NEW ESSAYS!

794) The Wild Blue Yonder/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  I just watched Werner Herzog’s 2005 science fiction fantasy film The Wild Blue Yonder, and am left in that rare position of not having much to say of the film that could really change the opinion of a viewer, pro or con, toward it. This is not because it is good nor bad, simply because it is one of those works of art that is not even on a good/bad scale. It is beyond such reckoning, a purely aural and visual experience for most of its 81 minutes, and thus has an effect similar to the phantasmagoric end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey....

Odd.

795) Paisan/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Having grown up amongst many folks of Italian descent, the term paisan, or pal, was quite familiar to me; especially when used by non-Italians to describe Italian friends of theirs. A similar meaning is conveyed with the use of the term as the title of the second film in Robert Rossellini’s War Trilogy. Paisan (Paisá), from 1946, is not nearly as well known as Rome Open City, his first trilogy film, but it is a significantly better film, as well as being more truly a Neo-Realist film than its more melodramatic predecessor. Part of the reason is that the 126 minute film is episodic, so that the mawkishness and melodrama, that is inherent in many war stories, never gets to the point of overwhelm. Made and released a year after Rome Open City, Paisan often played on double bills with the earlier film when it was released in America. The film is set during 1943 and 1944, and each of the six episodes follows the Allies’ chronological battles northward through Italy. Each episode highlights willful or mistaken miscommunication between the Allies, the Italians, and the Nazis. The film won many awards, in its day, but curiously languished while other Neo-Realist films became exalted as classics. While not, overall, a great film, three of the episodes reach heights that contain great moments, and these are enough to argue the film passes the near-great threshold, meaning reasonable arguments can be made in its favor. Those episodes are the third, the fourth, and the sixth and final one. The others range from bad to solid. All the episodes open with narration by Giulio Panicali....

Good.

796) Germany Year Zero/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Odd as it may seem, given that I was born two decades after the end of World War Two, watching the final film in Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy, Germany Year Zero, brought home visions of the decimated cityscapes from my own urban youth in the wastelands of the industrialized parts of Brooklyn and Queens in the early 1970s. Of course, whereas the whole city of Berlin, as filmed in 1947, was still mostly post-war rubble, there were only city blocks of such abandoned and destroyed buildings, and, instead of having happened in a brief period of a few weeks or months of bombing, it took decades of slow social and civil neglect to get the landscapes that still return to me in dream. But, the end result- poor people who turn to black markets to survive, and who scrape by one another to survive- is just as true. Also true is the psychic toll such takes on children who grow accustomed to such squalor. As some people who grew up in Belfast or Lebanon, or those living right now in Baghdad or other cities laid waste. I state this up front, just to get my own personal leanings toward the film out of the way. In that regard, I should also note that my own European family had folks on both sides of the war: those who died in concentration camps, and then fell behind the Iron Curtain, and those who fled to South America after the war, so I have a sense that both sides in any war suffer greatly, especially those cast in the role of villains, who were merely dragged along for the ride....

Great.

797) I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Like James Cagney, Paul Muni was a Broadway star who made it big in Hollywood, during the early sound era. And, like Cagney, his breakthrough role was that of a gangster, in a Warner Brothers film. In Cagney’s case, it was in 1931’s The Public Enemy, and in Muni’s case it was a year later, in the original Scarface (yes, this was the film that the 1980s Al Pacino quasi-comedy was loosely based on). Later, that same year, Muni delivered his second powerhouse performance, in another black and white Warner Brothers social crime drama: I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, directed by Mervyn Leroy, who was coming off the successful Little Caesar, which made Edward G Robinson a star....

Muni rocks.

798) I Am Cuba/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 film, I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) is probably the most divergent film I’ve ever watched in terms of the quality of its constituent parts. It is, as its reputation boasts, visually stunning, imaginative, innovative, and flat out great. But, in terms of its narrative, it is hackneyed, trite, and unimaginatively anti-American in its blatant agitprop, and laughably bad. And I say this fully aware of the Ugly Americanism that has wrought the communist fervour that still grips South America, as well as the Islamic Extremism, because the propagandising in the film has a seriously negative effect on the film, to the point that its labeling as ‘Commie kitsch’ by many of its detractors, and even some of its champions, is dead on....

Commie kitsch.

751) Synecdoche, New York/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Synecdoche, New York is a two hour long, 2008 film from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, and was his first attempt at directing films. It is a wildly overpraised and almost as wildly derided film. The truth is that it is a formulaic and dull film whose predictability, especially after the first 45 minutes, is almost total. Once one hooks into Kaufman’s symbolism and plot quirks (not a difficult task for one over the age of twelve) there is not a single plot development a keen observer cannot pick out the moment a certain trigger event occurs. That said, it is also one of those films that, despite its many and profound screenplay lapses (and has there ever been a more overhyped screenwriter than the dreadfully delimited Kaufman?), features some fine acting performances from some of the best actors in American film today: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, and Dianne Wiest....

Yawn.

752) Dirty Pretty Things/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  You know a film is in trouble when, while listening to the DVD commentary track, the director admits he hasn’t got a clue what the title means. That’s exactly what director Stephen Frears admits on the commentary track of the DVD for Dirty Pretty Things, an oddly overpraised film from 2003. Why it was so overpraised I can only surmise as critics being tired of the same old Hollywood pap that passes for thrillers. I say this because DPT is ostensibly a thriller, except that it’s not. In short, it’s a muddle of a film about a Nigerian political refugee & doctor named Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in London who’s running from a false charge of murdering his wife in his homeland. He takes several odd jobs- cab driving in the daylight & hotel front desk receptionist at night....

Ugh.

753) Lessons Of Darkness/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  1992’s Lessons Of Darkness, by Werner Herzog, was probably the next logical step in the documentary style of film that was pioneered by Herzog and the –Quatsi trilogy of films by Godfrey Reggio, which, themselves were not true documentaries. This 54 minute film, that follows the post-First Gulf War cleanup of the damaged oil wells left behind by Saddam Hussein’s retreating and vandalous army, has few equals in terms of visual impact, and was nominated for a 1992 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Where Reggio’s films were mere visions for visions’ sake, Herzog’s near apocalyptic scenes of oil-choked death, fire, chaos, and destruction have been labeled everything from a documentary film to a science fiction film, simply because Herzog slips in some snippets of poetry that speaks of the realm as otherworldly. It is amazing how a little sleight of hand can totally confound the willfully obtuse....

Terrific.

754) Walking With Dinosaurs/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  For male Americans who grew up between the years of 1945 and 1980, there was only one thing that tended to dominate their days — and it was not television, rock and roll, nor film. No, it was dinosaurs. I had a few dozen little plastic dinos, and I had quite a few books on them. A bit later came the space race, and astronomy was also a thing little boys dug (little boys, big things, and all). But always, always, there were dinosaurs — be it from visiting the natural history museums of big cities, watching assorted B films, reading books, playing with toys, or dreaming....

Solid.

755) Harlan County, USA/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Barbara Kopple is one of those filmmakers who can do just about any film well. And so much so, that when she misfires, as with her 1998 film on Woody Allen, Wild Man Blues, a critic may still give her the benefit of the doubt. However, when at her best, such as with the classic Academy Award winning documentary from 1976, Harlan County, USA, she’s almost nonpareil as a documentarian....

Excellent.

756) Le Samourai/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Le Samourai is the first film of Jean-Pierre Melville’s that I’ve seen, and it’s a good one. That stated, it’s not a great film, and the reason for this may be that the claim that some critics make of Melville- that he’s the French Alfred Hitchcock, seem to be true. Of course, this is only one film- well-crafted, but rather lightweight philosophically; as are almost all of Hitchcock’s films. Then again, Henri-Georges Clouzot also earned the appellation of ‘the French Hitchcock,’ and it was not so, for the few films of his that I’ve seen are both well beyond what Hitchcock could muster....

Solid.

757) Palm Of The Hand Stories/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  Too often writing that is lumped into the category of “experimental fiction” shouldn’t be. I remember once getting into an argument with someone over James Frey. My point was that I don’t care if the man embellished his memoir, his writing sucks. He can’t even use punctuation properly. And then this person responded with, “yes, but that’s because he’s experimental.” Actually, no. Experimental implies one is trying something truly new — be it through idea or in form, and although neither might succeed, at least there is some attempt at depth, and one is not simply using the word as a code for laziness....

Good.

758) Angels With Dirty Faces/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  My dad, long dead, was one of the biggest Jimmy Cagney fans of all time, and of all the films the little Mick with an attitude made, my dad’s two favorites were the 1940 boxing film, City For Conquest, and the 1938 gangster-cum-social melodrama, Angels With Dirty Faces. Both black and white films had Cagney team with Ann Sheridan, and both films had terrific performances by Cagney. But, if he had to choose, my dad would have gone with the earlier film as his favorite, simple because it featured the Dead End Kids, who would later star in comedy films as the Bowery Boys. And, amongst them, was my dad’s second favorite actor, at least of that era- Leo Gorcey. I would likely go with both films, too, and in the same order, but for a different reason, and that’s because the earlier film, when I first watched it with my dad in the early 1970s, left me asking him why the priest in the film had lied, at the end, to the Dead End Kids? However, that query about the ending to the film is, oddly, not the most asked. The most asked query is whether or not the lead character, gangster Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) turns ‘yellow’ when he is sent to the electric chair. Of course, anyone knowing anything of gangsters, and watching the prior parts of the 97 minute film (not 78, as wrongly noted on the DVD cover), can find no evidence to support such a claim. But, that’s precisely why so many ask such a superfluous question- that’s what people tend to do when something is so obvious....

Good.

759) The Third Man/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  The 1949 British black and white film, The Third Man, is, in many ways, the filmic equivalent of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. By that I mean the most obvious things are scoffed at as being not trustworthy, whereas the most implausible things are winked and nodded as being ‘true.’ As example, in the JFK Assassination mythos, there are two indisputable pieces of evidence that evince a conspiracy in the murder of the President: a) the Zapruder film, shot inadvertently, which clearly shows a head shot from in front of the moving car (the opposite direction of where Oswald was located), and b) live television coverage where the world saw known mobster Jack Ruby shoot Oswald, then remain silent about the conspiracy till his death. By any reasonable standard, including Occam’s Razor, there was an indisputable and provable conspiracy in the death of John F. Kennedy. Yet, still many people heed the fabulism of the Warren Commission, and not what they actually witnessed, either then, or in subsequent years, in person, or on television. Of course, I believe Oswald shot JFK, or attempted to, but there was clearly a second gunman, one Oswald likely knew nothing about, and who was sent as insurance so that the real shooter could get away and Oswald could legitimately be, as he claimed, a mere patsy in something that extended far beyond him....

Great.

760) The Sacrifice/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Watching Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s final work, Offret / The Sacrifice (1986), is an exercise in cinema appreciation. That’s not because The Sacrifice is a great film, but because it has great moments interspersed with moments of sheer boredom. In fact, The Sacrifice is one of those rare films that goes to the antipodes of what is good and bad in that art form. Overall, it’s worth seeing; but it is in no way, shape, or form a great film — much less a masterpiece....

Solid.

761) The Immoralist/Book Review/Dan Schneider  One of the hallmarks of great art is that it not only defines its time, but transcends it, as well. In reading over the Dover Thrift Edition of Andre Gide’s 1902 novella, The Immoralist (L’Immoraliste), this fact came home pointedly. What was shocking over a century ago simply is not any longer. And a work of art that depends on a gimmick, like shock value, simply cannot be considered great. Whilst reading the book, it kept gnawing at me that the book was mistitled. Better than being called The Immoralist, the work should have been titled The Boring Dilettante, for very little in the book’s narrative can be called ‘immoral’; save for an act of adultery and several perhaps implied affairs of the heart with young Arab boys. Putting aside titillation factors, then or now, the book is startlingly bereft of any real depth. Now, one might argue that since the book’s lead character, Michel, is a boring dilettante, that this is exactly what Gide intended. But that’s the old silly argument that to convey a character’s state of boredom the writer must write about it boringly. Yes, there is no character growth- not even negatively, with a regression, and this stasis could be an effective tool, but Gide simply does nothing with the idea. Ok, turn of the Twentieth Century French plutocrats were….hedonists. Wow. But where to go from that point?....

Ok.

762) Some Prefer Nettles/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  The intricacies of a deteriorating, loveless marriage are revealed within this rich and beautifully structured novel. Some Prefer Nettles is a great work of beauty and art that so captures the universal themes of the lonely and loveless while also addressing the struggles between the East and West throughout Japan at that time. Kaname and Misako’s marriage is one of function. They do not love one another, but likely had they never married, it is possible they could have been friends instead. They share a young son, Hiroshi, and although their marriage has become nothing more than perfunctory, neither can claim he or she has been treated poorly. Tanizaki’s precision with dialogue captures perfectly the politeness and facades of the culture, where much is shown by what is not said....

Great.

763) The Man From London/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Style over substance. That is the plaint of many a critic when they come across a film or book or any work of art they simply do not like, but which has undeniable merit, at least technically, if not in a few other measures, as well. But, the fact is that my opening words have little to do with most of the gripes labeled such. In fact, the reality is that while there indeed are such artworks for which the opening plaint is valid, far more often the correct plaint is good style, poor execution. Perhaps I have not encountered before a better example of this than the latest film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr, 2007’s The Man From London....

Ok.

764) Wild Kingdom/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  In the 1960s and 1970s there was no mass cable television. There were no channels devoted to one lone subject, like nature documentaries. Thus, the fix for lovers of animals and adventures came down to a foreign import, the underwater television specials of Jacques Cousteau, and the weekly television series, Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It was a nature show for the family, and did not feature computer graphics and slow motion shots of animals killing each other....

Good.

765) Sanshiro/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider  In Haruki Murakami’s introduction to Soseki’s Sanshiro, Murakami digresses on his late in life discovery of the famous Japanese writer, and details how his early financial struggles (before Murakami became a famous writer himself) led to his discovery. Apparently, Murakami could barely afford books back in the early 1970s, and Sanshiro was one of the few novels his wife owned. Although Murakami spends more time discussing himself in his introduction than Soseki’s work, he does detail a bit of background for those Westerners who might not be familiar with the novel. Sanshiro is the first part of a trilogy, which is followed by Soseki’s later novels And Then, and The Gate. What can be said about Sanshiro is that it possess all the elements of that Soseki style, in that, Sanshiro is both a warm and humorous work, coupled with moments of societal insights and depth. These themes, of course, are applied within the Japanese culture, and encompass the changes from tradition into modernization throughout that time....

Ok.

766) The Wrestler/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  The Wrestler is the fourth film made by director Darren Aronofsky, and the third that I've seen. His first film, Pi, had an interesting first half, then devolved into a Jewish conspiracy piece of nonsense. His next film, Requiem For A Dream, was an MTV monstrosity of music and non-characterization that was topped off by one of the silliest scenes in modern film history. His third film, which I've not seen, was a sci-fi film called The Fountain. So, with The Wrestler, Aronofsky finally has come to grips with reality. And it results in a brilliant film that melds good screenwriting with realism with a great acting performance by Mickey Rourke. In fact, with just about any other actor but Rourke, the film would have been merely solid--it's Rourke's performance which lifts the film just above the threshold for greatness....

Great.

767) This Sporting Life/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Throughout the dozen or so film roles I had seen him in, I was never particularly impressed with the film work of Richard Harris. Not that there was anything of particularly bad quality to it, but neither was there anything of particularly great quality either. Then I watched This Sporting Life, the 1963 black and white debut film of Lindsay Anderson, starring Harris as rugby star Frank Machin and….WOW! What a revelation. Yes, the comparisons to Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Robert De Niro's Jake La Motta in Raging Bull are apt...save for one thing. Harris gives an even better performance than those two iconic actors in those two iconic roles. Why? Simple. His performance is more real. Really. Watch Brando again, and compare his scene where he famously rages Stella to that where Harris pleads his love to Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts) in this film--Harris never loses total control, plus he has a tenderness and vulnerability inside of the rage....

Great.

768) Beauty And Sadness/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  Yasunari Kawabata reveals to what degree intricacy and complexity can exist among human relationships within his final published novel, Beauty and Sadness. Following in the same vein as his taut and spare Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, where Kawabata effectively condenses life-sized moments into poignant points, Beauty and Sadness is a great novel that shares many of these similar strengths. Finishing at a lean 206 pages, much psychological intensity and artistic craft are set within, and universal themes like love, jealousy, revenge and manipulation are all handled with subtlety and beauty....

Good.

769) The Lives Of Others/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  One of the most reliable ways to judge a work of art is what is known as the Day After Effect. That is to say, one should sleep on the engagement of a piece of art before one’s opinion is thrust forward. Perhaps one of the best examples of this dictum that I’ve come across, in recent years, is the 2006 German film, The Lives Of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen), directed by rookie filmmaker Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck. It’s the sort of film that, upon first watch, seems much better than when you really think about it. If you agree with its politics, as most film critics do, you are going to ‘like’ the film....

Good.

770) The Sound Of The Mountain/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  In Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) wanders the empty streets of New York City and begins to view life around him as it pertains to sex. Everything is sexualized, in fact, and viewers are left in a state of suspension: is this reality or is this dream? In Yasunari Kawabata’s novel The Sound of the Mountain, the lead character, Ogata Shingo, is similar to the Bill Harford character in Eyes Wide Shut, save for instead of viewing the world sexually, Shingo views the life around him as it relates to death. As Shingo nears the end of his life, he continually hears the far rumble of the mountain, reminding him each time that death is approaching. And it is through this rumination on death that Shingo also ruminates about his life, including the number of personal relationship disappointments he has experienced....

Good.

771) Naomi/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  A number of years ago I reviewed Nabokov’s Lolita and claimed it to be an overrated book. Not a bad book, but merely overrated. Comments were left calling me everything from a philistine to worse because how dare I disrespect Nabokov’s “genius”. Well, I still say Lolita is still an overrated book. Moreover, Tanizaki’s Naomi (1925) not only deals with similar themes as Lolita, but it is also a richer and more complex work. In fact, I am baffled that more Westerners are not familiar with it....

Great.

772) Vicky Cristina Barcelona/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Woody Allen’s 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a film with a moral: People do not change. No, let me rephrase that: People cannot change. Films of great depth have been made with premises as simple as that. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not a film of great depth. Great style? Yes. But not depth. Not that it’s a bad film, but especially compared to some of the masterworks on the human condition that Allen crafted in his 1977-1992 Golden Age (Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Another Woman, Crimes And Misdemeanors, to name a few) this film simply is out of its depths....

Good.

773) Bad Day At Black Rock/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Spencer Tracy. Melodrama. Social problems. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. Inherit The Wind. Judgment At Nuremberg. And Bad Day At Black Rock. No one portrayed morality, ethics, and decency like Spencer Tracy. And in those other films, his character was believable. The problem with Bad Day At Black Rock is that it simply is a film that has no clue what it’s about, and its hero, John J. Macreedy (Tracy)- a one-armed World War Two vet, is simply too good and powerful, almost to the point of being superhuman. The short (81 minutes) 1955 film, shot in Cinemascope color is a hybrid of the Western modernized, the film noir Westernized, the urban social problem film desertized, the melodrama bowdlerized, the exploitative B film given an A cast, and the psychodrama simplified....

Ok.

774) An Autumn Afternoon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Goddamn, Yasujiro Ozu’s great. Thus my first thought whilst taking in the last few moments of the Japanese film master’s last completed film, 1962’s An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma No Aji- which, according to online sources, translates as The Taste Of Mackerel- a feeling Ozu reputedly wanted to evoke with this film). Yes, many critics have pointed out that it shares many concerns with earlier Ozu films, and films that are considered greater films, but there is no doubt that this film is a great film, and arguably one of Ozu’s finest. It is in color, and clocks in at 112 minutes in length. Ostensibly, it follows the path of other Ozu films, in that it deals with a widowed father trying to marry off his daughter, and the fact that this act will likely leave him lonely. Yet, An Autumn Afternoon differs from the earlier takes on this subject in that its main focus is not on the emotions of the daughter, dealing with the guilt over leaving her father (as in 1949’s Late Spring or 1951’s Early Summer), but instead focuses on the father’s coming to terms with having to let his daughter go, for her good, if not his own....

Great.

775) Bluebeard/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Film director Edgar Ulmer was, in some ways, a pre-Sam Fuller Sam Fuller. Most of his career was spent toiling for B film production companies and producers. Yet, he has a reputation, like Fuller, of producing, if not great films, films that are certainly better than they should be, given the little money spent on them. Case in point is 1944’s Bluebeard (a film whose producer Leon Fromkess would later work with Fuller), made by PRC, a ‘poverty row’ studio. As evidence, watch the really well wrought puppet show scene, wherein an engaging opera scene is shown. This 72 minute, black and white film is filled with such moments, including a very good performance by John Carradine, an actor second to only the great Vincent Price in B film excellence in his art form....

Good.

776) Husbands/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  John Cassavetes was a filmmaker who made his independent films in two primary modes: brilliant character-driven masterpieces like Faces, The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night, or interesting character-driven mediocrities with ‘moments,’ like Shadows, A Woman Under The Influence, and Gloria. His 1970 film, Husbands, however, falls somewhere in between. It’s nowhere near a great film, for it is poorly edited and, surprisingly, poorly scripted, most of the time. But, there are certain scenes that are not overly long and utterly pointless. And in these scenes lie the seeds for what could have been a brilliant, if not great, film. As it is, though, the 142 minute DVD version of the film, released by Columbia and Sony Pictures, plays out more like the opening scene of the film that came before it, Faces. That film had an opening scene of drunken revelry and misery of the sort never before committed to celluloid. The difference is that it, for all its greatness and minor flaws, ran only about 20 minutes into that film, Now, extend that scene and try to cobble and sustain a film narrative about seven times its length, and the problems with Husbands becomes obvious. It simply needed the touch of a good editor....

Solid.

777) The Lake/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  Fantasies run amok in this slim Kawabata novel as the protagonist, Gimpei, revisits the women of his past by way of his remembrances and also while wandering the streets finding women to follow. That’s right, the story of a stalker. He has committed a crime which we do not know the details of, and so now Gimpei had taken to the streets, wandering in search of all types: from his young cousin he desired, to bathhouse girls, to a previous high school love. The Lake dips into all kinds of mystery (and memory), and as usual, Kawabata leaves much unexplained....

Great.

778) The Waiting Years/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  Fumiko Enchi’s novel, The Waiting Years, is one that supposedly took her eight years to write. With the many number of great male Japanese writers, one could easily despair with regards to the rarity of female perspectives, but fortunately, Enchi has written a good novel—good enough to add to the canon of Japanese literature. While I don’t believe The Waiting Years to be a great novel, it is certainly one that shouldn’t be overlooked....

Good.

779) The End Of Summer/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  When an artist has reached a level of such high art that he and his work can be spoken of as being in the top tier of his art form, something terrible happens: often brilliant — but not quite ineffably so — work is looked upon with a lesser eye by critics and audiences alike. This is not an unnatural development; once treated to fancy cuisine, even a good steak can seem a comedown to most palates. Yet, that is a frustrating development, for sometimes quality is overlooked or dismissed because it is merely an 8 of 10, rather than a perfect 10....

Very good.

780) House Of The Sleeping Beauties/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  Yasunari Kawabata spoils his readers. So far, everything I have read by him has been, well, great. From his novels like Snow Country and Beauty and Sadness to his shorter works like Palm-of-the-Hand Stories to finally House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, one can’t help but revel in his literature. This particular collection contains only three stories but they are ever so rich and layered. These tales are a must read for anyone who enjoys the short fiction form, and if looking for an introduction to Japanese literature, this isn’t a bad place to begin....

Great.

781) Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  The more I have become aware of the works of Paul Schrader the more I am convinced that his great screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was just a random act. Having read his ill-wrought and puerile book, Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, having sat through, to be kind, mediocrities like American Gigolo, Bringing Out The Dead, Affliction, The Last Temptation Of Christ, The Mosquito Coast, and the unfortunate remake of Cat People, I was almost convinced that Schrader was a hack....

Yawn.

782) Acts Of Worship/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  Yukio Mishima is a writer most known for his intense and lyrical novels and less so for his short stories. After reading this collection, one can see why. Acts of Worship is not a bad book, but rather an erratic arrangement of tales that merely offers glimpses into Mishima’s later greatness as a novelist. The short story form does not seem to suit him, for many of the characters in this collection come across as cardboard cutouts....

Ok.

783) The Gourmet Club/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  With great novels such as Naomi and Some Prefer Nettles, Junichiro Tanizaki is definitely one of Japan’s finest writers. His characters are complex, scenes are subtlety expressed and there are even moments of humor within his works. The Gourmet Club is a collection of six short stories — a “sextet” if you will, and while these tales reveal an array of subject matter and style, they are ultimately very good tales that just miss the mark for greatness....

Good.

784) Army Of Shadows/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Oftentimes, critics like to toss around terms like great, masterpiece, brilliant, etc., just to blow their own horns, or to jump on a bandwagon started rolling by a big name critic (this is called critical cribbing, and also involves the pilfering of review points from others). But, more often than not, the real reasons such terms are loosely bandied about is because most critics are simply lazy, too lazy to actually invest some time in engaging the film, book, artwork, theory as they are, by dint of their profession, supposed to. What happens, then, is that this overpraise boxes a critic in, especially when a true masterpiece, or great film, comes along, because you end up with a pantheon of art that is mostly solid to good, at best; thus effectively making the praise they offer to truly great art meaningless, for it is indistinguishable from that offered to the merely solid....

Good.

785) Love Story/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  When I was a boy, the film that dominated my earliest memories of pop culture was 1970’s Love Story. From the music to the saying, "Love means never having to say you’re sorry," to Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal being everywhere, it was the biggest movie of its day; sort of what Titanic was to folks a decade ago. And, yes, like Titanic, it’s a schlocky film. It has a few saving graces which place it above the doomed ocean liner picture, though....

Good schlock.

786) Remember You're A One-Ball!/Book Review/Jessica Schneider  If seeing the name Quentin Crisp immediately puts you in mind of The Naked Civil Servant, this is not the same Quentin Crisp. In fact, the Quentin Crisp who wrote Servant isn’t even Quentin Crisp but Denis Charles Pratt, while Quentin S. Crisp, the author of “Remember You’re A One-Ball!” is actually the real Quentin Crisp. Get all that? Yet, Quentin S. Crisp (born 1972 according to Wikipedia) will likely put readers in mind of the other Quentin Crisp, even though, well, the similarity ends with the name. But enough of that—this is about Quentin S. Crisp....

Good.

787) When A Woman Ascends The Stairs/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Mikio Naruse was a Japanese film director who was often thought of as the Fourth Wheel of Japanese Cinema during the mid-20th Century, safely ensconced behind the Trinity of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. Of course, there were other directors, like Masayaki Kobayashi and Kon Ichikawa, who could also claim that Fourth Wheel status, but of the three non-trinity directors, Naruse’s work has probably been the least seen in America. Thus, popping in The Criterion Collection DVD of his 1960 film, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs (Onna Ga Kaidan Wo Agaru Toki), I had no preset expectations of what the film would bring, and whose style (if any, of the five other named directors, Naruse’s style would most be near....

Excellent.

788) For Your Consideration/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Christopher Guest’s latest film, 2006’s non-mockumentary For Your Consideration, which skewers both the Hollywood and Independent film genres, is his weakest film to date. That said, it’s still a fine little comedy. Guest, who rose to fame in the seminal 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner, had released three mockumentaries to great critical success and solid box office. These were Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, all featuring Guest’s own ensemble of actors, from Indy film queen Parker Posey to old SCTV regulars like Eugene Levy (his writing partner on this and other films), Catherine O’Hara, and Fred Willard (who, as usual, steals this film)....

Solid.

789) Good Night, And Good Luck/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  George Clooney has to be, if not the most talented guy in Hollywood, certainly the luckiest; a former Sexiest Man Alive, according to People magazine, scion of a wealthy show business clan, a tv star, a movie star, and now a successful director. His first film, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, on wacky tv game show host Chuck Barris’s fantasies, was a sober look at a mentally disturbed man, much better than highly lauded screenwriter and director Paul Schrader’s similar Auto Focus, on tv star Bob Crane’s descent into pornography. But, we’ve all seen this before: a big star thinks he can make films, makes a first film that is lauded - think Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and on and on - and then starts pumping out sheer dreck....

Solid.

790) Objectivity/Logical Fallacies/Dan Schneider  While it is true that the practice of the arts is the highest of human pursuits, this does not exempt such practices, and their practitioners, from engaging in some of the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) practices that non-artists engage in. By this I am referring to the trap of falling into a logical fallacy. Logical fallacies are those things that we all sort of understand, until our feet are held to the fire, so before I explore logical fallacies, and present one of the most daunting to the field of art, let me first expound upon what they are, how they are used, and give a good example of such in the arts, as shown in a recent popular post on this website....

Nipping the idiots.

791) All About Eve/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  If a singular aspect, alone, can propel a film to greatness, than perhaps writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 black and white Oscar winning best film, All About Eve, is that film. Given that the film is about a play- a medium dominated by the power of the written word, this should not be a surprise, but it’s also a testament to the notion that, despite the fetishizing of cineastes, film was, is, and always will be, a medium dependent on the written word more than any visual aspect. In short, it is literature with pictures. All About Eve is blessed with dialogue that still sparkles with wit nearly six decades on, and, even more so than the films of Billy Wilder (whose Sunset Boulevard, released in the same year, is often compared to All About Eve) there simply was no Hollywood screenwriter that came as close to the great stage comedies of Oscar Wilde than Mankiewicz. That said, while the film’s cinematography is rather pedestrian, the only real ‘flaw,’ if one will, with the film is that, unlike Wilde, the very intelligence of all the characters works against any realism. Wilde tends to have characters that are not as smart as Mankiewicz’s, but usually more obviously comic. Granted, there is a dopey harlot-cum-starlet, Miss Caswell, played by Marilyn Monroe (in the most ‘realistic’ performance of Monroe’s career- itself a testament to great writing), but even there she is used to set up peerless wittiness. However, if this is a flaw with this film, so be it. Let us indulge in such travesty. Given current Hollywood’s obsessions with Lowest Common Denominator brain-dead fare, in which it seems incapable of realizing that film’s passive medium will never be able to out-video game the video game industry’s interactive medium, I say that every wannabe Michael Bay wannabe and clone in film school and beyond should be forced to watch this film over and over (strapped in and eyes forced open ala Little Alex’s coercion in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), if only to see that there is a market for mature adult drama out there, and that such need not be relegated to independent and foreign film fare....

Nearly great.

792) Gesualdo/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Werner Herzog, in his storied film career, has made many a good documentary and mockumentary. Gesualdo: Death For Five Voices (Tod Für Fünf Stimmen), made in 1995, is not one of them. Coming from a master of cinema, like Herzog, though, that still means Gesualdo is a pretty good film, but don’t expect anything of depth. Ostensibly, the film is a chronicle of the life of a 16th and 17th Century prince and musical composer named Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. One might think that the sordid tale that emerges in the 60 minute, made for television documentary, was crafted just to satisfy Herzog’s own dictates about ‘ecstatic truth.’....

So-so.

793) Rome Open City/DVD Review/Dan Schneider  Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 breakthrough black and white film, Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta), is one of the more misinterpreted films in cinema history. It’s often claimed as being the film that established Italian Neo-Realism as a movement, yet, even a cursory look at it reveals that, while it employs a few of the Neo-Realist tenets, by and large, the film that followed it, in Rossellini’s canon, Paisan, was truly his first Neo-Realist film. By contrast, Rome Open City is a fairly standard , although occasionally quite good, melodrama. Unlike ‘pure’ Neo-Realism, it employs numerous sets, two of Italy’s then most famous actors (Aldo Fabrizi, as Father Don Pietro Pellegrini and Anna Magnani, as Pina), and uses many shots that can only be described as ‘subjective. Compared to the most famous film of Italian Neo-Realism, Vittorrio De Sica’s 1948 The Bicycle Thief, this film simply does not hold up, on all levels....

Good.