Links To Dan & Jessica Schneider Online

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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?....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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)....

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....

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....

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....

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.’....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

799) Why I Am Letting My Poets & Writers Subscription Lapse/Essay/Dan Schneider For about a quarter of a century I have been a subscriber to Poets & Writers magazine. In the early days, before it went glossy, and was more or less a newsletter, I found it useful as a place to send around my then callow poems, and even to find out about gatherings and readings. I also had the naïve youthful belief that my subscription somehow (like the money dropped in my church’s collection plates) went to help those in need; in this case, young writer of quality, or programs devoted to helping such. As the years have gone on I have still subscribed (despite the functionary matters I most used it for now being available freely online, and in many other online sources) and read through its increasingly poorly written articles, and even ignored the fact that, despite its title, the magazine really did nothing to even discuss, much less promote, the art of poetry and writing. It became merely an advertising tool, via its ads and ads thinly veiled as articles to promote MFA programs, bad writers, scam publishers, and clueless agents and editors. Yet, I resisted the urge to cancel my subscription, even though I had let subscriptions to the American Poetry Review and The Academy Of American Poets lapse several years ago (as well as Sports Illustrated and TV Guide- sports and television simply are not that important to me any longer), because I could see all they cared about was fame and the sinecures of elite doggerelists. Why did I not follow through with letting Poets & Writers fall to the wayside? My idea was that one always needed to know what the enemy was up to....

800) A Fistful Of Dollars/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A Fistful Of Dollars, the 1964 film by Sergio Leone, that ignited the Spaghetti Western craze, is a very interesting film, even if it is only a pretty good film, cinematically. Among the interesting things about it is that its English language title, as presented within the film, lacks the article 'A.' It is Fistful Of Dollars, translated from the Italian Per Un Pugno Di Dollari. Another of its interesting facts is that it is perhaps one of the miost successful examples of artistic plagiarism ever, basically being a rework of Akira Kurosawa's 1961 film Yojimbo (Kurosawa sued Leone over the film and reaped substantial financial benefits from an out of court settlement, getting 15% of the film's worldwide gross, and exclusive distribution rights for Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, making more money with this film than with any of his own)....

801) Marty/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I recently purchased The Criterion Collection’s The Golden Age Of Television DVD set. It features eight of the classic live teleplays from the 1950s, which were labeled that title during a 1981 PBS rebroadcast of the best of the bunch, those dramas that stuck in the cultural memory over time. The reality was that live television drama was almost akin to what silent films were to film history: a unique early period where a now lost art form seems almost untouchable, or unrecreatable, for it was both unique yet accessible to later art forms in its medium. To think that live drama blended with television camera, in a sort of theater meets film experience, for One Night Only!....

802) Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call: New Orleans/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog is so unique as a director of films that he is as close to being uncategorizable as any filmmaker in the medium’s history. His 2009 film, Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call: New Orleans, is no exception. The film is a sort of satiric riff on the 1992 B film, Bad Lieutenant, made by schlockmeister Abel Ferrara, and starring Harvey Keitel. That film got wildly divergent criticism, but was a pretty bad film, and not nearly as campily fun as Ferrara’s best known film, King Of New York. And when I say this film is a satire, I mean it, even starting from its tripartite naming, which is rumored to have come about because the film’s producer had produced Ferrara’s film, and wanted to restart it as a sort of film franchise, in the mold of the television series CSI. Ferrara reputedly wished death upon the producer, Herzog, and all involved because he was so protective of his original piece of garbage. Herzog counterclaimed that his film is neither a sequel nor remake, and this is basically true. Other than the fact that the two lead characters in the films are corrupt police lieutenants, nothing else is the same....

803) The Crystal World/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is the first novel by British writer J.G. Ballard that I've read, following the recommendation from a friend. Sort of science and literary fiction fused, The Crystal World is a well-written book rather than a great story. Ballard is most commonly known for his memoir Empire of the Sun, which was made into a standard Hollywood film in 1987....

804) Forbidden Colors/Book Review/Jessica Schneider One of the qualities about Japanese literature to admire is the brevity. So often readers are presented with contemporary novels that are needlessly long, and endlessly describe boringly with a lack of insight. Forbidden Colors still has quite a bit going for it, in that it has Mishima’s stamp of skilled wording and numerous passages that are both lyrical and philosophical. Yet, what works against Forbidden Colors is the fact that the book, unlike many other Japanese novels of Mishima’s era, happens to be a bit verbose. Finishing at over 400 pages, this novel felt unnecessarily long, especially if comparing it to James Baldwin’s thin gem Giovanni’s Room, which is only a fraction of the length yet still seems to have characters more resonant than in Mishima’s similarly themed Forbidden Colors....

805) VQR/Scandal/Dan Schneider One of my website’s fans forwarded me a link to a recent New York Times article with the tabloid title, A Suicide Leaves A Literary Journal And Its Editor In Limbo. As I have a popular website and traverse through 15-1600 emails per week, I actually get many, MANY links to online stories about the absurd, the literary, the artistic, the scientific, the scandalous, the political, etc., and sometimes several of these formats are in one tale. The story detailed the editor of a university literary journal’s supposed bullying one of his underlings into committing suicide. The story, as the phrase now goes, went viral online, and within a few days there were literally tens of thousands of hand-wringing accounts about the ‘incident.’ On many literary blogs the editor was personally condemned as cold and unfeeling, even as his ‘editorial prowess’ was praised as visionary, even within the original article. But, in scouring many sources online, the basic thrust of the story is as such: one of the staff members of the journal committed suicide, either because of one or both of two salacious reasons: a) he was a ‘victim’ of the tyrannical editor’s workplace abuse, or b) he was imputed to be a lonely, aging homosexual, albeit most of the references were not so bold as to come out and state that, using weasel words, instead, to impute the dead man....

806) Osama/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Osama is touted as the first film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and it was shot in Kabul. That should be a warning. Works of art that are touted as the first this or that tend to be bad, their only distinction being their chronological primacy. Such was the case with the atrocious Eskimo film of a few years back called Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. In a sense, Osama is merely an Afghani Atanarjuat. The story is virtually non-existent, save that the Taliban is bad, evil, etc. Can you say duh? Aside from that there is little else. The whole film by director Siddiq Barmak is a mess, the acting- all done with ‘real people’ shows why that fact is manifest, and the whole thing is merely a Right Wing screed- as much a propaganda film for that extreme of Americana as The Motorcycle Diaries was for the Left....

807) The Red And The White/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Hungarian filmmaker Miklos Jancso’s 1967 black and white film The Red And The White (Csillagosok, Katonák) is an interesting experience, because it really is an experience, more so than a coherent story. But, I mean that in the best possible way. No, it’s nowhere near great cinema, but it’s a very interesting film, especially considering that he is seen as the biggest influence on the later Hungarian film director, Bela Tarr, who perfected the long take aesthetic in modern film....

808) Encounters At The End Of The World/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog’s career, the last couple of decades, has been far more focused on documentaries than on fiction films. His classic fiction films are almost all from the mid-1980s or earlier, whereas his notable documentaries are almost all since that era. Encounters At The End Of The World, a 100 minute long film, released in 2007, is among the very best of that later output. It follows the 2006-2007 austral summer journey of Herzog and his cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger to Antarctica....

809) Burden Of Dreams/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Les Blank’s 1982 documentary, Burden Of Dreams, is a film that, like Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, follows the near-obsessive drive of a great filmmaker to bring a great film to fruition. In the latter film, Eleanor Coppola detailed her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s will to bring Apocalypse Now to the screen. The former film details the similar drive that compelled German filmmaker Werner Herzog to make Fitzcarraldo. While the two fictive films are both great, the Coppola film is likely the greater film than Herzog’s, but, as far as the documentaries are concerned, Burden Of Dreams far outstrips Hearts Of Darkness. The latter film is a good film, but there’s nothing that lifts the film above the Making Of sort of documentary that’s since become de rigueur with DVD releases. In short, the film is pointless if you’ve not watched Apocalypse Now. Not so with Burden Of Dreams. While not a perfect film, it acts as not just a Making Of film, but a film that details a good portion of the sociological and anthropological nature of the natives that Herzog and his crew lived and worked amongst. And, the reason for this may lay in the fact that Blank got a grant from PBS, and the film was originally shown on American television in a truncated 60 minute version, rather than the extended 95 minute long release from The Criterion Collection....

810) Thousand Cranes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Subtlety and intricacy are what composes the power within a Kawabata novel, and Thousand Cranes is no different. Readers are given insights into characters via way of passive comment, a gesture overlooked, the description of lipstick on a stained cup or forgetting a stamp when mailing a letter. While Kawabata has managed to mostly hit home runs with all of his novels, Thousand Cranes falls slightly below his best, thereby causing me to rank it as one of his (slightly) lesser works, comparatively. Yet even lesser Kawabata is still very good....

811) Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories/Book Review/Dan Schneider It is an unusual circumstance that finds me writing not the first nor second, but the third, review of a particular book of short stories: Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories, by Yasunari Kawabata, that will appear on my own website. The first two reviews of the book to appear were written by Brent Peterson, in 2006, and by my wife, Jessica Schneider, earlier in 2010. Both were quite positive in their assessments of the stories, and, it’s an interesting circumstance that finds me, basically, not being able to disagree with most of the positive points both made about the book, yet still finding both reviews to be, essentially, wrong in their final judgments. The reason for this is that both prior reviews focused mainly on the books positives, while ignoring the book’s flaws, which, to me, are quite obvious and many....

812) Quicksand/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I’ve never read a Tanizaki novel that was absent of merit or one that I did not enjoy. His breezy style, coupled with his moments of humor, make all of his books entertaining on one level, yet he also carries a psychological depth within his characters, often revealing them as flawed and yet creating them in such a way that causes the audience to empathize with them. Quicksand is no different....

813) Secret Rendezvous/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Kobo Abe is sort of the Kafka of Japan. One doesn’t have to look far to see the influence, and Abe himself even admitted Kafka’s influence in one of the Hiroshi Teshigahara documentaries put out by Criterion. Teshigahara directed a number of films based on Abe’s novels, and thus far Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes appears to be his best work by a mile. Other works of his, such as The Face of Another and The Box Man have their moments, but none of his works that I’ve read thus far (including Secret Rendezvous) reaches the same level of greatness as The Woman in the Dunes....

815) Written In Stone/Book Review/Dan Schneider I recently received the galleys for an upcoming book (its evolving edits are the reason I will not quote from the work, as well as some needed correction of errors proofreading should catch) from Bellevue Literary Press called Written In Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place In Nature. It was written by science blogger Brian Switek, who once wrote the popular blog Laelaps, but now blogs on his own, at http://brianswitek.com/. I had long read his blog, on and off, especially whenever new controversies were in the air, and am always on the lookout for a younger version of Stephen Jay Gould or Loren Eiseley; and while he’s not there yet, Switek’s writing and scientific mind do show promise that the next few decades need not be lost to the ignorance of religion....

816) And Then/Book Review/Jessica Schneider And Then is the fifth book I’ve read by Natsume Soseki, one of Japan’s most highly regarded novelists. And Then is part of a trilogy, and is meant to follow his earlier novel Sanshiro, followed by The Gate (or Mon). Yet these books couldn’t be further from one another, for one does not need to read any or all of them in their designated order....

817) Paths Of Glory/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having grown up in the Vietnam era I knew many an ex-GI who would tell tales of fragging a bad C.O. Many older people, especially of the World War II generation, could never understand what would drive soldiers to loathe their superiors to the point of murder. Well, the answer is laid out in Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film, Paths Of Glory, like in no other. In fact, the film could well have been subtitled A Defense Of Fragging, if only the term had been coined....

818) The Darjeeling Limited/DVD Review/Dan Schneider For the last year and a half or so I’ve been lucky enough to be on the list of official reviewers for The Criterion Collection’s forthcoming releases, and this has meant that I have gotten a number of films titles that I already knew were great, having seen them in earlier, inferior, video editions, or in the theaters. I have also received titles that I suspected were great, due to the reputation of the work or its director. But, I have also gotten a batch of unrequested films thrown in to the mix, I figure, as a way for me to publicize releases that no one else really wants to review....

819) Radio Days/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Woody Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days is the best pure comedy the filmmaker ever wrote and directed, and as such it is a great film. There is much truth to Allen’s own stated dictum that drama his a higher form of art than comedy because it is, to paraphrase, ‘sitting at the grownups’ table.’ However, the fact that it deals with mere life (therefore gaining it the mischaracterization as plotless- think of the same criticisms of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn) rather than one or two ‘major’ ideas, the way his Stardust Memories, Crimes And Misdemeanors, Manhattan, or Another Woman do, does not diminish the sheer brilliance and greatness of Radio Days as a film, apart from its reality as a great comedy, as well. It is also why, despite the end of Allen’s Golden Age of filmmaking (1977’s Annie Hall through 1992’s Husbands And Wives), so many of his fans still go to see his films, in the hopes that Allen will recapture the sustained greatness of films like this, or, at least, hit some similar highs....

820) Patterns/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The more I reacquaint myself with the live television dramas of the 1950s the more I feel what a great opportunity the medium wasted. Well, perhaps wasted is the wrong word; it was killed. Murdered. This was not an example of declining ratings nor a changing culture. This was television coldly opting for videotape to do shows cheaper, without the ‘risks’ of live television. But, since risk, by definition connotes opportunities for failure AND success, television executives decided to cave in....

821) The Scarlet Gang Of Asakusa/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is difficult to take much from Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa because in many ways, it is an odd and experimental work that plays with narrative to the point that the overall arc comes across somewhat fragmented. This is not to say there are not nice moments within, but The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is both an early and relatively minor work when thinking of Kawabata’s output. It’s not even a stretch to claim this, since it is noted that Kawabata himself would often cringe whenever he heard it read aloud. Having said that, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is a work that should be read once readers have familiarized themselves with his more popular (and much better) novels such as Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain and Beauty and Sadness, among others....

822) For A Few Dollars More/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Italian film director Sergio Leone’s 1965 color film, For A Few Dollars More (Per Qualche Dollaro In Più), is the sort of film that’s not only good, but educational. I’ve often said that great art is hermetic, in that it is difficult for younger artists to learn how the thing was accomplished. Near-great art, such as this film, is even better for educating young artists on how to achieve greatness, for it does achieve greatness, in parts, but also allows the internal ‘scaffolding’ of the art to leak through in its non-great moments. This provides a ready contrast for young artists to see the mechanics behind something that works to such an extent that greatness is applicable, and aspects of the work that do not. Having said that, this film is a quantum leap above Leone’s first in the Dollars Trilogy: A Fistful Of Dollars, made a year earlier....

823) The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having just watched The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo), Sergio Leone’s final film in his Dollars Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns, I can say rarely has a film trilogy been so instructive as to the step by step artistic growth of its director as an artist. 1964’s A Fistful Of Dollars is a solid to good film, and a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. It is enjoyable but not that deep. 1965’s For A Few Dollars More is an excellent, almost great, film which showed Leone rising near greatness in almost every facet of filmmaking, and surpassing that bar in some. But it still had a few kinks to work out, and fixed many of the flaws of the first film, both technically and artistically. This 1966 three hour long capstone film sees Leone actually ascend over that bar and on into greatness. No, it is not the unfettered masterpiece of a film that Once Upon A Time In The West, and Once Upon A Time In America, are, but it’s close....

824) First Man Into Space/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I first watched the 1959 black and white English film, The First Man Into Space (Satellite Of Blood in the U.K.), on television, as an eight or nine year old child. I believe it was on a twilight double bill with The Unearthly Stranger, another British horror film, made a few years later. Like many similar films, The Quatermass Xperiment or The Crawling Hand, this low budget film has a standard premise. But, like The Unearthly Stranger, it is a bit more literate and enjoyable a sci fi romp. The odd thing is that it was one of four The Criterion Collection titles in a release called Monsters And Madmen, as all four films were produced by the same people, Amalgamated Films- a sort of junior rival to the American AIP (Roger Corman’s folks), and the Hammer Studios of England....

825) American Stories/Book Review/Jessica Sshneider Nagai Kafu is a somewhat underrated writer when one thinks of Japanese literature. I say this now after having read one of his early collections, American Stories. While I’ve not read any of his novels yet (Rivalry: A Geisha’s Tale will be next), much of his work has simply not been translated into English. Other than American Stories and Rivalry, no other major works of his seem to either be 1) translated into English and 2) easily available on Amazon. Published by Columbia University Press, Kafu’s work came recommended by a fellow writer friend of mine, and given Kafu’s influence upon the great Tanizaki, I became eager to read him. Happily, I can state that American Stories is both inventive, surprisingly fresh, and many of the tales within are excellent reads. In fact, this is a great book for any young short story writer to examine, for Kafu’s narrative play, but also because the tales are economically written and also full of memorable characters who are not stereotypes....

826) The Crown OF The Continent/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Readers will recall my review a while back of a nature documentary by filmmaker John Grabowska called Crown of the Continent. It was a highly poetic and beautifully crafted experience—taking viewers to deeps of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, in Alaska. Now, what is the difference, you wonder? Note the article: The Crown of the Continent is a 42 minute nature documentary by Ambassador Video on Glacier National Park in Montana. Originally, it was the title that caught my attention, as I’d encouraged many to watch Crown of the Continent within my review of it....

827) Drunken Angel/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 black-and-white effort Yoidore Tenshi / Drunken Angel is an interesting experience, for he clearly had not mastered the art form, yet. Even so, there is so much that is good in Drunken Angel — touches that would become great in just a few years. It’s like looking at a fetus and seeing distinguishable characteristics of its parents, though none is fully formed....

828) Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Much of Nagai Kafu’s work unfortunately has yet to be translated into English. After reading his collection of short stories, titled American Stories, I had much hope for this book, yet at the same time I’d been warned by a Kafu fan that Rivalry, while a good read, is nowhere near his best work. I find myself surprised that I agree with said assessment, for often what I am told by others I discover to be the opposite. I approach this review as not a fan, but as someone who knew little to nothing about Kafu before reading his work, save for the influence he had upon other Japanese writers....

829) Frisky, Furry And Fearsome/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Part of the fun in visiting any National Park is the hopeful chance of catching a glimpse of wildlife in its natural surrounds. Produced by Ambassador Video, Frisky, Furry and Fearsome focuses on five of our National Parks and the various animals that inhabit them. From screeching pikas, to rock-climbing mountain goats, to big horn sheep, marmots, ground squirrels, both black bears and grizzly bears, this instructional DVD offers a good overview of not only what species to expect from a number of National Parks, but the film begins with a brief introduction on the regulations with regard to wildlife, and how one should behave around it. This video is a clip of this exact scene....

830) Shane/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Mythic realism. That’s the perfect term to describe director George Stevens’ 1953 classic color Western Shane, one of the most unlikely great films I’ve ever seen. That’s because much of the 117 minute long film plays out as if it’s cheesy, with its lone, virtuous gunman who stands apart and above all others (a precursor to Clint Eastwood’s characters in Sergio Leone’s revolutionary Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti westerns), as a western version of the fathers of perfect nuclear families of the Eisenhower era sitcoms. Yet, below is a roiling realism that only serves to heighten the mythos, by contrast. This is the tension that is so unusual, yet remarkably powerful. I may have, when a boy, seen this film, in black and white, on television, for some scenes resonated as if I’d seen them long ago. Then again, such a seeming familiarity is part of the province of myth, and why this film achieves its greatness. It’s a greatness that is wholly distinct from the more modern sort of Western that Sergio Leone pioneered in the following decade. Leone’s films’ greatness (especially his westerns) was based upon a knowledge of film, as a medium and art, whereas Shane reaches far back into the eons, to portray its lead character as something akin to a god, in a way as primal as the Gilgamesh epic. In this sense, what many of the film’s detractors view as corniness, is archetypal characters and behaviors. But Stevens leavens this with well written characters and situations, and, to his credit, with believable villains who have real motivations, ones which actually gain a good deal of sympathy in the viewer....

831) McCabe & Mrs. MIller/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Two points ring out clarion when watching Robert Altman’s 1971 film, McCabe & Mrs. Miller: 1) Robert Altman is probably the most hit and miss major director in Hollywood history, with good films such as M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, and Gosford Park on his resume, and really poor films like this one, Popeye, and Vincent & Theo. 2) One of the main reasons McCabe & Mrs. Miller fails is because it is badly dated, and this is so due to a horrendous soundtrack for the film. Poor acting, poor screenwriting, and poor cinematography certainly don’t help, but the sheer finger up the ass ludicrousness of scoring a de facto Western with the proto-folk balladeering of Leonard Cohen is utterly mind-boggling; especially since it’s BAD Leonard Cohen music....

832) The Sound Of Waves/Book Reviews/Jessica Schneider Before this point, I was beginning to think that Yukio Mishima was only capable of one type of novel — that is, the angsty, pissed off, young male protagonist in search of self-destruction. In fact, it is sort of a joke among Mishima readers, in that one does not need to wonder too much what the unfolding of events will be. If there’s an attractive, young male, he will likely die (usually by seppuku) because all beauty must be destroyed. If there are women present, they’re likely dull, nagging, one-dimensional and getting in the way of said young male’s homoerotic fantasies. Destruction, angst, and hyperbole — all of these traits are often present within Mishima’s work, albeit he tends to write them very well. In other words, while I can’t claim Mishima to be a great writer (since his work tends to lack a complexity that is found within the best of Kawabata or Tanizaki, or so I’ve seen) what he does do, for most of the time, he does very well....

833) Nothing/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1997 Canadian sci fi film Cube, by Vincenzo Natali, was one of the great examples of good writing, good acting, and a limited budget making for an excellent, and thought provoking little film. Unfortunately, its financial success led to two mediocre sequels, neither of which had the verve of the original, and neither of which were directed by Natali. Thus, when I stumbled upon a 2003 film made by Natali, starring two of his stars from Cube, David Hewlett and Andrew Miller, I thought there was a good chance that it would be equally compelling....

834) The Thin Red Line/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are moments when greatness is immediately apparent. When I first watched Terrence Malick’s 1998 film, The Thin Red Line, over a decade ago, it was clear that the film was great, and so was its director. Perhaps it was the opening shot of the film, wherein a crocodile slithers into muck as a rising fugue intones, that invoked a poetic realism that the rest of the nearly three hour film sustains. Or, perhaps, it was within the first 5 or 10 minutes, when the voiceover narration and watery images mixed into something rarely seen onscreen. Nonetheless, I immediately felt that sort of pleasure seep into one, knowing that this artist knows exactly what he is doing, and it will be something very good, or even better. And every time I’ve watched it since it reveals nuances not noticed before. That’s a surefire marker of greatness. Oddly, the people I saw the film with disagreed, yet they had no real definitive reasons save the usual emotional response, or its lack. Upon rewatching the film, nothing has changed from my initial opinion. And given that this film was often spoken of in the same breath as Steven Spielberg’s schlocksterpiece, Saving Private Ryan, shows how utterly clueless most critics, much less layfolk, are, for while both films were released in the same year, and cover the same war, the qualitative difference is immense....

835) I Vitelloni/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes, after achieving a certain level, an artist makes a slight regression before hitting the heights of greatness. Such an arc is apparent to me after having watched Federico Fellini’s 1953, black and white Neo-Realist film, I Vitelloni (roughly translated to mean The Idlers or The Loafers). While better than his debut film, 1950’s Variety Lights, it is also better than his more lauded film, 1954’s La Strada (despite the lack of Fellini’s wife, Giulieta Masina)....

836) Galapagos/Book Review/Jessica Schneider What will become of the human race in a million years? Will humans be reflecting on how much smarter (or bigger brained) they once were? Galapagos is arguably the last good novel Kurt Vonnegut wrote,. As the book stands, I’d rank it below Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, yet it is definitely one of Vonnegut’s classics worth reading....

837) Mon/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Mon or The Gate is the third book in Natsume Soseki’s trilogy, with his first two books including Sanshiro and And Then. I place Mon as the second strongest book within this series, with Sanshiro being the strongest and And Then as the weakest. While Mon is the most psychologically complex of the novels (the lead of And Then is a bit of a whiny, self-indulgent brat) Sanshiro, with its humor and criticisms of academia and so-called intellectuals, is probably the better book. It is tough to argue, for on one hand, Sanshiro has a bad translator and Mon is probably the most depressing novel I’ve ever read. It’s not depressing in the sense that I was left crying, but it was a very dour and isolating experience, and while that’s not so much of a critical assessment as it is emotional, I still believe that Soseki is at his best when he laces humor within his narratives. When he tries to do straight drama, it’s not that the works are without merits, but he actually evokes more pathos when he is funny, believe it or not....

838) No Time For Sergeants/DVD Review/Dan Schneider When most people think of the live television shows from the 1950s, that produced such shows as Playhouse 90, The U.S. Steel Hour, etc, almost universally what comes to mind is drama, usually penned by the likes of a Paddy Chayefsky or Rod Serling. But the third entry in The Criterion Collection’s boxed set of DVDs, titled The Golden Age Of Television, is a comedy called No Time For Sergeants, adapted from a novel by Mac Hyman, and directed by Alex Segal. Most interestingly, though, the novel was adapted by Ira Levin, the man who would later pen his own novels, most famously Rosemary’s Baby. This teleplay debuted on The U.S. Steel Hour on March 15^th, 1955....

839) Mean Streets/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1973 film, Mean Streets, that is key to understanding not only the characters that inhabit that film, but also many of the characters that populated his later films, including even some of his polished but bloated, lifeless garbage with Leonardo DiCaprio. In it, the thugs played by stars Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro go along with a couple of other pals to shake down a pool hall owner who’s behind on a protection or loan payment. They basically insult the owner, who says he’s not gonna pay them because he’s offended. He calls one of the punks (not Keitel nor De Niro) a mook. The punk famously rejoinders, ‘A mook. What’s a mook?’....

840) Autumn In Spring And Other Stories/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is my first time reading anything by Ba Jin, and this collection of tales seems to be somewhat hard to come by. I ended up discovering it upon one of the discount paperback shelves in Half Price Books, where it had been marked down to something like 50 cents. It’s unfortunate that Ba Jin seems so difficult to come by, at least in translation, for this collection of tales was quite good. Not perfect mind you, but quite good — certainly good enough for me to recommend....

841) Meet Me In St. Louis/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The major problem with the film musical, as a form, is that there is never a hint of naturalism in it. Think of a science fiction or horror film. Yes, they may have outlandish plots and scary monsters, but the best of them will sneak the situation or monster up on the viewer so as to make the viewer comfortable with the notion of them, if not comfortable with the situation they present. But, in musicals, one has to expect the absurdity that people will break not only into son, but often song and dance, and often with background music that is diegetically not part of the reality. This is not to say people do not sing in their lives, on occasion. We all have; but it’s the rest of the situational expectation that makes most musicals cringe-worthy. And the most guilty of these sins are the classic Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 1950s....

842) The Quiet Duel/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Great artists have a way to make even their lesser works interesting, if not great. Such is the case with the 1949 black and white film, The Quiet Duel (Shizukanaru Ketto) from Akira Kurosawa, which was based on a play by Kazuo Kikuta, and adapted by Senkichi Taniguchi. At 95 minutes long, this melodrama is not long enough to get on one’s nerves, and just good enough to make a number of its moments stick in memory. The key word about the film, though, is melodrama, and for those accustomed to his greater later works....

843) The Silent Cry/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Silent Cry is a novel with not the best title. At least in the English translation, that is, for were I to just encounter this title without the Nobel winning stamp upon it, I would have quickly passed over it. That said, it is still not a good title, Nobel winner or not. This sort of reminds me of Hungarian writer Sandor Marai’s great novel Embers, which doesn’t have the best translation of title either, but Embers is better than The Silent Cry — both in title and in book. The title actually puts me in mind of that anti-abortion propaganda film I was forced to watch my freshman year in Catholic high school — The Silent Scream…or something. According to Wikipedia, the title’s translation from its original Japanese is Football in the First Year of Man'en. Ok, right, I can see that connection. Whatever. The Silent Cry, as a title, still sucks....

844) Mr. Arkadin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The first time I’d ever seen Orson Welles’ 1955 black and white film, Mr. Arkadin, was a few years ago, on a cheap 91 minute DVD version put out by LaserLight DVD. It was a film often called Welles’ ‘European Citizen Kane’, and had a bizarre introduction by a fey and gloved actor Tony Curtis, and was a very poor quality disk, with a scratched and highly white contrasted print that looked washed out. This turned out to be what was known as the American version of the film, which was a truncated version shown in a strict chronological order. It was a bizarre scrambled eggs sort of film with brilliant moments, but it made no sense logically, and I just knew something was askew, and likely missing....

845) Shock Corridor/DVD Review (Criterion)/Dan Schneider Director Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor is one of those wildly aberrant works of art than can be called great, on some levels, and utter schlock, on other levels. And both are correct assessments of this film that can only be termed a didactic melodrama. What results, though, is that one is left with a so-so film- not the piece of pulp garbage that many reviewers first assailed the black and white film (with dream sequence snippets in color) as, upon its release in 1963, nor the masterpiece that revisionists have proffered in later auteur-based assessments. It had been almost a quarter century since I last watched the film, but recently popped in The Criterion Collection DVD of the film, and rediscovered its ‘charms.’....

846) I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like?/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Any topic, no matter how disturbing, is potential for a short story. It all depends on how well the said topic is executed, and if executed well, the story succeeds. If executed poorly, it fails. Then, there are topics that when shoved together within a single collection don’t always work. Topics like cannibalism, incest, animal cruelty, S&M, masturbation, transsexuality, and any additional form of emotional cruelty may not work if there are more than, say, two of these topics within a tale. Reason being, the writing then runs the risk of becoming too melodramatic, too self-conscious with the writer’s desire to “shock” just for the sake of shock alone, or just not believable, and ultimately the literature is lost. Yet the debut collection of short stories in I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, by Justin Isis, not only touches upon many of these “troubling” topics, but the stories do contain wonderful moments of lyricism — the best collection of short fiction I can recall reading from a first time writer....

847) Twelve Monkeys/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Chris Marker’s 1962 short film, La Jetee, is one of the most interesting and exciting films ever made. Its use of still photographs for all but a few seconds of its near half hour length, allows a remarkable bit of viewer empathy to occur. In recall, the viewer actually animates the film. Director Terry Gilliam is one of the most interesting and exciting film directors in America over the last few decades, and his 1995 film, 12 Monkeys, ‘inspired’ by Marker’s film, is an excellent film that, because of a forced love tale and a bit of predictability in certain scenes, falls short of being great cinema. Nonetheless, it shows what a person with a singular vision can do in the arts, even when one’s vision is almost wholly derived from another source....

848) The Naked Kiss/DVD Review (Criterion)/Dan Schneider Maverick American filmmaker Sam Fuller was both a progressive and a prude, and no film of his better illustrates this schismic personal dichotomy, echoed in his art’s use of high and low techniques, than his 1964 black and white film noir melodrama The Naked Kiss, a cult classic whose title derives from its lead character, a prostitute named Kelly, who describes the kiss of the fiancée she kills, that way, meaning she could tell he was a sexual deviant from the get go. It’s a film that has brilliance, inanity, memorable scenes of realism, and trite predictable scenes of sheer fantasy- such as the mention of the titular act, which is not real, but works symbolically to explain certain elements of the lead character’s behavior....

849) When Right Is Wrong/Justin Isis's Book Review/Dan Schneider Let me be up front about something, and that is the fact that the person whose book is at the center of this review, of a review written about that book, has been a participant in the e-list of my own website, Cosmoetica, for several years. I have also spoken with him via Skype, once, and exchanged emails with him. My wife has an even longer history of corresponding with the writer in question, Justin Isis. With that out of the way, my opinions expressed have nothing to do with my personal knowledge of the writer. Rather, they have everything to do with the poorly written review of his first published book; one which is symptomatic of the problems with criticism, online and off, on literature and the other arts, in today’s culture....

850) Black Rain/Book Review/Dan Schneider It is amazing that whenever a book deals with “serious” subject matter, be it genocide, Hiroshima bombing, or lynching, the book will often receive rave reviews, regardless of how well the said subject is executed. This is because the majority of readers do not critique a work on its craft, but more due to its politics or heavy-handed subject matter. Then, whenever someone attempts to point out the flaws, the reviewer is immediately accused of being “unsympathetic” and a Nazi, and pro-death, etc. All of this, of course, is nonsense. I bring all this up because the Amazon review page of Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain has one of the highest ratings for Japanese novels I’ve ever encountered. (Usually there are a fair number of negative reviews—people claiming how boring the book was and how nothing happens.)....

851) Antonio Gaudi/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes the extra features on a DVD oddly turn out to surpass the featured film itself. Such is the case with the Criterion Collection’s DVD of Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1984 documentary on the buildings of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) - the film’s title is a spelling error. The film runs a mere 72 minutes, yet it seems much longer, and this is because, despite the film’s title, there is surprisingly little focus on the actual works of the architect. Much of the film skirts over things related to the buildings, and adds in odd musical accompaniment, by Toru Takemitsu, Kurodo Mori, and Shinji Hori....

852) Echoes Of Chonqqing/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Chongqing plays an important role in understanding the Second Sino-Japanese War, for it became not only the target of severe Japanese bombing, but many Chinese citizens from the eastern and northern parts of China migrated inward, that is, west, to escape Japanese-captured territory. Chongqing was the wartime capital during China’s war with Japan (1937–1945) and as a result of the increased population from other provinces, prices of food and other goods skyrocketed, making the lives of those living there quite difficult, but especially difficult when one is poor....

853) Harakiri/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 black and white film Harakiri (Seppuku), is the second film of his that I’ve seen; the first being his 9½ hour long The Human Condition. Despite Harakiri’s being only 133 minutes in length, it’s the better film; and that’s with the full acknowledgment that The Human Condition was a hell of a good film. Harakiri is also one of the best examples of a great political work of art precisely because its greatness has nothing to do with its politics, but because of its art. It’s only the fact that it has a political stance that makes it political, whereas most ‘political’ art preens its politics....

854) Harp Of Burma/Book Review/Dan Schneider The first thing to note when reading Harp of Burma by Michio Takeyama is that this isn’t a war novel. Certainly there are aspects of war involved, but to call it either a war or anti-war novel would be too lazy, since it is not really either. The novel contains some of the most idealized versions of both the Japanese forces and anti-war, for fighting itself is not sensationalized in any way. Instead, the thrust of the book is more of gentleness and peace, rather than the actual brutality that went on (although parts of that are mentioned.)....

855) One Hundred Great Paintings/Book Review/Dan Schneider I received an excellent art book recently, from the Yale University Press, called One Hundred Great Paintings, edited by Louise Govier. The 216-page book is a series of 100 prints of paintings from the National Gallery in London, England, and has a preface by well-known art historian Tim Marlow. In the preface Marlow writes of the book’s aims and approach....

856) The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs/Book Review/Dan Schneider Having lived less than a half century, I yet marvel at the speed with which science and human knowledge of its place in the cosmos has changed. Within my lifetime, man has ventured on to the moon; satellites have landed on other planets, dove into Jupiter’s clouds, sped out beyond Pluto and into interstellar space; the Hubble telescope has peered back billions of years into the cosmos; medical marvels have come aplenty; and even our understanding of the earth’s past has radically altered....

857) Dreams With Sharp Teeth/Film Review/Dan Schneider This is my first review of a film that I first saw on Netflix, rather than in a theater or on a DVD, and I have to say the service is something of a revolution in how one watches film; or, to be more accurate, in WHAT one watches, for had it not been for the recommendations links the website provides, based upon earlier choices of viewed material, I would likely not have had any knowledge nor interest in seeking out the title I ended up reviewing....

858) Japan At War: An Oral History/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It was not too long ago that I reviewed a book of oral history about wartime China called Echoes of Chongqing by Danke Li. The book focused only on women and their stories, and while there were certainly enough merits for me to recommend the book to anyone interested in this subject matter, my criticism was that 1) by having only women, the book suffered from a certain isolation and one-sidedness. Also 2) the voices, after a while, all sounded the same. The book also suffered from too much academic in that there were moments of nebulous platitudes inserted within that added nothing, save for sounding kind of preachy....

859) How It Ends/Book Review/Chris Impey British astronomer Chris Impey’s 2010 book, How It Ends: From You To The Universe is a classic sort of science book for the masses: it takes a topic all have an interest in (death) and expands it into something beyond the immediate. On the negative side, the book’s major flaw (albeit a minor one) is that it does not focus too strongly on actual endings, as it takes digressive turns into philosophy and minutia. On the positive side, the book never bogs down in jargon, abstruseness, nor extended discussions of either. This means that its 290 page text had no long patches that your average reader will just skip through because "this doesn’t interest me."....

860) The Promise/Book Review/Dan Schneider This is the second Pearl S. Buck book I have read, following her more popular The Good Earth, which is the better of the two books. The Good Earth has one of the most memorable endings I’ve ever encountered, where a father is dying and his last wish is for his sons to not ever sell his land. The two sons agree to this wish, though at the last moment exchange a glance (and smile) that means just the opposite....

861) Still Walking/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having recently gotten a review copy of The Criterion Collection’s latest DVD release, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2008 film Still Walking (Aruitemo Aruitemo), I found myself torn as fundamentally as I have ever been at the receipt of the package, but not for the reasons one might think a critic might be torn. The film is fabulous, great, and everything that the people who recommended I check out Kore-eda’s films said it would be, and I requested on their praise. But the DVD package left me profoundly saddened because this very same film is available for streaming on Netflix and the DVD’s features are so meager as to offer no real reason to actually buy the DVD package rather than just stream the film....

862) Senso/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In my recent review of the upcoming The Criterion Collection DVD for Still Walking, I lamented the fact that streaming technology of companies like Netflix may be the demise of the DVD Golden Era because there will be little or no market for the extra features popularized by that format, and that companies like Criterion may only be able to survive by becoming film distributors. Just a few days ago Criterion announced that it had engaged in an exclusive streaming partnership with Hulu, one of Netflix’s competitors. It seems my words were not only prescient but cogent. Nonetheless, I received another of Criterion’s upcoming DVD releases to review: Italian director Luchino Visconti’s 1954 wartime melodrama Senso....

863) Mildred Pierce/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Time has a way of making some films seem grander than they really are. A good example is Mildred Pierce, the 1945 black-and-white melodrama directed by Casablanca's Michael Curtiz, and that won star Joan Crawford a Best Actress Oscar. Mildred Pierce is in no way, shape, or form great art, even though it's certainly not a bad film. In fact, as a soap opera it’s quite entertaining — no, make that very entertaining; and entertainment is a quality that can stand on its own. (The problem in recent decades is that cinema has become nothing but entertainment.) In the case of Mildred Pierce, the entertainment is formulaic and rather predictable — but in an enjoyable, campy sort of way....

864) The Makioka Sisters/Book Review/Dan Schneider Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1948 novel, The Makioka Sisters, or Sasameyuki, whose Japanese title is Light Snow), is often referred to as the greatest of last century’s novels from Japan. Inevitably, this sort of hyperbole is difficult to live up to, and the book, classically divided into three ‘books’ and 101 chapters, fails in that claim. It’s not a bad novel, and not even a particularly good one, although it has many merits....

865) The Master Of Go/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Even those reviewers on Amazon that give this a favorable review, can’t really say why they think it is a good read. Had Kawabata not written it, perhaps the results would be less favorable. Granted, there are far worse books out there, but then by that same token, there are far better—even among Kawabata’s other works. The language too, it not as poetic or psychologically layered as it is in Snow Country or The Sound of the Mountain. Kawabata’s skill resides in his characters and the way he plays out their motives throughout his works. He is great at expressing the underlining aggression that exists between people—all of which is cloaked by kindness. There’s none of that here. The prose is functionary and matter of fact, plot driven, even though the plot is rather dull....

866) Ebert Presents At The Movies/A Review/Dan Schneider This past January, long-time film critic Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times, made his return to television based film reviewing, with a revival of his old battling critics format on PBS, titled Ebert Presents At The Movies. The last three words of the title was one of the sundry names of the review program that Ebert hosted for over three decades, first with deceased film critic Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, and, after Siskel’s death, with fellow Sun-Times culture columnist Richard Roeper. It was a format which debuted in 1975, and continued after Siskel’s death, in the late 1990s, and ended in 2008, after Ebert’s protracted battle with thyroid cancer left him unable to speak. In the interim, Ebert launched his own blog, which has been one of the more popular online websites for film and political discussions. Then, late in 2010, Ebert announced that he would be reviving his old format, replete with new battling critics, and with his wife as producer, this year.....

867) Portraits Of A Marriage/Book Review/Dan Schneider Hungarian writer Sandor Marai (1900-1989) has been having a rebirth of a literary career ever since his novels have been slowly released into English. His first, Embers, is a great psychological and philosophical experience that I highly recommend. His others, such as Casanova in Bolzano and The Rebels, have both been consistent in their quality. Now, his most recent release into English, Portraits of a Marriage, is definitely worth the read and overall an excellent book. It is great in parts, but perhaps what keeps me from calling it an overall great book is that there are some moments that dwindle on a bit too long, and at times, slightly dip into soap opera.....

868) 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. Compared to today’s better film comedies, this film is both more mature and more puerile in its approach to sex, in that it treats its characters as intellectual beings, yet also shows them as somehow reserved. Granted, the film is set in turn of the 20th Century Sweden, yet there is still an element missing in the film, especially when compared to later films in the Bergman canon. That missing element would most likely be depth....

869) The Graduate/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Comedian Mike Nichols, in the mid-1960s, abandoned a flourishing comedy career with his partner, Elaine May, to become a filmmaker. His first film was the 1966 Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton vehicle Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? His second, in 1967, was The Graduate - a film that, along with Midnight Cowboy, Bonnie And Clyde, and Easy Rider, ushered in mainstream Hollywood studios into the new era of director-centered cinema. Like many films that are landmark, for the external significance they bear, The Graduate has almost always been lauded as a great film. It’s not. It’s a good film that is more innovative than great, but which misses greatness for the simplest reason most films do - a screenplay that fails....

870) Godzilla Raids Again/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1955 black and white Japanese film, Godzilla Raids Again (?????? or Gojira No Gyakushu; aka Godzilla’s Counterattack, or Gigantis, The Fire Monster) was, for many decades, the ‘lost’ Godzilla film. Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I saw many Godzilla films, of the Showa Era, on television and some in theaters that ran children’s films; but I never saw Godzilla Raids Again until the early 1990s, when it was first released on VHS, in a truncated American version that was overdubbed with voiceover narration from noted Chinese actor Keye Luke (and additional work from Star Trek’s George Takei, aka Mr. Sulu). Other than the first Godzilla film, from a year earlier, this was the only film in the series that was filmed in black and white, and, oddly, it adds a realism and documentary nightmare like feel that all later films failed to capture....

871) Narcissus And Goldmund/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Hermann Hesse is one of those writers that allows for one to be picky. He has enough great titles that of those great titles, certain ones rank better, or in this case greater than others. Narcissus and Goldmund is among his great titles, but it’s one of his lesser greats. Steppenwolf, Demian and Siddhartha are still stronger works overall, but Narcissus and Goldmund is not too far behind. A couple of things that keep me from ranking this as his best: 1) the prose is not as rich and complex as that which can be found in those other works and 2) perhaps this is just due to the translation by Ursule Molinaro, but there were several instances of clichés and a flatness within the prose (at times) that did not appear to be present in his best works....

872) Mothra Vs. Godzilla/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It is odd how memory unfolds from art. It’s been twenty or so years since I last saw the classic 1964 color Godzilla film, Mothra Vs. Godzilla (better known to American audiences by the title Godzilla Vs. The Thing, as Roger Corman’s company, AIP redubbed it to lend more mystery to the ad campaign) yet, upon popping in the Toho Master Collection DVD of the film, instantly some things returned to me, of earlier viewings. The first was Godzilla’s famed entrance into the film, a half hour or so in, when reporters are covering a story about a radioactive mud field, after a typhoon has hit Japan’s countryside. Suddenly, the ground shakes, and it seems that an earthquake is abrewing. Except that it turns out to be Godzilla rising from beneath the mud, after having been swept ashore and buried. The second thing is, seeing it in color, on television, even though my family did not get color television until the late 1980s. I recall watching the film during a Godzilla marathon on Thanksgiving Day, in New York City, thus recalling Godzilla’s emergence scene, but it had to be at the home of one of my relatives. Back in the 1970s, the local, non-network, television stations would often run monster marathons on Thanksgiving....

873) Godzilla's Revenge/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I’ve seen thousands of films. Not as many as most remunerated film critics, but quite a bit more than your average filmgoer. And in all those films, across genres, decades, screenwriters, nationalities, directors, there are only two films that I can think of that truly get inside how a child reacts and thinks. Note, I am not claiming films that well portrayed childhood, such as a modern family classic like My Dog Skip, amongst that lot. Although, it is itself an arguably great film, that film, for all its virtues, was told in a rather conventional manner. No, the two films that best penetrate a child’s mind are actually both B science fiction films, and both are sequels. The first is Robert Wise’s 1944 debut directorial effort, the black and white The Curse Of The Cat People, and the second is 1969’s mere 69 minute long color film, Godzilla’s Revenge (aka All Monsters Attack, Oru Kaiju Dai Shingeki- admittedly all bad titles). Both films were made on shoe string budgets, employed narrative arcs vastly different than their predecessor films, but both really got in to the logical nub and center of a child’s POV on the world. It’s no surprise that both films are usually dismissed by fans of the original films in the series. Yet, The Curse Of The Cat People is a better film than Cat People and Godzilla’s Revenge is clearly the best film in the whole Godzilla series, save for the first film, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters (and its Japanese source film, Gojira), and, in reality, given the actual narrative inventiveness of this film, good arguments can be made that it is the best film in the series, and possibly the best film of director Ishiro Honda’s career....

874) L.A. Confidential/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Curtis Hanson’s 1997 film, L.A. Confidential, was far and away the best film released in Hollywood during that year Titanic swept all the awards. There were likely some independent American films that were good, and possibly some foreign films that were its equal, but from Hollywood, nothing was close. It is a great film that succeeds on every possible level, Perhaps its lone flaw is that there is no underlying deep philosophic posit to it, save, arguably, that all people are corrupt and corruptible; it just depends on the degree and motive....

875) De-Lovely/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Let me state my bias up front. I loathe musicals. There are very few I like- especially from the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood. That’s because the whole convention of people breaking into song at a difficult moment always strikes me as forced and phony. There are exceptions, though. The Sound Of Music because of….well, I loved Julie Andrews as a child, Evita because there’s only one spoken line in the film- it totally divorces itself from the conventional musical format, and Moulin Rouge because while there is some speaking, it’s even more lush and lavish than Evita. The 2004 Irwin Winkler film De-Lovely, a biopic of Tinpan Alley composer Cole Porter, is one of those rare musicals that work because it is a unique approach to both a musical and to a portrait of the artist, the man who wrote, among many other indelible hit songs, It’s De-Lovely, Let’s Misbehave, Anything Goes, Be A Clown, I Love You, and Ev’ry Time You Say Goodbye. This film works because it is not a pretentious film, and in that regard most reminded me of Amadeus, the portrait of another musical genius, Mozart, told with another innovative framing device for the tale- the life of the main character told through the eyes of his envious rival....

876) Stagecoach/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I love when I catch myself in a bias, and have the reality of the art bitchslap me. Having watched a number of John Ford and John Wayne films over the years I had come to expect certain things from both men. From Ford you get the landscapes, shallow screenplays, and often overweening visual poesy. From Wayne you’d get the wooden acting, hammy bodily gesticulations, and racist pseudo-patriotism. When I watched The Searchers, a monumentally overrated film, I nailed these flaws in both men. So, I was expecting much of the same, only more of it, and worse, from Stagecoach, the first pairing of these two men because 1) it was older, 2) it was made in the 1930s, 3) in black and white, and 4)much of film acting in that era was little beyond the silent era’s necessitated overacting. Thankfully, I was wrong. Very wrong. No, I would not state that Stagecoach is an inarguably great film- it has some flaws (mostly minor) and is essentially a B film, in many ways, but it’s one of the greatest B films ever made and a near-great film- Western or not, and both Ford and Wayne excel in it, which then begs the question: if they were so right in their first pairing, why did they go so wrong in later films, like, ahum….The Searchers?....

877) A Walk Into The Sea/Review/Dan Schneider Why do so many documentary filmmakers decide to make films about relatives or people they know? The obvious answer is the ease of getting information. But that does not explain why they choose the subjects they choose. Andrew Neel’s portrait of his grandmother, Alice Neel, at least has the benefit of being a profile of a great artist. Lucia Small’s portrait of her architect father, Glen Howard Small, called My Father, The Genius, at least shows off the insights of an underrated designer. And even Bill Rose’s The Loss Of Nameless Things at least profiles an artist of potential whose life and career were cut short by an accident. None of this is true for the 2006 documentary, A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams And The Warhol Factory, which clocks in at 77 minutes in length....

878) Close-Up/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Abbas Kiarostami is one of those "name" non-American directors who is looked to as a god. The low-budget Nema-ye Nazdik / Close-Up is the second Kiarostami effort I have seen and it is an excellent film. [Note: spoilers ahead] Close-Up is a pseudo-documentary — not a mockumentary, even though it has been labeled as such. Written and directed by Kiarostami between the making of two bigger-budgeted projects, Close-Up shows what pouncing upon something that just happens can do for an artist. Sometimes it’s not the force of creation, but the moment of recognition that defines when a piece of good art is wrought....

879) Kes/Blu-Ray Review/Dan Schneider The upcoming release of Ken Loach’s 1969 color film Kes allowed me my first chance to see the new Blu-Ray technology firsthand, as I recently upgraded to a Blu-Ray player with Netflix capacity. Hence, when sent a review copy by The Criterion Collection I was eager for my virginal go at the newer generation disk. Having seen it, I can say I noticed only a marginal quality difference vis-à-vis regular DVDs. Perhaps this is because Loach’s film is 40 years old, and Blu-Ray makes more sense on newer all digital films, and/or because I lack a digital widescreen tv. That said, crispness is one thing, but when film starts looking too much like video....

880) A Clockwork Orange/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, was the culmination of possibly the greatest consecutive run of three films from a single director, ever. Before this film, he had released Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb in 1964, and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. The former is, if not the single greatest comedy film ever made, is certainly the greatest satire. The latter, is inarguably the greatest science fiction film in the medium’s history, to date, and in the running for greatest film of all time, period. Yet, in some ways, A Clockwork Orange equals and surpasses its progenitors. It is a film that, despite its claims of being science fiction or pornographic, is even more subversively funny than Dr. Strangelove, in certain moments, and in others is as audacious as 2001. This trio of films is all the more remarkable....

881) Mr. Untouchable/Film Review/Dan Schneider Marc Levin’s 2007 documentary film, Mr. Untouchable, which gives background on notorious 1970s Harlem drug kingpin LeRoy ‘Nicky’ Barnes is a flat out great documentary. It is insightful, points out things that are wrong with many people’s ideas on reality, and does very well in backgrounding Barnes’ life and times, as well as using the often tired “talking heads” approach in a fresh way, by making those talking heads contradict one another and reveal their own evils when they speak of Barnes (who also appears in the film, silhouetted, because he’s in the Federal Witness Protection Program)....

882) About To Die/Book Review/Jessica Schneider We live in an image-obsessed culture, and if there is an image that can keep us from actually having to read an article, we’re likely to gawk at it, especially when that image exploits someone’s death, or rather, the moment just before someone’s death. Barbie Zelizer’s About to Die: How News Images Move the Public addresses why and how journalists exploit the use of the moment before one dies (what she calls the “as if” moment) over the actual death itself....

883) Eyes Of The Mothman/Review/Dan Schneider Having grown up in the 1970s I was exposed to many documentaries on subject matter that could be termed supernatural or paranormal. Back in those pre-VHS days, these sorts of films actually got fairy widespread releases into secondary theatres, and often ran for a year or two before hitting local television stations. If over the age of forty you surely must recall these films, which usually were on such topics as UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Erich Von Daniken's Ancient Astronauts, the Loch Ness monster, or other such ‘mysteries. Its television equivalent was Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of… series. These films all had cheesy production values and narrators who intoned doom at least once a minute, as well as asking silly rhetorical questions that made whatever outrageous subject matter they were focused on seem plausible....

884) Nietzsche And The Nazis/Film Review/Dan Schneider ‘The Nazis knew what they stood for; do we?’ is how the 165 minute long documentary, Nietzsche And The Nazis: A Personal View, by Stephen Hicks, PhD., ends queryingly. Yet, one might be loath to even label the 2006 film a documentary, as it is more an illustrated lecture. But, oh, what a lecture! I have famously railed against most philosophy. Not because I lack opinions but because so much philosophy is so mediocre and so poorly written. Friedrich Nietzsche, however, was an engaging, if not great, writer, and his ideas- good, bad, or indifferent, are always a challenge. These ideas, a near flawless dissection of Nazi theory and power, a historical weighing of their influence from Nietzsche, and the erudite yet sonorous tones of professor Hicks make this film one of the most intriguing yet innovative, yet also GREAT, documentaries I have watched....

885) The Public Enemy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The time a film was made often has an interesting effect on its ability to last or not. The 1931 black and white film that launched James Cagney into superstardom, The Public Enemy, directed by William Wellman, is a good case study. While it’s not, overall, an inarguably great film, it certainly is close. It’s a near-great film that certainly ranks as a great genre film- in this case the gangster film. The reason for its missing greatness is essentially because it is an early talking picture, and for the first decade or so, after the silent film era ended, many actors struggled with trying to get a more naturalistic feel to their physical appearances and acting styles. And, it would still be a good two decades before Neo-Realism swept the world cinema, and brought with it the modern ‘naturalism’ of cinema. A decade later, still, and the New Wave would wash over the globe, and empower directors to abandon preconceptions about cinematic rules....

886) Russian Ark/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Russian Ark (Russkiy Kovcheg) is one of those films more notable for the technical expertise it exhibits (or preens of) than any real artistic merit. It reminds one of Mike Figgis’s 2000 film Timecode, wherein that whole film was supposedly done in four separate single takes, in real time. That claim was debunked by a simple watching of the film, and the film itself was notable for being a screenplay disaster. The four stories, which occupied one fourth of the whole screen the whole time, had volume turned up on one section while the others were backgrounded, and then switched, which made it difficult for the viewer to even stick with whatever tale he preferred. Technically, the film was a mess, and, as there was no real story, just a gimmick, the film bombed critically and financially. Russian Ark, made in 2002....

887) Nazi Documentaries/Mengele-Leuchter/Dan Schneider I recently watched two very different documentaries about the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s policy of genocide against Jews, Gypsies, and other ‘undesirables’ during the Second World War. Most people have termed the genocide things like the holocaust or The Final Solution, but the phrase Nazi Genocide seems a far more apt term, as both the other terms tend to focus almost exclusively on the deaths of Jews (who were about 50% of all people killed in the death camps), while ignoring all the others killed. Ancillary to that is the tendency for the media to overplay the Nazi Genocide vis-à-vis all other earlier and later examples of genocide, including those that killed far more many people and far greater percentages, overall, of the people that were set out to be killed by the genocidalists. I get this out of the way, early, simply because both films deal with controversial aspects of the Nazi Genocide; the first film with a victim’s crusade to forgive her oppressors and the second with a patsy’s blundering in to try and exonerate some of the crimes committed. The problems both films faced is that, even to this day, there are genuine and myriad controversies regarding genocide, in general (see the denial of the Armenian genocide), and the Nazi Genocide, particularly....

888) Insignificance/Blu-Ray Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes it is a tough thing to decide, how to lead off a review of a work of art that simply is not good. In the case of the latest upcoming Blu-Ray release from The Criterion Collection, British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson’s play, Insignificance, this becomes something acute. I could start off with the obvious pun that the title recapitulates the arts merit. I could go on about how stage plays, even successful ones (artistically, not commercially) rarely guarantee cinematic success. Or, I could just say that the screenplay, acting, characterization, dialogue, editing, cinematography, and assorted other technical aspects, simply are not good, thus the whole film tanks. Let me compromise, and admit that all three of my potential essay openings would work because all three are equally so....

889) The Tree Of Life/Film Review/Dan Schneider American film director Terrence Malick’s fifth feature film release, in four decades in the business, The Tree Of Life, is a film that, in parts, has some of the greatest techniques and moments ever recorded in film history. It also has some fatal narrative flaws that prevent it from outright greatness as an overall work of art, and possibly the worst ending to a near-great film since Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic, Rashomon, while at the same time having one of the most self-indulgent and showoffy endings to a film since Federico Fellini’s 8½. More reprehensible than anything the film does, positively or negatively, is how utterly over the top some praise of the film has been, and how utterly ridiculous some of the criticism of the film has been. Granted, some of this has been generated by Malick....

890) Sky Island/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A number of years ago I visited northern New Mexico and I have been eager to return ever since. For any nature lover, this topography is paradise, and for me personally there is something universal about the American Southwest—perhaps it’s the notion that one is able to, with just a hike across the terrain, travel back into time so easily. There is also a comfortable ease about the surrounds and a beauty that is unlike any other place on earth. I understand what Georgia O’Keeffe meant when she said she had found her home there. And sometimes it is nice to just travel across canyons and the faraway without having to lift your feet. In John Grabowska’s latest documentary, Sky Island offers just that....

891) Strange New Worlds/Book Review/Dan Schneider Ok, let me get this out of the way: Ray Jayawardhana, the author of the uber-long subtitled Strange New Worlds: The Search For Alien Planets An Life Beyond Our Solar System, recently released from Princeton University Press, is not a great wordsmith. In short, no one is going to mix up his prose stylings, in this 288 page book, with the ruminative poesy of a Loren Eiseley, the enthused didacticism of a Carl Sagan, nor the wonderfully metaphoric Stephen Jay Gould....

892) The First Fossil Hunters/Book Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes a book can have a good germ of an idea, and be bloated WAY beyond all reasonable measure, based upon a) the good intent of the author, b) the ego of the author, or c) both a and b. Such is the case with Adrienne Mayor’s 2011 reisssue of her 2000 book The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, And Myth In Greek And Roman Times, which is a 253-page book of text, supplemented with 108 pages of appendices and notes which has to be some kind of a record ratio for supplements to actual material in a book that, technically, is neither a history nor science book....

893) 3 Biographical Documentaries/Film Review/Dan Schneider One recent afternoon I watched back to back to back documentaries on Netflix, and only after watching them realized they had a common theme: they were biographies of people. Or, technically biographies of two real people and one mythic figure with no historical proof; but you get my drift. The three films in question were 1994’s Martial Arts Master: The Life Of Bruce Lee, a 52 minute long film directed by Guy Scutter; The Case For Christ, a 71 minute long pseudo-documentary, from 2007, directed by Michael and Timothy Eaton, on Christian Apologist Lee Strobel’s claims to have ‘proof’ that Jesus Christ really existed, really was divine, and really died for youy (yes, your!) sins; and a 2010 documentary, directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, called Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work, which runs 84 minutes....

894) Diary Of A Mad Old Man/Book Review/Jessica Schneider With a title like Diary of a Mad Old Man, one does not need guess too hard when trying to assume what this story is about. In it, we have an old man named Utsugi who, because he is old, is suffering from a list of medical ills, yet that does not stop him from recording his sexual perversions in his journal. One of the first things he mentions is how he is sexually attracted to male dancers dressed up to look like women. Not men, mind you, but men dressed to look like women....

895) Some Like It Hot/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films are terrifically overrated, even if they are solid, enjoyable little films. Perhaps the most glaring example of this dictum is Billy Wilder’s 1959 black and white comedy Some Like It Hot. It often appears on Best Of lists as the top comedy of all time, but, while a good, solid film, it is nowhere near a great film, in screenwriting, technical measures, nor in, well, laughs per minute. Let’s tackle those three things in reverse. Perhaps the funniest film ever made, in terms of laughs per minute is Stanley Kramer’s 1963 all star comedy, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It’s a pants-pisser that unleashes 2-3 guffaws per minute. The scene where Jonathan Winters destroys the gas station is priceless. By contrast, Some Like It Hot hasn’t a single guffaw in the whole film- a number of moments that make you smile and tee-hee, but guffaw? No. Part of this is because the film has not aged well- it’s hard to still laugh at drag jokes nowadays....

896) A Cat, A Man, And Two Women/Book Review/Jessica Schneider A Cat, a Man and Two Women is a collection of three tales — containing one that is very good and two others that are pretty good. The title story, "A Cat, a Man, and Two Women," is a 100-page novella and is the best in the book, offering just the right amount of humor and tenderness involving a cat that affects the lives of those around it. The male protagonist, Shozo, is a weak-willed man who loves his cat, Lily. He loves her so much that the woman in his life is jealous of the affection he bestows upon her. The tale opens with Shozo sharing his mackerel with Lily, by getting her to repeatedly leap for the bait. His wife, Fukuko, has always had somewhat a disdain for the cat, and thus she resents the close bond her husband shares with the animal....

897) Night Fright/DVD Review/Dan Schneider John Agar is a B film sci fi and horror legend from the 1950s. By the late 1960s, however, his once renowned B film career had sputtered to even sub-Tor Johnson depths. In the remaining decades of his life he was reduced from B film leading man to (ugh!) B film character actor. One of the last roles that Agar had, as a B film leading man was in 1967’s Night Fright....

898) The Old Capital/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Yasunari Kawabata is known for the emotional intricacy and subtlety of his work, and in that regard, The Old Capital is no different. What separates Kawabata’s work from that of other Japanese writers are the insightful observations — what one notices are the very small details, and thus, how the the scene evokes emotion. Descriptions of the passing vistas in Snow Country evoke internal isolation and pathos, while the rumblings of a nearby mountain introduce feelings of death in The Sound of the Mountain. It is this shift from the external to the internal that makes Kawabata the distinct and intricate writer he is, and someone separate from his peers....

899) The Thin Blue Line/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Errol Morris, the documentarian who wrought the great The Fog of War, first came to prominence for his 1988 documentary film, the 98 minute long The Thin Blue Line. It's a very good film, but it is not a flat out great film likeThe Fog of War. In a sense, many of the things that hit full bloom in the later film, made in 2003, were given a test run in this more standard film. But, whileThe Fog of Waris a film whose import will only grow over the years, The Thin Blue Line is a film that was important upon its release, for it documented the incompetence and corruption that resides in the American legal system, and how an innocent man can easily get railroaded into a murder charge. The film also subsequently led to the release of said wrongly convicted man, and is often pointed to by capital punishment opponents, as proof that the system does not work, and cannot be error-free....

900) 3 Biopics/Fields-Chaplin-Kevorkian/Dan Schneider Sometimes an evening can conduce one to a certain way of feeling, and one evening I felt like watching biographies. The three I chose were W.C. Fields: The Great Man, Charlie Chaplin: The Forgotten Years, And Right To Exit: The Mock Trial Of Jack Kevorkian. Two of the films on silent era film comedians, three on controversial figures, and two on figures who were punished by the United States legal system. Chaplin was all three....

901) The Three Cornered World/Book Review/Jessica Schneider “Walking up a mountain track, I fell to thinking. Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current. Give free rein to your desires, and you become uncomfortably confined. It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.” And so this is the opening to Soseki Natsume’s novel, The Three Cornered World....

902) 3 Artist Documentaries/Gould, Hicks, Ellroy/Dan Schneider Over the course of several evenings I found myself watching an eclectic run of three biographical films of artists of varying quality. The films were Genius Within: The Inner Life Of Glenn Gould, American: The Bill Hicks Story, And James Ellroy’s Feast Of Death, and herein my views on all three works of art....

903) The Wild Geese/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In Japanese literature, two names are often lumped together: Soseki Natsume and Ogai Mori. Both are noted for having written during the fall of the Meiji Era — or what marked the decline of the classical image of Japan as it struggled to accept the new Western influences. They are also two writers who were hugely impacted by the suicide of General Nogi (which was carried out following the death of Emperor Meiji). Soseki’s novel, Kokoro, contains the influence of such, and many of his works have been translated into English. Ogai, however, is not as easily available in translation....

904) Vita Sexualis/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The very first thing that is mentioned about Ogai Mori’s 1909 published novel, Vita Sexualis, is that it was banned three weeks after publication. I find this amusing since the book is bereft of sex, and more about the burgeoning curiosity about it. All this is fine, and actually makes for an interesting read, albeit readers looking for steamy scenes are likely to be disappointed. Yet, those who know where to find them are not going to be sifting through a Japanese novel published in 1909....

905) Blue Valentine/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Blue Valentine is a film designed to stir debate, but not in the usual silly political nor emotional sort of way. Its debate is of a deeper and more profound measure, and that is it asks which of the two main characters profiled in the film is in the wrong? The film does its best to be evenhanded, and for every tick of the ledger against one of the major characters, an equally incisive demerit can be handed out to the other. However, the biggest demerit I can give regarding this 2010 film, directed by Derek Cianfrance, about the turmoil of a mediocre marriage, is the critical cribbing that abounds in essays and reviews of the film, online and off. And that cribbing involves the almost near-universal claim that this film follows the end of, or the dissolution of, that marriage. Yet, nothing of the sort can be convincingly construed from the film’s contents nor its ending....

906) Samurai Rebellion/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It is a trite thing to do, but when most critics try to laud a play or a film, or even the development of characters at their highest, they will use the term Shakespearean. This is odd since, while Shakespeare certainly was a great writer, the fact is that he was not adept, at all, in developing realistic characters nor scenes. His greatest plays- 7 or 8 out of his published 37 (perhaps a dozen to his most ardent champions) are great, in no way, shape, nor form, for their above mentioned qualities. Shakespeare, in fact, was not a dramatist, in the modern sense of the term, for pre-modern playwrights simply had no idea how to get in to the mind of the average man (or woman). One need look no further than Shakespeare’s own abysmally (and often painfully) bad and unfunny comedies to realize how actually denigrating he was of the common classes. It was not until the mid-19^th Century, and the emergence of Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen....

907) The Desert Of The Tartars/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Desert Of The Tartars (Il Deserto Dei Tartari) is a film that has been described as a cross between Beau Geste and Waiting For Godot, and into that mix I would toss some of the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara, especially Woman In The Dunes, as well as the troop interactions seen in the 1960s American television sitcom F Troop, even though The Desert Of The Tartars is not a comedy. This is because the slow moving and contemplative first half of the film follows the setting up of the main military officer characters between each other, and with their men, while the second half of the film speeds up the pace of the diegetic time, and focuses more on the reactions of the officers to the world outside their fortress, rather than within it....

908) The Fantastical Ascent Of Jason Sanford/Essay/Dan Schneider As I have often rightly been harsh on editors and critics who gladhand praise to their friends and associates in return for advancement opportunities in the fields of the arts and academia, let me state up front that I have known Jason Sanford for well over a decade, he attended maybe a dozen meetings of my old Uptown Poetry Group, and I have read a number of examples of his prose fiction over the last decade. That being my full disclosure (and, no, I have no financial investment in his person nor literary career), let me state that, having read Sanford’s two latest releases in e-book formats- his novella, Sublimation Angels, and his short story collection, Never Never Stories, I can say, with complete objectivity, that he is an excellent writer, at the minimum, and possibly a great one, especially if he keeps improving his craft....

909) The Fantastical Ascent Of Jason Sanford/Essay/Dan Schneider As I have often rightly been harsh on editors and critics who gladhand praise to their friends and associates in return for advancement opportunities in the fields of the arts and academia, let me state up front that I have known Jason Sanford for well over a decade, he attended maybe a dozen meetings of my old Uptown Poetry Group, and I have read a number of examples of his prose fiction over the last decade. That being my full disclosure (and, no, I have no financial investment in his person nor literary career), let me state that, having read Sanford’s two latest releases in e-book formats- his novella, Sublimation Angels, and his short story collection, Never Never Stories, I can say, with complete objectivity, that he is an excellent writer, at the minimum, and possibly a great one, especially if he keeps improving his craft....

910) General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait/Film Review/Dan Schneider Watching French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait, two things came to mind. First was an old Mad magazine spoof of Amin titled ‘Idiot And Mean’, in which, I believe the 1970s dictator of Uganda was visited by the crew of the original Star Trek television series, and second the fact that the word Dada, while literally part of Amin’s name, also was an early 20th century arts movement that embraced the meaningless of all art. The first point is obvious, because the name accorded Amin fits, and so does the second point fit, since the real Amin, as portrayed in this film, seems actually meaningless....

Thugalicious.

911) Docs on Groups/Interesting/Dan Schneider Documentaries that focus on individuals generally should focus on people of accomplishment or those with unique talents….unless the people focused on are being focused on for some higher purpose. In watching the two documentaries, It Might Get Loud and Confessions Of A Superhero, I witnessed both types of documentaries on people at, if not the absolute peak of their respective art forms, then close to it....

And so it goes.

912) Muhammad Ali/3 Docs/Dan Schneider Growing up in the 1970s, the specter of heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali — whom I could never stand — was everywhere. Contrary to opinions voiced about him post-Parkinson's Disease, Ali was the most despised athlete of that era. The most beloved was actually soccer superstar Pelé....

Hagrographic fluff.

913) Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie/Film Review/Dan Schneider Have you ever watched a Christopher Guest mockumentary, like For Your Consideration, loved it, but said, ‘Well, there are no real life people that stupid.’ You would be wrong, because in director Jay Delaney’s 63 minute long, 2009 documentary, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, that’s exactly what the viewer is seeing. The film follows two middle aged Portsmouth, Ohio friends and losers named Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton. The former is a small, clearly psychotic, but harmless, individual with bad dentition who believes he has a gift to call out to Bigfoots (or Bigfeet?) that he and Wayne track down in local forested areas....

Good.

914) Alice Neel/Film Review/Dan Schneider Growing up in New York City, in the 1970s, painter Alice Neel (who died in 1984, at age 84) was often in the news, with a show or retrospective at this or that gallery or museum. Such was the extent of her fame and renown, locally, that it’s hard to imagine she was anything other than a famous painter, but in the 2007 documentary, Alice Neel, directed by her grandson Andrew Neel, it is a myth that is quickly dispelled....

Good.

915) The Thin Red Line/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Journeyman film director Andrew Marton’s 1964 film version of James Jones’ novel, The Thin Red Line, is quite different from the 1998 film version by Terrence Malick. And almost all of those ways are inferior, despite there being a number of important scenes that are the same in both films. Having said that, the 99 minute long, black and white film is still a pretty good film, despite its cheap B movie level special effects, and pretty rotten acting....

Solid.

916) The Loss Of Nameless Things/Film Review/Dan Schneider Of the many documentaries available for streaming on Netflix, very few are worth watching. Some have potentially interesting subject matter, but are ill wrought. Others are just paint by numbers formula documentaries with a political, religious, or philosophic agenda. Still others are just plain amateurish. Then there are documentaries like Bill Rose’s 2005 The Loss Of Nameless Things, about the rise and violent fall of a playwright and dramaturg whose critical and artistic star seemed to be waxing, before, like many clichéd artists of talent, he kyboshed it all and nearly killed himself. Instead, he ended up destroying his brain, his marriage, his past, and his future. The artist in question was Oakley ‘Tad’ Hall III, son of the fairly well known novelist and Academic, Oakley Hall II....

Excellent.

917) Blue Valentine/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Blue Valentine is a film designed to stir debate, but not in the usual silly political nor emotional sort of way. Its debate is of a deeper and more profound measure, and that is it asks which of the two main characters profiled in the film is in the wrong? The film does its best to be evenhanded, and for every tick of the ledger against one of the major characters, an equally incisive demerit can be handed out to the other. However, the biggest demerit I can give regarding this 2010 film, directed by Derek Cianfrance, about the turmoil of a mediocre marriage, is the critical cribbing that abounds in essays and reviews of the film, online and off. And that cribbing involves the almost near-universal claim that this film follows the end of, or the dissolution of, that marriage. Yet, nothing of the sort can be convincingly construed from the film’s contents nor its ending....

Good.

918) The Wheel Of Time/DVD Review/Dan Schneider What is it about middle aged white men and their sudden love of Orientalism (or jazz, for that matter)? Is it a midlife crisis? This thought came to me watching Werner Herzog’s 2003 documentary Wheel Of Time. The best thing I can say of the film is that it would make for a solid PBS film by a typical documentary director, but coming from a master of cinema, like Herzog, it’s a profound disappointment. Why? There simply is nothing more to this film than Herzog filming the mundane goings on at a trio of Buddhist festivals in 2002, and acting as if peasants trekking about a mountain (Mount Kailash in Tibet), monks painting mandalas with colored sand, and white Austrians rapt with Orientalism, were supposed to lend some deep insight into the cosmic goings on. At least, that is what can be taken from Herzog’s narration of the film....

Good.

919) Identification Of A Woman/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s much maligned 1982 color film, Identification Of A Woman (Identificazione Di Una Donna), for the first time was an odd experience. Although I normally dismiss poor reviews and approach films with an open mind, the fact is that I was fully expecting the film to be yet another old man film, like Ingmar Bergman’s disastrous Saraband, or Federico Fellini’s stale Intervista. And, given the fact that the film was about a film director in a state of confusion, naturally, Fellini’s overrated 8½ and Woody Allen’s criminally underrated Stardust Memories came to mind....

Excellent.

920) Kuroneko/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Japanese film director Kaneto Shindo’s 1968 black and white horror film, Kuroneko (Yabu No Naka No Kuroneko or The Black Cat From The Groves), is a film both in step with its era- especially with the horror films coming out of Italy, and those from England’s Hammer studios, yet it is also a much deeper and cinematic film. It got worldwide acclaim, upon its release, but didn’t get good stateside distribution due to the cancellation of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival where it was considered one of the strongest entries. In a sense, it shares much with another horror film released the same year, from Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, Hour Of The Wolf, wherein the dead return to prey on the living....

Good.

921) This Dust Of Words/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Full disclosure up front: I received a DVD screener copy of documentary filmmaker Bill Rose’s 2008 film, This Dust Of Words, after I contacted him hoping to interview him for my Dan Schneider Interviews series, after I had seen and been impressed with his first documentary, 2005’s The Loss Of Nameless Things, which documented a promising young playwright and director’s fall from prominence after a careless auto accident left him a wholly different person from the artist he once was. While a bit raw, the film used some dramatic innovations to make memorable a tale about a figure that, before his accident, was almost a stereotype of the solipsistic self-declared genius enfant terrible of art....

Excellent.

922) I Am Better Than Your Kids/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I recall a plate I made for my mom when I was in the third grade. It was for Valentine's Day, or maybe Mother's Day. I drew a house with trees alongside it, and flowers that stretched over the roof. Big hearts floated in the air, the butterflies had multi-colored wings, and were larger than the front door. There is a small date in the bottom corner - I believe from the year 1984. My mom still keeps this plate in her pantry, and every time I visit, I see it there. She keeps it near, but not on display....

Ok.

923) Ben-Hur/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ben-Hur is one of those sword and sandal epics that, like The Ten Commandments or Spartacus, is a good film, well acted, well directed, but ultimately, is just a good excuse to eat junk food, for there’s nothing of any real depth to it. In many ways, it is sort of Part Two of Charlton Heston’s three part ‘religious epic’, which started with The Ten Commandments and ended with El Cid (a bit better of a film than the two others). The difference is that this is the least religious of the trio, despite its subtitle being A Story Of The Christ....

Good.

924) Capturing Reality/Film Review/Dan Schneider Pepita Ferrari’s 2008 documentary on the insights of the documentarian’s craft, Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary, is a solid effort. However, despite its nature, Capturing Reality never does what it celebrates in the works of others: it fails to innovate and explore every way that true stories can be told. In fact, Ferrari's 97-minute film consists of the talking heads of about 40 documentary filmmakers, interspersed with 150 or so scenes from their films....

Solid.

925) Amen/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras is not a poetic filmmaker. He is the exemplar of the political artist, except for one thing. He’s actually quite good at it. His career is filled with well made, if not visionary nor great, films, but, because the films do take some creative risks, and rarely condescend, they rise above the mountain of bad political art, in most fields, which can easily be reduced to a bumper sticker....

Solid.

926) Pickpocket/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Robert Bresson’s 1959 black and white film Pickpocket, after having seen his earlier Diary Of A Country Priest and later Mouchette and Au Hasard Balthazar, is to see a great artist in mid-flight to apex. Pickpocket is not a great film, for it suffers from some of the tics that worked against Diary Of A Country Priest (notably the habit of the character writing down what will happen in a journal, speaking it to the audience, then seeing the action play out visually), but it also presages some of the more visually fenestral moments of the two later films. Part of this is likely to the fact that the screenplay was written by Bresson alone, not adapted from another source. But, on the negative side, the fact that Bresson preferred to use amateur actors (whom he referred to as models or mannekins) worked against him big time in this film....

Good.

927) Hiroshima Mon Amour/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Alain Resnais’s 1959 black and white film Hiroshima Mon Amour is the third film of his that I’ve seen, after 1955’s mediocre documentary, Night And Fog, and 1961’s great and brilliant Last Year In Marienbad, and, unsurprisingly, the film lands somewhere in the middle, qualitatively. That said, it’s much closer to the later film, for only the somewhat melodramatic portrayal of its lead female character keeps it from reaching Last Year In Marienbad’s heights. And, in many ways, Hiroshima Mon Amour reaches dramatic and creative heights the later film cannot. Unfortunately, it also succumbs to weakness that the hermetic later film does not expose....

Excellent.

928) Color Me Kubrick/Film Review/Dan Schneider I watched my first pure Netflix fiction film, as opposed to documentary, and it was not good. I was going to watch In The Mood For Love, by Wong Kar-wai, but the picture could not include all of the subtitles at the bottom. The same was true with Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion, but that, too, had issues with the framing out of subtitles. Reported both problems, so that dampened the mood for foreign films. Then I came across a 2006 comedy and drama called Color Me Kubrick: A True...ish Story, which is about the noted 1990s impersonator of Stanley Kubrick- a gay man who used Kubrick’s own hermitry to his advantage, since few knew what the real Kubrick looked like. People may recall when New York Times drama critic, Frank Rich, wrote of his encounter with the imposter, Alan Conway, at a restaurant. This chance meeting led to Conway’s eventual downfall and exposure....

So-so.

929) Rock Prophecies/Film Review/Dan Schneider Relaxing at night, after a hard day at work and a few hours online, tending to emails, website modifications, correspondence, and creative things, amongst the best things to do, if too tired to read a book, is to watch a film. But, not a fictive film, but a documentary where, even if the film is not so good, you can at least learn some facts about the world at large. John Chester’s 2009 documentary, Rock Prophecies, is just such a film, as it follows the life and sudden fortune that befalls freelance rock photographer Robert M. Knight....

The man?

930) Esther's Inheritance/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Esther's Inheritance is now the fifth Sandor Marai novel I have read, and this also happens to be the total number of novels (as of this writing) that has been translated into English. All I can say is that I hope the translations continue, as I don’t think there’s much this man cannot do within his literary realm. Marai is one of those writers that focuses on the intricacies of human relationships — assessing and dissecting motives, presenting flaws and arguing for them, then arguing against them, and leaving some conclusions answered and others open. His writing is muscular and poetic, lean and intricate. His men are often too proud and his women too willing, yet the relationships are complex and the tension is taut....

Excellent.

931) The Mental Defective League/Book Review/Dan Schneider One of the more rewarding things about running a popular arts website is having tons of people begging for you to review their books, films, poems, etc. Naturally, with time being precious, a single critic could never review everything, especially if he, like me, is a creative artist, as well....

Good novel.

932) Sandhills Boy/Book Review/Dan Schneider On a recent trip to San Angelo, Texas, my wife and I were introduced to the name and persona of Western writer and Texas journalist Elmer Kelton. Well, introduced is a mite too passive a term, for in San Angelo- Kelton’s adopted hometown, one simply cannot avoid the man- his image is on billboards and sides of buildings, and his books take up whole shelves at local bookstores where the man, dead a few years, was a local legend and cottage industry. In one such store, the Cactus Book Shop, after talk and inquiries by me to the establishment’s owner, I decided to take the plunge....

Good.

933) Hunger/Film Review/Dan Schneider British film director Steve McQueen’s 2008 debut film, Hunger, is notable for many reasons: It is a great film, a great debut film, uses an innovative narrative structure, uses interesting cinematography in concert with its soundtrack, makes the best use of ambient sound to have the best non-musical soundtrack I’ve heard in a long time (if not ever), is the work of a black artist that is not obsessed with black only topics, and shows a maturity and grace that goes beyond even the first films of directors like David Gordon Green....

Great.

932) Woody Allen: A Documentary/Film Review/Dan Schneider I watched the recent PBS American Masters documentary on Woody Allen, Woody Allen: A Documentary, online, and it was surely a disappointment. It covered, in its three and a half hours, many of his films, his early life and break into show business, but it offered almost nothing of depth- oddly recapitulating the flaws of Barbara Kopple’s 1998 documentary on the same subject, Wild Man Blues. In a sense, the film gives the best representation of the critical cribbing that is killing most film criticism, by having vapid and flat out bad critics opine on subjects they do not understand, but it does little to give one a better understanding of the filmmaker, for the so-called talking head ‘experts’ it relies on are the dense and pretentious film professor Annette Insdorf, the lifeless hack film critic Richard Schickel, the ebulliently vacuous film critic Leonard Maltin, a film critic priest named Robert Lauder, who utters…well, nothing of value....

So-so.

933) Shame/Film Review/Dan Schneider Yes. Let that word simmer for a moment. It is the answer to a question I have long asked, in relation to the relentless puerilization of American cinema over the last 3 decades. The question was: will there be a next great adult filmmaker (in the John Cassavetes, not porno, mold) to come along? Well, he’s here, and his name is Steve McQueen, and I suspect that once his film career is at an end no one will be confusing him with the dead white American male film star of the 1960s and 1970s, for this black British director is now 2 for 2 in releasing great art to the masses....

Great.

934) Patton/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Franklin Schaffner’s 1970 film, Patton, is a film that falls just shy of overall greatness, unlike his previous film, Planet Of The Apes, even though both had excellent scripts, were unconventionally shot, had great acting performances, and were films that fundamentally altered their subgenres, biopics and science fiction. It is a film that, while it’s clearly not a great film, does not offer up an obvious reason. It starts off brilliantly, with Patton’s famous address to the film audience, and then, well, becomes, in many ways, a routine biopic- at least when it’s not about Patton directly, for George C. Scott owns the screen....

Good film.

935) 4 Queer Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched four documentaries on Netflix on the subject of homosexuality in America, and, as some may not expect, it was a mixed bag; not only qualitatively, but in the approach to the subject matter within. I state that some may not expect this because humans often lump each other into these vast categories from which escape is impossible: all Jews are- , all blacks must be- , all queers- , and so on. The four documentaries in question were, in order of viewing: Chris & Don: A Love Story; Black White + Gray: A Portrait Of Sam Wagstaff And Robert Mapplethorpe; Before Stonewall: The Making Of A Gay And Lesbian Community, and For The Bible Tells Me So....

Mixed bag.

936) 3 Vanity Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider It used to be that film documentaries were in the purview of professional film directors, editors, and producers, and that certain standards of artistic integrity and journalistic objectivity were observed. However, in this age of Netflix and instant streaming video, there has been the rise of the far too often noxious vanity documentary film, wherein the filmmaker essays a subject near and dear to them, with little import to anyone outside of whom they know, and try to propound that is artistically or culturally significant. On a recent morning I watched three such highly lauded films: Her Name Is Sabine, Exit Through The Gift Shop, and Buck....

So-so.

937) A Face In A Crowd/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Elia Kazan’s 1957 drama A Face in the Crowd, written by Kazan's On the Waterfront collaborator Budd Schulberg, is neither the forgotten masterpiece its champions claim it to be nor a minor work to be disregarded as it was for several decades. In fact, A Face in the Crowd is a good though clearly flawed effort, whose chief weaknesses are a screenplay that gets bogged down in soap-operatic didacticism and Andy Griffith's over-the-top film debut as Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes, a Will Rogers-like homespun philosopher who rises from drunken jailbird to national kingmaker....

Solid.

938) And So It Goes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I admit I have a love/hate relationships with writer biographies; for while I believe the creative work should stand on its own and that an artist’s personal issues should be no concern. I can understand why some might wish to know about the individual behind the creative process. Too often, however, readers rely on the biography as a means of interpreting the work (I saw it most in the case of Sylvia Plath where many teens and early twenty-somethings who frequent poetry blogs are incapable of understanding her poetry without knowing the details behind her suicide)....

Solid.

939) And So It Goes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I admit I have a love/hate relationships with writer biographies, for while I believe the creative work should stand on its own and that an artist’s personal issues should be no concern, I can understand why some might wish to know about the individual behind the creative process. Too often, however, readers rely on the biography as a means of interpreting the work (I saw it most in the case of Sylvia Plath where many teens and early twentysomethings who frequent poetry blogs are incapable of understanding her poetry without knowing the details behind her suicide)....

Ok.

940) 3 Biographical Documentaries/Dan Schneider I recently watched three biographical documentaries. Two of them were vanity documentaries on men of little accomplishment and artistic skill, while the other one was a near-great political documentary on one of the most important American heroes of the last fifty years. The three films were, in order of viewing, Bill Cunningham: New York; The Most Dangerous Man In America, and The Cats Of Mirikitani....

Hit and miss.

941) Howard Gardner/Extraordinary Minds/Dan Schneider In reviewing the five part television series, Extraordinary Minds, from 2010, a series of 52 minute long interviews conducted by Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist, let me return to an earlier point in time. Some years ago, in the mid to late 1990s, I happened across a book by Gardner, who had pioneered the idea that there are multiple intelligences- seven he initially defined, then expanded to eight, beyond that measured on standard IQ tests. This theory, propounded in 1993’s Multiple Intelligences, was embroidered upon in the book I read, titled Extraordinary Minds, published in 1998, which detailed the workings of four historical figures....

Taking it all down.

942) The Emperor Jones/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Emperor Jones, is one of those works that is very easy to misconstrue as simply racist or simple-minded Freudianism. It’s neither, but the 1933 film adaptation of said play, starring Paul Robeson in the role of Brutus Jones, suffers from many of the same misconceptions, as well as a few of its own, due to the breaks the film makes from its source material- both pro and con. And these breaks owe all of their power to the screenplay by DuBose Heyward, and the interpretation of it by film director Dudley Murphy, one of the earliest ‘lost’ avant-garde filmmakers, who films it all in a very quick, modern style, as opposed to the then dominant style of extended master shots....

Interesting.

943) Jules And Jim/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Francois Truffaut’s films have never been particularly deep, and his black and white 1962 ‘masterpiece,’ Jules And Jim, is no exception to that claim. Obviously, the quotation marks around the term declare that, no, it’s not really a masterpiece, but in researching old criticism of the film it’s amazing how often this term was bandied about without any support for its claim. Having said that, and given the rather fallow and overrated ground that is the Truffaut soil, I can attest that, of the handful of films of his I have seen, Jules And Jim is the best of the lot. But, had he not first gnawed his teeth at the Cahiers Du Cinema rag....

Solid.

944) Gomorrah/Film Review/Dan Schneider There is a difference between realistic films, such as those made by John Cassavetes, and cinema verité, or films that try to approximate realism. Realistic films know they are fiction, but nonetheless mimic reality for the sake of art, whereas cinema verité attempts to fool viewers into thinking it is real. Matteo Garrone’s 2008, 137 minute long gangster film, Gomorrah, is the latter sort of film....

Solid.

945) Giant/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director George Stevens’ 1956 film Giant is one of those grandiose soap operas that were popular back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, but one which has not aged particularly well. Yes, it did, and still does, offer more than the similar epic, Gone With The Wind, but Giant still lacks heft, despite its immense length (200 minutes) and large subject matter (the rise of Texas as an economic powerhouse in the early 20th Century). Having said that, the film has no glaring bad points, just as it has no particular high points one might call great. This includes the hit and miss acting by the film’s trio....

Solid.

946) The Dust Of Time/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There is a phrase that I came up with to describe when critics, especially of film, write reviews or essays about a film they claim to have seen yet feel no obligation to show any fealty to the images and actions depicted onscreen, and it is called critical cribbing. The most recent example of it that has proliferated — at least in a work of a director worth arguing over — is in Theo Angelopoulos’s last completed film, before his accidental death earlier this year, 2008’s Trilogy: The Dust Of Time, the second of a now never to be completed tercet of films on existence and the Greek Experience of the 20th Century. In looking over the sparse number of reviews online (Rotten Tomatoes’ link for the film even references a documentary on Dust, not this film!) there is a noxious meme that is repeated, and likely started from Angelopoulos’s own PR for the film, since it appears on the film’s website....

Disappointing final film.

947) Charles Johnson/Dan Schneider Interview 1/Dan Schneider In the last 59 years, I’ve been a professional cartoonist, producing two published collections, Black Humor in 1970 and Half-Past Nation Time in 1972, over 1,000 cartoons and illustrations in print, most recently one in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to accompany my essay on literature and literacy; and I created, hosted and co-produced in 1970 an early PBS how-to-draw series, “Charlie’s Pad,” which ran for about a decade. I’m a fiction-writer, with four published novels and three short story collections....

The legendary interview that started the phenomenon.

948) Daniel Dennett/Dan Schneider Interview 2/Dan Schneider I’m a philosopher, and I’ve written books on the Big Questions: consciousness, evolution, free will, moral responsibility, and even the meaning of life, and most recently, religion as a natural phenomenon. But my approach is unlike that of most philosophers. I’ve always thought that philosophers who attempted to address these issues without first finding out what the relevant sciences could offer in the way of illumination were being intellectually irresponsible. And in the process of mining the sciences for help with the philosophy, I’ve found that scientists could often use my philosophical help....

Dennett's obtuseness and limited purview mar what could have been a great interview.

949) Little Caesar/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Little Caesar is a good example of a film that is historically important, but that has dated very poorly. Tony Gaudio's camera work is mediocre, Warner Bros. musical director Erno Rapee's spare soundtrack is garbled, and the acting is for the most part wooden. Even Edward G. Robinson, who became a star in this role, is good — but hardly great....

Solid.

950) The Terror Of Tiny Town/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Terror Of Tiny Town is a 1938 dwarf B film (Black and white) that is often spoken of in the same terms as two other films with dwarves in them- Tod Browning’s 1931 film, Freaks, and Werner Herzog’s 1970 film Even Dwarfs Started Small, because it is, at its heart, an exploitation film- a typical 1930s B film Western, except that it boasts a cast of midgets....

Solid.

951) The Spirit Of The Beehive/Film Review/Dan Schneider Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice is not that his debut feature film, 1973’s The Spirit Of The Beehive (El Espíritu De La Colmena) is a great piece of cinema- far better than anything by Luis Bunuel, but that it is only one of three feature films he has made in his career, and only one of two fiction films, thus giving him the honor of being the lone major filmmaker who is in a position to call American film titan Terence Malick ‘prolific.’ That stated, The Spirit Of The Beehive is a masterful film that deals with the inner lives of children, and is the only major film I have ever seen that does so in such a great fashion. The only two other films that come close are both B films, 1969’s Godzilla's Revenge and 1944’s The Curse Of The Cat People....

Great.

952) The War Of The Worlds (CD)/DVD Review/Dan Schneider While perusing through the DVD racks at a local Half Price Books I came across a package with two DVDs and a bonus CD, called An Adaptation Of H.G. Wells’ Classic The War Of The Worlds. Thinking it was a version of the classic sci fi film from the 1950s, I bought it at its cheap price. But it was not the old film. Rather it was from a company called Madacy Home Video, and consisted of some faux newscasts, some documentaries, and a CD of the original 1938 broadcasts of the Mercury Theatre’s radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds....

Bad.

953) Sex & Marriage/2 Reviews/Dan Schneider Watching documentaries on Netflix can be engaging yet frustrating. On a single afternoon I watched a 2009 Discovery Channel documentary, called The Science Of Sex Appeal, which offered insights into the whys and wherefores of its titular subject matter, then watched a 2008 theatrical documentary film, Phyllis And Harold, which was the epitome of the noxious brand of film I call the vanity documentary, wherein a filmmaker makes a film about themselves or someone they know, of little import to anyone outside of whom they know, and try to propound it is artistically or culturally significant....

Solid.

954) Pete Hamill/Dan Schneider Interview 3/Dan Schneider That’s almost impossible to do in any brief way. I’m a son of immigrants (Catholics from Northern Ireland). I’m the oldest of their seven children. I’ve been a professional writer since June 1, 1960, when I first went to work as a newspaperman. I’ve published 20 books, including ten novels. I’ve covered wars and politics and murders and sports. Stating a goal would sound pompous, and I have no slogan posted above my desk. As any writer grows older the goals are always shifting. But I suppose that in my journalism and my fiction, I’ve tried hard to make the world more human....

A classic!

955) Slaughterhouse-Five/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes luck is better than skill, as the apothegm bemoans. Film director George Roy Hill likely would have agreed with this sentiment, given the arc of his career. Hill was basically a journeyman director of television who got a lucky break into the film industry, then mined a decent career in that field, despite, at best, yeoman’s level work, in terms of visuals, narrative, and overall directorial skill with actors and scripts. Now, years after his death, his name is best recalled for films like 1982’s The World According To Garp, 1973’s The Sting, or 1969’s Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid....

Underrated.

956) Pleasures Of The Flesh/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The two most obvious influences on Nagisa Oshima’s 1965 color film, Pleasures Of The Flesh (Etsuraku), are not those first posited upon its release: soft core Japanese porno films, called pink films, nor action thrillers (usually yakuza/gangster films). No, in retrospect the clear influences seem to have been Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime And Punishment and Rod Serling’s sci fi anthology television series The Twilight Zone. The former because of its theme, and the latter because of the film’s structure and execution....

Good.

957) Steven Pinker/Dan Schneider Interview 4/Dan Schneider Thanks, Dan. I was born in 1954 in the Jewish Anglophone community of Montreal. After getting a bachelor’s in experimental psychology at McGill, I’ve spent most of my life bouncing between Harvard and MIT, with a few intervals in California (Stanford and Santa Barbara). My initial research was in visual cognition – mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention. But starting in graduate school I cultivated an interest in language, particularly language development in children, which eventually took over my research. I’ve written many experimental papers in language and visual cognition, and, in the 1980s, two highly technical books on language. The first outlined a theory....

The best interview ever recorded, till that time.

958) West Of Brooklyn/DVD REview/Dan Schneider There are many ways to learn the art of constructing a compelling narrative: One can read classic novels and plays; one can watch great films and television shows; one can read ancient Greek dramas or watch professional wrestling; and one can even watch serial fiction: From old time movie serials to modern soap operas. I have done all of these things, and the last thing on this list is how I found out about the 97 minute long film, West of Brooklyn, written, produced, and starring Ronnie Marmo....

Good film.

959) 2 Rock Films/The Beatles-Led Zeppelin/Film Reviews Growing up, the rock heavens were dominated by four bands from Britain: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. The Who, and Led Zeppelin. In fact, so dominant were this quartet on rock stations of the late 1960s and 1970s that the foursome was simply known as Beatles/Stones/Zeppelin/Who and the only real argument was as to how they ranked, relative to each other. The Stones were always trying to catch up to the Beatles, in terms of fame in the wake of the Beatles, but then Led Zeppelin came along and pretty much buried everyone else, becoming to the 1970s what the Beatles were to the prior decade. In my pantheon, I always found the Beatles wildly overrated, especially at the expense of bands their equal or superiors, such as the Zombies, the Yardbirds, Cream, and even the Hollies, not to mention great American acts like the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane. Nonetheless, as I aged, I found that, in going against the flow, I’d underrated the Beatles, and currently would rank the quartet, in descending order, as Led Zeppelin. The Who, The Beatles, and the Stones bringing up the rear....

Solid.

960) Pickpocket/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Robert Bresson’s 1959 black and white film Pickpocket, after having seen his earlier Diary Of A Country Priest and later Mouchette and Au Hasard Balthazar, is to see a great artist in mid-flight to apex. Pickpocket is not a great film, for it suffers from some of the tics that worked against Diary Of A Country Priest (notably the habit of the character writing down what will happen in a journal, speaking it to the audience, then seeing the action play out visually), but it also presages some of the more visually fenestral moments of the two later films. Part of this is likely to the fact that the screenplay was written by Bresson....

Good.

961) 3 Films/Werner Herzog/Dan Schneider I recently streamed and watched three recent films by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog. The first was a fictive film- My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?- which, despite my expectations and others’ reviews, turned out to be the best fictive film Herzog’s done since the end of his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, and the other two were highly lauded documentaries (a form Herzog has excelled in over his half century long career)- Cave Of Forgotten Dreams and Into The Abyss- which were, oddly, not nearly as good as the criticism received....

So-so.

962) Lilyhammer/TV Review/Dan Schneider Northern Exposure meets The Sopranos! This sentence was uttered at some time during the pitch for Netflix’s first foray into original television programming, and the result is a pretty good first season of a Mafia comedy (not dramady) called Lilyhammer. The premise is that a New York City Mob Underboss finds himself aced out of a top slot by a rival, and takes it on the lam to the Feds, after his rival tries and fails to whack him. In return for testifying, Frank ‘The Fixer’ Tagliano (Steven Van Zandt- of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band infamy and The Sopranos) requests that his Federal Witness Protection people relocate him....

Solid.

963) Expelled From Eden/Book Review/Dan Schneider Fans of David Foster Wallace, relax! Your fair haired (and still dead) boy is still the most terrible, overpraised, overhyped, PoMo, omnibustial critic’s darling of a hack writer out there. Having read Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader, edited by Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson, I can safely say that Vollmann is merely a bad- nay, a very bad writer, but not a terrible one, for, unlike Wallace, Vollmann is at least capable of writing solid, passable prose in journalistic articles, even as his fictive prose is dull, and laden with stereotypes and stale tropes. Unlike Wallace (or James Frey or Dave Eggers- one of Vollmann’s publishers, for that matter), Vollmann’s paragraphs are not usually drenched in multiple naked clichés. That stated, it’s simply not good, and Vollmann’s sciolistic mind is, like William Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon before him, merely one which appends all sorts of observations together, with no grace nor facility, so that his ‘admirers’ can loftily claim and declaim that Vollmann is a ‘genius,’ with a mind that roams far and wide....

Shit!

964) 6 Food Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched six documentaries on Netflix detailing the nature and causes of the poor eating habits of the American public: Fed Up!; Food Matters; Food, Inc.; The Future Of Food; Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead; and Killer At Large: Why Obesity Is America’s Greatest Threat....

Mixed bag.

965) James Emanuel/Dan Schneider Interview 5/Dan Schneider This is the first time I am writing a brief Introduction to one of my interviews. This is because, of the first five interviewees: novelist Charles Johnson, philosopher Daniel Dennett, novelist/journalist Pete Hamill, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, and poet James Emanuel, Emanuel is clearly the least currently known. Partly this is due to his being a poet, that most demanding art that has more current practitioners than readers. But, he has also been oddly neglected- a situation I have started the ball rolling to change....

A classic Introduction to 'The Man.'

966) Mad Men/TV Review/Dan Schneider Recently, the AMC cable network finished airing the fifth season of their highly acclaimed advertising agency soap opera, set in the 1960s, called Mad Men (industry slang for the men who work on Madison Avenue, in Manhattan). I’ve yet to watch that season, as I lack cable tv, but, over the last few weeks watched the first four seasons (covering about 5½ years chronologically- 1960-65) on Netflix, due to the laudatory comments I’ve heard from others (the fifth season should be due soon for streaming). The good news is that it is, indeed, a well written and well acted show, for the most part. The bad news is, contra to most claims, it is not a great nor culturally significant television show....

Good stuff.

967) The Conjure Man-Fiction/Book Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently read two novels, unpublished by major houses, from two writers who share commonalities, in that neither one’s skills nor work are as good as they effusively claim, and that neither writer is actually primarily practicing the very sort of fiction they claim. I was thrust into the twenty odd year quest of Peter Damian Bellis to get his so-called Magical Realism novel, The Conjure Man, published when, as detailed here, I got a series of increasingly bizarre, self-laudatory, and philosophically impoverished, emails from the man declaiming that the book, written in the early 1990s, which he has spent the better part of two decades trying to get published at a big house, and which did get published, in 2010, by a de facto subsidy/self publishing press called River Boat Books- a press which, despite claiming to be in business since 1996, has only four titles to its credit, with two being from Bellis, as the Great American Novel....

Take a pass.

968) Tucker: The Man And His Dream/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film, Tucker: The Man And His Dream, was like watching a bit better version of the more recent Greg Kinnear film, Flash Of Genius. The main difference is that the later film was about how corporate America crushed a man who had an invention to improve a small part of the standard automobile, in the 1960s, whereas Tucker: The Man And His Dream is about how corporate America crushed a man whose invention was a better whole automobile. But, while the Coppola film is better than its latter day cinematic soulmate, it’s still nowhere near a great film, for it lacks a grand idea, and it delves into nothing particularly deep; not even the tried and true ‘politics is a form of organized crime’ gambit....

Solid.

969) She Gods Of Shark Reef/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films are so bad they are good. Think Plan 9 From Outer Space. Other films are so bad they are really bad. Think any film directed by Steven Spielberg. Others are bad, but weird, in a way that makes them difficult to classify, and virtually critic-proof. Case in point is B film legend Roger Corman’s 1958 color classic, She Gods Of Shark Reef. Ok, classic may be too strong a word for the 62 minute film. For the title? Yes. But the film? Eh. What’s bizarre is that this film, to be found in the 50 DVD pack from Treeline Films, is listed as a Sci Fi Classic. Ok? Except it’s not science fiction. It’s not even fantasy. It’s not even a thriller, so to speak....

Bad.

970) Once Upon A Time In Anatolia/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ceylan’s latest film, 2011’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da), is involving yet existential, crafted yet natural, sublime yet base, based on a true story yet utterly mythic, and a few other polarities that I think readers of this essay will prefer to discover for themselves. That stated, let me tell you what this film is not, despite the gush of praise from critics who have praised it, mindlessly critically cribbing from each other, despite not even remotely understanding the very film they praise. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is not a police procedural film, nor is it an homage nor riff on Sergio Leone’s cinema....

Great.

971) Jack Horner/Dan Schneider Interview 6/Dan Schneider My general philosophy on life is that it is the result and evolution of promiscuous chemicals, and it would be hard to live without. My general philosophy of science is that the scientific process is the only avenue to understand anything of interest. My general philosophy of the cosmos is that it’s really big, and old, and probably started with an infinitesimal, quiet thump....

A second dig.

972) The Turin Horse/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I often wonder what occurs to an artist when their work is willfully misinterpreted by stolid critics, or anyone, for that matter? I write this being in a position to know the answer, at least for myself, because, aside from being a critic of art, film, literature, and other things, I am also an artist, writer, and poet. But, the stereotype that dogs most artists- that of the immature, self-centered , irrational, mentally ill (or nearly so) person does not apply in my case, and from everything I’ve ever read or seen of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, he likely does not fall into that trap either....

Great end?

973) Underworld/Book Review/Dan Schneider Having heard the hype, for years, about Don DeLillo’s long 1997 novel, Underworld, and its being a Postmodern ‘masterpiece,’ I was thinking the work would be something in the unreadably puerile vein of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, perhaps involving parodies of the sort of goombahs from a bad Martin Scorsese gangster film. Were that the case I would have started this essay with something along the lines of: Support the arts- do NOT buy this book! Thankfully, it was not. In fact, the book is not even, in any remote sense, a Postmodern novel, as the only thing about it that can even remotely be called Postmodern is that it is told in a non-linear fashion....

Promise fizzles.

974) The Corrections/Book Review/Dan Schneider Having read Jonathan Franzen’s melodramatic 2001 novel, The Corrections, after having recently read Postmodern tripe by William Vollmann, Thomas Pynchon, and so-called Postmodern-cum-classic prose by Don DeLillo, I wondered how in the hell anyone could think that this book was good, much less great. Yes, Franzen can hold a narrative, unlike Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, or that ilk, but it is wholly shorn of depth, gets worse as it goes- being a merely competently written melodrama, larded with stereotypes of WASPs and their WASPy pseudo-problems that morphs into a cliché-ridden sub-soap opera that is almost as bad, in its subgenre, as anything put forth by the writers named above. Franzen is wholly in the T.C Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates camp of being able to craft a narrative structure, but not one of any depth, novelty, nor interest....

A bad soap opera.

975) 5 Wackos/Documentary Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched a run of five biographical documentaries on Netflix streaming video that were about, well, assorted wacky folks in the arts and sciences. The five films were Scott Walker: 30 Century Man; Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey; Transcendent Man; Limelight; and Lenny Bruce: Without Tears....

Off the beam.

976) Gravity's Rainbow/Book Review/Dan Schneider Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 quasi-sci fi novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (named after the trajectory of German V-2 rockets), is not remotely a good novel, and, in places, the 300,000+ word book is a horrible novel, on a par with David Foster Wallace’s ridiculously bad sci fi novel Infinite Jest (in fact, that hack and his horrors, actually were spawned by this earlier monstrosity) and James Joyce’s pointless and ridiculously bad Finnegans Wake. It crests a little bit higher than those works because it ascends to intellectual coherence, if nothing else, on a few occasions, and this is not what most Postmodern novels even seem to strive for....

Terrible.

977) The Frantic Force/Book Review/Dan Schneider If I had the money and time to be self-employed, or live off of my own writing, I might have the time to indulge in all the partaking of art I am proffered. From countless small time publishers offering me free copies- print and cyber- of their latest releases, to almost as many small time film sites and companies that somehow my name and email addresses somehow, and inevitably, make their way onto. Add to that the endless submissions of essays and poems- especially from the Indian Subcontinent which, in almost mind-boggling fashion, seems to mint a quarter million or more English language and literature MFAs and PhDs per year, and to whom my name, and my website, Cosmoetica, invariably end up as one of the top targets....

Solid.

978) 3 Political Documentaries/Reviews/Dan Schneider The first of the documentaries I watched was by Alex Gibney, who previously wrought the superb Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, in 2005. In 2010 he released another great documentary on American capitalism, called Casino Jack And The United States Of Money, which followed the life and legacy of Republican lobbyist and organized criminal Jack Abramoff, whose filthy dealings extended from sweatshop owners in Saipan to perpetrating frauds on casinos run by Indian tribes, to involvement in a hit on a business rival ordered by members of New York’s Gambino crime family, to supporting anti-abortion Christian Fundamentalists....

Good.

979) Repulsion/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Narrative is immanent in art. One simply cannot extricate it from any art form. One cannot dispose of narrative, only retard it. Often when one reads an essay about or review of a work of art, and the reviewer cannot get the art work, he will claim it has no narrative. If the work of art is bad it will have a narrative, merely a poor one. But a poor narrative is not a lack of narrative. If the work of art is great, and the reviewer does not get it, he will claim it has disposed of narrative. But it will have a narrative, and a great one; but one that pushes the boundaries of what narrative is....

Great.

980) Rocco And His Brothers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are great films that revel in poesy and their artiness- think the canons of Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, and there are films, and then there are films that achieve greatness via their being great ‘prose.’ Such a film is Luchino Visconti’s 1960, 176 minute long, black and white film Rocco And His Brothers (Rocco E I Suoi Fratelli), easily the best of the handful of Visconti films I’ve seen, and in the first rank of prose masterpieces on film. Its greatness is not only in its great parts, but in its lesser facets, too. There is not only a realism that flows from the roots of the Italian Neo-Realism born in the 1940s....

Great.

981) Phillip Lopate/Dan Schneider Interview 7/Dan Schneider Although I’m known primarily as a personal essayist, all my work is informed by a reflective, analytical spirit, and aims for a sense of humor and honesty. There is at times a sardonic, ironic, curmudgeonly tone to it, but I am really going after wisdom and compassion. Beyond that, I’m very identified with cities and an urban perspective....

The first bizarre interview.

982) 2 Adventurer Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched two documentary films on adventurers, a 2010 film called The Wildest Dream: Conquest Of Everest, directed by Anthony Geffen, and 2008’s Academy Award Winning Best Documentary, James Marsh’s Man On Wire. It was one of those synchronicities that just happened while trolling about Netflix. Only in retrospect did I make a connection between the themes of the two films. Not only were they about adventurers, but in the former film, the film’s subject failed in his quest to be the first man to scale Mount Everest, yet is lauded in death, while, in the latter film, the film’s subject succeeded....

Daring the fates.

983) White Heat/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Raoul Walsh’s 1949 black and white gangster film, White Heat, is often mislabeled a film noir, but it’s clearly nothing of the kind. Films noir have ambiguous anti-heroes and the things that they engage in is ethically shady, not out and out evil. This certainly does not describe Walsh’s film, featuring Jimmy Cagney as Arthur ‘Cody’ Jarrett, a thinly disguised Arthur ‘Doc’ Barker, the notorious gangster from the 1930s. Jarrett has little shading; he’s pure evil, with a sadistic streak, and all the things he is involve din are likewise pure evil. He’s a murderer and psychopath, but he’s not psychotic....

Mama Mia!

984) Chaplin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Every so often, when I look up the historical critical context of a film, I am surprised by what I find. Most often I see films that are schlock get undue praise, but since most of anything in life is bad (lest we’d not notice the good). This is not unusual. Then there are good or great films that are severely dissed. Almost every Stanley Kubrick film, post-1970, falls into this category. But, then there are films which are nice little films, not particularly bad, but also nowhere near great, that just elicit an off reaction from critics. Such a film is Richard Attenborough’s 1992 film, Chaplin....

Solid.

985) Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol/Television Review/Dan Schneider The best ever. Let those words penetrate. I state them in reference to the titular work under review and, mind you, I have seen every film and telefilm ‘straight’ version of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, plus almost every humorous take on it- be it spoof or satire, from lame musical adaptations to modernized updates to the brilliant reworking of the tale in the first season of the great American television sitcom, The Odd Couple. But, the animated Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol is the best version ever of the tale....

The best ever.

986) Desmond Morris/Dan Schneider Interview 8/Dan Schneider I was a child during World War Two and grew up viewing adult humans as rather disgusting - people whose main goal in life was to kill one another. Worse still, I spent the first part of World War Two watching my father suffering from wounds he had received in the First World War. I was fourteen when he finally died and at that age I decided, in my passionate, juvenile way, that all authorities, all governments, all religious leaders and all political leaders were the scum that floated to the top of society. I had to rebel, but I was a good little boy, well brought up by loving parents, and my rebellion could not be a destructive one - after all I was rebelling against mass violence and hatred, so my rebellion had to be of some other, more positive kind. I had two great interests, art and animals....

A return to form.

987) Smash His Camera/Film Review/Dan Schneider One of the most unintendedly hilarious arcs of Leon Gast’s 2010 bio-documentary of New York paparazzo Ron Galella, Smash His Camera, regards opinions about his actual ‘art,’ since the 87 minute film reveals that many of the more than 3 million images he’s collected in a fifty year career are now residing inside the walls of some of the more prestigious art galleries of the world. The debate is seen in roundtable amongst fellow photographers- some whom are photojournalists like Galella and others who fall more into the Diane Arbus art photographer side. While both sides make points, to the average viewer one has to come down emphatically on the side of Galella when Chuck Close sneers at Galella’s work....

Eh.

988) Rape And Revisionism In Soap Operas/Essay/Dan Schneider As an artist, writer, and critic of both, I have had a long involvement with, what for lack of a better term, can be called serial fiction, in all its forms across varied media. As a young child, I read comic books, which, as the successor to comic strips, were the most popular serial fiction of the first third of the 20^th Century. Before comic strips, the serialized novel, most popularized by 19^th Century titans like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, made them into the closest thing to today’s film and music celebrities....

Nasty.

989) Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?/DVD Review/Dan Schneider What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? is one of those films that almost everybody has a wrong opinion of, from critic to fan to hater. First, it’s simply not a Grand Guignol film. Why? It simply does not play out on a large enough scale. Second, it’s not really a camp film. Some of the later films its two stars and rivals, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, were in were definitely camp, but not this film. It does, however, have a low budget film feel, in a very good way, because it deglamorizes its two stars, and thus humanizes them, removing them from their earlier career modes as screen sirens. Third, there are a few other misconceptions about the film, but I’ll pick up those threads as this essay perdures....

Good.

990) Negativity/MFA Mafia/Dan Schneider Not long ago a reader of my website let me know of a 2008 essay from The Kenyon Review, simply titled No. Its writer is a career Academic named Brian Doyle, whose CV is gratuitously displayed below the article: Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He is the author, he thinks (some of them are small and quick and hard to see in the underbrush), of thirteen books of essays, poems, nonfiction, and fiction, notably the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River. Among the peculiar honors which have come his way and confused him utterly is the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which still makes him laugh, although he got a free trip to New York City out of that, with a terrific dinner in a great jazz club, that was fun....

Suck me.

991) The Story Of Film/An Odyssey/Dan Schneider I recently got through watching a 15 part, 900 minute long 2011 documentary on cinema titled The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, directed and narrated by Irish film critic and historian Mark Cousins, on Netflix, based upon his book of the same name. As might be expected of such a large undertaking, the film has highs and lows. The highs are quite good, but the lows are equally glaring, making the overall project a worthwhile, albeit often draining and droning film series....

Solid.

992) The MFA Mafia/And Their Apologists/Dan Schneider Recently, film critic Roger Ebert, who has a distressing habit of 3-4 times per year, swallowing his own foot on his Chicago Sun-Times blog, posted a piece titled Books Do Furnish A Mind, wherein he bemoaned the state of reading in our republic, and pinned the blame on everything other than the biggest cause of the problem- the fact that MFA writing programs have, since their inception after World War Two, tried to commmoditize writing to the point of becoming assembly lines churning out bad, soulless writers and books that, duh?, no one actively chooses to read, not even the ever diminishing clique of bad MFA writers, churned out by the tens of thousands each year....

Yawn.

993) Bang The Drum Slowly (1956)/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I had been a fan of the old baseball film, Bang The Drum Slowly, which came out in 1973, for many years. It was not a great film, but it entertained, and was one of the early pre-The Godfather films that showcased the talents of a young Robert De Niro. But, it certainly wasn’t great cinema, more or less a baseball version of the football melodrama Brian’s Song, or a non-musical, more dour version of Damn Yankees! It followed a year or so in the life of a dying backup catcher for a pro baseball team, the New York Mammoths, obviously modeled after the New York Yankees. While working my way through The Criterion Collection’s DVD set called The Golden Age Of Television I came upon the fifth entry in the series....

Solid.

994) Dad's In Heaven With Nixon/Film Review/Dan Schneider I’ve seen enough documentaries, especially those that regularly stream on Netflix, to recognize the hallmarks of what I can only label “vanity documentaries,” in the manner that the term vanity has been applied to subsidy presses. By this I mean that the filmmaker is an amateur — often wealthy, with too much time on their hands, who decides to make a film on some member of their family, or on some so called “tragedy” that has befallen the clan. Yet, none of the people in these films has any achievements of note, nor are their tragedies anything that most of the viewers of the film will not have experienced, and many will have experienced far worse. Most of these films never see the inside of a movie theater....

Bad.

995) 4 Scandalous Films/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched four documentaries involving criminal scandals of assorted varieties, and each film had pros and cons. The four documentaries under examination are Trudell; The Eyes Of Tammy Faye; Mario’s Story, and Inside Deep Throat....

Ok.

996) Almanac Of Fall/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having already seen Bela Tarr’s later film canon, it was an interesting excursion back in time, to see his 1984 color (yes, a color film from Tarr!) film, Almanac Of Fall (Öszi Almanach). It’s not a great film, and is claimed to be the link between his earliest ‘realist’ films and his later black and white psycho-films, but it is an interesting film, and well worth a watch; even if one will not be pounded by the depths of films like Satantango or Werckmeister Harmonies....

Good.

997) Two Singer Documentaries/Review/Dan Schneider One might think that if one did a documentary on a subject that was good, that the resulting documentary would, likewise, be good, or better. But, this is not usually the case. And watching these two documentaries on musicians- Joni Mitchell: Woman Of Heart and Mind and Glenn Tilbrook: One For The Road- is a good instruction on why this is so....

Mediocre.

998) Female Athletics/Film Review/Dan Schneider I recently streamed three Netflix documentary films that dealt with females in dubious sporting events. These three films were Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies Of Wrestling; Blood On The Flat Track: The Rise Of The Rat City Roller Girls; and Brutal Beauty: Tales Of The Rose City Rollers....

Solid.

999) The Death Of Roger Ebert/Essay/Dan Schneider I went to sleep one afternoon (I usually work overnights), being informed that film critic Roger Ebert’s cancer had returned, and woke up that evening to learn that the man had just died. That day, April 4^th of 2013, is now almost a month gone, and in the interim, some of my fans and readers have suggested (some more strongly than others) that I needed to chime in my own two cents on the man, his life, his criticism, etc., and the reason for this is that they feel that since the man wrote a lengthy 2009 article on me, on his highly trafficked blog....

Rest in Peace, Roger!

1000) The Blackboard Jungle/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Any film that stars Sidney Poitier is going to rise and fall on the basis of his presence. He is one of those classic actors, like a Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy, or John Wayne, that simply captures the attention of an audience, for good or ill. Oftentimes its for the good, but in this film it’s not for the ill, simply for the pointless.....

Solid.

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	NEW ESSAYS! 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. 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. *799) Why I Am Letting My Poets & Writers* Subscription Lapse/Essay/Dan Schneider** For about a quarter of a century I have been a subscriber to Poets & Writers magazine. In the early days, before it went glossy, and was more or less a newsletter, I found it useful as a place to send around my then callow poems, and even to find out about gatherings and readings. I also had the naïve youthful belief that my subscription somehow (like the money dropped in my church’s collection plates) went to help those in need; in this case, young writer of quality, or programs devoted to helping such. As the years have gone on I have still subscribed (despite the functionary matters I most used it for now being available freely online, and in many other online sources) and read through its increasingly poorly written articles, and even ignored the fact that, despite its title, the magazine really did nothing to even discuss, much less promote, the art of poetry and writing. It became merely an advertising tool, via its ads and ads thinly veiled as articles to promote MFA programs, bad writers, scam publishers, and clueless agents and editors. Yet, I resisted the urge to cancel my subscription, even though I had let subscriptions to the American Poetry Review and The Academy Of American Poets lapse several years ago (as well as Sports Illustrated and TV Guide- sports and television simply are not that important to me any longer), because I could see all they cared about was fame and the sinecures of elite doggerelists. Why did I not follow through with letting Poets & Writers fall to the wayside? My idea was that one always needed to know what the enemy was up to.... Bye-bye. 800) A Fistful Of Dollars/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A Fistful Of Dollars, the 1964 film by Sergio Leone, that ignited the Spaghetti Western craze, is a very interesting film, even if it is only a pretty good film, cinematically. Among the interesting things about it is that its English language title, as presented within the film, lacks the article 'A.' It is Fistful Of Dollars, translated from the Italian Per Un Pugno Di Dollari. Another of its interesting facts is that it is perhaps one of the miost successful examples of artistic plagiarism ever, basically being a rework of Akira Kurosawa's 1961 film Yojimbo (Kurosawa sued Leone over the film and reaped substantial financial benefits from an out of court settlement, getting 15% of the film's worldwide gross, and exclusive distribution rights for Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, making more money with this film than with any of his own).... Good. 801) Marty/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I recently purchased The Criterion Collection’s The Golden Age Of Television DVD set. It features eight of the classic live teleplays from the 1950s, which were labeled that title during a 1981 PBS rebroadcast of the best of the bunch, those dramas that stuck in the cultural memory over time. The reality was that live television drama was almost akin to what silent films were to film history: a unique early period where a now lost art form seems almost untouchable, or unrecreatable, for it was both unique yet accessible to later art forms in its medium. To think that live drama blended with television camera, in a sort of theater meets film experience, for One Night Only!.... Great. 802) Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call: New Orleans/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog is so unique as a director of films that he is as close to being uncategorizable as any filmmaker in the medium’s history. His 2009 film, Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call: New Orleans, is no exception. The film is a sort of satiric riff on the 1992 B film, Bad Lieutenant, made by schlockmeister Abel Ferrara, and starring Harvey Keitel. That film got wildly divergent criticism, but was a pretty bad film, and not nearly as campily fun as Ferrara’s best known film, King Of New York. And when I say this film is a satire, I mean it, even starting from its tripartite naming, which is rumored to have come about because the film’s producer had produced Ferrara’s film, and wanted to restart it as a sort of film franchise, in the mold of the television series CSI. Ferrara reputedly wished death upon the producer, Herzog, and all involved because he was so protective of his original piece of garbage. Herzog counterclaimed that his film is neither a sequel nor remake, and this is basically true. Other than the fact that the two lead characters in the films are corrupt police lieutenants, nothing else is the same.... Good. 803) The Crystal World/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is the first novel by British writer J.G. Ballard that I've read, following the recommendation from a friend. Sort of science and literary fiction fused, The Crystal World is a well-written book rather than a great story. Ballard is most commonly known for his memoir Empire of the Sun, which was made into a standard Hollywood film in 1987.... Good. 804) Forbidden Colors/Book Review/Jessica Schneider One of the qualities about Japanese literature to admire is the brevity. So often readers are presented with contemporary novels that are needlessly long, and endlessly describe boringly with a lack of insight. Forbidden Colors still has quite a bit going for it, in that it has Mishima’s stamp of skilled wording and numerous passages that are both lyrical and philosophical. Yet, what works against Forbidden Colors is the fact that the book, unlike many other Japanese novels of Mishima’s era, happens to be a bit verbose. Finishing at over 400 pages, this novel felt unnecessarily long, especially if comparing it to James Baldwin’s thin gem Giovanni’s Room, which is only a fraction of the length yet still seems to have characters more resonant than in Mishima’s similarly themed Forbidden Colors.... Solid. 805) VQR/Scandal/Dan Schneider One of my website’s fans forwarded me a link to a recent New York Times article with the tabloid title, A Suicide Leaves A Literary Journal And Its Editor In Limbo. As I have a popular website and traverse through 15-1600 emails per week, I actually get many, MANY links to online stories about the absurd, the literary, the artistic, the scientific, the scandalous, the political, etc., and sometimes several of these formats are in one tale. The story detailed the editor of a university literary journal’s supposed bullying one of his underlings into committing suicide. The story, as the phrase now goes, went viral online, and within a few days there were literally tens of thousands of hand-wringing accounts about the ‘incident.’ On many literary blogs the editor was personally condemned as cold and unfeeling, even as his ‘editorial prowess’ was praised as visionary, even within the original article. But, in scouring many sources online, the basic thrust of the story is as such: one of the staff members of the journal committed suicide, either because of one or both of two salacious reasons: a) he was a ‘victim’ of the tyrannical editor’s workplace abuse, or b) he was imputed to be a lonely, aging homosexual, albeit most of the references were not so bold as to come out and state that, using weasel words, instead, to impute the dead man.... No shock. 806) Osama/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Osama is touted as the first film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and it was shot in Kabul. That should be a warning. Works of art that are touted as the first this or that tend to be bad, their only distinction being their chronological primacy. Such was the case with the atrocious Eskimo film of a few years back called Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. In a sense, Osama is merely an Afghani Atanarjuat. The story is virtually non-existent, save that the Taliban is bad, evil, etc. Can you say duh? Aside from that there is little else. The whole film by director Siddiq Barmak is a mess, the acting- all done with ‘real people’ shows why that fact is manifest, and the whole thing is merely a Right Wing screed- as much a propaganda film for that extreme of Americana as The Motorcycle Diaries was for the Left.... Bad. 807) The Red And The White/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Hungarian filmmaker Miklos Jancso’s 1967 black and white film The Red And The White (Csillagosok, Katonák) is an interesting experience, because it really is an experience, more so than a coherent story. But, I mean that in the best possible way. No, it’s nowhere near great cinema, but it’s a very interesting film, especially considering that he is seen as the biggest influence on the later Hungarian film director, Bela Tarr, who perfected the long take aesthetic in modern film.... Interesting. 808) Encounters At The End Of The World/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog’s career, the last couple of decades, has been far more focused on documentaries than on fiction films. His classic fiction films are almost all from the mid-1980s or earlier, whereas his notable documentaries are almost all since that era. Encounters At The End Of The World, a 100 minute long film, released in 2007, is among the very best of that later output. It follows the 2006-2007 austral summer journey of Herzog and his cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger to Antarctica.... Interesting. 809) Burden Of Dreams/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Les Blank’s 1982 documentary, Burden Of Dreams, is a film that, like Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, follows the near-obsessive drive of a great filmmaker to bring a great film to fruition. In the latter film, Eleanor Coppola detailed her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s will to bring Apocalypse Now to the screen. The former film details the similar drive that compelled German filmmaker Werner Herzog to make Fitzcarraldo. While the two fictive films are both great, the Coppola film is likely the greater film than Herzog’s, but, as far as the documentaries are concerned, Burden Of Dreams far outstrips Hearts Of Darkness. The latter film is a good film, but there’s nothing that lifts the film above the Making Of sort of documentary that’s since become de rigueur with DVD releases. In short, the film is pointless if you’ve not watched Apocalypse Now. Not so with Burden Of Dreams. While not a perfect film, it acts as not just a Making Of film, but a film that details a good portion of the sociological and anthropological nature of the natives that Herzog and his crew lived and worked amongst. And, the reason for this may lay in the fact that Blank got a grant from PBS, and the film was originally shown on American television in a truncated 60 minute version, rather than the extended 95 minute long release from The Criterion Collection.... Good doc. 810) Thousand Cranes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Subtlety and intricacy are what composes the power within a Kawabata novel, and Thousand Cranes is no different. Readers are given insights into characters via way of passive comment, a gesture overlooked, the description of lipstick on a stained cup or forgetting a stamp when mailing a letter. While Kawabata has managed to mostly hit home runs with all of his novels, Thousand Cranes falls slightly below his best, thereby causing me to rank it as one of his (slightly) lesser works, comparatively. Yet even lesser Kawabata is still very good.... Good. 811) Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories/Book Review/Dan Schneider It is an unusual circumstance that finds me writing not the first nor second, but the third, review of a particular book of short stories: Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories, by Yasunari Kawabata, that will appear on my own website. The first two reviews of the book to appear were written by Brent Peterson, in 2006, and by my wife, Jessica Schneider, earlier in 2010. Both were quite positive in their assessments of the stories, and, it’s an interesting circumstance that finds me, basically, not being able to disagree with most of the positive points both made about the book, yet still finding both reviews to be, essentially, wrong in their final judgments. The reason for this is that both prior reviews focused mainly on the books positives, while ignoring the book’s flaws, which, to me, are quite obvious and many.... Ok. 812) Quicksand/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I’ve never read a Tanizaki novel that was absent of merit or one that I did not enjoy. His breezy style, coupled with his moments of humor, make all of his books entertaining on one level, yet he also carries a psychological depth within his characters, often revealing them as flawed and yet creating them in such a way that causes the audience to empathize with them. Quicksand is no different.... Good. 813) Secret Rendezvous/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Kobo Abe is sort of the Kafka of Japan. One doesn’t have to look far to see the influence, and Abe himself even admitted Kafka’s influence in one of the Hiroshi Teshigahara documentaries put out by Criterion. Teshigahara directed a number of films based on Abe’s novels, and thus far Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes appears to be his best work by a mile. Other works of his, such as The Face of Another and The Box Man have their moments, but none of his works that I’ve read thus far (including Secret Rendezvous) reaches the same level of greatness as The Woman in the Dunes.... Mediocre. 814) 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. Husbands (1970) falls somewhere in between.... Ok. 815) Written In Stone/Book Review/Dan Schneider I recently received the galleys for an upcoming book (its evolving edits are the reason I will not quote from the work, as well as some needed correction of errors proofreading should catch) from Bellevue Literary Press called Written In Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place In Nature. It was written by science blogger Brian Switek, who once wrote the popular blog Laelaps, but now blogs on his own, at http://brianswitek.com/. I had long read his blog, on and off, especially whenever new controversies were in the air, and am always on the lookout for a younger version of Stephen Jay Gould or Loren Eiseley; and while he’s not there yet, Switek’s writing and scientific mind do show promise that the next few decades need not be lost to the ignorance of religion.... Solid. 816) And Then/Book Review/Jessica Schneider And Then is the fifth book I’ve read by Natsume Soseki, one of Japan’s most highly regarded novelists. And Then is part of a trilogy, and is meant to follow his earlier novel Sanshiro, followed by The Gate (or Mon). Yet these books couldn’t be further from one another, for one does not need to read any or all of them in their designated order.... Ok. 817) Paths Of Glory/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having grown up in the Vietnam era I knew many an ex-GI who would tell tales of fragging a bad C.O. Many older people, especially of the World War II generation, could never understand what would drive soldiers to loathe their superiors to the point of murder. Well, the answer is laid out in Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film, Paths Of Glory, like in no other. In fact, the film could well have been subtitled A Defense Of Fragging, if only the term had been coined.... Great. 818) The Darjeeling Limited/DVD Review/Dan Schneider For the last year and a half or so I’ve been lucky enough to be on the list of official reviewers for The Criterion Collection’s forthcoming releases, and this has meant that I have gotten a number of films titles that I already knew were great, having seen them in earlier, inferior, video editions, or in the theaters. I have also received titles that I suspected were great, due to the reputation of the work or its director. But, I have also gotten a batch of unrequested films thrown in to the mix, I figure, as a way for me to publicize releases that no one else really wants to review.... Zzzzz.... 819) Radio Days/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Woody Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days is the best pure comedy the filmmaker ever wrote and directed, and as such it is a great film. There is much truth to Allen’s own stated dictum that drama his a higher form of art than comedy because it is, to paraphrase, ‘sitting at the grownups’ table.’ However, the fact that it deals with mere life (therefore gaining it the mischaracterization as plotless- think of the same criticisms of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn) rather than one or two ‘major’ ideas, the way his Stardust Memories, Crimes And Misdemeanors, Manhattan, or Another Woman do, does not diminish the sheer brilliance and greatness of Radio Days as a film, apart from its reality as a great comedy, as well. It is also why, despite the end of Allen’s Golden Age of filmmaking (1977’s Annie Hall through 1992’s Husbands And Wives), so many of his fans still go to see his films, in the hopes that Allen will recapture the sustained greatness of films like this, or, at least, hit some similar highs.... Great. 820) Patterns/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The more I reacquaint myself with the live television dramas of the 1950s the more I feel what a great opportunity the medium wasted. Well, perhaps wasted is the wrong word; it was killed. Murdered. This was not an example of declining ratings nor a changing culture. This was television coldly opting for videotape to do shows cheaper, without the ‘risks’ of live television. But, since risk, by definition connotes opportunities for failure AND success, television executives decided to cave in.... Great. 821) The Scarlet Gang Of Asakusa/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is difficult to take much from Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa because in many ways, it is an odd and experimental work that plays with narrative to the point that the overall arc comes across somewhat fragmented. This is not to say there are not nice moments within, but The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is both an early and relatively minor work when thinking of Kawabata’s output. It’s not even a stretch to claim this, since it is noted that Kawabata himself would often cringe whenever he heard it read aloud. Having said that, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is a work that should be read once readers have familiarized themselves with his more popular (and much better) novels such as Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain and Beauty and Sadness, among others.... So-so. 822) For A Few Dollars More/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Italian film director Sergio Leone’s 1965 color film, For A Few Dollars More (Per Qualche Dollaro In Più), is the sort of film that’s not only good, but educational. I’ve often said that great art is hermetic, in that it is difficult for younger artists to learn how the thing was accomplished. Near-great art, such as this film, is even better for educating young artists on how to achieve greatness, for it does achieve greatness, in parts, but also allows the internal ‘scaffolding’ of the art to leak through in its non-great moments. This provides a ready contrast for young artists to see the mechanics behind something that works to such an extent that greatness is applicable, and aspects of the work that do not. Having said that, this film is a quantum leap above Leone’s first in the Dollars Trilogy: A Fistful Of Dollars, made a year earlier.... Excellent. 823) The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having just watched The Good, The Bad And The Ugly *(Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo), Sergio Leone’s final film in his Dollars Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns, I can say rarely has a film trilogy been so instructive as to the step by step artistic growth of its director as an artist. 1964’s A Fistful Of Dollars* is a solid to good film, and a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. It is enjoyable but not that deep. 1965’s For A Few Dollars More is an excellent, almost great, film which showed Leone rising near greatness in almost every facet of filmmaking, and surpassing that bar in some. But it still had a few kinks to work out, and fixed many of the flaws of the first film, both technically and artistically. This 1966 three hour long capstone film sees Leone actually ascend over that bar and on into greatness. No, it is not the unfettered masterpiece of a film that Once Upon A Time In The West, and Once Upon A Time In America, are, but it’s close.... Great. 824) First Man Into Space/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I first watched the 1959 black and white English film, The First Man Into Space (Satellite Of Blood in the U.K.), on television, as an eight or nine year old child. I believe it was on a twilight double bill with The Unearthly Stranger, another British horror film, made a few years later. Like many similar films, The Quatermass Xperiment or The Crawling Hand, this low budget film has a standard premise. But, like The Unearthly Stranger, it is a bit more literate and enjoyable a sci fi romp. The odd thing is that it was one of four The Criterion Collection titles in a release called Monsters And Madmen, as all four films were produced by the same people, Amalgamated Films- a sort of junior rival to the American AIP (Roger Corman’s folks), and the Hammer Studios of England.... Days of yore.... 825) American Stories/Book Review/Jessica Sshneider Nagai Kafu is a somewhat underrated writer when one thinks of Japanese literature. I say this now after having read one of his early collections, American Stories. While I’ve not read any of his novels yet (Rivalry: A Geisha’s Tale will be next), much of his work has simply not been translated into English. Other than American Stories and Rivalry, no other major works of his seem to either be 1) translated into English and 2) easily available on Amazon. Published by Columbia University Press, Kafu’s work came recommended by a fellow writer friend of mine, and given Kafu’s influence upon the great Tanizaki, I became eager to read him. Happily, I can state that American Stories is both inventive, surprisingly fresh, and many of the tales within are excellent reads. In fact, this is a great book for any young short story writer to examine, for Kafu’s narrative play, but also because the tales are economically written and also full of memorable characters who are not stereotypes.... Good. 826) The Crown OF The Continent/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Readers will recall my review a while back of a nature documentary by filmmaker John Grabowska called Crown of the Continent. It was a highly poetic and beautifully crafted experience—taking viewers to deeps of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, in Alaska. Now, what is the difference, you wonder? Note the article: The Crown of the Continent is a 42 minute nature documentary by Ambassador Video on Glacier National Park in Montana. Originally, it was the title that caught my attention, as I’d encouraged many to watch Crown of the Continent within my review of it.... Good. 827) Drunken Angel/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 black-and-white effort Yoidore Tenshi / Drunken Angel is an interesting experience, for he clearly had not mastered the art form, yet. Even so, there is so much that is good in Drunken Angel — touches that would become great in just a few years. It’s like looking at a fetus and seeing distinguishable characteristics of its parents, though none is fully formed.... Good. 828) Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Much of Nagai Kafu’s work unfortunately has yet to be translated into English. After reading his collection of short stories, titled American Stories, I had much hope for this book, yet at the same time I’d been warned by a Kafu fan that Rivalry, while a good read, is nowhere near his best work. I find myself surprised that I agree with said assessment, for often what I am told by others I discover to be the opposite. I approach this review as not a fan, but as someone who knew little to nothing about Kafu before reading his work, save for the influence he had upon other Japanese writers.... So-so. 829) Frisky, Furry And Fearsome/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Part of the fun in visiting any National Park is the hopeful chance of catching a glimpse of wildlife in its natural surrounds. Produced by Ambassador Video, Frisky, Furry and Fearsome focuses on five of our National Parks and the various animals that inhabit them. From screeching pikas, to rock-climbing mountain goats, to big horn sheep, marmots, ground squirrels, both black bears and grizzly bears, this instructional DVD offers a good overview of not only what species to expect from a number of National Parks, but the film begins with a brief introduction on the regulations with regard to wildlife, and how one should behave around it. This video is a clip of this exact scene.... Enjoyable. 830) Shane/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Mythic realism. That’s the perfect term to describe director George Stevens’ 1953 classic color Western Shane, one of the most unlikely great films I’ve ever seen. That’s because much of the 117 minute long film plays out as if it’s cheesy, with its lone, virtuous gunman who stands apart and above all others (a precursor to Clint Eastwood’s characters in Sergio Leone’s revolutionary Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti westerns), as a western version of the fathers of perfect nuclear families of the Eisenhower era sitcoms. Yet, below is a roiling realism that only serves to heighten the mythos, by contrast. This is the tension that is so unusual, yet remarkably powerful. I may have, when a boy, seen this film, in black and white, on television, for some scenes resonated as if I’d seen them long ago. Then again, such a seeming familiarity is part of the province of myth, and why this film achieves its greatness. It’s a greatness that is wholly distinct from the more modern sort of Western that Sergio Leone pioneered in the following decade. Leone’s films’ greatness (especially his westerns) was based upon a knowledge of film, as a medium and art, whereas Shane reaches far back into the eons, to portray its lead character as something akin to a god, in a way as primal as the Gilgamesh epic. In this sense, what many of the film’s detractors view as corniness, is archetypal characters and behaviors. But Stevens leavens this with well written characters and situations, and, to his credit, with believable villains who have real motivations, ones which actually gain a good deal of sympathy in the viewer.... Great. 831) McCabe & Mrs. MIller/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Two points ring out clarion when watching Robert Altman’s 1971 film, McCabe & Mrs. Miller: 1) Robert Altman is probably the most hit and miss major director in Hollywood history, with good films such as MASH, Nashville, The Player, and Gosford Park on his resume, and really poor films like this one, Popeye, and Vincent & Theo. 2) One of the main reasons McCabe & Mrs. Miller fails is because it is badly dated, and this is so due to a horrendous soundtrack for the film. Poor acting, poor screenwriting, and poor cinematography certainly don’t help, but the sheer finger up the ass ludicrousness of scoring a de facto Western with the proto-folk balladeering of Leonard Cohen is utterly mind-boggling; especially since it’s BAD Leonard Cohen music.... Overrated mediocrity. 832) The Sound Of Waves/Book Reviews/Jessica Schneider* Before this point, I was beginning to think that Yukio Mishima was only capable of one type of novel — that is, the angsty, pissed off, young male protagonist in search of self-destruction. In fact, it is sort of a joke among Mishima readers, in that one does not need to wonder too much what the unfolding of events will be. If there’s an attractive, young male, he will likely die (usually by seppuku) because all beauty must be destroyed. If there are women present, they’re likely dull, nagging, one-dimensional and getting in the way of said young male’s homoerotic fantasies. Destruction, angst, and hyperbole — all of these traits are often present within Mishima’s work, albeit he tends to write them very well. In other words, while I can’t claim Mishima to be a great writer (since his work tends to lack a complexity that is found within the best of Kawabata or Tanizaki, or so I’ve seen) what he does do, for most of the time, he does very well.... So-so. 833) Nothing/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1997 Canadian sci fi film Cube, by Vincenzo Natali, was one of the great examples of good writing, good acting, and a limited budget making for an excellent, and thought provoking little film. Unfortunately, its financial success led to two mediocre sequels, neither of which had the verve of the original, and neither of which were directed by Natali. Thus, when I stumbled upon a 2003 film made by Natali, starring two of his stars from Cube, David Hewlett and Andrew Miller, I thought there was a good chance that it would be equally compelling.... Solid. 834) The Thin Red Line/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are moments when greatness is immediately apparent. When I first watched Terrence Malick’s 1998 film, The Thin Red Line, over a decade ago, it was clear that the film was great, and so was its director. Perhaps it was the opening shot of the film, wherein a crocodile slithers into muck as a rising fugue intones, that invoked a poetic realism that the rest of the nearly three hour film sustains. Or, perhaps, it was within the first 5 or 10 minutes, when the voiceover narration and watery images mixed into something rarely seen onscreen. Nonetheless, I immediately felt that sort of pleasure seep into one, knowing that this artist knows exactly what he is doing, and it will be something very good, or even better. And every time I’ve watched it since it reveals nuances not noticed before. That’s a surefire marker of greatness. Oddly, the people I saw the film with disagreed, yet they had no real definitive reasons save the usual emotional response, or its lack. Upon rewatching the film, nothing has changed from my initial opinion. And given that this film was often spoken of in the same breath as Steven Spielberg’s schlocksterpiece, Saving Private Ryan, shows how utterly clueless most critics, much less layfolk, are, for while both films were released in the same year, and cover the same war, the qualitative difference is immense.... Masterful. 835) I Vitelloni/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes, after achieving a certain level, an artist makes a slight regression before hitting the heights of greatness. Such an arc is apparent to me after having watched Federico Fellini’s 1953, black and white Neo-Realist film, I Vitelloni (roughly translated to mean The Idlers or The Loafers). While better than his debut film, 1950’s Variety Lights, it is also better than his more lauded film, 1954’s La Strada (despite the lack of Fellini’s wife, Giulieta Masina).... Classic. 836) Galapagos/Book Review/Jessica Schneider What will become of the human race in a million years? Will humans be reflecting on how much smarter (or bigger brained) they once were? Galapagos is arguably the last good novel Kurt Vonnegut wrote,. As the book stands, I’d rank it below Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, yet it is definitely one of Vonnegut’s classics worth reading.... Good. 837) Mon/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Mon or The Gate is the third book in Natsume Soseki’s trilogy, with his first two books including Sanshiro and And Then. I place Mon as the second strongest book within this series, with Sanshiro being the strongest and And Then as the weakest. While Mon is the most psychologically complex of the novels (the lead of And Then is a bit of a whiny, self-indulgent brat) Sanshiro, with its humor and criticisms of academia and so-called intellectuals, is probably the better book. It is tough to argue, for on one hand, Sanshiro has a bad translator and Mon is probably the most depressing novel I’ve ever read. It’s not depressing in the sense that I was left crying, but it was a very dour and isolating experience, and while that’s not so much of a critical assessment as it is emotional, I still believe that Soseki is at his best when he laces humor within his narratives. When he tries to do straight drama, it’s not that the works are without merits, but he actually evokes more pathos when he is funny, believe it or not.... Good. 838) No Time For Sergeants/DVD Review/Dan Schneider When most people think of the live television shows from the 1950s, that produced such shows as Playhouse 90, The U.S. Steel Hour, etc, almost universally what comes to mind is drama, usually penned by the likes of a Paddy Chayefsky or Rod Serling. But the third entry in The Criterion Collection’s boxed set of DVDs, titled The Golden Age Of Television, is a comedy called No Time For Sergeants, adapted from a novel by Mac Hyman, and directed by Alex Segal. Most interestingly, though, the novel was adapted by Ira Levin, the man who would later pen his own novels, most famously Rosemary’s Baby. This teleplay debuted on The U.S. Steel Hour on March 15^th, 1955.... Solid. 839) Mean Streets/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1973 film, Mean Streets, that is key to understanding not only the characters that inhabit that film, but also many of the characters that populated his later films, including even some of his polished but bloated, lifeless garbage with Leonardo DiCaprio. In it, the thugs played by stars Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro go along with a couple of other pals to shake down a pool hall owner who’s behind on a protection or loan payment. They basically insult the owner, who says he’s not gonna pay them because he’s offended. He calls one of the punks (not Keitel nor De Niro) a mook. The punk famously rejoinders, ‘A mook. What’s a mook?’.... Great. 840) Autumn In Spring And Other Stories/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is my first time reading anything by Ba Jin, and this collection of tales seems to be somewhat hard to come by. I ended up discovering it upon one of the discount paperback shelves in Half Price Books, where it had been marked down to something like 50 cents. It’s unfortunate that Ba Jin seems so difficult to come by, at least in translation, for this collection of tales was quite good. Not perfect mind you, but quite good — certainly good enough for me to recommend.... Good. 841) Meet Me In St. Louis/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The major problem with the film musical, as a form, is that there is never a hint of naturalism in it. Think of a science fiction or horror film. Yes, they may have outlandish plots and scary monsters, but the best of them will sneak the situation or monster up on the viewer so as to make the viewer comfortable with the notion of them, if not comfortable with the situation they present. But, in musicals, one has to expect the absurdity that people will break not only into son, but often song and dance, and often with background music that is diegetically not part of the reality. This is not to say people do not sing in their lives, on occasion. We all have; but it’s the rest of the situational expectation that makes most musicals cringe-worthy. And the most guilty of these sins are the classic Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.... Mediocre. 842) The Quiet Duel/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Great artists have a way to make even their lesser works interesting, if not great. Such is the case with the 1949 black and white film, The Quiet Duel (Shizukanaru Ketto) from Akira Kurosawa, which was based on a play by Kazuo Kikuta, and adapted by Senkichi Taniguchi. At 95 minutes long, this melodrama is not long enough to get on one’s nerves, and just good enough to make a number of its moments stick in memory. The key word about the film, though, is melodrama, and for those accustomed to his greater later works.... Ok. 843) The Silent Cry/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Silent Cry is a novel with not the best title. At least in the English translation, that is, for were I to just encounter this title without the Nobel winning stamp upon it, I would have quickly passed over it. That said, it is still not a good title, Nobel winner or not. This sort of reminds me of Hungarian writer Sandor Marai’s great novel Embers, which doesn’t have the best translation of title either, but Embers is better than The Silent Cry — both in title and in book. The title actually puts me in mind of that anti-abortion propaganda film I was forced to watch my freshman year in Catholic high school — The Silent Scream…or something. According to Wikipedia, the title’s translation from its original Japanese is Football in the First Year of Man'en. Ok, right, I can see that connection. Whatever. The Silent Cry, as a title, still sucks.... Mediocre. 844) Mr. Arkadin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The first time I’d ever seen Orson Welles’ 1955 black and white film, Mr. Arkadin, was a few years ago, on a cheap 91 minute DVD version put out by LaserLight DVD. It was a film often called Welles’ ‘European Citizen Kane’, and had a bizarre introduction by a fey and gloved actor Tony Curtis, and was a very poor quality disk, with a scratched and highly white contrasted print that looked washed out. This turned out to be what was known as the American version of the film, which was a truncated version shown in a strict chronological order. It was a bizarre scrambled eggs sort of film with brilliant moments, but it made no sense logically, and I just knew something was askew, and likely missing.... Great restoration. 845) Shock Corridor/DVD Review (Criterion)/Dan Schneider Director Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor is one of those wildly aberrant works of art than can be called great, on some levels, and utter schlock, on other levels. And both are correct assessments of this film that can only be termed a didactic melodrama. What results, though, is that one is left with a so-so film- not the piece of pulp garbage that many reviewers first assailed the black and white film (with dream sequence snippets in color) as, upon its release in 1963, nor the masterpiece that revisionists have proffered in later auteur-based assessments. It had been almost a quarter century since I last watched the film, but recently popped in The Criterion Collection DVD of the film, and rediscovered its ‘charms.’.... Ok. 846) I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like?/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Any topic, no matter how disturbing, is potential for a short story. It all depends on how well the said topic is executed, and if executed well, the story succeeds. If executed poorly, it fails. Then, there are topics that when shoved together within a single collection don’t always work. Topics like cannibalism, incest, animal cruelty, S&M, masturbation, transsexuality, and any additional form of emotional cruelty may not work if there are more than, say, two of these topics within a tale. Reason being, the writing then runs the risk of becoming too melodramatic, too self-conscious with the writer’s desire to “shock” just for the sake of shock alone, or just not believable, and ultimately the literature is lost. Yet the debut collection of short stories in I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, by Justin Isis, not only touches upon many of these “troubling” topics, but the stories do contain wonderful moments of lyricism — the best collection of short fiction I can recall reading from a first time writer.... Good. 847) Twelve Monkeys/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Chris Marker’s 1962 short film, La Jetee, is one of the most interesting and exciting films ever made. Its use of still photographs for all but a few seconds of its near half hour length, allows a remarkable bit of viewer empathy to occur. In recall, the viewer actually animates the film. Director Terry Gilliam is one of the most interesting and exciting film directors in America over the last few decades, and his 1995 film, 12 Monkeys, ‘inspired’ by Marker’s film, is an excellent film that, because of a forced love tale and a bit of predictability in certain scenes, falls short of being great cinema. Nonetheless, it shows what a person with a singular vision can do in the arts, even when one’s vision is almost wholly derived from another source.... Solid. 848) The Naked Kiss/DVD Review (Criterion)/Dan Schneider Maverick American filmmaker Sam Fuller was both a progressive and a prude, and no film of his better illustrates this schismic personal dichotomy, echoed in his art’s use of high and low techniques, than his 1964 black and white film noir melodrama The Naked Kiss, a cult classic whose title derives from its lead character, a prostitute named Kelly, who describes the kiss of the fiancée she kills, that way, meaning she could tell he was a sexual deviant from the get go. It’s a film that has brilliance, inanity, memorable scenes of realism, and trite predictable scenes of sheer fantasy- such as the mention of the titular act, which is not real, but works symbolically to explain certain elements of the lead character’s behavior.... Solid. 849) When Right Is Wrong/Justin Isis's Book Review/Dan Schneider Let me be up front about something, and that is the fact that the person whose book is at the center of this review, of a review written about that book, has been a participant in the e-list of my own website, Cosmoetica, for several years. I have also spoken with him via Skype, once, and exchanged emails with him. My wife has an even longer history of corresponding with the writer in question, Justin Isis. With that out of the way, my opinions expressed have nothing to do with my personal knowledge of the writer. Rather, they have everything to do with the poorly written review of his first published book; one which is symptomatic of the problems with criticism, online and off, on literature and the other arts, in today’s culture.... Taking out a bad review. 850) Black Rain/Book Review/Dan Schneider It is amazing that whenever a book deals with “serious” subject matter, be it genocide, Hiroshima bombing, or lynching, the book will often receive rave reviews, regardless of how well the said subject is executed. This is because the majority of readers do not critique a work on its craft, but more due to its politics or heavy-handed subject matter. Then, whenever someone attempts to point out the flaws, the reviewer is immediately accused of being “unsympathetic” and a Nazi, and pro-death, etc. All of this, of course, is nonsense. I bring all this up because the Amazon review page of Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain has one of the highest ratings for Japanese novels I’ve ever encountered. (Usually there are a fair number of negative reviews—people claiming how boring the book was and how nothing happens.).... Solid. 851) Antonio Gaudi/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes the extra features on a DVD oddly turn out to surpass the featured film itself. Such is the case with the Criterion Collection’s DVD of Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1984 documentary on the buildings of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) - the film’s title is a spelling error. The film runs a mere 72 minutes, yet it seems much longer, and this is because, despite the film’s title, there is surprisingly little focus on the actual works of the architect. Much of the film skirts over things related to the buildings, and adds in odd musical accompaniment, by Toru Takemitsu, Kurodo Mori, and Shinji Hori.... Ok. 852) Echoes Of Chonqqing/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Chongqing plays an important role in understanding the Second Sino-Japanese War, for it became not only the target of severe Japanese bombing, but many Chinese citizens from the eastern and northern parts of China migrated inward, that is, west, to escape Japanese-captured territory. Chongqing was the wartime capital during China’s war with Japan (1937–1945) and as a result of the increased population from other provinces, prices of food and other goods skyrocketed, making the lives of those living there quite difficult, but especially difficult when one is poor.... Good. 853) Harakiri/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 black and white film Harakiri (Seppuku), is the second film of his that I’ve seen; the first being his 9½ hour long The Human Condition. Despite Harakiri’s being only 133 minutes in length, it’s the better film; and that’s with the full acknowledgment that The Human Condition was a hell of a good film. Harakiri is also one of the best examples of a great political work of art precisely because its greatness has nothing to do with its politics, but because of its art. It’s only the fact that it has a political stance that makes it political, whereas most ‘political’ art preens its politics.... Great. 854) Harp Of Burma/Book Review/Dan Schneider The first thing to note when reading Harp of Burma by Michio Takeyama is that this isn’t a war novel. Certainly there are aspects of war involved, but to call it either a war or anti-war novel would be too lazy, since it is not really either. The novel contains some of the most idealized versions of both the Japanese forces and anti-war, for fighting itself is not sensationalized in any way. Instead, the thrust of the book is more of gentleness and peace, rather than the actual brutality that went on (although parts of that are mentioned.).... Good. 855) One Hundred Great Paintings/Book Review/Dan Schneider I received an excellent art book recently, from the Yale University Press, called One Hundred Great Paintings, edited by Louise Govier. The 216-page book is a series of 100 prints of paintings from the National Gallery in London, England, and has a preface by well-known art historian Tim Marlow. In the preface Marlow writes of the book’s aims and approach.... Excellent. 856) The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs/Book Review/Dan Schneider Having lived less than a half century, I yet marvel at the speed with which science and human knowledge of its place in the cosmos has changed. Within my lifetime, man has ventured on to the moon; satellites have landed on other planets, dove into Jupiter’s clouds, sped out beyond Pluto and into interstellar space; the Hubble telescope has peered back billions of years into the cosmos; medical marvels have come aplenty; and even our understanding of the earth’s past has radically altered.... Excellent. 857) Dreams With Sharp Teeth/Film Review/Dan Schneider This is my first review of a film that I first saw on Netflix, rather than in a theater or on a DVD, and I have to say the service is something of a revolution in how one watches film; or, to be more accurate, in WHAT one watches, for had it not been for the recommendations links the website provides, based upon earlier choices of viewed material, I would likely not have had any knowledge nor interest in seeking out the title I ended up reviewing.... Ok. 858) Japan At War: An Oral History/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It was not too long ago that I reviewed a book of oral history about wartime China called Echoes of Chongqing by Danke Li. The book focused only on women and their stories, and while there were certainly enough merits for me to recommend the book to anyone interested in this subject matter, my criticism was that 1) by having only women, the book suffered from a certain isolation and one-sidedness. Also 2) the voices, after a while, all sounded the same. The book also suffered from too much academic in that there were moments of nebulous platitudes inserted within that added nothing, save for sounding kind of preachy.... Good. 859) How It Ends/Book Review/Chris Impey British astronomer Chris Impey’s 2010 book, How It Ends: From You To The Universe is a classic sort of science book for the masses: it takes a topic all have an interest in (death) and expands it into something beyond the immediate. On the negative side, the book’s major flaw (albeit a minor one) is that it does not focus too strongly on actual endings, as it takes digressive turns into philosophy and minutia. On the positive side, the book never bogs down in jargon, abstruseness, nor extended discussions of either. This means that its 290 page text had no long patches that your average reader will just skip through because "this doesn’t interest me.".... Good. 860) The Promise/Book Review/Dan Schneider This is the second Pearl S. Buck book I have read, following her more popular The Good Earth, which is the better of the two books. The Good Earth has one of the most memorable endings I’ve ever encountered, where a father is dying and his last wish is for his sons to not ever sell his land. The two sons agree to this wish, though at the last moment exchange a glance (and smile) that means just the opposite.... Good. 861) Still Walking/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having recently gotten a review copy of The Criterion Collection’s latest DVD release, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2008 film Still Walking (Aruitemo Aruitemo), I found myself torn as fundamentally as I have ever been at the receipt of the package, but not for the reasons one might think a critic might be torn. The film is fabulous, great, and everything that the people who recommended I check out Kore-eda’s films said it would be, and I requested on their praise. But the DVD package left me profoundly saddened because this very same film is available for streaming on Netflix and the DVD’s features are so meager as to offer no real reason to actually buy the DVD package rather than just stream the film.... Great film. 862) Senso/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In my recent review of the upcoming The Criterion Collection DVD for Still Walking, I lamented the fact that streaming technology of companies like Netflix may be the demise of the DVD Golden Era because there will be little or no market for the extra features popularized by that format, and that companies like Criterion may only be able to survive by becoming film distributors. Just a few days ago Criterion announced that it had engaged in an exclusive streaming partnership with Hulu, one of Netflix’s competitors. It seems my words were not only prescient but cogent. Nonetheless, I received another of Criterion’s upcoming DVD releases to review: Italian director Luchino Visconti’s 1954 wartime melodrama Senso.... Good fluff. 863) Mildred Pierce/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Time has a way of making some films seem grander than they really are. A good example is Mildred Pierce, the 1945 black-and-white melodrama directed by Casablanca's Michael Curtiz, and that won star Joan Crawford a Best Actress Oscar. Mildred Pierce is in no way, shape, or form great art, even though it's certainly not a bad film. In fact, as a soap opera it’s quite entertaining — no, make that very entertaining; and entertainment is a quality that can stand on its own. (The problem in recent decades is that cinema has become nothing but entertainment.) In the case of Mildred Pierce, the entertainment is formulaic and rather predictable — but in an enjoyable, campy sort of way.... Good fluff deux. 864) The Makioka Sisters/Book Review/Dan Schneider Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1948 novel, The Makioka Sisters, or Sasameyuki, whose Japanese title is Light Snow), is often referred to as the greatest of last century’s novels from Japan. Inevitably, this sort of hyperbole is difficult to live up to, and the book, classically divided into three ‘books’ and 101 chapters, fails in that claim. It’s not a bad novel, and not even a particularly good one, although it has many merits.... Ok. 865) The Master Of Go/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Even those reviewers on Amazon that give this a favorable review, can’t really say why they think it is a good read. Had Kawabata not written it, perhaps the results would be less favorable. Granted, there are far worse books out there, but then by that same token, there are far better—even among Kawabata’s other works. The language too, it not as poetic or psychologically layered as it is in Snow Country or The Sound of the Mountain. Kawabata’s skill resides in his characters and the way he plays out their motives throughout his works. He is great at expressing the underlining aggression that exists between people—all of which is cloaked by kindness. There’s none of that here. The prose is functionary and matter of fact, plot driven, even though the plot is rather dull.... Dull. 866) Ebert Presents At The Movies/A Review/Dan Schneider This past January, long-time film critic Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times, made his return to television based film reviewing, with a revival of his old battling critics format on PBS, titled Ebert Presents At The Movies. The last three words of the title was one of the sundry names of the review program that Ebert hosted for over three decades, first with deceased film critic Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, and, after Siskel’s death, with fellow Sun-Times culture columnist Richard Roeper. It was a format which debuted in 1975, and continued after Siskel’s death, in the late 1990s, and ended in 2008, after Ebert’s protracted battle with thyroid cancer left him unable to speak. In the interim, Ebert launched his own blog, which has been one of the more popular online websites for film and political discussions. Then, late in 2010, Ebert announced that he would be reviving his old format, replete with new battling critics, and with his wife as producer, this year..... A sad final chapter. 867) Portraits Of A Marriage/Book Review/Dan Schneider Hungarian writer Sandor Marai (1900-1989) has been having a rebirth of a literary career ever since his novels have been slowly released into English. His first, Embers, is a great psychological and philosophical experience that I highly recommend. His others, such as Casanova in Bolzano and The Rebels, have both been consistent in their quality. Now, his most recent release into English, Portraits of a Marriage, is definitely worth the read and overall an excellent book. It is great in parts, but perhaps what keeps me from calling it an overall great book is that there are some moments that dwindle on a bit too long, and at times, slightly dip into soap opera..... Near-great. 868) 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. Compared to today’s better film comedies, this film is both more mature and more puerile in its approach to sex, in that it treats its characters as intellectual beings, yet also shows them as somehow reserved. Granted, the film is set in turn of the 20th Century Sweden, yet there is still an element missing in the film, especially when compared to later films in the Bergman canon. That missing element would most likely be depth.... Good. 869) The Graduate/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Comedian Mike Nichols, in the mid-1960s, abandoned a flourishing comedy career with his partner, Elaine May, to become a filmmaker. His first film was the 1966 Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton vehicle Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? His second, in 1967, was The Graduate - a film that, along with Midnight Cowboy, Bonnie And Clyde, and Easy Rider, ushered in mainstream Hollywood studios into the new era of director-centered cinema. Like many films that are landmark, for the external significance they bear, The Graduate has almost always been lauded as a great film. It’s not. It’s a good film that is more innovative than great, but which misses greatness for the simplest reason most films do - a screenplay that fails.... Overrated, but good. 870) Godzilla Raids Again/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1955 black and white Japanese film, Godzilla Raids Again (?????? or Gojira No Gyakushu; aka Godzilla’s Counterattack, or Gigantis, The Fire Monster) was, for many decades, the ‘lost’ Godzilla film. Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I saw many Godzilla films, of the Showa Era, on television and some in theaters that ran children’s films; but I never saw Godzilla Raids Again until the early 1990s, when it was first released on VHS, in a truncated American version that was overdubbed with voiceover narration from noted Chinese actor Keye Luke (and additional work from Star Trek’s George Takei, aka Mr. Sulu). Other than the first Godzilla film, from a year earlier, this was the only film in the series that was filmed in black and white, and, oddly, it adds a realism and documentary nightmare like feel that all later films failed to capture.... Better than claimed. 871) Narcissus And Goldmund/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Hermann Hesse is one of those writers that allows for one to be picky. He has enough great titles that of those great titles, certain ones rank better, or in this case greater than others. Narcissus and Goldmund is among his great titles, but it’s one of his lesser greats. Steppenwolf, Demian and Siddhartha are still stronger works overall, but Narcissus and Goldmund is not too far behind. A couple of things that keep me from ranking this as his best: 1) the prose is not as rich and complex as that which can be found in those other works and 2) perhaps this is just due to the translation by Ursule Molinaro, but there were several instances of clichés and a flatness within the prose (at times) that did not appear to be present in his best works.... Good. 872) Mothra Vs. Godzilla/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It is odd how memory unfolds from art. It’s been twenty or so years since I last saw the classic 1964 color Godzilla film, Mothra Vs. Godzilla (better known to American audiences by the title Godzilla Vs. The Thing, as Roger Corman’s company, AIP redubbed it to lend more mystery to the ad campaign) yet, upon popping in the Toho Master Collection DVD of the film, instantly some things returned to me, of earlier viewings. The first was Godzilla’s famed entrance into the film, a half hour or so in, when reporters are covering a story about a radioactive mud field, after a typhoon has hit Japan’s countryside. Suddenly, the ground shakes, and it seems that an earthquake is abrewing. Except that it turns out to be Godzilla rising from beneath the mud, after having been swept ashore and buried. The second thing is, seeing it in color, on television, even though my family did not get color television until the late 1980s. I recall watching the film during a Godzilla marathon on Thanksgiving Day, in New York City, thus recalling Godzilla’s emergence scene, but it had to be at the home of one of my relatives. Back in the 1970s, the local, non-network, television stations would often run monster marathons on Thanksgiving.... Solid. 873) Godzilla's Revenge/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I’ve seen thousands of films. Not as many as most remunerated film critics, but quite a bit more than your average filmgoer. And in all those films, across genres, decades, screenwriters, nationalities, directors, there are only two films that I can think of that truly get inside how a child reacts and thinks. Note, I am not claiming films that well portrayed childhood, such as a modern family classic like My Dog Skip, amongst that lot. Although, it is itself an arguably great film, that film, for all its virtues, was told in a rather conventional manner. No, the two films that best penetrate a child’s mind are actually both B science fiction films, and both are sequels. The first is Robert Wise’s 1944 debut directorial effort, the black and white The Curse Of The Cat People, and the second is 1969’s mere 69 minute long color film, Godzilla’s Revenge (aka All Monsters Attack, Oru Kaiju Dai Shingeki- admittedly all bad titles). Both films were made on shoe string budgets, employed narrative arcs vastly different than their predecessor films, but both really got in to the logical nub and center of a child’s POV on the world. It’s no surprise that both films are usually dismissed by fans of the original films in the series. Yet, The Curse Of The Cat People is a better film than Cat People and Godzilla’s Revenge is clearly the best film in the whole Godzilla series, save for the first film, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters (and its Japanese source film, Gojira), and, in reality, given the actual narrative inventiveness of this film, good arguments can be made that it is the best film in the series, and possibly the best film of director Ishiro Honda’s career.... A critically abused classic. 874) L.A. Confidential/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Curtis Hanson’s 1997 film, *L.A. Confidential, was far and away the best film released in Hollywood during that year Titanic* swept all the awards. There were likely some independent American films that were good, and possibly some foreign films that were its equal, but from Hollywood, nothing was close. It is a great film that succeeds on every possible level, Perhaps its lone flaw is that there is no underlying deep philosophic posit to it, save, arguably, that all people are corrupt and corruptible; it just depends on the degree and motive.... Great. 875) De-Lovely/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Let me state my bias up front. I loathe musicals. There are very few I like- especially from the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood. That’s because the whole convention of people breaking into song at a difficult moment always strikes me as forced and phony. There are exceptions, though. The Sound Of Music because of….well, I loved Julie Andrews as a child, Evita because there’s only one spoken line in the film- it totally divorces itself from the conventional musical format, and Moulin Rouge because while there is some speaking, it’s even more lush and lavish than Evita. The 2004 Irwin Winkler film De-Lovely, a biopic of Tinpan Alley composer Cole Porter, is one of those rare musicals that work because it is a unique approach to both a musical and to a portrait of the artist, the man who wrote, among many other indelible hit songs, It’s De-Lovely, Let’s Misbehave, Anything Goes, Be A Clown, I Love You, and Ev’ry Time You Say Goodbye. This film works because it is not a pretentious film, and in that regard most reminded me of Amadeus, the portrait of another musical genius, Mozart, told with another innovative framing device for the tale- the life of the main character told through the eyes of his envious rival.... Solid. 876) Stagecoach/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I love when I catch myself in a bias, and have the reality of the art bitchslap me. Having watched a number of John Ford and John Wayne films over the years I had come to expect certain things from both men. From Ford you get the landscapes, shallow screenplays, and often overweening visual poesy. From Wayne you’d get the wooden acting, hammy bodily gesticulations, and racist pseudo-patriotism. When I watched The Searchers, a monumentally overrated film, I nailed these flaws in both men. So, I was expecting much of the same, only more of it, and worse, from Stagecoach, the first pairing of these two men because 1) it was older, 2) it was made in the 1930s, 3) in black and white, and 4)much of film acting in that era was little beyond the silent era’s necessitated overacting. Thankfully, I was wrong. Very wrong. No, I would not state that Stagecoach is an inarguably great film- it has some flaws (mostly minor) and is essentially a B film, in many ways, but it’s one of the greatest B films ever made and a near-great film- Western or not, and both Ford and Wayne excel in it, which then begs the question: if they were so right in their first pairing, why did they go so wrong in later films, like, ahum….The Searchers?.... Terrific. 877) A Walk Into The Sea/Review/Dan Schneider Why do so many documentary filmmakers decide to make films about relatives or people they know? The obvious answer is the ease of getting information. But that does not explain why they choose the subjects they choose. Andrew Neel’s portrait of his grandmother, Alice Neel, at least has the benefit of being a profile of a great artist. Lucia Small’s portrait of her architect father, Glen Howard Small, called My Father, The Genius, at least shows off the insights of an underrated designer. And even Bill Rose’s The Loss Of Nameless Things at least profiles an artist of potential whose life and career were cut short by an accident. None of this is true for the 2006 documentary, A Walk Into The Sea: Danny Williams And The Warhol Factory, which clocks in at 77 minutes in length.... Mediocre. 878) Close-Up/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Abbas Kiarostami is one of those "name" non-American directors who is looked to as a god. The low-budget Nema-ye Nazdik / Close-Up is the second Kiarostami effort I have seen and it is an excellent film. [Note: spoilers ahead] Close-Up is a pseudo-documentary — not a mockumentary, even though it has been labeled as such. Written and directed by Kiarostami between the making of two bigger-budgeted projects, Close-Up shows what pouncing upon something that just happens can do for an artist. Sometimes it’s not the force of creation, but the moment of recognition that defines when a piece of good art is wrought.... Good. 879) Kes/Blu-Ray Review/Dan Schneider The upcoming release of Ken Loach’s 1969 color film Kes allowed me my first chance to see the new Blu-Ray technology firsthand, as I recently upgraded to a Blu-Ray player with Netflix capacity. Hence, when sent a review copy by The Criterion Collection I was eager for my virginal go at the newer generation disk. Having seen it, I can say I noticed only a marginal quality difference vis-à-vis regular DVDs. Perhaps this is because Loach’s film is 40 years old, and Blu-Ray makes more sense on newer all digital films, and/or because I lack a digital widescreen tv. That said, crispness is one thing, but when film starts looking too much like video.... Good. 880) A Clockwork Orange/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, was the culmination of possibly the greatest consecutive run of three films from a single director, ever. Before this film, he had released Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb in 1964, and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. The former is, if not the single greatest comedy film ever made, is certainly the greatest satire. The latter, is inarguably the greatest science fiction film in the medium’s history, to date, and in the running for greatest film of all time, period. Yet, in some ways, A Clockwork Orange equals and surpasses its progenitors. It is a film that, despite its claims of being science fiction or pornographic, is even more subversively funny than Dr. Strangelove, in certain moments, and in others is as audacious as 2001. This trio of films is all the more remarkable.... Great. 881) Mr. Untouchable/Film Review/Dan Schneider Marc Levin’s 2007 documentary film, Mr. Untouchable, which gives background on notorious 1970s Harlem drug kingpin LeRoy ‘Nicky’ Barnes is a flat out great documentary. It is insightful, points out things that are wrong with many people’s ideas on reality, and does very well in backgrounding Barnes’ life and times, as well as using the often tired “talking heads” approach in a fresh way, by making those talking heads contradict one another and reveal their own evils when they speak of Barnes (who also appears in the film, silhouetted, because he’s in the Federal Witness Protection Program).... Great. 882) About To Die/Book Review/Jessica Schneider We live in an image-obsessed culture, and if there is an image that can keep us from actually having to read an article, we’re likely to gawk at it, especially when that image exploits someone’s death, or rather, the moment just before someone’s death. Barbie Zelizer’s About to Die: How News Images Move the Public addresses why and how journalists exploit the use of the moment before one dies (what she calls the “as if” moment) over the actual death itself.... Bad book. 883) Eyes Of The Mothman/Review/Dan Schneider Having grown up in the 1970s I was exposed to many documentaries on subject matter that could be termed supernatural or paranormal. Back in those pre-VHS days, these sorts of films actually got fairy widespread releases into secondary theatres, and often ran for a year or two before hitting local television stations. If over the age of forty you surely must recall these films, which usually were on such topics as UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Erich Von Daniken's Ancient Astronauts, the Loch Ness monster, or other such ‘mysteries. Its television equivalent was Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of… series. These films all had cheesy production values and narrators who intoned doom at least once a minute, as well as asking silly rhetorical questions that made whatever outrageous subject matter they were focused on seem plausible.... Great documentary. 884) Nietzsche And The Nazis/Film Review/Dan Schneider ‘The Nazis knew what they stood for; do we?’ is how the 165 minute long documentary, Nietzsche And The Nazis: A Personal View, by Stephen Hicks, PhD., ends queryingly. Yet, one might be loath to even label the 2006 film a documentary, as it is more an illustrated lecture. But, oh, what a lecture! I have famously railed against most philosophy. Not because I lack opinions but because so much philosophy is so mediocre and so poorly written. Friedrich Nietzsche, however, was an engaging, if not great, writer, and his ideas- good, bad, or indifferent, are always a challenge. These ideas, a near flawless dissection of Nazi theory and power, a historical weighing of their influence from Nietzsche, and the erudite yet sonorous tones of professor Hicks make this film one of the most intriguing yet innovative, yet also GREAT, documentaries I have watched.... Great. 885) The Public Enemy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The time a film was made often has an interesting effect on its ability to last or not. The 1931 black and white film that launched James Cagney into superstardom, The Public Enemy, directed by William Wellman, is a good case study. While it’s not, overall, an inarguably great film, it certainly is close. It’s a near-great film that certainly ranks as a great genre film- in this case the gangster film. The reason for its missing greatness is essentially because it is an early talking picture, and for the first decade or so, after the silent film era ended, many actors struggled with trying to get a more naturalistic feel to their physical appearances and acting styles. And, it would still be a good two decades before Neo-Realism swept the world cinema, and brought with it the modern ‘naturalism’ of cinema. A decade later, still, and the New Wave would wash over the globe, and empower directors to abandon preconceptions about cinematic rules.... Classic Cagney. 886) Russian Ark/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Russian Ark (Russkiy Kovcheg) is one of those films more notable for the technical expertise it exhibits (or preens of) than any real artistic merit. It reminds one of Mike Figgis’s 2000 film Timecode, wherein that whole film was supposedly done in four separate single takes, in real time. That claim was debunked by a simple watching of the film, and the film itself was notable for being a screenplay disaster. The four stories, which occupied one fourth of the whole screen the whole time, had volume turned up on one section while the others were backgrounded, and then switched, which made it difficult for the viewer to even stick with whatever tale he preferred. Technically, the film was a mess, and, as there was no real story, just a gimmick, the film bombed critically and financially. Russian Ark, made in 2002.... Ok. 887) Nazi Documentaries/Mengele-Leuchter/Dan Schneider I recently watched two very different documentaries about the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s policy of genocide against Jews, Gypsies, and other ‘undesirables’ during the Second World War. Most people have termed the genocide things like the holocaust or The Final Solution, but the phrase Nazi Genocide seems a far more apt term, as both the other terms tend to focus almost exclusively on the deaths of Jews (who were about 50% of all people killed in the death camps), while ignoring all the others killed. Ancillary to that is the tendency for the media to overplay the Nazi Genocide vis-à-vis all other earlier and later examples of genocide, including those that killed far more many people and far greater percentages, overall, of the people that were set out to be killed by the genocidalists. I get this out of the way, early, simply because both films deal with controversial aspects of the Nazi Genocide; the first film with a victim’s crusade to forgive her oppressors and the second with a patsy’s blundering in to try and exonerate some of the crimes committed. The problems both films faced is that, even to this day, there are genuine and myriad controversies regarding genocide, in general (see the denial of the Armenian genocide), and the Nazi Genocide, particularly.... Ok. 888) Insignificance/Blu-Ray Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes it is a tough thing to decide, how to lead off a review of a work of art that simply is not good. In the case of the latest upcoming Blu-Ray release from The Criterion Collection, British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson’s play, Insignificance, this becomes something acute. I could start off with the obvious pun that the title recapitulates the arts merit. I could go on about how stage plays, even successful ones (artistically, not commercially) rarely guarantee cinematic success. Or, I could just say that the screenplay, acting, characterization, dialogue, editing, cinematography, and assorted other technical aspects, simply are not good, thus the whole film tanks. Let me compromise, and admit that all three of my potential essay openings would work because all three are equally so.... Bad. 889) The Tree Of Life/Film Review/Dan Schneider American film director Terrence Malick’s fifth feature film release, in four decades in the business, The Tree Of Life, is a film that, in parts, has some of the greatest techniques and moments ever recorded in film history. It also has some fatal narrative flaws that prevent it from outright greatness as an overall work of art, and possibly the worst ending to a near-great film since Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic, Rashomon, while at the same time having one of the most self-indulgent and showoffy endings to a film since Federico Fellini’s 8½. More reprehensible than anything the film does, positively or negatively, is how utterly over the top some praise of the film has been, and how utterly ridiculous some of the criticism of the film has been. Granted, some of this has been generated by Malick.... Great failure. 890) Sky Island/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A number of years ago I visited northern New Mexico and I have been eager to return ever since. For any nature lover, this topography is paradise, and for me personally there is something universal about the American Southwest—perhaps it’s the notion that one is able to, with just a hike across the terrain, travel back into time so easily. There is also a comfortable ease about the surrounds and a beauty that is unlike any other place on earth. I understand what Georgia O’Keeffe meant when she said she had found her home there. And sometimes it is nice to just travel across canyons and the faraway without having to lift your feet. In John Grabowska’s latest documentary, Sky Island offers just that.... Excellent. 891) Strange New Worlds/Book Review/Dan Schneider Ok, let me get this out of the way: Ray Jayawardhana, the author of the uber-long subtitled Strange New Worlds: The Search For Alien Planets An Life Beyond Our Solar System, recently released from Princeton University Press, is not a great wordsmith. In short, no one is going to mix up his prose stylings, in this 288 page book, with the ruminative poesy of a Loren Eiseley, the enthused didacticism of a Carl Sagan, nor the wonderfully metaphoric Stephen Jay Gould.... Solid read on extraordinary subject. 892) The First Fossil Hunters/Book Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes a book can have a good germ of an idea, and be bloated WAY beyond all reasonable measure, based upon a) the good intent of the author, b) the ego of the author, or c) both a and b. Such is the case with Adrienne Mayor’s 2011 reisssue of her 2000 book The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, And Myth In Greek And Roman Times, which is a 253-page book of text, supplemented with 108 pages of appendices and notes which has to be some kind of a record ratio for supplements to actual material in a book that, technically, is neither a history nor science book.... Bad book. 893) 3 Biographical Documentaries/Film Review/Dan Schneider One recent afternoon I watched back to back to back documentaries on Netflix, and only after watching them realized they had a common theme: they were biographies of people. Or, technically biographies of two real people and one mythic figure with no historical proof; but you get my drift. The three films in question were 1994’s Martial Arts Master: The Life Of Bruce Lee, a 52 minute long film directed by Guy Scutter; The Case For Christ, a 71 minute long pseudo-documentary, from 2007, directed by Michael and Timothy Eaton, on Christian Apologist Lee Strobel’s claims to have ‘proof’ that Jesus Christ really existed, really was divine, and really died for youy (yes, your!) sins; and a 2010 documentary, directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, called Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work, which runs 84 minutes.... Big range. 894) Diary Of A Mad Old Man/Book Review/Jessica Schneider With a title like Diary of a Mad Old Man, one does not need guess too hard when trying to assume what this story is about. In it, we have an old man named Utsugi who, because he is old, is suffering from a list of medical ills, yet that does not stop him from recording his sexual perversions in his journal. One of the first things he mentions is how he is sexually attracted to male dancers dressed up to look like women. Not men, mind you, but men dressed to look like women.... Ok. 895) Some Like It Hot/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films are terrifically overrated, even if they are solid, enjoyable little films. Perhaps the most glaring example of this dictum is Billy Wilder’s 1959 black and white comedy Some Like It Hot. It often appears on Best Of lists as the top comedy of all time, but, while a good, solid film, it is nowhere near a great film, in screenwriting, technical measures, nor in, well, laughs per minute. Let’s tackle those three things in reverse. Perhaps the funniest film ever made, in terms of laughs per minute is Stanley Kramer’s 1963 all star comedy, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It’s a pants-pisser that unleashes 2-3 guffaws per minute. The scene where Jonathan Winters destroys the gas station is priceless. By contrast, Some Like It Hot hasn’t a single guffaw in the whole film- a number of moments that make you smile and tee-hee, but guffaw? No. Part of this is because the film has not aged well- it’s hard to still laugh at drag jokes nowadays.... Ok. 896) A Cat, A Man, And Two Women/Book Review/Jessica Schneider A Cat, a Man and Two Women is a collection of three tales — containing one that is very good and two others that are pretty good. The title story, "A Cat, a Man, and Two Women," is a 100-page novella and is the best in the book, offering just the right amount of humor and tenderness involving a cat that affects the lives of those around it. The male protagonist, Shozo, is a weak-willed man who loves his cat, Lily. He loves her so much that the woman in his life is jealous of the affection he bestows upon her. The tale opens with Shozo sharing his mackerel with Lily, by getting her to repeatedly leap for the bait. His wife, Fukuko, has always had somewhat a disdain for the cat, and thus she resents the close bond her husband shares with the animal.... Good. 897) Night Fright/DVD Review/Dan Schneider John Agar is a B film sci fi and horror legend from the 1950s. By the late 1960s, however, his once renowned B film career had sputtered to even sub-Tor Johnson depths. In the remaining decades of his life he was reduced from B film leading man to (ugh!) B film character actor. One of the last roles that Agar had, as a B film leading man was in 1967’s Night Fright.... Horrid. 898) The Old Capital/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Yasunari Kawabata is known for the emotional intricacy and subtlety of his work, and in that regard, The Old Capital is no different. What separates Kawabata’s work from that of other Japanese writers are the insightful observations — what one notices are the very small details, and thus, how the the scene evokes emotion. Descriptions of the passing vistas in Snow Country evoke internal isolation and pathos, while the rumblings of a nearby mountain introduce feelings of death in The Sound of the Mountain. It is this shift from the external to the internal that makes Kawabata the distinct and intricate writer he is, and someone separate from his peers.... Good. 899) The Thin Blue Line/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Errol Morris, the documentarian who wrought the great The Fog of War, first came to prominence for his 1988 documentary film, the 98 minute long The Thin Blue Line. It's a very good film, but it is not a flat out great film likeThe Fog of War. In a sense, many of the things that hit full bloom in the later film, made in 2003, were given a test run in this more standard film. But, whileThe Fog of Waris a film whose import will only grow over the years, The Thin Blue Line is a film that was important upon its release, for it documented the incompetence and corruption that resides in the American legal system, and how an innocent man can easily get railroaded into a murder charge. The film also subsequently led to the release of said wrongly convicted man, and is often pointed to by capital punishment opponents, as proof that the system does not work, and cannot be error-free.... Excellent. 900) 3 Biopics/Fields-Chaplin-Kevorkian/Dan Schneider Sometimes an evening can conduce one to a certain way of feeling, and one evening I felt like watching biographies. The three I chose were W.C. Fields: The Great Man, Charlie Chaplin: The Forgotten Years, And Right To Exit: The Mock Trial Of Jack Kevorkian. Two of the films on silent era film comedians, three on controversial figures, and two on figures who were punished by the United States legal system. Chaplin was all three.... Good. 901) The Three Cornered World/Book Review/Jessica Schneider “Walking up a mountain track, I fell to thinking. Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current. Give free rein to your desires, and you become uncomfortably confined. It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.” And so this is the opening to Soseki Natsume’s novel, The Three Cornered World.... Solid. 902) 3 Artist Documentaries/Gould, Hicks, Ellroy/Dan Schneider Over the course of several evenings I found myself watching an eclectic run of three biographical films of artists of varying quality. The films were Genius Within: The Inner Life Of Glenn Gould, American: The Bill Hicks Story, And James Ellroy’s Feast Of Death, and herein my views on all three works of art.... Interesting. 903) The Wild Geese/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In Japanese literature, two names are often lumped together: Soseki Natsume and Ogai Mori. Both are noted for having written during the fall of the Meiji Era — or what marked the decline of the classical image of Japan as it struggled to accept the new Western influences. They are also two writers who were hugely impacted by the suicide of General Nogi (which was carried out following the death of Emperor Meiji). Soseki’s novel, Kokoro, contains the influence of such, and many of his works have been translated into English. Ogai, however, is not as easily available in translation.... Good. 904) Vita Sexualis/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The very first thing that is mentioned about Ogai Mori’s 1909 published novel, Vita Sexualis, is that it was banned three weeks after publication. I find this amusing since the book is bereft of sex, and more about the burgeoning curiosity about it. All this is fine, and actually makes for an interesting read, albeit readers looking for steamy scenes are likely to be disappointed. Yet, those who know where to find them are not going to be sifting through a Japanese novel published in 1909.... Solid. 905) Blue Valentine/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Blue Valentine is a film designed to stir debate, but not in the usual silly political nor emotional sort of way. Its debate is of a deeper and more profound measure, and that is it asks which of the two main characters profiled in the film is in the wrong? The film does its best to be evenhanded, and for every tick of the ledger against one of the major characters, an equally incisive demerit can be handed out to the other. However, the biggest demerit I can give regarding this 2010 film, directed by Derek Cianfrance, about the turmoil of a mediocre marriage, is the critical cribbing that abounds in essays and reviews of the film, online and off. And that cribbing involves the almost near-universal claim that this film follows the end of, or the dissolution of, that marriage. Yet, nothing of the sort can be convincingly construed from the film’s contents nor its ending.... Good. 906) Samurai Rebellion/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It is a trite thing to do, but when most critics try to laud a play or a film, or even the development of characters at their highest, they will use the term Shakespearean. This is odd since, while Shakespeare certainly was a great writer, the fact is that he was not adept, at all, in developing realistic characters nor scenes. His greatest plays- 7 or 8 out of his published 37 (perhaps a dozen to his most ardent champions) are great, in no way, shape, nor form, for their above mentioned qualities. Shakespeare, in fact, was not a dramatist, in the modern sense of the term, for pre-modern playwrights simply had no idea how to get in to the mind of the average man (or woman). One need look no further than Shakespeare’s own abysmally (and often painfully) bad and unfunny comedies to realize how actually denigrating he was of the common classes. It was not until the mid-19^th Century, and the emergence of Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen.... Great. 907) The Desert Of The Tartars/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Desert Of The Tartars (Il Deserto Dei Tartari) is a film that has been described as a cross between Beau Geste and Waiting For Godot, and into that mix I would toss some of the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara, especially Woman In The Dunes, as well as the troop interactions seen in the 1960s American television sitcom F Troop, even though The Desert Of The Tartars is not a comedy. This is because the slow moving and contemplative first half of the film follows the setting up of the main military officer characters between each other, and with their men, while the second half of the film speeds up the pace of the diegetic time, and focuses more on the reactions of the officers to the world outside their fortress, rather than within it.... Almost great. 908) The Fantastical Ascent Of Jason Sanford/Essay/Dan Schneider As I have often rightly been harsh on editors and critics who gladhand praise to their friends and associates in return for advancement opportunities in the fields of the arts and academia, let me state up front that I have known Jason Sanford for well over a decade, he attended maybe a dozen meetings of my old Uptown Poetry Group, and I have read a number of examples of his prose fiction over the last decade. That being my full disclosure (and, no, I have no financial investment in his person nor literary career), let me state that, having read Sanford’s two latest releases in e-book formats- his novella, Sublimation Angels, and his short story collection, Never Never Stories, I can say, with complete objectivity, that he is an excellent writer, at the minimum, and possibly a great one, especially if he keeps improving his craft.... Great potential. 909) The Fantastical Ascent Of Jason Sanford/Essay/Dan Schneider As I have often rightly been harsh on editors and critics who gladhand praise to their friends and associates in return for advancement opportunities in the fields of the arts and academia, let me state up front that I have known Jason Sanford for well over a decade, he attended maybe a dozen meetings of my old Uptown Poetry Group, and I have read a number of examples of his prose fiction over the last decade. That being my full disclosure (and, no, I have no financial investment in his person nor literary career), let me state that, having read Sanford’s two latest releases in e-book formats- his novella, Sublimation Angels, and his short story collection, Never Never Stories, I can say, with complete objectivity, that he is an excellent writer, at the minimum, and possibly a great one, especially if he keeps improving his craft.... Great potential. 910) General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait/Film Review/Dan Schneider Watching French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait, two things came to mind. First was an old Mad magazine spoof of Amin titled ‘Idiot And Mean’, in which, I believe the 1970s dictator of Uganda was visited by the crew of the original Star Trek television series, and second the fact that the word Dada, while literally part of Amin’s name, also was an early 20th century arts movement that embraced the meaningless of all art. The first point is obvious, because the name accorded Amin fits, and so does the second point fit, since the real Amin, as portrayed in this film, seems actually meaningless.... Thugalicious. 911) Docs on Groups/Interesting/Dan Schneider Documentaries that focus on individuals generally should focus on people of accomplishment or those with unique talents….unless the people focused on are being focused on for some higher purpose. In watching the two documentaries, It Might Get Loud and Confessions Of A Superhero, I witnessed both types of documentaries on people at, if not the absolute peak of their respective art forms, then close to it.... And so it goes. 912) Muhammad Ali/3 Docs/Dan Schneider Growing up in the 1970s, the specter of heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali — whom I could never stand — was everywhere. Contrary to opinions voiced about him post-Parkinson's Disease, Ali was the most despised athlete of that era. The most beloved was actually soccer superstar Pelé.... Hagrographic fluff. 913) Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie/Film Review/Dan Schneider Have you ever watched a Christopher Guest mockumentary, like For Your Consideration, loved it, but said, ‘Well, there are no real life people that stupid.’ You would be wrong, because in director Jay Delaney’s 63 minute long, 2009 documentary, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, that’s exactly what the viewer is seeing. The film follows two middle aged Portsmouth, Ohio friends and losers named Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton. The former is a small, clearly psychotic, but harmless, individual with bad dentition who believes he has a gift to call out to Bigfoots (or Bigfeet?) that he and Wayne track down in local forested areas.... Good. 914) Alice Neel/Film Review/Dan Schneider Growing up in New York City, in the 1970s, painter Alice Neel (who died in 1984, at age 84) was often in the news, with a show or retrospective at this or that gallery or museum. Such was the extent of her fame and renown, locally, that it’s hard to imagine she was anything other than a famous painter, but in the 2007 documentary, Alice Neel, directed by her grandson Andrew Neel, it is a myth that is quickly dispelled.... Good. 915) The Thin Red Line/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Journeyman film director Andrew Marton’s 1964 film version of James Jones’ novel, The Thin Red Line, is quite different from the 1998 film version by Terrence Malick. And almost all of those ways are inferior, despite there being a number of important scenes that are the same in both films. Having said that, the 99 minute long, black and white film is still a pretty good film, despite its cheap B movie level special effects, and pretty rotten acting.... Solid. 916) The Loss Of Nameless Things/Film Review/Dan Schneider Of the many documentaries available for streaming on Netflix, very few are worth watching. Some have potentially interesting subject matter, but are ill wrought. Others are just paint by numbers formula documentaries with a political, religious, or philosophic agenda. Still others are just plain amateurish. Then there are documentaries like Bill Rose’s 2005 The Loss Of Nameless Things, about the rise and violent fall of a playwright and dramaturg whose critical and artistic star seemed to be waxing, before, like many clichéd artists of talent, he kyboshed it all and nearly killed himself. Instead, he ended up destroying his brain, his marriage, his past, and his future. The artist in question was Oakley ‘Tad’ Hall III, son of the fairly well known novelist and Academic, Oakley Hall II.... Excellent. 917) Blue Valentine/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Blue Valentine is a film designed to stir debate, but not in the usual silly political nor emotional sort of way. Its debate is of a deeper and more profound measure, and that is it asks which of the two main characters profiled in the film is in the wrong? The film does its best to be evenhanded, and for every tick of the ledger against one of the major characters, an equally incisive demerit can be handed out to the other. However, the biggest demerit I can give regarding this 2010 film, directed by Derek Cianfrance, about the turmoil of a mediocre marriage, is the critical cribbing that abounds in essays and reviews of the film, online and off. And that cribbing involves the almost near-universal claim that this film follows the end of, or the dissolution of, that marriage. Yet, nothing of the sort can be convincingly construed from the film’s contents nor its ending.... Good. 918) The Wheel Of Time/DVD Review/Dan Schneider What is it about middle aged white men and their sudden love of Orientalism (or jazz, for that matter)? Is it a midlife crisis? This thought came to me watching Werner Herzog’s 2003 documentary Wheel Of Time. The best thing I can say of the film is that it would make for a solid PBS film by a typical documentary director, but coming from a master of cinema, like Herzog, it’s a profound disappointment. Why? There simply is nothing more to this film than Herzog filming the mundane goings on at a trio of Buddhist festivals in 2002, and acting as if peasants trekking about a mountain (Mount Kailash in Tibet), monks painting mandalas with colored sand, and white Austrians rapt with Orientalism, were supposed to lend some deep insight into the cosmic goings on. At least, that is what can be taken from Herzog’s narration of the film.... Good. 919) Identification Of A Woman/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s much maligned 1982 color film, Identification Of A Woman (Identificazione Di Una Donna), for the first time was an odd experience. Although I normally dismiss poor reviews and approach films with an open mind, the fact is that I was fully expecting the film to be yet another old man film, like Ingmar Bergman’s disastrous Saraband, or Federico Fellini’s stale Intervista. And, given the fact that the film was about a film director in a state of confusion, naturally, Fellini’s overrated 8½ and Woody Allen’s criminally underrated Stardust Memories came to mind.... Excellent. 920) Kuroneko/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Japanese film director Kaneto Shindo’s 1968 black and white horror film, Kuroneko (Yabu No Naka No Kuroneko or The Black Cat From The Groves), is a film both in step with its era- especially with the horror films coming out of Italy, and those from England’s Hammer studios, yet it is also a much deeper and cinematic film. It got worldwide acclaim, upon its release, but didn’t get good stateside distribution due to the cancellation of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival where it was considered one of the strongest entries. In a sense, it shares much with another horror film released the same year, from Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, Hour Of The Wolf, wherein the dead return to prey on the living.... Good. 921) This Dust Of Words/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Full disclosure up front: I received a DVD screener copy of documentary filmmaker Bill Rose’s 2008 film, This Dust Of Words, after I contacted him hoping to interview him for my Dan Schneider Interviews series, after I had seen and been impressed with his first documentary, 2005’s The Loss Of Nameless Things, which documented a promising young playwright and director’s fall from prominence after a careless auto accident left him a wholly different person from the artist he once was. While a bit raw, the film used some dramatic innovations to make memorable a tale about a figure that, before his accident, was almost a stereotype of the solipsistic self-declared genius enfant terrible of art.... Excellent. 922) I Am Better Than Your Kids/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I recall a plate I made for my mom when I was in the third grade. It was for Valentine's Day, or maybe Mother's Day. I drew a house with trees alongside it, and flowers that stretched over the roof. Big hearts floated in the air, the butterflies had multi-colored wings, and were larger than the front door. There is a small date in the bottom corner - I believe from the year 1984. My mom still keeps this plate in her pantry, and every time I visit, I see it there. She keeps it near, but not on display.... Ok. 923) Ben-Hur/DVD Review/Dan Schneider *Ben-Hur* is one of those sword and sandal epics that, like The Ten Commandments or Spartacus, is a good film, well acted, well directed, but ultimately, is just a good excuse to eat junk food, for there’s nothing of any real depth to it. In many ways, it is sort of Part Two of Charlton Heston’s three part ‘religious epic’, which started with The Ten Commandments and ended with El Cid (a bit better of a film than the two others). The difference is that this is the least religious of the trio, despite its subtitle being A Story Of The Christ.... Good. 924) Capturing Reality/Film Review/Dan Schneider Pepita Ferrari’s 2008 documentary on the insights of the documentarian’s craft, Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary, is a solid effort. However, despite its nature, Capturing Reality never does what it celebrates in the works of others: it fails to innovate and explore every way that true stories can be told. In fact, Ferrari's 97-minute film consists of the talking heads of about 40 documentary filmmakers, interspersed with 150 or so scenes from their films.... Solid. 925) Amen/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras is not a poetic filmmaker. He is the exemplar of the political artist, except for one thing. He’s actually quite good at it. His career is filled with well made, if not visionary nor great, films, but, because the films do take some creative risks, and rarely condescend, they rise above the mountain of bad political art, in most fields, which can easily be reduced to a bumper sticker.... Solid. 926) Pickpocket/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Robert Bresson’s 1959 black and white film Pickpocket, after having seen his earlier Diary Of A Country Priest and later Mouchette and Au Hasard Balthazar, is to see a great artist in mid-flight to apex. Pickpocket is not a great film, for it suffers from some of the tics that worked against Diary Of A Country Priest (notably the habit of the character writing down what will happen in a journal, speaking it to the audience, then seeing the action play out visually), but it also presages some of the more visually fenestral moments of the two later films. Part of this is likely to the fact that the screenplay was written by Bresson alone, not adapted from another source. But, on the negative side, the fact that Bresson preferred to use amateur actors (whom he referred to as models or mannekins) worked against him big time in this film.... Good. 927) Hiroshima Mon Amour/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Alain Resnais’s 1959 black and white film Hiroshima Mon Amour is the third film of his that I’ve seen, after 1955’s mediocre documentary, Night And Fog, and 1961’s great and brilliant Last Year In Marienbad, and, unsurprisingly, the film lands somewhere in the middle, qualitatively. That said, it’s much closer to the later film, for only the somewhat melodramatic portrayal of its lead female character keeps it from reaching Last Year In Marienbad’s heights. And, in many ways, Hiroshima Mon Amour reaches dramatic and creative heights the later film cannot. Unfortunately, it also succumbs to weakness that the hermetic later film does not expose.... Excellent. 928) Color Me Kubrick/Film Review/Dan Schneider I watched my first pure Netflix fiction film, as opposed to documentary, and it was not good. I was going to watch In The Mood For Love, by Wong Kar-wai, but the picture could not include all of the subtitles at the bottom. The same was true with Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion, but that, too, had issues with the framing out of subtitles. Reported both problems, so that dampened the mood for foreign films. Then I came across a 2006 comedy and drama called Color Me Kubrick: A True...ish Story, which is about the noted 1990s impersonator of Stanley Kubrick- a gay man who used Kubrick’s own hermitry to his advantage, since few knew what the real Kubrick looked like. People may recall when New York Times drama critic, Frank Rich, wrote of his encounter with the imposter, Alan Conway, at a restaurant. This chance meeting led to Conway’s eventual downfall and exposure.... So-so. 929) Rock Prophecies/Film Review/Dan Schneider Relaxing at night, after a hard day at work and a few hours online, tending to emails, website modifications, correspondence, and creative things, amongst the best things to do, if too tired to read a book, is to watch a film. But, not a fictive film, but a documentary where, even if the film is not so good, you can at least learn some facts about the world at large. John Chester’s 2009 documentary, Rock Prophecies, is just such a film, as it follows the life and sudden fortune that befalls freelance rock photographer Robert M. Knight.... The man? 930) Esther's Inheritance/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Esther's Inheritance is now the fifth Sandor Marai novel I have read, and this also happens to be the total number of novels (as of this writing) that has been translated into English. All I can say is that I hope the translations continue, as I don’t think there’s much this man cannot do within his literary realm. Marai is one of those writers that focuses on the intricacies of human relationships — assessing and dissecting motives, presenting flaws and arguing for them, then arguing against them, and leaving some conclusions answered and others open. His writing is muscular and poetic, lean and intricate. His men are often too proud and his women too willing, yet the relationships are complex and the tension is taut.... Excellent. 931) The Mental Defective League/Book Review/Dan Schneider One of the more rewarding things about running a popular arts website is having tons of people begging for you to review their books, films, poems, etc. Naturally, with time being precious, a single critic could never review everything, especially if he, like me, is a creative artist, as well.... Good novel. 932) Sandhills Boy/Book Review/Dan Schneider On a recent trip to San Angelo, Texas, my wife and I were introduced to the name and persona of Western writer and Texas journalist Elmer Kelton. Well, introduced is a mite too passive a term, for in San Angelo- Kelton’s adopted hometown, one simply cannot avoid the man- his image is on billboards and sides of buildings, and his books take up whole shelves at local bookstores where the man, dead a few years, was a local legend and cottage industry. In one such store, the Cactus Book Shop, after talk and inquiries by me to the establishment’s owner, I decided to take the plunge.... Good. 933) Hunger/Film Review/Dan Schneider British film director Steve McQueen’s 2008 debut film, Hunger, is notable for many reasons: It is a great film, a great debut film, uses an innovative narrative structure, uses interesting cinematography in concert with its soundtrack, makes the best use of ambient sound to have the best non-musical soundtrack I’ve heard in a long time (if not ever), is the work of a black artist that is not obsessed with black only topics, and shows a maturity and grace that goes beyond even the first films of directors like David Gordon Green.... Great. 932) Woody Allen: A Documentary/Film Review/Dan Schneider I watched the recent PBS American Masters documentary on Woody Allen, Woody Allen: A Documentary, online, and it was surely a disappointment. It covered, in its three and a half hours, many of his films, his early life and break into show business, but it offered almost nothing of depth- oddly recapitulating the flaws of Barbara Kopple’s 1998 documentary on the same subject, Wild Man Blues. In a sense, the film gives the best representation of the critical cribbing that is killing most film criticism, by having vapid and flat out bad critics opine on subjects they do not understand, but it does little to give one a better understanding of the filmmaker, for the so-called talking head ‘experts’ it relies on are the dense and pretentious film professor Annette Insdorf, the lifeless hack film critic Richard Schickel, the ebulliently vacuous film critic Leonard Maltin, a film critic priest named Robert Lauder, who utters…well, nothing of value.... So-so. 933) Shame/Film Review/Dan Schneider Yes. Let that word simmer for a moment. It is the answer to a question I have long asked, in relation to the relentless puerilization of American cinema over the last 3 decades. The question was: will there be a next great adult filmmaker (in the John Cassavetes, not porno, mold) to come along? Well, he’s here, and his name is Steve McQueen, and I suspect that once his film career is at an end no one will be confusing him with the dead white American male film star of the 1960s and 1970s, for this black British director is now 2 for 2 in releasing great art to the masses.... Great. 934) Patton/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Franklin Schaffner’s 1970 film, Patton, is a film that falls just shy of overall greatness, unlike his previous film, Planet Of The Apes, even though both had excellent scripts, were unconventionally shot, had great acting performances, and were films that fundamentally altered their subgenres, biopics and science fiction. It is a film that, while it’s clearly not a great film, does not offer up an obvious reason. It starts off brilliantly, with Patton’s famous address to the film audience, and then, well, becomes, in many ways, a routine biopic- at least when it’s not about Patton directly, for George C. Scott owns the screen.... Good film. 935) 4 Queer Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched four documentaries on Netflix on the subject of homosexuality in America, and, as some may not expect, it was a mixed bag; not only qualitatively, but in the approach to the subject matter within. I state that some may not expect this because humans often lump each other into these vast categories from which escape is impossible: all Jews are- , all blacks must be- , all queers- , and so on. The four documentaries in question were, in order of viewing: Chris & Don: A Love Story; Black White + Gray: A Portrait Of Sam Wagstaff And Robert Mapplethorpe; Before Stonewall: The Making Of A Gay And Lesbian Community, and For The Bible Tells Me So.... Mixed bag. 936) 3 Vanity Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider It used to be that film documentaries were in the purview of professional film directors, editors, and producers, and that certain standards of artistic integrity and journalistic objectivity were observed. However, in this age of Netflix and instant streaming video, there has been the rise of the far too often noxious vanity documentary film, wherein the filmmaker essays a subject near and dear to them, with little import to anyone outside of whom they know, and try to propound that is artistically or culturally significant. On a recent morning I watched three such highly lauded films: Her Name Is Sabine, Exit Through The Gift Shop, and Buck.... So-so. 937) A Face In A Crowd/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Elia Kazan’s 1957 drama A Face in the Crowd, written by Kazan's On the Waterfront collaborator Budd Schulberg, is neither the forgotten masterpiece its champions claim it to be nor a minor work to be disregarded as it was for several decades. In fact, A Face in the Crowd is a good though clearly flawed effort, whose chief weaknesses are a screenplay that gets bogged down in soap-operatic didacticism and Andy Griffith's over-the-top film debut as Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes, a Will Rogers-like homespun philosopher who rises from drunken jailbird to national kingmaker.... Solid. 938) And So It Goes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I admit I have a love/hate relationships with writer biographies; for while I believe the creative work should stand on its own and that an artist’s personal issues should be no concern. I can understand why some might wish to know about the individual behind the creative process. Too often, however, readers rely on the biography as a means of interpreting the work (I saw it most in the case of Sylvia Plath where many teens and early twenty-somethings who frequent poetry blogs are incapable of understanding her poetry without knowing the details behind her suicide).... Solid. 939) And So It Goes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I admit I have a love/hate relationships with writer biographies, for while I believe the creative work should stand on its own and that an artist’s personal issues should be no concern, I can understand why some might wish to know about the individual behind the creative process. Too often, however, readers rely on the biography as a means of interpreting the work (I saw it most in the case of Sylvia Plath where many teens and early twentysomethings who frequent poetry blogs are incapable of understanding her poetry without knowing the details behind her suicide).... Ok. 940) 3 Biographical Documentaries/Dan Schneider I recently watched three biographical documentaries. Two of them were vanity documentaries on men of little accomplishment and artistic skill, while the other one was a near-great political documentary on one of the most important American heroes of the last fifty years. The three films were, in order of viewing, Bill Cunningham: New York; The Most Dangerous Man In America, and The Cats Of Mirikitani.... Hit and miss. 941) Howard Gardner/Extraordinary Minds/Dan Schneider In reviewing the five part television series, Extraordinary Minds, from 2010, a series of 52 minute long interviews conducted by Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist, let me return to an earlier point in time. Some years ago, in the mid to late 1990s, I happened across a book by Gardner, who had pioneered the idea that there are multiple intelligences- seven he initially defined, then expanded to eight, beyond that measured on standard IQ tests. This theory, propounded in 1993’s Multiple Intelligences, was embroidered upon in the book I read, titled Extraordinary Minds, published in 1998, which detailed the workings of four historical figures.... Taking it all down. 942) The Emperor Jones/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Emperor Jones, is one of those works that is very easy to misconstrue as simply racist or simple-minded Freudianism. It’s neither, but the 1933 film adaptation of said play, starring Paul Robeson in the role of Brutus Jones, suffers from many of the same misconceptions, as well as a few of its own, due to the breaks the film makes from its source material- both pro and con. And these breaks owe all of their power to the screenplay by DuBose Heyward, and the interpretation of it by film director Dudley Murphy, one of the earliest ‘lost’ avant-garde filmmakers, who films it all in a very quick, modern style, as opposed to the then dominant style of extended master shots.... Interesting. 943) Jules And Jim/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Francois Truffaut’s films have never been particularly deep, and his black and white 1962 ‘masterpiece,’ Jules And Jim, is no exception to that claim. Obviously, the quotation marks around the term declare that, no, it’s not really a masterpiece, but in researching old criticism of the film it’s amazing how often this term was bandied about without any support for its claim. Having said that, and given the rather fallow and overrated ground that is the Truffaut soil, I can attest that, of the handful of films of his I have seen, Jules And Jim is the best of the lot. But, had he not first gnawed his teeth at the Cahiers Du Cinema rag.... Solid. 944) Gomorrah/Film Review/Dan Schneider There is a difference between realistic films, such as those made by John Cassavetes, and cinema verité, or films that try to approximate realism. Realistic films know they are fiction, but nonetheless mimic reality for the sake of art, whereas cinema verité attempts to fool viewers into thinking it is real. Matteo Garrone’s 2008, 137 minute long gangster film, Gomorrah, is the latter sort of film.... Solid. 945) Giant/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director George Stevens’ 1956 film Giant is one of those grandiose soap operas that were popular back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, but one which has not aged particularly well. Yes, it did, and still does, offer more than the similar epic, Gone With The Wind, but Giant still lacks heft, despite its immense length (200 minutes) and large subject matter (the rise of Texas as an economic powerhouse in the early 20th Century). Having said that, the film has no glaring bad points, just as it has no particular high points one might call great. This includes the hit and miss acting by the film’s trio.... Solid. 946) The Dust Of Time/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There is a phrase that I came up with to describe when critics, especially of film, write reviews or essays about a film they claim to have seen yet feel no obligation to show any fealty to the images and actions depicted onscreen, and it is called critical cribbing. The most recent example of it that has proliferated — at least in a work of a director worth arguing over — is in Theo Angelopoulos’s last completed film, before his accidental death earlier this year, 2008’s Trilogy: The Dust Of Time, the second of a now never to be completed tercet of films on existence and the Greek Experience of the 20th Century. In looking over the sparse number of reviews online (Rotten Tomatoes’ link for the film even references a documentary on Dust, not this film!) there is a noxious meme that is repeated, and likely started from Angelopoulos’s own PR for the film, since it appears on the film’s website.... Disappointing final film. 947) Charles Johnson/Dan Schneider Interview 1/Dan Schneider In the last 59 years, I’ve been a professional cartoonist, producing two published collections, Black Humor in 1970 and Half-Past Nation Time in 1972, over 1,000 cartoons and illustrations in print, most recently one in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to accompany my essay on literature and literacy; and I created, hosted and co-produced in 1970 an early PBS how-to-draw series, “Charlie’s Pad,” which ran for about a decade. I’m a fiction-writer, with four published novels and three short story collections.... The legendary interview that started the phenomenon. 948) Daniel Dennett/Dan Schneider Interview 2/Dan Schneider I’m a philosopher, and I’ve written books on the Big Questions: consciousness, evolution, free will, moral responsibility, and even the meaning of life, and most recently, religion as a natural phenomenon. But my approach is unlike that of most philosophers. I’ve always thought that philosophers who attempted to address these issues without first finding out what the relevant sciences could offer in the way of illumination were being intellectually irresponsible. And in the process of mining the sciences for help with the philosophy, I’ve found that scientists could often use my philosophical help.... Dennett's obtuseness and limited purview mar what could have been a great interview. 949) Little Caesar/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Little Caesar is a good example of a film that is historically important, but that has dated very poorly. Tony Gaudio's camera work is mediocre, Warner Bros. musical director Erno Rapee's spare soundtrack is garbled, and the acting is for the most part wooden. Even Edward G. Robinson, who became a star in this role, is good — but hardly great.... Solid. 950) The Terror Of Tiny Town/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Terror Of Tiny Town is a 1938 dwarf B film (Black and white) that is often spoken of in the same terms as two other films with dwarves in them- Tod Browning’s 1931 film, Freaks, and Werner Herzog’s 1970 film Even Dwarfs Started Small, because it is, at its heart, an exploitation film- a typical 1930s B film Western, except that it boasts a cast of midgets.... Solid. 951) The Spirit Of The Beehive/Film Review/Dan Schneider Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice is not that his debut feature film, 1973’s The Spirit Of The Beehive (El Espíritu De La Colmena) is a great piece of cinema- far better than anything by Luis Bunuel, but that it is only one of three feature films he has made in his career, and only one of two fiction films, thus giving him the honor of being the lone major filmmaker who is in a position to call American film titan Terence Malick ‘prolific.’ That stated, The Spirit Of The Beehive is a masterful film that deals with the inner lives of children, and is the only major film I have ever seen that does so in such a great fashion. The only two other films that come close are both B films, 1969’s Godzilla's Revenge and 1944’s The Curse Of The Cat People.... Great. 952) The War Of The Worlds (CD)/DVD Review/Dan Schneider While perusing through the DVD racks at a local Half Price Books I came across a package with two DVDs and a bonus CD, called An Adaptation Of H.G. Wells’ Classic The War Of The Worlds. Thinking it was a version of the classic sci fi film from the 1950s, I bought it at its cheap price. But it was not the old film. Rather it was from a company called Madacy Home Video, and consisted of some faux newscasts, some documentaries, and a CD of the original 1938 broadcasts of the Mercury Theatre’s radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds.... Bad. 953) Sex & Marriage/2 Reviews/Dan Schneider Watching documentaries on Netflix can be engaging yet frustrating. On a single afternoon I watched a 2009 Discovery Channel documentary, called The Science Of Sex Appeal, which offered insights into the whys and wherefores of its titular subject matter, then watched a 2008 theatrical documentary film, Phyllis And Harold, which was the epitome of the noxious brand of film I call the vanity documentary, wherein a filmmaker makes a film about themselves or someone they know, of little import to anyone outside of whom they know, and try to propound it is artistically or culturally significant.... Solid. 954) Pete Hamill/Dan Schneider Interview 3/Dan Schneider That’s almost impossible to do in any brief way. I’m a son of immigrants (Catholics from Northern Ireland). I’m the oldest of their seven children. I’ve been a professional writer since June 1, 1960, when I first went to work as a newspaperman. I’ve published 20 books, including ten novels. I’ve covered wars and politics and murders and sports. Stating a goal would sound pompous, and I have no slogan posted above my desk. As any writer grows older the goals are always shifting. But I suppose that in my journalism and my fiction, I’ve tried hard to make the world more human.... A classic! 955) Slaughterhouse-Five/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes luck is better than skill, as the apothegm bemoans. Film director George Roy Hill likely would have agreed with this sentiment, given the arc of his career. Hill was basically a journeyman director of television who got a lucky break into the film industry, then mined a decent career in that field, despite, at best, yeoman’s level work, in terms of visuals, narrative, and overall directorial skill with actors and scripts. Now, years after his death, his name is best recalled for films like 1982’s The World According To Garp, 1973’s The Sting, or 1969’s Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.... Underrated. 956) Pleasures Of The Flesh/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The two most obvious influences on Nagisa Oshima’s 1965 color film, Pleasures Of The Flesh (Etsuraku), are not those first posited upon its release: soft core Japanese porno films, called pink films, nor action thrillers (usually yakuza/gangster films). No, in retrospect the clear influences seem to have been Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime And Punishment and Rod Serling’s sci fi anthology television series The Twilight Zone. The former because of its theme, and the latter because of the film’s structure and execution.... Good. 957) Steven Pinker/Dan Schneider Interview 4/Dan Schneider Thanks, Dan. I was born in 1954 in the Jewish Anglophone community of Montreal. After getting a bachelor’s in experimental psychology at McGill, I’ve spent most of my life bouncing between Harvard and MIT, with a few intervals in California (Stanford and Santa Barbara). My initial research was in visual cognition – mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention. But starting in graduate school I cultivated an interest in language, particularly language development in children, which eventually took over my research. I’ve written many experimental papers in language and visual cognition, and, in the 1980s, two highly technical books on language. The first outlined a theory.... The best interview ever recorded, till that time. 958) West Of Brooklyn/DVD REview/Dan Schneider There are many ways to learn the art of constructing a compelling narrative: One can read classic novels and plays; one can watch great films and television shows; one can read ancient Greek dramas or watch professional wrestling; and one can even watch serial fiction: From old time movie serials to modern soap operas. I have done all of these things, and the last thing on this list is how I found out about the 97 minute long film, West of Brooklyn, written, produced, and starring Ronnie Marmo.... Good film. 959) 2 Rock Films/The Beatles-Led Zeppelin/Film Reviews Growing up, the rock heavens were dominated by four bands from Britain: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. The Who, and Led Zeppelin. In fact, so dominant were this quartet on rock stations of the late 1960s and 1970s that the foursome was simply known as Beatles/Stones/Zeppelin/Who and the only real argument was as to how they ranked, relative to each other. The Stones were always trying to catch up to the Beatles, in terms of fame in the wake of the Beatles, but then Led Zeppelin came along and pretty much buried everyone else, becoming to the 1970s what the Beatles were to the prior decade. In my pantheon, I always found the Beatles wildly overrated, especially at the expense of bands their equal or superiors, such as the Zombies, the Yardbirds, Cream, and even the Hollies, not to mention great American acts like the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane. Nonetheless, as I aged, I found that, in going against the flow, I’d underrated the Beatles, and currently would rank the quartet, in descending order, as Led Zeppelin. The Who, The Beatles, and the Stones bringing up the rear.... Solid. 960) Pickpocket/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Robert Bresson’s 1959 black and white film Pickpocket, after having seen his earlier Diary Of A Country Priest and later Mouchette and Au Hasard Balthazar, is to see a great artist in mid-flight to apex. Pickpocket is not a great film, for it suffers from some of the tics that worked against Diary Of A Country Priest (notably the habit of the character writing down what will happen in a journal, speaking it to the audience, then seeing the action play out visually), but it also presages some of the more visually fenestral moments of the two later films. Part of this is likely to the fact that the screenplay was written by Bresson.... Good. 961) 3 Films/Werner Herzog/Dan Schneider I recently streamed and watched three recent films by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog. The first was a fictive film- My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?- which, despite my expectations and others’ reviews, turned out to be the best fictive film Herzog’s done since the end of his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, and the other two were highly lauded documentaries (a form Herzog has excelled in over his half century long career)- Cave Of Forgotten Dreams and Into The Abyss- which were, oddly, not nearly as good as the criticism received.... So-so. 962) Lilyhammer/TV Review/Dan Schneider Northern Exposure meets The Sopranos! This sentence was uttered at some time during the pitch for Netflix’s first foray into original television programming, and the result is a pretty good first season of a Mafia comedy (not dramady) called Lilyhammer. The premise is that a New York City Mob Underboss finds himself aced out of a top slot by a rival, and takes it on the lam to the Feds, after his rival tries and fails to whack him. In return for testifying, Frank ‘The Fixer’ Tagliano (Steven Van Zandt- of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band infamy and The Sopranos) requests that his Federal Witness Protection people relocate him.... Solid. 963) Expelled From Eden/Book Review/Dan Schneider Fans of David Foster Wallace, relax! Your fair haired (and still dead) boy is still the most terrible, overpraised, overhyped, PoMo, omnibustial critic’s darling of a hack writer out there. Having read Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader, edited by Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson, I can safely say that Vollmann is merely a bad- nay, a very bad writer, but not a terrible one, for, unlike Wallace, Vollmann is at least capable of writing solid, passable prose in journalistic articles, even as his fictive prose is dull, and laden with stereotypes and stale tropes. Unlike Wallace (or James Frey or Dave Eggers- one of Vollmann’s publishers, for that matter), Vollmann’s paragraphs are not usually drenched in multiple naked clichés. That stated, it’s simply not good, and Vollmann’s sciolistic mind is, like William Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon before him, merely one which appends all sorts of observations together, with no grace nor facility, so that his ‘admirers’ can loftily claim and declaim that Vollmann is a ‘genius,’ with a mind that roams far and wide.... Shit! 964) 6 Food Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched six documentaries on Netflix detailing the nature and causes of the poor eating habits of the American public: Fed Up!; Food Matters; Food, Inc.; The Future Of Food; Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead; and Killer At Large: Why Obesity Is America’s Greatest Threat.... Mixed bag. 965) James Emanuel/Dan Schneider Interview 5/Dan Schneider This is the first time I am writing a brief Introduction to one of my interviews. This is because, of the first five interviewees: novelist Charles Johnson, philosopher Daniel Dennett, novelist/journalist Pete Hamill, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, and poet James Emanuel, Emanuel is clearly the least currently known. Partly this is due to his being a poet, that most demanding art that has more current practitioners than readers. But, he has also been oddly neglected- a situation I have started the ball rolling to change.... A classic Introduction to 'The Man.' 966) Mad Men/TV Review/Dan Schneider Recently, the AMC cable network finished airing the fifth season of their highly acclaimed advertising agency soap opera, set in the 1960s, called Mad Men (industry slang for the men who work on Madison Avenue, in Manhattan). I’ve yet to watch that season, as I lack cable tv, but, over the last few weeks watched the first four seasons (covering about 5½ years chronologically- 1960-65) on Netflix, due to the laudatory comments I’ve heard from others (the fifth season should be due soon for streaming). The good news is that it is, indeed, a well written and well acted show, for the most part. The bad news is, contra to most claims, it is not a great nor culturally significant television show.... Good stuff. 967) The Conjure Man-Fiction/Book Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently read two novels, unpublished by major houses, from two writers who share commonalities, in that neither one’s skills nor work are as good as they effusively claim, and that neither writer is actually primarily practicing the very sort of fiction they claim. I was thrust into the twenty odd year quest of Peter Damian Bellis to get his so-called Magical Realism novel, The Conjure Man, published when, as detailed here, I got a series of increasingly bizarre, self-laudatory, and philosophically impoverished, emails from the man declaiming that the book, written in the early 1990s, which he has spent the better part of two decades trying to get published at a big house, and which did get published, in 2010, by a de facto subsidy/self publishing press called River Boat Books- a press which, despite claiming to be in business since 1996, has only four titles to its credit, with two being from Bellis, as the Great American Novel.... Take a pass. 968) Tucker: The Man And His Dream/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film, Tucker: The Man And His Dream, was like watching a bit better version of the more recent Greg Kinnear film, Flash Of Genius. The main difference is that the later film was about how corporate America crushed a man who had an invention to improve a small part of the standard automobile, in the 1960s, whereas Tucker: The Man And His Dream is about how corporate America crushed a man whose invention was a better whole automobile. But, while the Coppola film is better than its latter day cinematic soulmate, it’s still nowhere near a great film, for it lacks a grand idea, and it delves into nothing particularly deep; not even the tried and true ‘politics is a form of organized crime’ gambit.... Solid. 969) She Gods Of Shark Reef/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films are so bad they are good. Think Plan 9 From Outer Space. Other films are so bad they are really bad. Think any film directed by Steven Spielberg. Others are bad, but weird, in a way that makes them difficult to classify, and virtually critic-proof. Case in point is B film legend Roger Corman’s 1958 color classic, She Gods Of Shark Reef. Ok, classic may be too strong a word for the 62 minute film. For the title? Yes. But the film? Eh. What’s bizarre is that this film, to be found in the 50 DVD pack from Treeline Films, is listed as a Sci Fi Classic. Ok? Except it’s not science fiction. It’s not even fantasy. It’s not even a thriller, so to speak.... Bad. 970) Once Upon A Time In Anatolia/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ceylan’s latest film, 2011’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da), is involving yet existential, crafted yet natural, sublime yet base, based on a true story yet utterly mythic, and a few other polarities that I think readers of this essay will prefer to discover for themselves. That stated, let me tell you what this film is not, despite the gush of praise from critics who have praised it, mindlessly critically cribbing from each other, despite not even remotely understanding the very film they praise. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is not a police procedural film, nor is it an homage nor riff on Sergio Leone’s cinema.... Great. 971) Jack Horner/Dan Schneider Interview 6/Dan Schneider My general philosophy on life is that it is the result and evolution of promiscuous chemicals, and it would be hard to live without. My general philosophy of science is that the scientific process is the only avenue to understand anything of interest. My general philosophy of the cosmos is that it’s really big, and old, and probably started with an infinitesimal, quiet thump.... A second dig. 972) The Turin Horse/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I often wonder what occurs to an artist when their work is willfully misinterpreted by stolid critics, or anyone, for that matter? I write this being in a position to know the answer, at least for myself, because, aside from being a critic of art, film, literature, and other things, I am also an artist, writer, and poet. But, the stereotype that dogs most artists- that of the immature, self-centered , irrational, mentally ill (or nearly so) person does not apply in my case, and from everything I’ve ever read or seen of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, he likely does not fall into that trap either.... Great end? 973) Underworld/Book Review/Dan Schneider Having heard the hype, for years, about Don DeLillo’s long 1997 novel, Underworld, and its being a Postmodern ‘masterpiece,’ I was thinking the work would be something in the unreadably puerile vein of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, perhaps involving parodies of the sort of goombahs from a bad Martin Scorsese gangster film. Were that the case I would have started this essay with something along the lines of: Support the arts- do NOT buy this book! Thankfully, it was not. In fact, the book is not even, in any remote sense, a Postmodern novel, as the only thing about it that can even remotely be called Postmodern is that it is told in a non-linear fashion.... Promise fizzles. 974) The Corrections/Book Review/Dan Schneider Having read Jonathan Franzen’s melodramatic 2001 novel, The Corrections, after having recently read Postmodern tripe by William Vollmann, Thomas Pynchon, and so-called Postmodern-cum-classic prose by Don DeLillo, I wondered how in the hell anyone could think that this book was good, much less great. Yes, Franzen can hold a narrative, unlike Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, or that ilk, but it is wholly shorn of depth, gets worse as it goes- being a merely competently written melodrama, larded with stereotypes of WASPs and their WASPy pseudo-problems that morphs into a cliché-ridden sub-soap opera that is almost as bad, in its subgenre, as anything put forth by the writers named above. Franzen is wholly in the T.C Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates camp of being able to craft a narrative structure, but not one of any depth, novelty, nor interest.... A bad soap opera. 975) 5 Wackos/Documentary Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched a run of five biographical documentaries on Netflix streaming video that were about, well, assorted wacky folks in the arts and sciences. The five films were Scott Walker: 30 Century Man; Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey; Transcendent Man; Limelight; and Lenny Bruce: Without Tears.... Off the beam. 976) Gravity's Rainbow/Book Review/Dan Schneider Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 quasi-sci fi novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (named after the trajectory of German V-2 rockets), is not remotely a good novel, and, in places, the 300,000+ word book is a horrible novel, on a par with David Foster Wallace’s ridiculously bad sci fi novel Infinite Jest (in fact, that hack and his horrors, actually were spawned by this earlier monstrosity) and James Joyce’s pointless and ridiculously bad Finnegans Wake. It crests a little bit higher than those works because it ascends to intellectual coherence, if nothing else, on a few occasions, and this is not what most Postmodern novels even seem to strive for.... Terrible. 977) The Frantic Force/Book Review/Dan Schneider If I had the money and time to be self-employed, or live off of my own writing, I might have the time to indulge in all the partaking of art I am proffered. From countless small time publishers offering me free copies- print and cyber- of their latest releases, to almost as many small time film sites and companies that somehow my name and email addresses somehow, and inevitably, make their way onto. Add to that the endless submissions of essays and poems- especially from the Indian Subcontinent which, in almost mind-boggling fashion, seems to mint a quarter million or more English language and literature MFAs and PhDs per year, and to whom my name, and my website, Cosmoetica, invariably end up as one of the top targets.... Solid. 978) 3 Political Documentaries/Reviews/Dan Schneider The first of the documentaries I watched was by Alex Gibney, who previously wrought the superb Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, in 2005. In 2010 he released another great documentary on American capitalism, called Casino Jack And The United States Of Money, which followed the life and legacy of Republican lobbyist and organized criminal Jack Abramoff, whose filthy dealings extended from sweatshop owners in Saipan to perpetrating frauds on casinos run by Indian tribes, to involvement in a hit on a business rival ordered by members of New York’s Gambino crime family, to supporting anti-abortion Christian Fundamentalists.... Good. 979) Repulsion/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Narrative is immanent in art. One simply cannot extricate it from any art form. One cannot dispose of narrative, only retard it. Often when one reads an essay about or review of a work of art, and the reviewer cannot get the art work, he will claim it has no narrative. If the work of art is bad it will have a narrative, merely a poor one. But a poor narrative is not a lack of narrative. If the work of art is great, and the reviewer does not get it, he will claim it has disposed of narrative. But it will have a narrative, and a great one; but one that pushes the boundaries of what narrative is.... Great. 980) Rocco And His Brothers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are great films that revel in poesy and their artiness- think the canons of Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, and there are films, and then there are films that achieve greatness via their being great ‘prose.’ Such a film is Luchino Visconti’s 1960, 176 minute long, black and white film Rocco And His Brothers (Rocco E I Suoi Fratelli), easily the best of the handful of Visconti films I’ve seen, and in the first rank of prose masterpieces on film. Its greatness is not only in its great parts, but in its lesser facets, too. There is not only a realism that flows from the roots of the Italian Neo-Realism born in the 1940s.... Great. 981) Phillip Lopate/Dan Schneider Interview 7/Dan Schneider Although I’m known primarily as a personal essayist, all my work is informed by a reflective, analytical spirit, and aims for a sense of humor and honesty. There is at times a sardonic, ironic, curmudgeonly tone to it, but I am really going after wisdom and compassion. Beyond that, I’m very identified with cities and an urban perspective.... The first bizarre interview. 982) 2 Adventurer Documentaries/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched two documentary films on adventurers, a 2010 film called The Wildest Dream: Conquest Of Everest, directed by Anthony Geffen, and 2008’s Academy Award Winning Best Documentary, James Marsh’s Man On Wire. It was one of those synchronicities that just happened while trolling about Netflix. Only in retrospect did I make a connection between the themes of the two films. Not only were they about adventurers, but in the former film, the film’s subject failed in his quest to be the first man to scale Mount Everest, yet is lauded in death, while, in the latter film, the film’s subject succeeded.... Daring the fates. 983) White Heat/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Raoul Walsh’s 1949 black and white gangster film, White Heat, is often mislabeled a film noir, but it’s clearly nothing of the kind. Films noir have ambiguous anti-heroes and the things that they engage in is ethically shady, not out and out evil. This certainly does not describe Walsh’s film, featuring Jimmy Cagney as Arthur ‘Cody’ Jarrett, a thinly disguised Arthur ‘Doc’ Barker, the notorious gangster from the 1930s. Jarrett has little shading; he’s pure evil, with a sadistic streak, and all the things he is involve din are likewise pure evil. He’s a murderer and psychopath, but he’s not psychotic.... Mama Mia! 984) Chaplin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Every so often, when I look up the historical critical context of a film, I am surprised by what I find. Most often I see films that are schlock get undue praise, but since most of anything in life is bad (lest we’d not notice the good). This is not unusual. Then there are good or great films that are severely dissed. Almost every Stanley Kubrick film, post-1970, falls into this category. But, then there are films which are nice little films, not particularly bad, but also nowhere near great, that just elicit an off reaction from critics. Such a film is Richard Attenborough’s 1992 film, Chaplin.... Solid. 985) Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol/Television Review/Dan Schneider The best ever. Let those words penetrate. I state them in reference to the titular work under review and, mind you, I have seen every film and telefilm ‘straight’ version of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, plus almost every humorous take on it- be it spoof or satire, from lame musical adaptations to modernized updates to the brilliant reworking of the tale in the first season of the great American television sitcom, The Odd Couple. But, the animated Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol is the best version ever of the tale.... The best ever. 986) Desmond Morris/Dan Schneider Interview 8/Dan Schneider I was a child during World War Two and grew up viewing adult humans as rather disgusting - people whose main goal in life was to kill one another. Worse still, I spent the first part of World War Two watching my father suffering from wounds he had received in the First World War. I was fourteen when he finally died and at that age I decided, in my passionate, juvenile way, that all authorities, all governments, all religious leaders and all political leaders were the scum that floated to the top of society. I had to rebel, but I was a good little boy, well brought up by loving parents, and my rebellion could not be a destructive one - after all I was rebelling against mass violence and hatred, so my rebellion had to be of some other, more positive kind. I had two great interests, art and animals.... A return to form. 987) Smash His Camera/Film Review/Dan Schneider One of the most unintendedly hilarious arcs of Leon Gast’s 2010 bio-documentary of New York paparazzo Ron Galella, Smash His Camera, regards opinions about his actual ‘art,’ since the 87 minute film reveals that many of the more than 3 million images he’s collected in a fifty year career are now residing inside the walls of some of the more prestigious art galleries of the world. The debate is seen in roundtable amongst fellow photographers- some whom are photojournalists like Galella and others who fall more into the Diane Arbus art photographer side. While both sides make points, to the average viewer one has to come down emphatically on the side of Galella when Chuck Close sneers at Galella’s work.... Eh. 988) Rape And Revisionism In Soap Operas/Essay/Dan Schneider As an artist, writer, and critic of both, I have had a long involvement with, what for lack of a better term, can be called serial fiction, in all its forms across varied media. As a young child, I read comic books, which, as the successor to comic strips, were the most popular serial fiction of the first third of the 20^th Century. Before comic strips, the serialized novel, most popularized by 19^th Century titans like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, made them into the closest thing to today’s film and music celebrities.... Nasty. 989) Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?/DVD Review/Dan Schneider What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? is one of those films that almost everybody has a wrong opinion of, from critic to fan to hater. First, it’s simply not a Grand Guignol film. Why? It simply does not play out on a large enough scale. Second, it’s not really a camp film. Some of the later films its two stars and rivals, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, were in were definitely camp, but not this film. It does, however, have a low budget film feel, in a very good way, because it deglamorizes its two stars, and thus humanizes them, removing them from their earlier career modes as screen sirens. Third, there are a few other misconceptions about the film, but I’ll pick up those threads as this essay perdures.... Good. 990) Negativity/MFA Mafia/Dan Schneider Not long ago a reader of my website let me know of a 2008 essay from The Kenyon Review, simply titled No. Its writer is a career Academic named Brian Doyle, whose CV is gratuitously displayed below the article: Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He is the author, he thinks (some of them are small and quick and hard to see in the underbrush), of thirteen books of essays, poems, nonfiction, and fiction, notably the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River. Among the peculiar honors which have come his way and confused him utterly is the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which still makes him laugh, although he got a free trip to New York City out of that, with a terrific dinner in a great jazz club, that was fun.... Suck me. 991) The Story Of Film/An Odyssey/Dan Schneider I recently got through watching a 15 part, 900 minute long 2011 documentary on cinema titled The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, directed and narrated by Irish film critic and historian Mark Cousins, on Netflix, based upon his book of the same name. As might be expected of such a large undertaking, the film has highs and lows. The highs are quite good, but the lows are equally glaring, making the overall project a worthwhile, albeit often draining and droning film series.... Solid. 992) The MFA Mafia/And Their Apologists/Dan Schneider Recently, film critic Roger Ebert, who has a distressing habit of 3-4 times per year, swallowing his own foot on his Chicago Sun-Times blog, posted a piece titled Books Do Furnish A Mind, wherein he bemoaned the state of reading in our republic, and pinned the blame on everything other than the biggest cause of the problem- the fact that MFA writing programs have, since their inception after World War Two, tried to commmoditize writing to the point of becoming assembly lines churning out bad, soulless writers and books that, duh?, no one actively chooses to read, not even the ever diminishing clique of bad MFA writers, churned out by the tens of thousands each year.... Yawn. 993) Bang The Drum Slowly (1956)/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I had been a fan of the old baseball film, Bang The Drum Slowly, which came out in 1973, for many years. It was not a great film, but it entertained, and was one of the early pre-The Godfather films that showcased the talents of a young Robert De Niro. But, it certainly wasn’t great cinema, more or less a baseball version of the football melodrama Brian’s Song, or a non-musical, more dour version of Damn Yankees! It followed a year or so in the life of a dying backup catcher for a pro baseball team, the New York Mammoths, obviously modeled after the New York Yankees. While working my way through The Criterion Collection’s DVD set called The Golden Age Of Television I came upon the fifth entry in the series.... Solid. 994) Dad's In Heaven With Nixon/Film Review/Dan Schneider I’ve seen enough documentaries, especially those that regularly stream on Netflix, to recognize the hallmarks of what I can only label “vanity documentaries,” in the manner that the term vanity has been applied to subsidy presses. By this I mean that the filmmaker is an amateur — often wealthy, with too much time on their hands, who decides to make a film on some member of their family, or on some so called “tragedy” that has befallen the clan. Yet, none of the people in these films has any achievements of note, nor are their tragedies anything that most of the viewers of the film will not have experienced, and many will have experienced far worse. Most of these films never see the inside of a movie theater.... Bad. 995) 4 Scandalous Films/Film Reviews/Dan Schneider I recently watched four documentaries involving criminal scandals of assorted varieties, and each film had pros and cons. The four documentaries under examination are Trudell; The Eyes Of Tammy Faye; Mario’s Story, and Inside Deep Throat.... Ok. 996) Almanac Of Fall/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having already seen Bela Tarr’s later film canon, it was an interesting excursion back in time, to see his 1984 color (yes, a color film from Tarr!) film, Almanac Of Fall (Öszi Almanach). It’s not a great film, and is claimed to be the link between his earliest ‘realist’ films and his later black and white psycho-films, but it is an interesting film, and well worth a watch; even if one will not be pounded by the depths of films like Satantango or Werckmeister Harmonies.... Good. 997) Two Singer Documentaries/Review/Dan Schneider One might think that if one did a documentary on a subject that was good, that the resulting documentary would, likewise, be good, or better. But, this is not usually the case. And watching these two documentaries on musicians- Joni Mitchell: Woman Of Heart and Mind and Glenn Tilbrook: One For The Road- is a good instruction on why this is so.... Mediocre. 998) Female Athletics/Film Review/Dan Schneider I recently streamed three Netflix documentary films that dealt with females in dubious sporting events. These three films were Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies Of Wrestling; Blood On The Flat Track: The Rise Of The Rat City Roller Girls; and Brutal Beauty: Tales Of The Rose City Rollers.... Solid. 999) The Death Of Roger Ebert/Essay/Dan Schneider I went to sleep one afternoon (I usually work overnights), being informed that film critic Roger Ebert’s cancer had returned, and woke up that evening to learn that the man had just died. That day, April 4^th of 2013, is now almost a month gone, and in the interim, some of my fans and readers have suggested (some more strongly than others) that I needed to chime in my own two cents on the man, his life, his criticism, etc., and the reason for this is that they feel that since the man wrote a lengthy 2009 article on me, on his highly trafficked blog.... Rest in Peace, Roger! 1000) The Blackboard Jungle/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Any film that stars Sidney Poitier is going to rise and fall on the basis of his presence. He is one of those classic actors, like a Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy, or John Wayne, that simply captures the attention of an audience, for good or ill. Oftentimes its for the good, but in this film it’s not for the ill, simply for the pointless..... Solid. Cosmoetica Links Schneider Online Schneider Online2 Schneider Online3


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