501) The Big Red One/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Having seen the original version of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, years ago, on television, I could see glimmers of something far grander, but did not know what it could be, and given the callowness of my youth, even had I known what was missing, I could not have mentally interpolated back what the studio that financed the film, Lorimar, had cut. Fuller was basically a B film auteur....

Fuller rocks!

502) Soylent Green/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  In terms of the arts, the 1970s were a very turbulent era. In literature and the visual arts, it was the closing of a great fifty or sixty year period of creativity that has yet to be restarted. In music it was a decade that many see as a low point, due to corporate rock and disco. On television it was a Golden Age for situation comedies, from The Odd Couple to the Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to All In The Family, but in film it was even a greater period of creativity, in all genres, that saw the rise of the American auteur....

Chuck rocks!

503) Black Orpheus/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

So-so.

504) Vertigo/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Watching the films of Alfred Hitchcock reminds one of the fairy tale of Goldilocks And The Three Bears. Not so much in the actual filmic nature of the art, but in the critical reception accorded the films. As example, some of the films that are labeled masterpieces, like Psycho or The Birds, are just right in their assessment. Other films that are critically neglected are, in fact, among Hitchcock’s better films, such as Rope and Frenzy....

Hitchcock's most overrated film.

505) Frenzy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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.....

Hitchcock's most underrated film.

506) Filmatic 4/Conversation(s) With Other Women/Dan Schneider  One of the principle requirements of a good/great film is the ability to make the audience forget they are watching a movie.  In his feature debut, Conversation(s) With Other Women, director Hans Canosa has the script and actors needed to accomplish this suspension of belief but decided to make it blatantly obvious to the viewer that they are, in fact, watching a movie....

Talking and talking....

507) American Genius/Book Review/Kirpal Gordon  Lynne Tillman has written a wild ride of a book. In American Genius she brings to the dramatic monologue, that old warhorse that’s covered many a literary waterfront, much of the whacked-out wit, subversive schtick and psycho-anarchy reminiscent of performance art as it has been practiced in lower Manhattan over the last thirty years....

What others say....

508) Grace Paley/Short Fiction/Dan Schneider  The very things that have made Grace Paley a terrible poet unfortunately affect her bad fiction as well. She is preachy, pedantic, and damns any notion of advancing skill or craftsmanship over screeding and speechifying. And it’s doubly a shame because her earliest stories showed some potential, however limited, but even more drive....

Oy gevalt!

509) Haruki Murakami/Book Review/Dan Schneider  Haruki Murakami is one of the most well known Japanese novelists still living, but his small collection of six short stories, After The Quake, is a good intro to this writer. The book’s stories revolve around the brief time between a January, 1995 earthquake that devastated the city of Kobe, and the terrorist poison gas attacks in a subway a couple of months later in Tokyo....

Super-Frog rules.

510) 3 Women/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Robert Altman’s 1977 film 3 Women, which he wrote and directed from a dream he had, is not a bad film, but not a great film either. It is one of those films, ala Robert Browning, whose reach exceeds its grasp, but not in the good way. It is intended to work on a dream level, yet it is too realistic in its detail for much of the film to be seen as all dream, and not quite bizarre enough to be real dream, especially in its far too forced, and ultimately failed, ending....

Altman goes 2001.

511) Opening Night/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, the wife of Cassavetes, long after we’ve gotten the point....

Cassavetes in top form.

512) Mein Kampf/Book Review/Thomas Healy  Mein Kampf is one of the most remarkable and disturbing books of the twentieth century.  It was perhaps the only book that really mattered during the Third Reich, becoming something of a secular bible of National Socialism.  Millions of households kept a copy of it on their bookshelves, and it was frequently presented as a gift at weddings and graduations.  It is a book that continues to deserve scrutiny because it constitutes the vision of Adolf Hitler.  It contains the basic elements of his ideology, most of his plans, and much of his character....

Taking on the plan.

513) Diary Of A Country Priest/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Suicide?

514) Forbidden Planet/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  When one thinks of 1950s science fiction films one thinks of the sort of schlocky black and white B films that were parodied on the old Mystery Science Theater 3000 television show. Yet, while there were far more films like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Robot Monster than good films, the 1950s did have some very good, if not great, science fiction films like The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, War Of The Worlds, and The Thing From Another World. Yet, the best of the bunch, for its literacy and production values, was undoubtedly MGM’s first big foray into A level science fiction, Forbidden Planet....

Robby rules.

515) The Bad Sleep Well/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 black and white film, The Bad Sleep Well (Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru), is often compared to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it’s an inapt comparison for, while Shakespeare’s play has a higher sense of poetry, Kurosawa’s film has far more relevance, realism, and complexity, even if, like Hamlet, it’s a high class melodrama. The film was written by Kurosawa and four collaborators....

Unheralded masterpiece.

516) The Decalogue/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, illuminating aspects of the Ten Commandments from the third, transitional phase of his career, which included this 1988-89 Polish television series, filmed in 1987 and 1988, as well as the two subsequent feature films derived from episodes five and six....

Hit and miss.

517) Regeneration/DVD Review/ Dan Schneider  In 1998 I saw a great war film that was lost in the glare of the nearly simultaneous American film releases of Terrence Malick’s remake of The Thin Red Line- which is a great film, and Steven Spielberg’s cliché and stereotype-dripping Saving Private Ryan....

Butchered film- a crime against art!

518) Vincent And Theo/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Vincent & Theo, a 1990 film by director Robert Altman, may be the worst film ever made by a major director who has made a great film. Watching this two hour and twenty minute abomination left me, and my wife, stunned by its wretchedness. From the nonexistent narrative, to the indulgence of every artistic cliché imaginable....

A crime against art- period!

519) Brotherhood Of The Bomb/Book Review/Dan Schneider  In the world of historians, Daniel J. Boorstin stands head and shoulders above all lesser writers in that nonfiction genre, much as Loren Eiseley and, to a lesser extent, Stephen Jay Gould, reign supreme as literary craftsmen in the sciences. This thought was inescapable to me as I read yet another in a prolix series of books about the historic import of scientists....

Zzzzz....

520) Amarcord/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Federico Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord is a film that has often been linked with Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander as films by old men looking back on their youth. While this is true, in the main, the fact is that 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....

Fellini at his best worst.

521) Fanny And Alexander/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Why Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 final ‘filmic film’, Fanny & Alexander (Fanny Och Alexander), bears the appellation it does is a mystery- one of many in the film, since the first titular character, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) is a third or fourth level supporting character at best, and in the three hour theatrical version of the film she is not even mentioned by name for nearly an hour into the film....

Ingmar goes home again.

522) No Tokens Accepted/Book Review/SuZi  That which is taboo has been so much a part of literature – even American literature – that taboo topics are truly an artistic tradition. Unfortunately, serious consideration of stigmatized topics still arouses much social ire; there are plenty  of provincials who become apoplectic if their padded-room, never-neverland nostalgia shows a gossamer reality. It is because of these minions of vitriol that art is shackled and gagged in our current climate. Because we live in a decade of deep deception, the corporate purveyors of culture push forth various marionettes programmed to please. Don’t be fooled by such tokenism....

Gay lit.

523) Downfall/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 37^th 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....

Hitler and co.

524) Everyday People/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 crap 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....

Underrated.

525) The Jimmy Show/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

More underrated.

526) Satyricon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  The best way to understand director Federico Fellini’s audacious 1968 film Satyricon (also known as Fellini Satyricon, because 1967 saw the release of Satyricon by fellow Italian filmmaker Gian Luigi Polidoro) is within the context of its year of release. That pivotal year saw the release of such indelible film classics as The Graduate, Planet of the Apes, Night Of The Living Dead, and 2001: A Space Odyssey....

Overlooked.

527) The Double Life Of Veronique/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Overrated.

528) I Am Curious/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Way overrated.

529) Gates Of Heaven/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Ok.

530) Marnie/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. One of them was Marnie, his 1964 color follow up to the two terrific films mentioned at the start, starring his The Birds female lead, Tippi Hedren....

Rape?

531) Signs Of Life/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  No filmmaker’s career has been more defined and structured by the musical choices he has made than German film director Werner Herzog; and this claim is evident from his first full length feature, 1968’s Signs Of Life (Lebenszeichen), which he made when he was twenty-four and released when he was twenty-five, after writing the script when he was twenty-one, but getting the idea for it, he claims, when he was fifteen or sixteen. Oddly, the film also gives a story credit to someone named Achim Von Arnim....

Great from the get go.

532) Straw Dogs/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. Yes, 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, they have one big thing going for them that Straw Dogs does not. They are great films. While Straw Dogs is not nearly as good a film as its hagiographers claim- for Peckinpah had all the subtlety and psychological depth of a sledgehammer....

Overrated.

533) Deliverance/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  New on the Fox Network: When Good Movies Go Bad! Or, a review of John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance....

Ridiculous.

534) Late Spring/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Masterful.

535) A Woman Under The Influence/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Ok.

536) Even Dwarfs Started Small/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Weird.

537) Juliet Of The Spirits/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 8½. Unlike that prior film, often considered Fellini’s best....

Weird (in color!).

538) Clouds Of May/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Potential.

539) Stan & Ollie/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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 (for my money the best comedy team of all time, because while their slapstick was the equal of any other team, their verbal repartee was nonpareil). Even in television, the roles are always clearly defined. Tony Randall was the straight man for Jack Klugman in The Odd Couple, and Desi Arnaz was Lucille Ball’s straight man in I Love Lucy. Perhaps the only other comedy team where the straight man role was not clearly defined was The Honeymooners’ pairing of Jackie Gleason and Art Carney....

Who's straight?

540) Empire Falls/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Richard Russo sucks. Period.

541) Floating Weeds/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. The most famed examples of this trait are 1934’s silent black and white A Story Of Floating Weeds (Ukikusa Monogatari), written by Ozu and Tadao Ikeda....

Ozu rules.

542) The 400 Blows/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  In 1959 a pair French films were released that became the twin pillars of the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), and were instantly hailed as classics. One, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (A Bout de Souffle), was a bad film, and the other, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups), was a good film. Neither, however, can really be called great cinema, despite their reputations. That said, Truffaut’s film is far better than Godard’s because it mostly avoids overt clichés, even as its screenplay- its weakest element, written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussey, often bogs down in anomy. Like Godard, Truffaut shot his film in black and white, and indulged the real world, as well as doing long takes, to try to feign naturalism, even though these were often outcomes of necessity not choice, borne out of lack of financing rather than artistic vision.....

Frogs on parade.

543) The Return Of The Secaucus 7/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Independent filmmaker John Sayles’ debut film, The Return Of The Secaucus 7, released in late 1979, is a film that is typical of the low budget feel of such films from that era- even such horror films like Last House On The Left or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like those other films it is filled with inexperienced and mediocre acting, and unrealistic dialogue. Before this film was made, Sayles had been a screenwriter and script doctor for Roger Corman’s cheapo horror films. This film, however, was the first that bore his own imprint and vision. Unfortunately, the excellence of his later films only points up the flaws of this first film, written and directed by Sayles on a low budget. Like many low budget indy films, this film is long on talk and short on action and visual razzle-dazzle, and was filmed at a New Hampshire lodge....

So-so start for Sayles.

544) Hume's Fork/Book Review/SuZi  The quintessential function of comedy is didactic: it seeks to teach by the most powerful of persuasive tools –the chuckles and the guffaw. In order to induce a giggle, the voice of the narrator must ally and unify the point of view of the audience with that of witness, so that all ears envision the action from the same angle. Any disenfranchisement from this unity will result in the death of the joke; all possibilities for experiencing the lesson are lost. Any good griot can hold an audience enraptured. The profit for the audience is not only the joy of the joke, but the ecstasy of enlightenment potentiated by the story’s climax....

Tuning?

545) Belle De Jour/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 Buñuel’s Belle De Jour- his 1967 foray into color film, based upon the same titled novel of Joseph Kessler, released in 1928....

Oo-la-la!

546) Maids Of Wilko/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Babes aplenty.

547) Ordet/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Denmark’s Carl Theodor Dreyer was one of the great auteurs of early cinema, and such masterpieces as Vampyr and Day Of Wrath attest to that fact. Many critics, however, have hailed either his earlier silent film, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, or his later Ordet (The Word) as his greatest work, and while I’ve never seen the earlier film in a full reatoration, having just watched Ordet I can say, uncategorically, that it is not in a league with Vampyr nor Day Of Wrath. This is not to say that the film is a bad one, but it is nowhere near a great one....

Night Of The Living Christians.

548) The Known World/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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. It is ironic, because in this edition of the novel, the best writing in the whole book comes from an epilogue that reprints perhaps the best of those tales....

Poor blacks.

549) Native Son/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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. Yet, it is a great novel- despite some flaws in length and occasional descriptive lapses into banality, because, by its end, and the courtroom speeches for and against the protagonist- a killer and rapist named Bigger Thomas, your average reader is wholly involved in the vortical scenario....

Dead black.

550) The Hidden Fortress/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 is 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. Yes, there are a handful of similarities, but ‘influence’ is usually used when a great work of art is influenced by an equal or lesser work of art, not when bad art rips off greater art. In short, influence occurs in evolution, not devolution, and Lucas’s claims bear the stench of a lesser artist trying to parasitically sponge off a greater artist’s reputation....

George Lucas sucks.

551) The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Noirish supreme.

552) Through A Glass Darkly/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Yawn.

553) Winter Light/DVD Review /Dan Schneider  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....

Supreme Socrates.

554) The Silence/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. Through A Glass Darkly has the most of it, Winter Light is nearly void of it, and The Silence has a bit of it, although not nearly as much as the lurid American trailer for the film would suggest....

Ssssh.

555) Gertrud/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, made in 1964. Well, my advice to such critics is to look past the bullshit and deal with what is really onscreen. Gertrud is a bad film, and is one in a long line of bad ‘last films’ made by great filmmakers. Recently, I watched Ingmar Bergman’s final film, Saraband, and it was a black mark on an otherwise sterling career. While this film is not as bad as that, it’s close, and Dreyer did not have nearly as many great films to his credit as Bergman has to offset his failure....

Oy!

556) White Teeth/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Yawn and hurl.

557) Amadeus/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, of this biopic on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart....

Pretty good.

558) Brinkley's Beat/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Yawn.

559) The Life Aquatic/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Screenwriter and film director Wes Anderson has made a career out of quirky films that have a rabid following, but offer little depth. He rarely pushes himself, and why his latest film, 2004’s The Life Aquatic, With Steve Zissou 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....

Still Bill Murray.

560) The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 7^th Voyage Of Sinbad. Or, perhaps I saw it first on WABC-TV’s The 4:30 Movie, or late night, on Chiller Theater or Creature Feature. Regardless of when I first saw it, I was immediately hooked on the Ray Harryhausen special effects. Even in this day of CGI effects, I still prefer the older films....

Still a joy.

561) Where The Green Ants Dream/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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- such as Even Dwarfs Started Small, Heart Of Glass, and 1984’s Where The Green Ants Dream (Wo Die Grünen Ameisen Traümen). Whereas Even Dwarfs Started Small is an enigmatic study on Fascism that is beyond evaluation on a normal scale, and Heart Of Glass was filmed with its actors hypnotized, Where The Green Ants Dream is an odd concoction that mixes all three of Herzog’s styles....

Herzog lite.

562) Hour Of The Wolf/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, or even nothing, than almost any other director. Almost all the creepiness that a viewer feels watching this film comes from scenes, that in other circumstances, would be banal, even dull....

Howling.

563) The Fearless Vampire Killers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  One of the overlooked things about most of the vintage 1960s and 1970s Hammer Studios horror films is that they were quite funny, often in an unintentional way. 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, much less superior vampire films like the silent F.W. Murnau classic Nosferatu, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, nor Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night. No, the Hammer films were always more along the line of the non-George Romero zombie flicks- full of hammy acting, bad gags, cheap effects, few scares, but a ton of laughs- not unlike the same era’s Godzilla films....

So-so?

564) La Strada/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 both him and its female lead, his wife Giulieta Masina, stars, won the 1954 Venice Film Festival’s top award and the 1956 Best Foreign Picture Academy Award, yet there is something missing from it. It is a good film, arguably a very good or near-great film, but it is definitely not a great film....

Fellini gets great.

565) North By Northwest/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Hitchcock gets Grant.

566) Distant/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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). The earlier film had potential, but reeked of a small budget and improvised quality in the worst ways- plot holes and wooden acting from amateurs. That Clouds Of May succeeded on any level was a testament to Ceylan’s talent....

Ceylan gets great.

567) Things Behind the Sun/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, as well as wasting some fine performances, save that of the ever PC and increasingly hyperbolic Don Cheadle, whose performance here presages his terrible role in last year’s Oscar-winning Crash....

Anders gets PC.

568) The Caulfield Boy/New Take/Max Raskin  For many a misunderstood introvert, seeing “fuck” and “phony” for the first time in print is a remarkably heady experience; not surprisingly, The Catcher in the Rye is an extremely popular novel among teens. The novel is so admired that it has bred a class of young Holden Caulfield sycophants, desperately trying to emulate this demigod of malcontent. This reverence is misplaced. When first reading Catcher it might appear that Caulfield’s carping has some validity....

Catch this, Holden!

569) The Passenger/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Jack's back, or not?

570) Short Cuts/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Short Cuts, the three plus hour long 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....

Carver carved.

571) Good Morning/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Ozu farts.

572) Smiles Of A Summer Night/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, over a half a century later, and half a world away, it only shows how differently tastes in humor can be....

Ingmar laughs.

573) All The President's Men/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Nixon plots.

574) The Dead/Comment/Norman Ball  Stalin once said- in prescient anticipation of the personal interest story- kill one man and it’s a story; kill one million and it’s a statistic. People seem oddly unfazed when yet another American GI dies in Iraq. Kidnap a soldier however (or in this case, three) and all hell breaks loose....

Media yawn.

575) American Idol/Season 6/Dan Schneider  The 6^th season of American Idol was the worst since its first season- in terms of talent level and excitement. Yes, the eventual winner, Jordin Blake- a seventeen year old prodigy, has far greater long term potential than that season’s winner, Kelly Clarkson, but if one looks at the last seventeen year old to make the finals, Season 3’s Diana Degarmo, it’s clear that Jordin was a cut below in talent level, even if she has more marketing potential....

Yawn....

576) Early Summer/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Masterful.

577) The Wild Bunch/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Wild, really?

578) The Searchers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, but as good an example of this trend as can be shown certainly is John Ford’s famed 1956 John Wayne Western, The Searchers. Upon its initial release, the film made a solid profit, and was considered a good film....

Still looking.

579) Cat People/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. Such was the fortuitous pairing of film producer Val Lewton (née Vladimir Leventin) and film director Jacques Tourneur....

Meow!

580) Chester Himes/Collected Stories/Dan Schneider  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, and while he was a superior short story teller to Himes, Himes is still a good writer....

Damned Good.

581) It Happened One Night/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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 1934 film It Happened One Night may be an exception. Today, most people know Capra solely for his rediscovered classic It’s A Wonderful Life, made a dozen years later....

Colbert meows.

582) The Monolith Monsters/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Perhaps it is all because of Grant Williams. Williams was a B film actor who was best known for his starring and titular role in The Incredible Shrinking Man, generally acknowledged as one of the most literate and high quality B sci fi films from the 1950s. In watching the DVD of his next noted film, The Monolith Monsters, I was struck by how well written a film that film is also, even as it is another B sci fi film. No, Williams’ role in the 77 minute black and white film, from 1957-as was The Incredible Shrinking Man, is not as important as his role in the prior film....

Tinker Toys?

583) Lit Fiction/Good?/Paul Burga  The stories reviewed come from The 2005 Best American Short Stories. Why 2005? Why not? Each year the overall quality of the collections is basically the same....

Yawn....

584) Let's Eliminate High School/Idea?/Joe Reese  As a career teacher (college, high school, elementary school—the list is long), I'm always interested in proposals to improve our educational establishment.  Frequently these proposals stipulate that we just get tougher, and expect more from our students.  Yesterday I read a suggestion that high school students be required to take four years of English, four years of math, three years of social studies, three years of science, and two years of a foreign language....

Radical, dude!

585) THX 1138/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Lucas in form.

586) The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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 20^th Century, via the life of a young girl named Francie Nolan. That book was the debut novel of a woman named Betty Smith, who was nearing fifty when she wrote it. A few years earlier, in 1940, the debut novel, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, of another woman, made an equally big impact, yet its author, Carson McCullers, was less than half the age of Smith....

Aces.

587) Heat And Other Stories/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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 is 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 howls.

588) Knife In The Water/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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....

Roman rocks.

589) Cries And Whispers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. That said, it’s not a bad film, merely an interesting and lesser one from his oeuvre that is laced with some very odd moments, some really bad moments, and some cringingly self-conscious moments....

Ingmar scowls.

590) Le Petit Soldat/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, and the fact that it had an implicitly anti-war message at a time when the French were trying to hold on to their colonial power in Africa during the Algerian War....

Godard gets better.

591) Throne Of Blood/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Akira Kurosawa’s black and white 1957 film Throne of Blood (Kumonosu Jô- 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, longtime Kurosawa leading man Toshirô Mifune....

Sharp!

592) Taste Of Cherry/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  There is the old, and often neglected, nostrum about ‘gilding the lily.’ I was reminded of this watching Abbas Kiarostami’s acclaimed 1997 film Taste Of Cherry (Ta’m E Guilass), co-winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, for while it comes close to being a great film for the bulk of its running time of 99 minutes (not the oft-claimed 95 minutes), its much discussed ending, of breaking the fourth wall....

Bitter?

593) The Mole People/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Sometimes bad films get reputations that they thoroughly deserve- like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, or Robot Monster. These films are so ineptly staged, directed, written, and acted, that they are actually very funny, if not good. Sometimes bad films get reputations that they do not deserve- in the sense of being thought of as good or even great films. These are notoriously lauded films that do not even have the kitsch factor of the aforementioned films. They are dull, plodding, and preachy....

Oy!

594) Colossus: The Forbin Project/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. Yes, there had been intelligent sci fi in the decades before. In the 1930s, there was William Cameron Menzies’ Things To Come, based upon the H.G. Wells tale....

Better than expected.

595) Lightning Over Water/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, and 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 of John Donne’s or William Shakespeare’s poetic skills....

Exploiting the near-dead.

596) 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....

Exploiting the mentally ill.

597) Grand Illusion/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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. Both have flaws, but Grand Illusion has more flaws than Citizen Kane and is clearly the lesser film, although it’s still certainly a very good film. It was written by Renoir- son of the famed Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir....

The Frogs.

598) The Stuff Of Thought/Steven Pinker/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....

Aces the words!

599) Fearless/Tim Lott/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....

Mediocre.

600) An Artist Of The Floating World/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 when it comes to storytelling, and it is for that very reason why his prose is so great. I first encountered Ishiguro when I read The Remains of the Day, which was a great book. I was pleasantly surprised by how great the writing was, that I went ahead and sought out more of his books. Although I believe The Remains of the Day to be a great novel, as great as it is, An Artist of the Floating World is even better....

Master.

601)  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....

Solid.

602)  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....

Pisser.

603)  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....

Downer.

604) O. Henry/Book Review/Dan Schneider  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. Yet, even the best of formulae lend themselves to needless repetition and predictability. While there are a handful of tales that are great, most are merely solid, for O. Henry lacks a modern feel to his character development. In one tale he can be as realistic as turn of the Twentieth Century fiction can be and in the next he can give merely slight caricatures and corny sight gags....

Classic.

605) War-Gods Of The Deep/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  War-Gods Of The Deep is one of those films whose title really makes no sense, but is right in keeping with the whole tenor of the film. It was made in 1965, the first of the famed American International Pictures post-Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe-themed horror and sci fi films of the 1960s, that started with The House Of Usher in 1960, and was a part of the Big Four of horror and sci fi films of that era....

Classic schlock.

606) Minnie And Moskowitz/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  All choice entails risk, therefore John Cassavetes’ 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 his Faces, ok films like his Shadows, and bad films, like his 1971 film, Minnie And Moskowitz, an awkwardly written and poorly acted comedy....

Classic schmaltz that fails.

607) 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’, or the third, or when all of the early potential has drained away? This was what I was thinking as I watched David Gordon Green’s third filmic effort, Undertow, an hour and forty-eight minute effort released in 2004. Oh, it’s not a bad film, but all it is is a stylized, updated version of Night Of The Hunter, and that was a vastly overrated mediocrity of a film....

Modern crap.

608) Contempt/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Of the films I’ve seen so far of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, his best is 1963’s Contempt (Les Mépris), 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 for, despite a gorgeous aping of the Michelangelo Antonioni style of shooting....

Classic mediocrity.

609) Amy Hempel/Book Review/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, who wallow in cardboard characters and clichés, and even to ‘fuck me’ writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Nell Freudenberger, yet none of them were as consistently overhyped as the short fiction of Amy Hempel....

Oh shit!

610) Roma/DVD Review/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). It is a picaresque film, as both the other films are, and has some of the heightened imagery and poesy of Satyricon, while possessing Amarcord’s humor and jabs at Fellini’s Fascist era youth....

Fellini on high.

611) 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 filmic world. While not a great film, it is a bit more successful a film than other fare from that era, such as his own Blind Chance, from 1981....

Ok.

612) Flatland/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, while the other is a lower-budgeted 99 minute long film called Flatland: The Film. This is an independent animated feature that has many good points, but just as many bad points. Neither film is the first adaptation nor re-envisioning of Abbott’s brilliant Victorian era satire....

Misusing a classic.

613) Nights Of Cabiria/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  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, and 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....

Making a classic.

614) Landscape In The Mist/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  There is a superlative scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s 1988 film Landscape In The Mist (Τοπίο στην ομίχλη or Topio Stin Omichli) that is amongst the best filmic depictions of sexual abuse ever shown, and should be shown as a primer to Hollywood directors on how to be subtle and poetic, especially when dealing with such terminally PC topics. In it, the young ten or twelve year heroine of the film, Voula....

Theo in high gear.

615) The Yards/Film Review/Joe Valdez  Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) returns to Queens after serving a sixteen month prison sentence for auto theft. Guests at his welcome home party include his buddy Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), his ailing mother (Ellen Burstyn), his aunt (Faye Dunaway) and his cousin Erica (Charlize Theron), who has become Willie’s girlfriend, in spite of a history she once had with Leo....

Marky-Mark takes off.

616) Winter Kills/Film Review/Joe Valdez  On a cargo vessel off the coast of Malaysia, Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges) is visited by Keifeitz (Richard Boone), the do-dirt man who works for Nick’s father, owner of the shipping company, among other global interests. Keifeitz has with him a man in bandages (Joe Spinell) who wants to confess: he was the gunman responsible for killing Nick’s half-brother - President Kegan - nineteen years ago from an office tower in Philadelphia....

Interesting.

617) Blondes/Dumb?/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 in some way or other, which leads me to ask, what came first?....

The question.

618) Birth Control/The Pill/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....

Jess explains it all.

619) Sofia Coppola/Hack?/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....

The end?

620) Bad Luck/Sucks!/Jessica Schneider  I’m depressed. Why? For the past ten months I’ve been having literary foreplay with a literary agent who told me she thought I was a ‘terrific’ writer, had excellent credentials and that she loved my work. She loved it so much that throughout this time, we spoke twice on the phone, and I shared with her 3 of my manuscripts. It seemed like she was pretty focused on having me as a client. That is, until last week when she told me no. Her reasons? She didn’t think she could sell my work to a major New York publisher....

So do agents!

621) The Knock At The Door/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  For anyone who has ever wanted an introduction to the Armenian Genocide, reading Margaret Ajemian Ahnert’s memoir, The Knock at the Door, would be a good place to start. The book deals with Ahnert’s mother, Ester, and how at the ages of fifteen through nineteen, the Armenian girl has to endure starvation, beatings, and rape—yet manages to survive. This story, based on the stories that Ester relayed to Ahnert, talks about how the Armenians were forced out of their houses....

Death abounds.

622) The Painted Veil/DVD Review/Joe Valdez  In 1925, British couple Kitty Fane (Naomi Watts) and Dr. Walter Fane (Edward Norton) travel by sedan chair through interior China. In flashbacks to London, we learn that Walter is a bacteriologist who runs a government lab in Shanghai. He woos Kitty, an attractive, but immature girl. She has no romantic feelings for the serious doctor, but accepts a marriage proposal to get away from her mother....

Chinese intrigue.

623) 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’. In the intervening years, documentaries such as The Kid Stays In The Picture, American Splendor, and Mayor Of The Sunset Strip have used narrative and filmic techniques that make Crumb seem downright quaint and formulaic, by comparison....

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