes himself, and why his latest film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) was considered worthy of treatment by The Criterion Collection, which usually reserves its accolades for films of stature — both American and foreign — is a puzzle. Granted, they deemed Anderson’s prior mediocre effort, The Royal Tenenbaums, and the 1998 mega-flop sci-fi action flick Armageddon worthy of their treatment, but that still is not enough reason to justify this entry into their pantheon — their three hundredth title, in fact....

Gurgle.

306) The Silence/DVD Review The last film of Ingmar Bergman’s Spider Trilogy, The Silence (Tystnaden), is not as good as the film which directly preceded it, Winter Light, but is closer to it, in quality, than the trilogy’s comparatively weak first film, Through A Glass Darkly. This is because the weak link in Bergman’s filmic repertoire is his ability to handle sexuality....

Not so silent.

307) Amadeus/DVD Review In all the years since its release, I'd never seen the 1984 Oscar winning best film Amadeus, partly because classical music did not interest me, and partly because I have an aversion to 'period dramas', and all their costumery. As the years have gone on, and my wife has nagged me to see this favorite of hers. I finally gave in and bought the two DVD Director's Cut version, released in 2001....

Not so great.

308) White Teeth/Book Review I get really tired of the bland sort of reviews that pass for negative criticism. You know what I mean. In it, a reviewer who is scared shitless of making an enemy of a writer, or a publishing house, writes a few mild rebukes of the writer, but comes around in the end to praise the writer as being terrific, as a writer and person, and that it was just this book, or a portion of it, that failed....

Ugh!

309) Fitzcarraldo/DVD Review I first watched Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo back in the late 1980s, on PBS, and found it to be a great film. All these years later I still find it to be a great film, if not quite in a league with Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s other most famed filmic pairing, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God....

Kinski, again.

310) Red/DVD Review The final film of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors (Trois Couleurs) trilogy, Red (Rouge), released in 1994, is almost universally acclaimed as the best of the films. For once, the common consensus is correct. Of course, if one is to believe some of the online reviews of this film, and the whole trilogy, there are plenty of people who seriously question whether or not Three Colors is a better trilogy than the two Star Wars trilogies, that of The Matrix, or even The Lord Of The Rings. Let me end that debate, once and for all....

Irene Jacob rocks!

311) Where The Green Ants Dream/DVD Review There are three distinct styles of German director Werner Herzog's films. There are his great, deep, and memorable fictive films - such as Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, and Fitzcarraldo, there are his smaller evocative documentary-like films - such as Fata Morgana, Little Dieter Needs To Fly, and Grizzly Man, and then there are his unclassifiable films....

Outback adventures.

312) The Double Life Of Veronique/DVD Review The Double Life Of Véronique (La Double Vie De Véronique) is the 1991 French-Polish film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, written by himself and Krzysztof Piesiewicz that was the presage for the greatness of the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), and was an international sensation at both the Cannes and New York film festivals, for here is where the gilt-hazed camera work of Slawomir Idziak, the music of Zbigniew Preisner (although slyly credited to the fictional Van den Budenmayer in the film- a running joke within Kieslowski’s later works), and Kieslowski’s own vision first touched greatness- even if it is a conditional greatness, more of sensuality than sense. The film has been rhapsodized by international film critics as Kieslowski’s ‘coming out’ film, but one can see it is clearly a bridge between the direction he was headed with his tv series The Decalogue, and where he ended up in the Trilogy....

Irene Jacob rocks.

313) La Strada/DVD Review Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini’s 1954 black and white film La Strada (The Road) is one of those films that is midway between his early neo-realism and his later magical realism, with touches of both aplenty. It made stars of both him and its female lead, his wife Giulietta Masina, won the 1954 Venice Film Festival’s top award and the 1956 Best Foreign Picture Academy Award, yet there is something missing from it....

Fellini's first flirtation with the fabulous.

314) Short Cuts/DVD Review Short Cuts, the three-hour-plus film written and directed by Robert Altman (with co-writer Frank Barhydt), based upon a series of short stories by Raymond Carver, is an odd film. It's not a bad film, nor is it even remotely a great film- the only two sorts of films that the hit (Nashville) and miss (Vincent And Theo) Altman has plenty of experience with. The nine stories and one poem of Carver's, from the same titled anthology book, have been transplanted from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles, and many of the stories are made to cross over with each other, where they were unconnected in print, as well from different story collections, with several characters being based upon more than one character to help achieve that end....

So-so.

315) Blowup/DVD Review Blowup was Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English language film, made in Great Britain, in 1966, and it’s a flat-out great film, at a crisp 111 minutes. It was nominated for two Academy Awards; Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay- by Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond- adapted from the short story Las Babas Del Diablo, by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, and won the National Society Of Film Critics title as best film of 1967. Having first seen the two Hollywood films most influenced by it- Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation....

Masterful.

316) The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad/DVD Review Perhaps I was five or six when I first snuck into one of the cheapo movie theaters off of Myrtle Ave., in Queens, to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). Or perhaps I saw it first on WABC-TV’s “The 4:30 Movie,” or late at night, on “Chiller Theater” or “Creature Feature."....

Fun, fun, fun....

317) North By Northwest/DVD Review The addition of pretense can be a killer in a film. It is precisely the lack of such a quality that makes Alfred Hitchcock’s two and a quarter hour long 1959 color thriller North By Northwest a better and more enjoyable film than his preceding film, Vertigo, even if the film comes nowhere near the excellence of his following film, Psycho. Whereas the two films that end in –o attempt to impose a deeper psychology into their screenplays, North By Northwest is a popcorn eater's gala, pre-James Bondian Cold War thriller. It’s no wonder the film was a popular smash while Vertigo was a financial flop....

Cary at his Grantiest.

318) Solaris/DVD Review I first saw the 2002 Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris, starring George Clooney, then read Stansislaw Lem’s novel, then watched this- Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 169 minute film version of the book, Solaris (Solyaris), which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and each successive interpretation I’ve seen of the work is better than the last, even though Lem publicly disavowed Tarkovsky’s film....

Masterwork.

319) Distant/DVD Review Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2002 film Distant (Uzak), his third feature film (his first was 1997’s black and white The Small Town [Kasaba]), is a significant step up from his good but flawed 1999 film Clouds Of May (Mayis Sikintisi)....

Masterful.

320) Autumn Sonata/DVD Review Ingmar Bergman's almost-fated 1978 filmic teaming with Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata (Hostsonaten), is amongst the very best of the films in his canon. It is also the most emotionally intense of the series of Strindbergian or Chekhovian chamber dramas he has filmed over the years, which includes his Spider Trilogy....

Bergman chambered.

321) The Collected Stories/Chester Himes In reading The Collected Stories Of Chester Himes I was reminded of another short story writer who made his name in the 1930s and 1940s as a social realist writer, and then made his mark writing pulpy novels toward the end of his career. That writer was Irwin Shaw....

Da Man!

322) The Wild Bunch/DVD Review Director Sam Peckinpah’s two hour and twenty-five minute long 1969 Western classic, The Wild Bunch, is certainly an influential and important film, but, compared to the other great Western released that year, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West, it has not held up nearly as well....

Spaghetti's better.

323) Ugetsu/DVD Review Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari), a 1953 film by Kenji Mizoguchi, which won the Venice Film Festival’s top prize (the Silver Lion Award for Best Direction) that year, is one of the best films to ever deal with the subject of human desire, and not only the obvious sexual aspects of the emotion....

Ghostly.

324) All The President's Men/DVD Review Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 hit film All The President’s Men is as good an example of a filmmaker as craftsman as there is. Pakula was never a great director/auteur, a man with a ‘vision.’ Rather, he was a journeyman filmmaker who tried to best shape whatever scripts came his way. The film is a good one, but it falls shy of greatness because it is a film that is all surface level....

On the trail.

325) Things Behind The Sun/DVD Review The best way to kill a technically well made film is through a bad screenplay. Exhibit 1A: filmmaker Allison Anders’ 2003 Showtime film Things Behind The Sun. Ostensibly based upon Anders’ real life ‘trauma’ of being raped as a child, the film wallows in every manner of cliché on the subject of victimhood imaginable....

PC Police.

326) The Searchers/DVD Review Films, like artists or authors, tend to have their critical reputations wax and wane through a few cycles until a consensus is finally reached. Of course, consensus has little to do with real world excellence or failure. As good an example of this trend as can be shown certainly is John Ford’s famed 1956 John Wayne western, The Searchers....

Overrated.

327) The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter/Book Review Not long ago I was blown away by the 1943 novel, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, which tells the tale of the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, during the first twenty years of the 20th Century, via the life of a young girl named Francie Nolan....

Not quite.

328) THX1138/DVD Review Many years ago I came across a VHS tape of THX 1138, the first film from George Lucas, released in 1970, and was amazed by it- not only for what it was, but because of who was responsible for it. It certainly was unlike any other film he subsequently made- the lightweight American Graffiti and the Star Wars films, both in tone and quality. It was more like a Samuel Beckett work than the schlock that his later films represented. It had a combination of Oriental zeitgeist and European technique, and moved at the pace of the Eastern European animated sci fi film Fantastic Planet. It was thoughtful and literate and, vis-a-vis his later crap, only begged the question, 'Whatever happened to George Lucas?'....

What happened, George?

329) Cat People/DVD Review Every so often there comes an artist who works in a disrespected genre, yet who has enough talent and vision to almost make that whole genre seem respectable; at least in his own takes on it. And, when two such artists get together, their synergy is even greater....

Meow!

330) L'Avventura/DVD Review Some films that are labeled classics, or great films, are not even good films. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless immediately comes to mind. Others, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, whose title literally means The Adventure, as well as Italian slang for a one night stand, are not necessarily bad, but still only interesting failures, and not worthy of their reputation. L’Avventura was the first in a trilogy of black and white widescreen films Antonioni would make about alienation and personal anomy....

Ho-hum.

331) Heat And Other Stories/Book Review When one thinks of the great mysteries in life one is often drawn to the spectacular, such as whether or not aliens in UFOs have landed or whether or not there ever was an Atlantis, or to the deep, such as what it the meaning of existence. Yet, just as great a mystery, to me, at least, is how a writer like Joyce Carol Oates has first gotten into print, and second, stayed there....

Joyce Carol Oates sucks.

332) Knife In The Water/DVD Review Roman Polanski is at his best as a filmmaker when he focuses on the realist and small moments of horror in a human life. When he goes a bit overboard, and into the grotesque or surreal, such as in The Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck, Rosemary’s Baby, or Chinatown, his films tend to lose their way, even if still good....

Polanski debuts.

333) The M&C Interview 1: Charles Johnson, 6/07

334) It Happened One Night/DVD Review It is a very rare thing when a light-hearted comedy, something that is quintessentially the stuff of a ‘good movie,’ breaches into that territory where the term ‘good film’ can also be applied, but Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) may be an exception....

Yes it did!

335) La Notte/DVD Review La Notte (The Night), the 1961 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, and the second of his Alienation Trilogy, after L’Avventura and before L’Eclisse, is a huge artistic leap up from its predecessor film. It’s not so much that L’Avventura was such a bad film- it’s not. It has its moments, and a good premise that swiftly decays into anomie and melodrama, whereas La Notte, even at an hour and fifty-five minutes in length, is a highly focused, layered, and concentrated, adult drama about the ennui that occurs in a marriage of dilettantes....

Antonioni rules.

336) Lightning Over Water/DVD Review The more that I watch of the 1970s New German Cinema (Das Neue Kino) the more manifest it becomes that, despite the usual namedropping of Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog as a trio, it truly was only a one-man movement. Herzog is and was so far above and cinematically dominant over his two rivals that to speak of the lesser two in the same breath as Herzog is like mentioning the Gawain poet whilst going on about John Donne’s or William Shakespeare’s poetic skills....

Wim blows.

337) The Monolith Monsters/DVD Review Perhaps it is all because of Grant Williams. Williams was a B-film actor who was best known for his starring role in The Incredible Shrinking Man, a 1957 release that has been generally acknowledged as one of the most literate B sci-fi films of the 1950s. In watching the DVD of his other notable 1957 film, The Monolith Monsters, I was struck by how well written this other B sci-fi film was....

Gravity rules.

338) Le Petit Soldat/DVD Review Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) was the second film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, pioneer of the French New Wave of filmmaking, and after the unexpected success of his first film, Breathless- a banal, poorly acted, and dull attempt at (or satire of?) film noir, this second film was greeted with a swift banning in France- for its portrayal of the similar way Right- and Left-Wing terror groups behave....

Godard gets better.

339) Cries And Whispers/DVD Review Cries And Whispers, (Viskningar Och Rop) a 1972 film of Ingmar Bergman's, which was consistently and highly lauded around the world, upon its release, is not a great film, nor anywhere the masterpiece that it's claimed to be....

Shame, Ingmar, shame!

341) Colossus: The Forbin Project/DVD Review There was a time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when science fiction films seemed to be emerging from their cult status, and into the mainstream as films that could express the deepest and highest aspirations of mankind in ways that mere literary sci-fi could not. There were a plethora of intelligent films in that era.....

Neglected classic.

340) Bread/Poem

342) Grand Illusion/DVD Review Jean Renoir’s 1937 black and white film, Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion), is often bandied about with Citizen Kane on the list of all time great films, but unlike that film, Grand Illusion was a commercial and critical sensation from its initial release. While both are arguably great films, neither is really within sniffing distance of any mythic top spot....

Classic, but not great.

343) The Mole People/DVD Review Sometimes bad films get reputations they thoroughly deserve, e.g., Plan 9 from Outer Space, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and Robot Monster. These films are so ineptly staged, directed, written, and acted that they are actually very funny, if not necessarily "good." Sometimes bad films get reputations they do not deserve — in the sense of being thought of as good or even great films. These films even lack the kitsch factor of the aforementioned examples....

Not as bad as can be.

344) Throne Of Blood/DVD Review Akira Kurosawa's black-and-white 1957 film Throne of Blood (Kumonosu j�- literally Spider-Web's Castle) is a very good film, but not quite up there with the best of his films, like Seven Samurai, Ikiru, nor The Bad Sleep Well, despite its vaunted adaptation from Shakespeare's Macbeth. That said, the hour and forty-nine minute long film, written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Ryuzo Kikushima, features one of the best performances by its star....

Akira kicks ass!

345) O. Henry/Book Review O. Henry is famed for his ‘twist’ endings, and as such, many of his short stories fall into a formula. That said, it’s a pretty good formula, and if more writers that are published could find themselves a formula that works as well it would be alot better world to read in....

Pretty good.

346) L'Eclisse/DVD Review Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (The Eclipse), his 1962 black and white capstone of his Alienation Trilogy that began with L’Avventura and continued with La Notte, is arguably a great film, but still a cut or two below its immediate predecessor, the indisputably brilliant La Notte, simply because it lacks the story and excellent portrayal of a human relationship that that earlier film has. It is, however, a superior film to L’Avventura, in that its sustains it sublime weirdness and disaffecting qualities throughout the film, whereas that first film in the trilogy petered out into a dull ending after an intriguing and mysterious premise....

Antonioni fractalizes.

347) The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser/DVD Review Werner Herzog is a nonpareil filmmaker. Yes, one might argue that a Stanley Kubrick or an Ingmar Bergman, a Federico Fellini or an Akira Kurosawa were greater directors of films, but all of them have a more fundamental connection to the central, if not conventional, core of the art of filmmaking. Herzog is farther off into his own cinematic dimension than any other director. If there can be such a thing as instinct into so rigorous an art as filmmaking, then Herzog is as close to a pure beast in that art as one can get....

Herzog's ecstasy.

348) At A Glance: Blondes/Jessica Schneider So I saw something recently on CNN that was addressing the tired question of whether or not blondes were dumber than people with darker hair colors. Even Paris Hilton made the point that every decade there is at least one blonde that the culture fusses over, and now she is that blonde. Just where does this stereotype stem? From Paris to Anna Nicole, to Pam Anderson, to Britney Spears, to Marilyn Monroe, all have exuded that ‘dumbness’ quality....

Paris Hilton?

349) Nights Of Cabiria/DVD Review Before Federico Fellini became the audacious and surrealistic film auteur of the 1960s he was a lauded and accomplished Italian Neorealistic film director of the 1950s, more in league with Vittorio De Sica and Lucchino Visconti. No film better represents this era of Fellini’s art than his sterling 1957 film Nights Of Cabiria (Le Notti Di Cabiria), written by Fellini, Tulio Pinelli, and Ennio Flaiano (with Pier Paolo Pasolini scripting the Roman street slang), and starring his wife Giulieta Masina....

Giulieta in fine form.

350) The M&C Interview 2: Daniel Dennett, 7/07

351) Fearless/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I’ve always believed that a great children’s tale is a great tale. When thinking of the great works in children’s literature, one might think Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, or E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web or Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass....

Or not?

352) War-Gods Of The Deep/DVD Review/Dan Schneider War-Gods of the Deep is one of those films whose title makes no sense, but is right in keeping with the whole tenor of the film itself. Made in 1965, this American International Pictures production the studio’s first non-Roger Corman release based on a Edgar Allan Poe’s story, and was a part of the Big Four of the horror/sci-fi genre of that era. The three other competitors in the field were the giant-monster films from Japan (Gojira / Godzilla, Mosura / Mothra, Gammera the Invincible, etc.), the stop-motion action-adventure-monster films of Ray Harryhausen, and the British Hammer Studios horror productions....

Silliness.

353) At A Glance: Birth Control/Jessica Schneider There aren’t a lot of discussions about this, and from what I gather, few men know much about the birth control pill and all the side effects that go along with it. To assume that any and every female can just ‘go on the pill’ as a reasonable form of contraception is untrue. Many women and their systems cannot handle it, and suffer terrible side effects from it. I was one of these people, and I thought I would share my experience....

No nos.

354) Crumb/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I recently came across a DVD version of Terry Zwigoff’s lauded documentary Crumb, and bought it because I recall how perversely fascinating I found it on a first go-round, when I saw it in the theaters with a pal of mine over a decade ago. However, upon rewatching the film, the first thing that stands out about it is how poorly it has held up as a filmic ‘portrait of an artist’....

Overrated.

355) Minnie And Moskowitz/DVD Review/Dan Schneider All choice entails risk, therefore John Cassavetes’s artistic choice to structure his films based mostly on improvisation rather than hard scripted dialogue is a decision that can result in great films, like Faces, ok films like Shadows, and bad films like Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), an awkwardly written and poorly acted comedy. Admittedly, the film offers a few brilliant moments that reveal Cassavetes at his filmmaking best, but it also shows far too much sloppy editing, amateurish overacting, and a really forced love story between two characters that have nothing in common and are not given any reason to bridge that gap....

Overrated deux.

356) The Stuff Of Thought/Book Review/Dan Schneider Take One: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose. No, that won’t do. No matter how accurate that statement is, its excessive alliteration is bound to sound too cutesy for such an engaging read as his latest foray into the way mankind thinks and speaks....

Pinker hits another four-bagger.

357) The Wrong Man/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Alfred Hitchcock was the consummate Hollywood director in that his films had high production values, big name stars, were immaculately composed and scored, usually by Bernard Herrmann, as in this film. Yet they also tended to lack heart, or real human emotion. They were all basically plot-driven vehicles that usually had twist endings, that stretched the bounds of the reasonable. In a way he was the M. Night Shyamalan of his day, except that he was a far superior filmmaker in every way. Every so often, however, he would try his hand at a different style of film, like Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Jamaica Inn, and Under Capricorn....

Hitch unleashed.

358) An Artist Of The Floating World/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Kazuo Ishiguro is a Master of the novel. No wait, I’ll go as far as to say he’s one of the best novelists ever to have written in the English language. I’ve just finished his 1986 published novel An Artist of the Floating World, and I have to say that it is one of the best books I’ve ever read about an artist. In so many ways, Ishiguro breaks all the rules....

Ishiguro rocks.

359) Love And Death/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It’s an odd thing to experience art fresh and then re-experience it with greater knowledge about it and its sources. As example, as a Woody Allen fan I’d watched his terrific 1975 satire Love And Death, filmed in Hungary and France, probably ten or twelve times, fully getting all the references to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s and Leo Tolstoy’s works, but I had never been in the position of viewing the film having knowledge of all the sly European cinema references; especially those which poke fun at Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s canon.....

Woody rolls.

360) Shame/Film Review/Dan Schneider I should no longer be surprised when critics miss the most obvious things in works of art, because they are human beings, and the vast majority of human beings are lazy by nature. That said, the simplistic notion that Ingmar Bergman’s great 1968 film Shame (or Skammen) is merely an anti-war film does a great deal of damage to the reputation of this very complex, and highly nuanced, film. Compared to its more filmically showoffy predecessors, Persona and Hour Of The Wolf, Shame is seemingly a more classic film, in terms of narrative....

Shamefully neglected.

361) Siddhartha/Book Review/Dan Schneider Siddhartha, a bildungsroman by Herman Hesse, first published in 1922, is simply one of the greatest books ever written. I say that not because I agree with its essential philosophy (which is problematic in some of its over-simplicity), a predisposition that far too often accounts for why critics recommend or do not recommend a work of art, but because it is the embodiment of one of the oldest maxims that defines great literature: saying the most in the least amount of words....

Classic.

362) Uncommon Arrangements/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In the postscript to her latest nonfiction book, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles (1910-1939), Katie Roiphe comments that "these hours lived, painful, messy, exhilarating, richly chaotic, are another kind of art." The belief in this very sentiment - that, amid the creativity of the artists' work, there lives the "art" of the everyday and, likewise, the artists' way of coping with it - is why books like this are written....

Marriage fails.

363) Uncommon Arrangements/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In the postscript of her latest non-fiction book, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles (1910-1939) Katie Roiphe comments on the ideas of these marriages having been, “These hours lived, painful, messy, exhilarating, richly chaotic, are another kind of art.” It is the belief in this very sentiment why books like Uncommon Arrangements are written. That, amid the creativity of the artists’ work, lives the ‘art’ of the everyday, and likewise, the artists’ way of coping with it....

Marriage fails. again.

364) Suite Française/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is difficult to review a work that one not only knows is unfinished, but also one that reads that way. Such has never been a stronger case than with Irene Nemirovsky’s ‘novel’ Suite Française. The book has been marketed as a novel when really it is two unfinished novellas....

So-so.

365) Amy Hempel/Career Hack/Dan Schneider Over the years I have encountered and criticized many sorts of bad writers, from hack poets like James Tate and Donald Hall, to greeting card doggerelist Maya Angelou, to literary necrophile Thomas Steinbeck, to the deliterate prose of writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, who cannot even construct competent nor compelling sentences, to prose hacks like T.C. Boyle, Richard Russo, and Joyce Carol Oates....

Ugh!

366) Night And Fog/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Let me get this out of the way. I am not an anti-Semite. And Night And Fog is not a good documentary, assuming it can even be called a documentary. I say this because the near universal praise for Alain Resnais’s 1955 black and white, and color, film is ill-founded. Most of it has to do with a) the seeming impolitic nature of criticizing anything that displays Nazi butchery, and b) the fact that the 31-minute long film was the first "real" attempt at categorizing the Nazi horrors of World War Two to the world at large....

Yawn.

367) Undertow/DVD Review/Dan Schneider When does the seep of an artist’s talent get to be too much? Is it the first time he ’sells out,’ the third time, or when all of the early potential has drained away? This was what I was thinking as I watched David Gordon Green’s third effort, Undertow, released in 2004. Oh, it’s not a bad film, but then again it’s nothing more than a stylized, updated version of Night of the Hunter, and that was a vastly overrated mediocrity of a film to begin with, directed by Charles Laughton in 1955, and starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous psychopath who stalks children who run away from him....

Yawn.

368) Contempt/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Of the films I’ve seen so far of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, his best is Le Mépris/Contempt (1963), adapted by Godard from Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo (published in English as The Ghost at Noon). That statement should not be taken as an acknowledgement of greatness, for although this is his best film, it is not close to being a great film.....

Lang dominates.

369) Roma/DVDReview/Dan Schneider The 1972 film Roma, by Federico Fellini, lies somewhere between his 1968 film Satyricon and his 1973 film Amarcord, not only chronologically, but creatively (The Clowns, from 1970, is a minor work, by comparison).....

So-so.

370) A Tree Grows In Brooklyn/Book Review/Dan Schneider I only recently got around to reading Betty Smith’s 1943 memoir-cum-novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, mainly because it had a reputation as an Oprah Winfrey sort of book, meaning I thought it must be one of those tomes filled with good intentions but short on literary merit. After all, the first mention of it I can recall was a snide comment in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon from the 1940s. Boy, do I love to be wrong about things like this. The novel is a total masterpiece....

Masterpiece.

371) Variety Lights/DVD Review/Dan Schneider If you have ever wondered why Federico Fellini's film Eight and a half was called Eight and a half, the reason is simple. It was the eighth full film he had directed, till that point, along with a half film credit, which was his debut effort, 1950's co-direction in the 97 minute long black and white film Variety Lights (Luci Del Varietà), along with Neo-Realist film directing veteran Alberto Lattuada....

So-so start.

372) The Maytrees/Book Review/Jessica Schneider When I first heard about Annie Dillard’s latest novel The Maytrees, I was inclined to read it because the reviews had spoken of Dillard’s nature bent in her work, as well as leaning to the likes of Thoreau and Emerson. Being that I have been a long time devoted reader of nature writing and nature literature, from Thoreau and Emerson to Loren Eiseley....

So-so.

373) At A Glance/Marie Antoinette/Jessica Schneider Last night I watched the film Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola, and it was a really bad film. What irritates me though, is that this film, directed by a person who has only gotten where she is due to her lineage, now has convinced me that she really has no talent as a filmmaker. I’ve never seen The Virgin Suicides, and I’m one of the few who appreciated and defended her film Lost in Translation as being something that shows ‘potential’, even though the fact that she won the Oscar for the writing is ridiculous....

Pass the cake.

374) The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog is a nonpareil filmmaker. Yes, one might argue that a Stanley Kubrick or an Ingmar Bergman, a Federico Fellini or an Akira Kurosawa, were greater directors of films, but all of them have a more fundamental connection to the central- if not conventional, core of the art of filmmaking. Herzog is farther off into his own cinematic dimension than any other director. If there can be such a thing as instinct into so rigorous an art as filmmaking, then Herzog is as close to a pure beast in that art as one can get....

The man.

375) Camera Buff/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Krzystof Kieslowski directed one of the more interesting self-reflexive films in 1979, when he filmed Camera Buff (Amator, literally Amateur), his second feature film, which runs an hour and fifty-two minutes. It is the one which made him a known commodity in the film world....

Good try.

376) Flatland: The Film/DVD Review/Dan Schneider This year has seen the release of two films based upon Edwin Abbott Abbott’s great 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions. One calls itself Flatland: The Movie, and is a half hour-long animated educational film featuring the voices of Martin Sheen and Michael York....

So-so.