Bolt

Byron Howard, Chris Williams, 2008 (7.8*)
Another enjoyable Pixar-Disney animated film, with some incredibly realistic graphics, at least the landscape portions (the humans look a little stiff and plastic). Bolt is a small Swiss shepherd who is rescued from an animal shelter in the beginning, when he is being appropriately cute with a rubber carrot toy. His person, as he calls her, is a little girl named Penny.

The story inexplicably then skips forward five years, at a point when Bolt and Penny are the stars of a kids tv show, in which Bolt rescues Penny from various perilous situation, most involving a green-eyed man (voiced by veteran actor Malcolm MacDowell).

The only problem with Bolt is that in order to make the show work, he has been fooled into thinking that Penny is really in danger, he has no idea that it's all a TV show, and everything is make believe. Mistaking Penny to be really in danger while he's trapped in his studio trailer, he manages to escape and immediately gets packed up and shipped away.

He runs into an alley cat named Mittens (Susie Essman, perhaps the weakest cast member - I'd have rather heard a pro comedienne like Joan Cusask in this role), and a hilarious hamster in a running ball, named Rhino.

Perhaps the lead roles could have been better cast. John Travolta is just ok as Bolt, he was actually funnier in real action comedies like Get Shorty. Miley Cyrus was just ok as Penny, no doubt selected for her young fan base.

Filmed just after The Incredibles, this has a lot of similar action, but the screenplay isn't quite as good, but it was certainly more entertaining to me than Up, which was Pixar's worst film to date to me, losing their best character in the first 10 minutes, and sticking us with two unlikeable characters for the rest of the film.

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Millennium Mambo

Hsiao-hsien Hou, Taiwan, 2001 (7.7*)
If you're a fan of the films of Hou or Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, (best of which are Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love) or like me, you just like watching Taiwanese beauty Shu Qi (Hsu Chi, photo below) just walk around, you'll enjoy this film of Hou's.

Hou gives us a snapshot of the life of aimless Vicky, who does little more than hang around night clubs. She reflects back in the beginning of this on her relationship ten years earlier with Hau-Hau, a jealous house rock dj, who generally mistreats or ignores her and wants her to account for her time away from him or phone calls to others. Whenever they break up, he starts following her around again. We also see Vicky later in Japan, with a different man.

This is a not like a typical western film romance: boy meets girl, they have a relationship, then they (a) get married, or (b) part ways, end of film.. This is a segment of Vicky's life that covers roughly a decade, and we see scenes from each portion to give us a picture of her overall lifestyle. Much of the film is linked or propelled by electronic trance music, and it all fits together to create a very modern style, to me, reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai.

Director Hou said in an interview that he wanted to show Taiwan night life and incorporate the trance music of Lim Giong (who co-wrote the music), so he used all Taiwanese actors. On the dvd, I like the longer, deleted "In Japan" segment that gives Shu some leeway as an actress to show more emotion than in the rest of the film, where she seems mostly just angered by life circumstances. She is certainly worth watching, as are all the films of Hou. He's definitely an artist, usually bringing visual poetry to the simplest of stories.

Winner of 6 awards, including a technical prize at Cannes

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Flowers of Shanghai

Hsiao-hsien Hou, Taiwan, 1998 (7.8*)
Without a lot of action, Hou paints a picture of life in upper-class brothels in Shanghai in the 1880's. The courtesans were known as "flower girls", hence the title. They were often bought as little girls, and kept in the house as servants until of age to go into the trade. Many never rose above servitude to become successful courtesans. In this tale, we see all types, but the stories center on several courtesans in their prime, and reveal to us all their gossip, conniving, and scheming.

Meanwhile, the clientele basically does little more than play drinking games and remain noncommital regarding taking better care of their mistresses. Many characters pass through the houses, yet Hou focuses on just key moments and conversations. Tony Leung is the best known of these actors.

The movie never leaves the internal rooms of the flower houses, and you feel a sense of the social circumstances that ensnares all the characters, whether they're patrons or the purchased. The cinematography is beautiful, as are the women, shot in the low-lighting of the interiorr spaces, very reminiscent of that in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, shot in candlelight, with the same color palette as Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love.

Probably not the most involving of Hou's films, but one worth seeing nonetheless. It is ranked #898 on our compendium of all film polls

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Gallipoli

Peter Weir, Australia, 1981 (7.8*)
Memorial Day War-a-thon film #17
Two sprinters from Ausralia, played by Mel Gibson and Marc Lee, are sent to the Gallipoli campaign in World War One, as battlefield runners, the speedy who carry messages between military commanders in days before radios and easier communication.

If you don't know the history of this battle, I won't spoil it here, but the battle footage is well done, fairly realistic (and without CGI). The main themes of the film will hit you like a brick wall at the film's conclusion, and they are the universal themes of all wars: on the whole, they are a futile exercise, but in some individual cases, heroes may rise from among average men and attain at least a moment of timeless glory.

Winner of 9 awards, 20 nominations, including 8 Australia Film Institute awards (Film, Director, Actor for Gibson, Supporting actor for Bill Hunter, Screenplay, Cinematography, Sound, Film Editing) - it didn't win any international awards, just Australian.Dur

Another in a line of excellent Peter Weir films, which include Fearless (my favorite), Witness, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, The Mosquito Coast, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

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Spartacus

Stanley Kubrick, 1960 (7.9*)
Memorial Day War-athon #4
Kirk Douglas plays the Roman slave Spartacus, who fought for his freedom, then organized a massive army of ex-slaves that actually fought against a Roman army legion. This epic, around three hours long, is the first of this scale from director Stanley Kubrick, who previously cast Douglas in his anti-war classic Paths of Glory.

Though it's lacking in the riveting story of Lawrence of Arabia or Gandhi, this is still a historical epic of the same scale, and another based on a real historical person - and though not as grandiose as those films, it's still an epic worth seeing. This is, of course, an American slant on the story, a man's gotta have his freedom, or give him death, that kind of patriotic story. It also came out a year after Ben-Hur, so Biblical era epics were hot property, these were merely two in a river of these (Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis, Greatest Story Ever Told, The Robe), with Cleopatra to follow and perhaps kill the genre with one blow.

This actually won four Oscars®: Peter Ustinov for supporting actor, costume design, art direction, and cinematography. It won 8 awards overall out of 13 nominations

This is likely to remain the most famous of all of Kirk Douglas' film roles. It's also an interesting work in the filmography of Stanley Kubrick, the one Hollywood-style epic unlike all his others, now that we have a restored and uncut edition, it's more like his original film.

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Basic Instinct

Paul Verhoeven, 1992 (7.6*)
This film won't appeal to everyone, but for those who enjoy a Hitchcockian murder mystery updated with modern sensuality, this will be right up your alley. After the murder of a famous rock star, detective Michael Douglas is making the rounds of those closest to the victim, and he runs across a beautiful and seductive suspect  in Sharon Stone. After a now legendary and infamous interrogation scene, he becomes intrigued by Stone's charms. Even though he has a fiance, he becomes involved with Stone anyway, who, it turns out, may have more than one thing to hide. He may have met his match, I'll let you decide after seeing it.

This film put Sharon Stone on the map, she was certainly more believably seductive in this than any prior roles. Thanks to some better acted screen mayhem than usual, this rises above standard slasher fare and approaches the finest of that genre. This was one film that begged for no sequel, but they made one anyway, which I already know not to watch.

This won 5 awards out of 18 nominations, but nothing big, in fact a couple were MTV awards (both for Stone), so those don't count

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Blue Velvet

David Lynch, 1986 (7.7*)
A naive suburban teen, played by Kyle MacLachlan in a breakthrough performance, finds a severed human ear in a field near his house. After going to the police, he decides to do a little amateur investigating on his own, to the chagrin of his girlfriend Laura Dern (who doesn't have much to do here other than act astonished). He uncovers a sinister local underworld revolving around sultry lounge singer Isabella Rossellini, whose signature song is the film's title.

It turns out that even though married, she is persued by drug-huffing and freaky Dennis Hopper, who has more than a few screws loose in this film, even compared to his normal dysfunctionality. Her rejections of his disgusting affections have led to the seamy big city underbelly that Kyle has stumbled upon.

There are many unsettling scenes in this, beginning with a closeup of the fly-covered ear in the films opening scene, but it gets far worse than that. In a way, this is like watching a film of car wrecks and high school catfights - you are disgusted but somehow oddly attracted, thinking what the hell is coming next? This film is not for the squeamish, but innovative director David Lynch (Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive) has put his own personal stamp on crime films and has created an updated noir style for the new millenium.

This is now considered a cult classic, yet only has a rating of 7.8 at IMDB and 75/100 from Metacritics, so it's a film that is often discussed yet not universally praised. Like most Lynch films, your own feelings may vary widely, as he often wavers between brilliance and depravity. This is a film that could be accurately rated as both over-the-top pretentious garbage and as a uniquely different crime classic. There's a lot more unsettling disgust here than true romance (I felt embarassed for Isabella Rossellini and the demands placed on her performance), yet it's a film that won't go away, and despite my less than stellar rating, it's a must-see for die-hard fans of crime films.

One thing is certain: I'll never be able to hear this song again without this film bubbling up from the subconscious.

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Cobra Verde

Werner Herzog, Germany, 1988 (7.8*)
Another of director Herzog's adventure films in South America with madman actor Klaus Kinski. Kinski here plays a local Spanish bandit, named Francisco Manoel da Silva, but called Cobra Verde by the locale natives, a man avoided by all when he wanders into town.

A local plantation owner decides he is just the sort of man to oversee his slave operation for his massive sugar cane farms. He soon impregnates all his daughters, and as punishment, is sent to Africa to manage slave procurement there, work not completed in a decade due to local uprisings. The authorities are certain they are sending Cobra Verde off to his death.

However, like Herzog's other films with Kinski, this is about a white man surviving and interacting with local indigenous populations. Though not as fully satisfying as Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God, this is the last of their five films together as Kinski died soon after this release, and is still a worthy entry into what could be called the "South American Trilogy" of the Herzog-Kinski collaborations.

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Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman, 2008 (7.6*)
Many will be confused and maddened by this complex and epic dark poem to one man's creative and spiritual abyss. Charlie Kaufman is best known for writing some of the most interesting screenplays in the last decade: Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which won Kaufman a screenplay Oscar®. However, unlike those films, here Kaufman also directs his own work, and he seems less reigned in than when directed by Michael Gondry and Spike Jonze.

The story is about theater director and playwright Caden Cotard, brilliantly but sadly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who receives a 'genius grant' and builds a hugely complex epic play about his own life. The cast, sets and growth of the main set to gargantuan proportions are as complex as this story, as over 200 sets were used as the play grows to last most of Cotard's adult life, as he seems to become dissociated from time, with years compressed into what he feels are days.

The supporting cast of women is superb - Catherine Keener, Dianne Wiest, Samantha Morton, Emma Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh are all standouts. Keener is Cotard's artist wife who takes their daughter and flees to Berlin, a failure which haunts the rest of Cotard's life, especially his romances, as Cotard is more consumed by his artistic creations than any woman he encounters.

Only Kaufman could write a story this complex about a small life, featuring literally a hundred characters, getting to the level of one playing Cotard directing the play about himself, working alongside him daily like a Doppelganger shadow, who also knows intimate details of Cotard's personal life. This is not a pleasant film, but is a richly conceived and complex dark comedy on the consumption of an artist by his self-indulgent obsession with his own life. This will interest cinephiles and fans of Kaufman's other works, but will likely bore the masses and those more desirous of an easy to follow and happier narrative.

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Tea With Mussolini

Franco Zeffirelli, 1999 (7.8*)
A nostalgic comedy with a bizarre twist as a group of ex-patriate, aristocratic British women live in Florence, Italy, in the 30s, and who love all things Italian, especially the Renaissance art, but also Mussolini and the fascists ("they brought law and order").

Maggie Smith, perfect as usual, leads the troupe as the widow, Lady Hestor, of a former British ambassador to Italy. She is actually invited to tea with Il Duce himself in one memorable scene, as Mussolini is pretending to befriend England well before the actual war begins and promises the ladies his protection no matter what happens. Even though this seems a bit farfetched and lighthearted, it's actually based on true events, centered around an Italian orphan named Luca (Baird Wallace when grown up), befriended by the ladies and instructed in the arts, and whose coming-of-age tale this becomes. The real life Luca was actually a technical advisor on this movie.

The cast is terrific, as it also stars Cher as an American entertainer beloved in Italy, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, probably the best of the actors here, and Lily Tomlin, as a tough, masculine archeologist. The cast also has a great dog, a little Jack Russell that is actually the director's dog Nikki. Excellent on detail like costumes, and a bit preposterous enough to be both a unique and a memorable tale, but also a bit lighthearted in light of the setting in history. It's not often that you find a comedy featuring a character like Mussolini.

Quote: "Il Duce has a right to his empire - we live in a time of great dictators"

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Happy Feet

George Miller, 2006 (7.6*)
From the same George Miller that directed The Road Warrior and produced Babe, this animated feature won an Oscar®, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe. A penguin couple, played by Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, have a newborn called Mumble. While these Emperor penguins all have a song in their heart and attract mates with it, Mumble can't carry a tune but instead has Fred Astaire toe-tapping feet, which baffles the others and makes him an outcast.

The elders, led by Hugo Weaving (The Matrix, V for Vendetta), represent those who worship the "Great Wind" and leave it all up to the whims of nature, the invisible 'deity'. Mumble thinks the humanoids (called "aliens") have messed up their fisheries due to stories about them, so he sets off to find them and let them know they need to stop.

The first part of the film is almost non-stop pop and R-and-B songs, which get old fast. What saves the film is some amazing animation: the ocean, penguins underwater, long shots of thousands of them on glaciers. The story is really pro-environmental propaganda, which is ok but will likely be lost on kids, who are obviously the primary target audience for a film that is 75% pop music.

Robin Williams provides some comedy at least, as Ramon, leader of a gang of Hispanic sounding Adelie penguins, and as Lovelace (named for Linda, star of Deep Throat? now that's just bizarre..), a self-promoting guru who charges pebbles for advice and answers to questions, as these penguins use pebbles to build nests to attract females. Brittany Murphy is Gloria, who is Mumbles love interest. This would be a lot better with more dancing and less singing, but should still be quite engrossing to kids, who seem amazed that animated characters can sing and dance like people.

Happy Feet actually won 14 awards (awards page at IMDB), most for animated feature, and a sequel is due out this year.

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Invictus

Clint Eastwood, 2009 (7.5*)

Not one of Clint's best as director, a by-the-numbers sports film which contains little drama or conflict to pull the viewer in. Morgan Freeman, who produced, is excellent as Nelson Mandela, even somewhat resembling him physically, and garnering another best actor Oscar® nomination. Newly elected, his country is still torn apart racially, so he sees the upcoming 1995 rugby World Cup, being held in South Africa, as a potentially unifying event. Their rugby team, though world ranked, is being manhandled by better teams like England.

President Mandala calls in the team's captain, blandly played by Matt Damon, who does little here to convince skeptics that he can act (in spite of a supporting actor Oscar® nomination, where the heck did that come from?) to his office for an inspirational meeting. Damon has little do other than play rugby and tell his players "we can do better for our country". If you don't know this story or the outcome, it may have a little suspense for you, but it seems to be directed as if everyone knows the outcome, here's the 'behind the scenes' inspiration.

Don't expect to learn much about rugby here, but you will learn something more about South African racially motivated politics. All in all, a pleasant but forgettable sports film. Good for soccer junkies disappointed that the 2010 World Cup is now over.

Quote: Soccer is a gentlemen's game played by hooligans, rugby is a hooligan's game played by gentlemen.

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Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese, 2010 (7.8*)

This is Scorsese's tribute to Hitchcockian melodramas, in my opinion, aided by an exotic island location which holds a maximum security asylum for the criminally insane, and an earnest if strained performance by Leonardo Dicaprio. The film is full of stormy atmosphere, disappearing psychos, mysterious doctors; in fact, all it's missing are the Universal logo and Boris Karloff and you'd have a classic 40's horror film if done in black and white.

I've actually heard people say that this is Scorsese's best film, while others have placed it closer to his worst (impossible with Bringing Out the Dead in his filmography), so it's obviously not an 'accepted classic' of his. I guess it really depends on how jaded a film fan you are, for this is really not a new story, the 'twist' is not that unexpected, and one gets the feeling that 'I've seen all this before'.

The most misleading marketing in recent history has all the ads touting this as a Hitchcockian suspense-horror film, yet it's far closer to A Beautiful Mind and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, being more about states of insanity than any horrific mystery. I'm not sure if Scorsese's real fans will find this as rewarding as his more serious efforts (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Departed), yet it's an engrossing enough story to hold one's interest until the cliched plot unravels. Look for terrific character actor Ted Levine, the killer in Silence of the Lambs, in a small part as a prison guard.

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Nine

Rob Marshall, 2009 (7.7*)
Like a Fellini film, this musical tribute to his classic 8½ is a bit surreal and disjointed, but is still entertaining to watch. The cast, featuring no less than seven Oscar®-winning actors, is very good throughout, even though many are here just to perform one musical number each. In particular, Kate Hudson and Penelope Cruz are surprisingly good singers, and Fergie, Nicole Kidman, and Judi Dench are also better than expected. We already knew that the superb Marion Cotillard, understated here, could not only sing but act.

Perhaps the biggest waste is that Daniel Day Lewis doesn't get to display his skills much, and the ageless Sophia Loren is relegated to a minor role as his mother, though she does deliver her song quite well - who knew she could also sing? Lewis plays filmmaker Guido Contini, who has no script but some exciting ideas in his head, which become this film, individually exciting but no cohesion, just like his life.

The best parts of this film are the art direction, the music, and the cinematography, which is partially done in b&w to simulate the look of Fellini films. There's also a touching scene with Lewis and Dench at the waterfront of a small coastal town. Fans of musicals won't be disappointed at all, as this is at the level of a Bob Fosse production. Though shunned by most critics, it received ten nominations from the broadcast film critics, but only four Oscar® nominations, including Cruz for supporting actress.

Find the video for Hudson's "Cinema Italiano" number, which took six weeks of rehearsal, and is terrific - she's even dressed like her mother, Goldie Hawn, a go-go dancer in the 60's, and who only wished she could sing like her daughter.

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Oklahoma!

Fred Zinnemann, 1955 (7.4*)
This musical is so corny that it actually begins with Gordon McCrae as cowboy Curly riding beneath corn "as high as an elephant's eye" as he sings in the opening song 'Oh, What a Beautiful Morning'. Though not a Rodgers and Hammerstein fan myself (too simplistic and childish for me), I'll have to admit that I found myself singing this song for days afterwards, as it's definitely one of their best. In fact, this musical, their first, is probably their best overall, and I'd include 'Surrey With the Fringe on Top' as another of their best songs. Apparently in this obviously 19th century time frame, this was the best transportation available for impressing a woman on a date.

The story here won't hold much examination as it features the odd competition for Shirley Jones' affections (her first role) between McRae and the burly but thick-headed Rod Steiger as farmhand Judd. For some reason, director Zinnemann chose nearly an entire cast of non-singing actors, such as the awful Gloria Grahame (her singing may cause severe spinal pain) and Edward Albert as a traveling Persian salesman - no kidding. An odd choice, given that McRae is perhaps the best musical singer ever - his talent makes the others fairly unendurable, but may give one goosebumps as he hits all the high notes as well.

The pacing is pretty uneven, especially the unending picnic lunch auction-social dance scene, which unnecessarily seems to take up a third of the entire film - a scene which also implies that you can buy a woman for good, given that McRae and Steiger each risk their entire life's fortune for a meal of Shirley's - this also seems to border on the idea of 'women for sale' to the highest bidder. The story would probably have been better if made less serious (such as the final confrontation) and more humorous, for those lighter moments are the outstanding memories of this pleasant if hokey and cornball entertainment. The mouth-watering color in the dvd restoration makes this a must-see for fans of musicals of either the Hollywood or Broadway variety. Winner of two Oscars®

Note: I actually gave this a slightly higher rating than the fans at IMDB, where it's rated 7.1, but by only just over 4,000 viewers. One viewer wrote "a must for fans of Western musicals" - puzzling since the only other one I can recall is the terrible Paint Your Wagon, though I guess one can include The Harvey Girls, and perhaps Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as 'westerns'. Still, it's the tiniest of sub-genres, so this one is clearly tops. "Oklahoma, OK!"

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The Fortune Cookie

Billy Wilder, 1966, bw (7.8*)
Ok, maybe not Wilder's best comedy, but it may well be the best performance by Walter Matthau, earning him a well-deserved Oscar® for supporting actor, after mostly undistinguished minor dramatic roles. This is also his first teaming with Jack Lemmon, as he plays the shyster lawyer brother-in-law of Lemmon's sideline football cameraman for CBS, injured on a punt return by Boom Boom Jefferson (Ron Rich). You can see the ambulance-chasing wheels turning in Matthau's every move as he seeks to extract a huge financial award from the insurance company for Lemmon's faked back injury.

For his part, Lemmon has to play mostly straight man with morals to Matthau's oily smooth orchestrations as nearly all the comedy comes from the parody of lawyers without any scruples when money is involved. The funniest scenes are when Wilder parodies our overly litiginous society, all the lawyers are hilarious caricatures of men with nothing but dollar signs in mind. The more serious issues injected here, such as Boom Boom's alcoholism, dampen the comedic flow somewhat and keep this from being as funny as it could have been.

Wilder is one of the great directors, here's a small list of his best films:
The Front Page, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Lost Weekend, The Spirit of St. Louis, One Two Three, Ace in the Hole, The Seven Year Itch, Sabrina, The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, Witness For the Prosecution.

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The Major and the Minor

Billy Wilder, 1942, bw (7.6*)

This pleasant pastry is master director Billy Wilder's first as a director after several successful screenplays, with Ninotchka probably the best known. In the screwball tradition pioneered by Ernst Lubitsch, whom Wilder knew and admired, Hawks, Capra and others, this preposterous story has a thirty-something Ginger Rogers try to pass as 12-yr old Susan "Susu" Applegate in order to get a half-fare train ticket back home to Iowa from New York. On the train, she hides from the conductor in the sleeper berth of military major Ray Milland, who is not really a comic actor, on his way to a military academy though he'd rather be somewhere close to the impending war.

This plot is the perfect sitcom idea, even though it borders on tipping the prurience scale as Milland lets what he thinks is a 12 year old girl sleep in his cabin and hang out with him for several days, in spite of his fiance's suspicions that all is not as it seems. Of course, everyone falls for Ginger, including the 400 cadets at the academy, and of course Ginger slowly falls for Milland and is of course jealous of his fiance.

Not Wilder's best, and perhaps squeaky-voiced and petite Jean Arthur would have been a better choice for this role, but still a classic screwball comedy and one worth seeing. It's obvious that Wilder wanted to please the studio and audiences in his first film as director. He would, of course, soon shock the film world with the radical classics Double Idemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Stalag 17 - and would make better comedies in Sabrina and Some Like It Hot, but this film is still a must for Wilder, Rogers, and screwball comedy fans alike.

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Floating Weeds

aka Ukigusa
Yasujiro Ozu, 1959, Japan (7.8*)
This is a beautifully filmed art film from master Japanese filmmaker Ozu, his first in color after a career of b&w masterpieces. His films are slow-moving yet carefully constructed visual set pieces that slowly reveal his characters motivations and emotions. Ozu has won many Japanese film awards, and the b&w film Tokyo Story is his best known, while Early Summer won the most awards.

In this story, a struggling traveling kabuki theater group (ie, the "weeds" of the title) arrives at a sleepy seaside village, a place they've been before, which revives old memories and relationships, including an important one for their leader Komanjuro. While most are simply trying to find local affairs, for Komanjuro, played by Ganjiro Nakamura, and a local woman, wonderfully played by understated Machiko Kyo, theirs is really a family reunion that involves a son they had together.

This is one of film critic Roger Ebert's favorite ten films, but is really more of an art house than a popular film, so it will please fans of Ozu and Japanese art cinema more than more general audiences, who will want more action and movement. That said, each scene here is carefully constructed visually with much emphasis on the importance of understated colors and compositional balance, something that Ozu excels at achieving.

Note: Ranked 1010 on our survey of net polls.. Tokyo Story is ranked 57th.. Late Spring next at 436.. Early Summer (aka Bakushu) won the most awards, is 978.. Depending on which list I check, I see Ozu is ranked 19th on one list with 7 films, but much lower on another with only 5 films.. hmmm..

The film's page at IMDB, the rating there is 7.9, practically the same as mine

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Red Cliff

International Version

aka Chi Bi
John Woo, 2008, 5 hrs, China (7.7*)
This is a giant-scaled and expensive war epic about a Han Dynasty war in 208 A.D. involving three Chinese empires. The Hans of the north invade a southern empire to quell smaller warlords, two of which form an alliance, but they are still overwhelmed in numbers by 800,000 to just 50,000. The invading king is really after the wife of the southern leader, a beauty he saw just once, but he also has a painting of her for inspiration. Lin Chi-Ling is appropriately breath-taking in this role, with a delicate flower-like beauty; she's a moving work of art herself and worthy of causing wars.

Lacking strength, the southern alliance, led by warrior Tony Leung and strategist Takeshi Kaneshiro decides to use a plan to force a decisive naval and land battle at a fortress on the Yellow River called Red Cliff, with the emphasis on attacking the invading fleet. Most of the film is a buildup to this battle, showing preparations in great detail. The special effects of the warfare are terrific, as this was one of the most expensive Chinese films ever made at 80 million, which means it looks like a 500 m film from the west. However, there is not much story here, at least nothing compelling, so this will please fans of war films due to the massive technical achievement but will not be that engrossing to more general fans.

There are two versions of this massive war epic from famed Hong Kong action director John Woo; make sure you see the complete five-hour film on 2 discs called the "international version", not the shortened "theatrical release".

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Up in the Air

Jason Reitman, 2009 (7.6*)
This is pleasant fluff that spends a lot of time traveling but ultimately arrives nowhere. I suppose it's George Clooney's clout in Hollywood that got this film a much higher total of Oscar nominations than it really deserved. I can see maybe one for screenplay, maybe one for Vera Farmiga's supporting performance if you can overlook the fact that the two lead actresses here had perhaps the worst hairdos in a major film in recent memory - really, they were so bad that it was distracting to me.

Clooney plays a confirmed bachelor with no attachments who spends 80% of his time on the road as a corporate hit man, performing layoffs that the home companies don't have the guts for. His only stated goal in life is attaining the "10 million mile club" of American Airlines. He runs into Farmiga (hey, change your name!) on the road, who becomes his love buddy. His 'fresh out of college' cohort has a scheme to save all the travel expenses for his company: firing people over a webcam. The Oscar nomination for Anna Kendrick was hard to believe after seeing this - all I can say is "weak year for films" as this one defies belief.

This will entertain you for ninety minutes, but without much humor; then you'll forget about it when it's over. It makes a few comments about lifestyles but without digging too deeply or trying too hard, relying more on Clooney's charm than much else.

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