Reviews

Not only because of the cheap, crummy, careless cinematography.

(If you're going to use the live footage on a 'phone crap, and actually go to the trouble of having girlfriend explain to Drugboy that she has set the 'phone opposite him "to make a record," when you shift to the reverse shot filmed in standard manner, either set up a phone on a stand in the scene or frame it so the audience doesn't see that the space between the two actors is empty.)

Not only because Mr. Dano didn't bother to write a real script, so much of the dialogue is clearly ad-libbed, (not "improvised" as improvisation implies at least some consideration and talent), and pointless: Several rambling minutes on the existence and excellence of Pizza Fries. (This idiocy might have been a bit redeemed if the character had explained which industrial solvents he used to clean the cheese, oil and crumbs out of his beard.)

Not only because the thing is assembled from rusty, old parts that don't even fit together...

An "Intervention." Right. Let's see:

Up front, the female lead, while cataloguing her trials and tribulations with addict boyfriend, explains to Sis how she put him through rehab multiple times "at nice places." Of course, this makes all the subsequent stuff about how Drugboy must accept that he "has a problem, etc." as though he has to face it for the first time not only trite but ludicrous.

But that nonsense is kind of eclipsed by having two-thirds of the folks doing the intervention spend most of the time letting Drugboy know that they actively dislike him. Pizzabeard really goes all the way, explaining that he, (Pizzabeard), does not consider Drugboy worthy to live merely because Pizzabeard's brother is dead.

Not only because Mr. Dano attempts to distract the viewer from noticing that his opus is almost entirely content-free by shifting the setting from motel room, to automobile interior, to the woods, for no particular dramatic or narrative reason.

Again, the dialogue includes a statement that the trip is to a house in the country which arguably could make sense: i.e. Do the intervention in a place isolated from distractions and temptations.

HOWEVER, while we see the outside of a house that is all closed up, the cast trudges on by to set up a makeshift camp in THE FOREST.

What happened, Mr. Dano? Did one of the executive producers realize what a bunch of incompetents you and your crew are and wisely decide NOT to let you use their home as a location?

Of course, you still had to shift things to the country to serve the ridiculous, lazy ending that you tacked on just to get rid of the whole mess: A random "religious" nutjob.

Good God. Was that a real poncho he was wearing or was that a Sears poncho? Cosmik debris, indeed.

Most of this is almost par-for-the-course. What really stinks is how lousy the sound is: not just the recording, but also cast members, who seem to know nothing about diction and enunciation, repeatedly dropped the register to inaudible levels in the middle of sentences.

There is absolutely no way this wasn't recognized during production. The fact that you, and your production staff, allowed this to remain without correction before presenting it for consideration indicates a degree of carelessness I really can't understand. Did you not want people to hear your words?

Many filmmakers have little respect for their audience, but you seem to have outright contempt.

There is a concept in US civil law, (and I'm sure in other legal theories, as well), known as warranty of merchantability. The idea is that if you are selling something, it should be fit for the purpose for which it is intended. For instance, if you buy a car, you have a right to expect that the steering and brakes will function, even if the manufacturer doesn't specifically say that they will, because without them you don't have a working automobile.

Since the advent of synchronized sound in the late 1920s, it has become a standard of motion picture production to have working sound. One can excuse a great deal of carelessness and incompetence by calling it "style" and ducking under the heading of artistic license, but the lack of audible sound is a genuine manufacturing defect and renders the product unfit for sale and consumption.

The only thing worse is the fact that the services that charge the audience money to transmit this unfit product seem to have just as much, or even more contempt for their customers. Does no one at these companies review the product by actually watching it?

Maybe it's time for a class action.

XYZ.

Ms. Nyland did a very good job of quietly differentiating Ava and her sister. A three character drama performed by only two actors is an accomplishment. But the overall project suffers from a carelessness that, unfortunately, causes it to fail.

Here are some, but by no means all, examples:

1. We are informed that between the time Ava agrees to assist Jamie in the ritual and its enactment several months pass, yet the questions Ava asks as they are driving to actually do it are so elementary that we must conclude she has been content to remain ignorant of the procedure's details until then.

That Jamie has been deceiving her is irrelevant. For someone who, while regarding her sister's grave, wonders in concrete terms whether the putrefaction of the internal soft organs is forcing the liquefied putrescine and cadavarine out through the corpse's orifices, (what the funeral industry refers to by the sanitized (for your protection) term "purge"), this represents an astounding lack of curiosity.

The inconsistency is compounded by the fact that several times Ava expresses amazed wonderment that Jamie can "really do it." She is not, apparently, a simpleton, so how and when and why did she become convinced that her brother-in-law can do the impossible?

(The nature of the ritual was not surprising, but it did raise the genuinely spooky thought: What blood relative did the person who taught Jamie the technique use to resurrect his own son? (For something with a similar effective eeriness see the dramatizations of "Weird Tailor," in Boris Karloff's Thriller, season 2, episode 4 (1961), and the Amicus horror anthology Asylum (1972), the latter featuring Barry Morse and Peter Cushing.) )

2. Along the same lines: why in the world, (this one or the next), would Ava be ignorant of the basic details of her sister's death? In particular, that she was thrown from the car. Are we to believe that she, and her parents, never saw or asked to see the police, accident or coroner's reports? Or, are we to believe the equally ludicrous assumption that Jamie, for no discernible reason, dragged his dead wife's body back to the car before anyone else arrived and then lied about it.

3. The headstone's appearance was a nice touch and suggestive: Perhaps part of the cost of raising the dead by supplanting the spirit of the living is having to exist with the empty carcass. Perhaps Ava's spirit was consigned to her sister's dead body to balance things out. Regardless, the implication was that the grave itself appeared supernaturally.

Unfortunately, this was entirely nullified when Jamie digs up the grave. Morticians, at least in the US, have long been out of the habit of simply wrapping the naked corpse in a winding sheet and shipping it off un-coffined, and cemetery gravediggers do not usually bury a body only two feet deep. The only way this makes sense is to assume Jamie moved and prepared the body himself as part of the preliminaries to the resurrection procedure.

But this doesn't track with the fact that he expresses disgust at even the thought of the condition of the corpse at least twice, and that the ground in his yard was undisturbed. We are informed that the ritual is taking place on the first anniversary of the accident - even if he had moved the body immediately after its original burial, a year is not enough time for the ground to settle completely.

Also, the winding sheet emerged from the soil as white and bright as from a washing machine supplied with plenty of good old Clorox bleach. It would not have cost the production more than a few minutes time to rub a little dirt into it. This is yet another reason why it is unbelievable that the body had been buried there for any length of time.

So, as noted, there are really only two possibilities:

a) The entire grave was moved supernaturally in which case we must believe the late Mrs. Jamie was interred by professionals in just a sheet only a couple of feet down, or:

b) Jamie moved the body, and the inscrutable powers of darkness were kind enough to help keep things tidy by shipping the stone since it was too heavy for him to lift himself.

At the risk of being accused of pedantry, I have belabored this because this is where the film became absolutely impossible for me to take seriously, largely because the people who made it couldn't be bothered to think these things through.

Finally, (and this is why I was impelled to write any of this at all), I'm one of those insufferable types that stays for the credits and yours contain something I've never before encountered in any book, magazine, newspaper, movie, electronic medium, or anything else, and I'm astonished it got through a supposedly professional production.

In the very last line of the crawl, Unquiet Films, LLC's assertion of ownership spells "copyright" wrong. It's "copyright," I've always assumed, because it's a statement of right to copy and distribute. I don't know what "copywrite" means and I'm fairly certain it doesn't appear in a dictionary of the English language. Did no one bother to even run the text through a spell check program?

I'm a mathematician, not an attorney, but it might be wise to consult yours, (or fire them if they did the incorporation & proofreading because they are probably the kind of lawyer you hope the other guy has), to be certain the error doesn't invalidate any ownership rights or limitations of liability.

The Devil is in the details.

XYZ.

And this movie demonstrates why.

Horror author Thomas Livingston, (Craig Sheffer), convinces the owner of a haunted lighthouse, (played with remarkable vitality by the unwrapped, bleached mummy of Seti I), to lock him into the tower for a weekend to gather information for a new book.

Mr. Livingston spends a great deal of time pulling faces, sitting whenever possible, going up and down a wrought-iron spiral staircase looking for the backpack he is wearing, opening a multitude of small plastic bottles of water and finding that none of them are of the proper vintage, and regretting that he failed to check the expiration dates on his Wonder Bread and bologna. (The producers should seriously consider marketing a Thomas Livingston action figure.)

In short, things go from bad to worse until eventually Mr. Livingston must escape the accursed place by any means necessary.

Fortunately, a very large, cyclopean octopus with only four arms and a serious glandular disorder, intercepts the images sent from Mr. Livingston's malfunctioning wireless camera, falls instantly in love, and takes the Nantucket Sleigh Ride from his home near The Island of Misfit Toys to rescue the intrepid writer.

Unfortunately, when the heroic quadruped arrives and calls, "Rapunzel, let down your hair!" Mr. Livingston discovers that his bun has become entangled like the Gordian knot.

Attempting to loosen it using the harpoon stored on the third level, (all REAL lighthouses since the Pharos at Alexandria have been equipped with harpoons...Herman Melville said so), Mr. Livingston loses his balance, somehow slides past a metal grating with bars spaced about four inches apart, through a small window and falls to his death.

His soul is quickly snatched by an alien for the collection it has been building since 1832 when it caused the wreck of a Clipper ship, (even though the Clipper wasn't developed until the 1840s...now that's devious), where it will remain trapped in the lighthouse until said alien acquires the full mint-condition set, when it will auction them on EBay for the price of a ticket back home.

The octopus, (who had already been depressed since it was disowned by its parents Cthulu and Nyalarthotep), winds up in the Doldrums, hangs out with The Goat With A Thousand Young, gets a tattoo, and becomes an opium addict.

Seti, who neglected to get an indemnification from Mr. Livingston, (I presume), finds that his insurance rates become ruinously high, and he loses the lighthouse to Captain January who turns it into a shrine to Shirley Temple. The Historical Society objects and bitter litigation ensues.

A tragedy of star-crossed lovers not seen since the days of the Elizabethan metaphysical poets like Andrew Marvell, William Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Writer, producer, director Gregory Lamberson has done something very special here and may well become the true successor to the Polonia Brothers. Special notice should be given to the editing, which has enough non sequiturs to out-Wood Ed Wood, the costume design which includes a police officer's uniform with the American Flag on the wrong sleeve and hence backwards, and a family of four in the 1930s wearing styles from at least four different decades between 1880 and 1970 without one single article being from 1930-1939.

But it is the cinematography that has something truly unique: a ghostly bride who uses both hands to lift the hem of her gown above her shoes before starting to climb the stairs. Most filmmakers would fear this prosaic detail might spoil the supernatural effect and place the view a bit higher or edit it out, but this film dares to tread where others would only attempt to float.

The longest winter I ever spent was a weekend in Buffalo.

XYZ

Note: Craig Sheffer dropped out of sight shortly after the release of Widow's Point. There is an unsubstantiated rumor that when Gabrielle Anwar learned Mr. Sheffer had allowed their daughter to appear in the film she lured Sheffer, Anthony Michael Hall, and some other guy into an underground crypt with a tale of fabulous treasure and locked them in. Probably just nonsense.

The first major clue that the viewer is in the clutches of manipulative, emotional morons, who assume the audience is as stupid as they are, is the scene where a supposedly devastated Sam (Billy Crudup) looks around his late eighteen year old son's room and we see the shelves stuffed with games, books and toys one would associate with a six-to-twelve year old. That indigestible bolus of phony pathos was so obvious that it telegraphed "the kid is the shooter."

The suspicion was reinforced when Sam emerged from a liquor store with two un-bagged 1.75 liter bottles of hard booze, stumbled into his convertible and was accosted by a TV reporter. Sam, a real class act, responds to the young woman's question by calling her "a heartless, bottom-feeding M- F-" and this is really where the movie unmasks because this is not a story about the experience of the parent(s) of a teenage mass murderer.

It is, despite a couple of obligatory demurs thrown in for show, the pathetic wet dream of a middle aged, suburban, professional mediocrity who fancies that regressing back into a particularly surly, crude, unpleasant, and fundamentally dishonest teenager is a really cool idea. (American Beauty (1999), a tepid, rather vacuous version of the better but somewhat confusing Appassionata (1974), looks like great art compared to this.)

Two years pass. Sam is living on a small sailboat, on a small, polite lake, and habitually urinates in full view from the prow of his boat. When told by another denizen that his behavior is unacceptable, Sam responds with sarcasm and insult at the level of deliberately and repeatedly mispronouncing the man's name.

Later, Sam is asked to move his boat for an upcoming regatta, agrees to do so, then doesn't. Later still, Sam is awakened by the passing regatta. Annoyed, he yells at it to shut up. When it doesn't, he pulls out his guitar, straps his amp to the front of the mast, ties his boat's wheel, (which incidentally means fixing the rudder's position), plays a screechy, obnoxious version of the overture to Rossini's opera William Tell in a sad, talentless imitation of Jimi Hendrix's poignant rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, and, with an elaborately raised middle finger, (reminding the viewer that they could be watching, or reading, Sometimes A Great Notion (1971) instead), sails into the middle of the regatta, colliding with other boats and knocking people into the water.

Although his actions are childish, irresponsible and downright dangerous, the movie wants us to cheer Sam for sticking it to the uptight, straight world. How do we know this? Well, for instance, there are four confrontations between Sam and the fellow who asks Sam to not piss in the lake. In all of them the latter is made to look ridiculous in the most superficial manner possible.

Examples: The character is classic "nerd" and dressed in ill-fitting, clown-like garments, such as urine-yellow slacks. In the first two encounters, he is in a tiny rowboat, (reminiscent of a miniscule clown car), wearing a greatly oversized, bright red, old-style life vest. In the third he is wearing an enormous bow tie of the type that was considered fashionable in men's formal attire of the 1970s. (This is not the only instance where the production is redolent with the odor of 1970s adolescence.)

Yet we are expected to take this bilge seriously.

(Instead of circulating a petition, I would simply have fired a distress rocket into the cabin of Sam's boat...preferably while he was in it.)

The Plagiarist from Pill Hill music subplot is nothing more than a vehicle for a potent strain of narcissism. This is evident both in the music itself, (which is of the shallow, simplistic, derivative, whiny, self-absorbed variety that the Surgeon General warns can cause testicular retraction in male listeners), and in the reactions of the audience. Sam plays one song and is avidly pursued by a kid, (named Quentin -- shortened by Sam to "Q" to impress the chicks), who rhapsodizes until Sam agrees to join a garage band with some other kids.

Sam fits right in with these young people less than half his age who are essentially his entire social nexus, but the movie, completely lacking a critical eye, plays this absurdity straight and without a trace of irony. One yearns for something less artificial...like The Partridge Family.

Mom is just as bad. She has an 11-month, "$200,000.00, miracle" baby. Assuming a nominal 9 month gestation, this means she became pregnant, or hired a surrogate, 4 months after her son's murder spree and death. (There is here the core foundation of a story about a parent attempting to run from the events, (in fact, she accuses Sam of "hiding out"), but this script either cannot recognize authenticity or treats ideas as things to be glimpsed but never touched.)

Had the filmmakers anything of substance to offer, this could have been the drama of a man trying to reconstruct his son's life in an effort to understand why he did what he did, or something indicative of an acute, unique pain and confusion. But that requires a conscience. Instead, the closest we get is Sam and his ex-wife celebrating their dead son's 21st birthday by drinking tequila out of the bottle, cleaning graffiti off his massive headstone, and absolving each other of any responsibility whatsoever for their child's actions.

Almost Famous (2000), another technically competent, awful, utterly juvenile movie starring Mr. Crudup, equated Peter Frampton with Eric Clapton, but Rudderless is completely compassless. Sam and his ex are the kind of parents whose son would willingly be complicit in a fraud to obtain admission to an institution he didn't rate on merit.

Maybe that's why the kid blew a few gaskets and rocker-arms.

And Mr. Macy, in his fern-barish club, looked just plain silly topped by a little round lid -- Edmond (2005) would not have approved -- but I've never seen an electric ukulele before.

XYZ

It's 1973. It's Ohio. Clive (David Call) is a twenty-eight year old high school student who wears his hair like Veronica Lake, stores his beard in the basement, and is a rude little snot. In particular, he adopts an attitude of overwhelmingly smug superiority towards his family, (and beyond...he is more arrogant than thirty 19th Century Prussian noblemen combined), spouts truisms as though they are profundities, and has a habit of answering polite, direct questions in one of the following manners:

1. Ignores the questioner entirely.

2. Asks the questioner a provocative, smarmy, personal question that entirely evades the original query.

3. Treats the questioner to a pompous load of esoteric bs with the implication that his answer is beyond them.

4. Responds with one or two words in Hungarian, a language he pretends to have invented, and apparently, has made it through seventeen or eighteen years of this affected crap without encountering anyone smart enough to call him on it.

However, Clive is entitled because he's a genius, particularly in math. We know this because we see him do things like use a soldering iron and attach an antenna to a toaster, (lord knows why), and because we see him in a gymnasium finishing a math exam first while his family anxiously looks on from the bleachers. (Of course, Clive, being Clive, plops his exam (in a blue book, of all things) down with a smack, struts away with body language clearly implying contempt for the procedure, and kicks the wooden gym door open with a loud bang even though the rest of the participants are still working.)

(Just by the way, one learns to expect bad science and math in movies, but mathematics is not extracting square roots or computing numerical logarithms or enumerating the primes between 900 and 950, and mathematics competitions contain none of that kind of stuff as problems. Its been many years, but I recall an easy one from one of the Putnam exams: A common calculus mistake is to assume that the product rule for derivatives is (fg)' = f'g'. If f(x) = exp (-x^2), find a continuous function g(x), such that this wrong product rule is right.*)

Apparently Clive's mathematical genius didn't emerge until late in his high school career, because had it appeared earlier, anyone like him who thinks math is based on "absolute certainty," (no, it isn't), "knows everything about it," (impossible), and considers it finite and structurally self-evident, "like a cathedral," (way off the mark), would long since have placed out of any standard curriculum and at least be doing doctoral research.

His family isn't that much better. Mom and Dad, to prove they aren't too outclassed by their gifted child, are in the habit of dropping arcane quotes cribbed from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in a manner that conclusively demonstrates they don't know what they are talking about. They also exhibit more than a smattering of the classic crank syllogism: "Galileo was persecuted, Darwin was vilified, Newton was not understood, all of them were right; I am ignored, vilified and misunderstood, therefore I am right too."

Mom considers herself a cultural maven because she categorically rejects rock and roll and knows that Chopin was Polish. However, the paintings on the walls are so bad they make 'Dogs Playing Poker' look like Landseer. She lies to her younger son by telling him he is just as special and gifted in music when he stumbles over the opening phrases of Debussy's Clair de Lune on the piano, then proceeds to inform him that having a genius brother is a "lifetime commitment."

When Dad, (William Hurt, out-mumbling David Duchovny in this film), who is in the insurance business, makes a rather gentle dinner table explanation of the value of what he does, (probably motivated by some understandable insecurity), Clive accuses him of "lying to his family." Instead of clonking the ungrateful jackass on the head, (that comes later and for the wrong reason), and reminding him that his food, shelter, clothing, guitar, amps, grass, bong money and so forth is provided by Dad's "lying" profession, (Clive obviously is too brilliant to work), it is DAD who leaves the table and says something conciliatory.

Younger brother is constantly patronized by Clive but is even-tempered to the point of idiocy, actually thanking him for "taking him" on an outing with Clive's lover and Clive's beard, where they laugh at him for not understanding Hungarian and dose him with a small sugar cookie laced with so little grass that he can't taste it. (A Pomeranian would be hard pressed to catch a buzz but brother blisses out.) To be fair, little brother does get to sleep with the beard, (who looks remarkably healthy for someone who lives behind the basement furnace and subsists almost exclusively on citrus fruit -- although her diet would preclude scurvy one still would expect a Dickensian waif living in the slums of London sewing silk flowers by candlelight until her eyesight fails), but this fluid transfer occurs unexpectedly and well after the "thanks" are tendered.

The most untenable thing about this movie is that I think we are supposed to care about these people and feel bad when Clive dies of AIDS. I must be heartless because I wished those stupid wings we see at the beginning and end had snapped off and that he had crashed and burned right from the start.

Hilary Swank should stick to fisticuffs.

XYZ

* Solution (sketch): (fg)' = f'g + fg' = f'g' --> f'g = (f'-f)g' --> g'/g = f'/(f'-f) = -2xf(/(-2xf-f) = 2x/(1+2x) since f=/=0. Now note that g'/g is the logarithmic derivative of abs(g) and integrate both sides. (The interesting mathematical content raised by this problem is determining necessary and sufficient conditions on f such that a solution, g, exists. Clearly f=exp(R(x)), R(x)=p(x)/q(x), p(x),q(x) e F{X}, q=/=0, (p,q)=1 will work, but that's just an obvious generalization of the original problem.)

Perhaps Scorsese has covered a wider range: with a little bit of bending one might be able to argue that a Sarte's existential outlaw-as-hero (who, in his purest form, must be a loner) and Travis Bikel could at least inhabit the same temporal space. At the same time, like Coppola or even Sergio Leone, Scorsese has also given us superb portraits of individuals who function within a larger framework that is labeled as criminal, but which are as integral to the fabric of civilization as the systems that produce its food, or water, or shelter.

Using the familiar framework of good-cop-with-soul-in-torment-becomes-rogue-vigilante-avenger Fred Carpenter has done something extraordinary, and perhaps unique in film: deconstructed the anti-hero archetype at the level of its core essence and then re-assembled it as a darkly humorous, absurdist drama. Nothing in the film can be taken at face value, and Carpenter makes this clear from the hilariously spasmodic opening sequence right through to the very tail end of the sluggish credit crawl.

Instead of veering too far into pure academic slush, here are a few exemplars of these inherent, almost slapstick flourishes:

If you attempt to demonstrate your courage and deadly-serious intent by confronting your nemesis on his home turf to tell him something while "looking him in the eye," you can grimace as much as you like, but it just doesn't work if he's wearing dark sunglasses at the time.

Mobsters who sit at sidewalk tables and sip Snapple instead of espresso are probably not too serious a threat. However, it's still not a great idea to make a mobster the beneficiary of a million dollar policy on your life, and worse still to let them know you've actually done so. It is just a bit more evidence that Darwin was right.

From the Fred & Wilma Flintstone Line of DIY Furnishing Tips: A 2x2 stack of cinderblocks four or five layers high are an excellent makeshift table in an otherwise empty commercial building, but you must decide which briefcase to place on it beforehand.

If you are shooting on location at, or near, a beach, and a natural rainbow appears nicely framed through an open door, it's kind of a shame not to take advantage of it.

It will take many more decades to fully assess the catastrophic, insidious damage done by James Cameron's Titanic (1997), but the silliness factor alone is already measured in megatons.

If you jump off a roof, you can float to the ground in slow motion if you position your arms in just the right way. In fact, you can even defy the law of gravity entirely if you dress in black leather, adopt a suitably ridiculous fashion concept, strike a fatuous pose, wear sunglasses indoors and at night, and are not Hugo Weaving. (It will take centuries to fully assess the catastrophic, insidious damage done by The Wachowski Brothers. Chances are that the damage is irreversible, like entropic thermal conduction, or the pressure induced delta-to-alpha phase transition of gallium (<=4.0 molar%) stabilized plutonium alloy, but no one now alive will ever know.)

It's rare to see martial arts, tai chi and beer wings all together in one plump, cuddly, villainous package.

It's rarer still to have your heroine basically be a serial killer tacitly sanctioned by the police.

Your chances of being an efficient, effective serial killer are increased by choosing targets who are so stupid they either stand still, waiting to be pulverized, or insist on playing the gentleman and going to get the bomb out of the car themselves. (Of course, if beer wings had gone flying through the inferno like De Niro in Casino (1995) it could have been truly great cinema. Then again, maybe a subtle, low-key approach would have worked better. Sam Peckinpah, for example, would simply have had someone's ears torn off with vice-grips...'tis a poser.)

"You are not Charles Bronson in a dress!" I rarely invoke The Creator, but omfg.

Some police officers wear plain clothes but only have one tie...and no dresses.

Implants can sometimes make a woman's breasts appear ridiculous, or even downright grotesque. Of course, it's all merely a matter of taste.

Never trust an accountant whose back office wall consists of the rear fire door, and whose desk is under the circuit-breaker panel. That his computer doesn't work either should be another red flag.

Always buy your insurance and luncheon meats from ground-level, store front brokerages.

Some people allow their spouse to manage the money, even though they buy McYachts and million dollar life insurance policies while the rent-to-own furniture is about to be repossessed. (A tad more Darwinism-in-action here.)

It's not unusual for a thirty year old woman to have a twenty-five year old biological daughter.

One may recover from a through-and-through gunshot wound in the region of the right kidney by taking a good, long snooze on a sofa.

If a young, black male makes an appearance anywhere in your film, be sure to stick a basketball in his hands, but there is no need to put up a hoop. (DARE! To keep kids off drugs!)

If you are standing in your driveway and some rusty old Detroit rolling iron careens in followed by the driver crawling out and collapsing in front of you, dribble.

You simply cannot have too many scenes of cars being badly parked. (cf. Terror from the Year 5000 (1958), Hobgoblins (1988))

One car. Four wheels. Two hubcaps. One side. You do the math.

Scorsese's lyrical tracking shot through the kitchens versus pizza ovens. Yes, pizza ovens.

When in doubt, blow everything up. (It always worked for Terry Gilliam in his Monty Python days, many long years ago.)

It would probably be entertaining and informative to see some of the other entries at the 2001 Long Island International Film Expo.

XYZ

Greedy to inherit his uncle's one-unit slum, Travis (Wes Bentley) euthanizes his hapless relative by strumming his guitar and singing him to death, and then, overwhelmed by ennui, does the world a service by burning all his music, songbooks, and lyrics.

Years pass during which Travis harvests wild peyote, and maintains a shrine by keeping a picture of George Will propped on his uncle's bed, right under a glassless skylight so the stars may look down unimpeded by refraction. Travis is into keeping it "real," you see, and aware that into every life a little rain must fall. It is for this reason he wears two carefully styled fronds of hair framing his face rather like Mena Suvari and Jason Biggs did in Loser (2000).

But living off the grid has drawbacks. Although he learns to survive without water, Travis must hunt daily for rodents to run his generators, and reptiles to eat. Also, regularly having to pump out the composting toilet into the gigantic, rusting sewage tank becomes tiresome. Eventually he discovers that the glamour of solitary, desert slum life pales like the sun bleached enamel of his pickup. Travis is not Thoreau.

At this point, coincident with his thirtieth birthday, Travis follows a drifting plastic bag and discovers The Cave. Entering the tunnel-like maw, he is guided by a naked Tom Laughlin through an ecstatic vision of an all-tile bathroom, (the basis of modern civilization), and emerges in a metaphorical rebirth characterized by a full-blown psychotic episode, the delusional architecture of which includes the existence of two "former band-mates," Anna (Amber Tamblyn), and Barry (Vincent Piazza).

As the film begins Travis is fully engaged with these hallucinations. Although writer Adam Chanzit and director Gabriel Cowan initially leave the reality of Anna and Barry ambiguous, their phantasmagoric status is revealed by details similar to Herman Wouk's description of Captain Queeg as "a Freudian delight; he crawls with clues." For example:

1. Anna and Barry were both "born" in the same year, month and week as Travis.

2. The "reunion" is organized, (in fact, insisted upon), by Travis to celebrate their thirtieth birthdays, yet he owns neither telephone nor computer, (revealed when Barry "loses" his telephone but does not ask to borrow Travis').

3. Travis lives off a dirt road in the desert without human artifacts between his dwelling and the horizon, yet his guests have no difficulty with wireless connectivity.

4. Travis exhibits uniform hostility towards Anna and Barry's successful integration into mainstream society, presenting an almost paranoid obsession with material status. This is very apparent when he demands that they place a dollar value on his "assistance" in his uncle's death. Travis' narcissistic denial is so profound he is incapable of recognizing that most people who care for a dying relative or loved one must do so without simultaneously being a freeloader like himself.

5. Travis' conceptualizations of Anna and Barry are hardly even caricatures. They are mere cartoons. Both are sellouts. Both are sexualized objects. Both are unobtainable. And both betray Travis by engaging in joyless intercourse on the second night, after Travis absents himself without notice and spends the dark hours shirtless on the desert floor. This masochistic fantasy reeks of self-flagellation accentuated with more than a touch of voyeurism when we learn Travis has recorded the encounter on Barry's cell phone, which he had previously stolen.

6. While Barry is the more detailed hallucination, he is also the more absurd.

Barry is infantile: we see and hear about his masturbation rituals; we see him have a tantrum, break the bathroom mirror, (whose disappearing fragments reflect his (i.e. Travis') fractured self), fall asleep on the floor in a half-fetal position, and dream he encounters a digitally enhanced white unicorn that can't find its "horn."

Barry is quite literally anal: we see and hear about his ritual of entirely disrobing prior to defecating. (Years earlier Travis found a neatly folded pile of clothing in a dorm latrine and couldn't help prowling through it because he "had to meet someone who took off all his clothes to shit.")

Barry is a coward: he left the band for law school without telling the others because he was afraid of Travis' ridicule; he failed to invite Travis to his wedding because he was afraid Travis might shame him.

Barry is dominated by his wife: he must run five miles every morning because she insists and becomes almost frantic when he can't find his phone and report to her.

A telling exchange occurs near the end of the film when Travis says to Barry, "Maybe I'll come back as a hard working Jew." Hence Barry is an infantile, anal, timid, sexually insecure, Jewish tax attorney tied with thick apron strings. Such a creature could only exist within a disordered cranium.

7. When Travis breaks into one of the trio's old standards Anna and Barry join in with pleasure. Since we know Travis' music is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things, the pair can only be the stuff that dreams are made on.

More examples could easily be cited.

The film closes at the start of the third night. Anna and Barry trundle back into the aether, while our hero returns to The Cave to give suicide another try. We can but hope he at least makes a nice dietary supplement for those cute coyotes we never got to meet.

Certainly not as dreadful as The Big Chill (1983), a movie about soulless androids striking facile poses in a series of furniture showrooms, but just about as hollow as Lawrence Kasdan's protestations that he had never even heard of John Sayles' Return of the Seacaucus Seven (1979). Where The Graduate (1967) is supposed to enter into all this is beyond me.

Anyway, it should make a good second feature on Tamblyn Family Movie Night along with Peyton Place (1957), West Side Story (1961), or The Haunting (1963).

XYZ

Lauren Holly, a popular author who translates Shakespearean prose into tweet-sized bites, is forced at gunpoint into a wormhole and transported to the planet of Bliss, Mississippi, where she speaks like Senator Beauregard Claghorn and is fed dangerously large amounts of orange juice and MDMA laced with abysmally flat, sophomoric melodrama. Until she has acquired a sufficiently high and consistent blood level of these chemicals to make her compliant she is imprisoned by Valerie Harper in a funeral parlor that eats small children and puppies, and has a roof with mold problems so severe that it sprouts Triffids.

Holly's manager is mostly immune to the blissful blandishments as long as she can regularly recharge her wifi inoculation, but this proves problematic as wifi has been banished in the name of Doctrinal Purity and survives only in a few locations, where it is regularly harassed by Mary Kay representatives who eat cupcakes and burn cell phones until the batteries explode. Those caught using cell phones are required to surrender the device and are subject to arrest by testosterone-challenged Deputy Ricky who supplements his income with part-time liquor delivery, and constantly speaks into his shoulder mounted radio even though he is the only remaining police officer in Mississippi and therefore has never received a reply.

Holly's mother Kudzu, (although she uses the alias Kazoo for security reasons), is a hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional dachshund from Georgia, another planet located north of the 49th parallel. Kudzu/Kazoo communicates via an extremely realistic ventriloquist dummy named "Mama," that has working opposable thumbs and an accent equal parts Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Butterfly McQueen, Charlie McCarthy, and an Oscar winning Hattie McDaniel. Mama has been trying for years to mate Holly with suitable gentleman callers that she advertises for in the classified section of Glass Menagerie Monthly, hoping to produce the super being known as Alan Smithee in Canada, and the Kwisatz Haderach among the Bene Gesserit.

Unbeknownst to Holly, almost all the denizens of Bliss also have gene-splicing on their collective mind, and plan to join her to a creature who made millions early in the roofie boom and by giving seminars on how you too can get rich flipping distressed properties for no money down. He teaches his son to offer caffeine instead of apologies to old ladies run down by skateboards, is addicted to Grecian Formula, which he imbibes intravenously, and is prone to making bizarre, arcane statements such as, "I am the mayor of bliss." Believed to be a widower, the mother of his children actually escaped after faking her own death with a large dose of Rohypnol (flunitrazepam) suddenly, last summer.

Holly, although heavily medicated, initially retains enough good sense to be unnerved by "the mayor" and his odd progeny, particularly the male, who disguises his malformed cranium by constantly wearing an ill-fitting helmet despite the fact that his skateboard has no wheels. Sensing Holly's disquiet, the offspring are quietly disposed of by feeding them to Rhoda's B&B, which has always been dependent upon the kindness of caterers -- a move even the mayor's ex-in-laws approve in writing with a poorly-timed, hand delivered note.

With her manager held incommunicado in Bliss' dungeon, and Mama desperate, there remain only two other impediments to the union. One is just a batty old dame who once had an affair with George Wallace and was quoted as saying that she didn't object to Obama's presidency "as long as he kept the White House lawn trimmed and came on every Thursday to do the windows." She is sentenced to be burned at the stake.

The other stumbling block is a worshiper who has been following Holly around the solar system trying to get her autograph in waterproof ink for his invisible sister Ophelia. Protected from bliss by a layer of aluminum foil between his scalp and toupee, he kidnaps Holly and attempts an aggressive deprogramming procedure. This fails when she is quickly rescued by the prompt action of a vigilant Prayer Chain that was organized to replace the Amber Alert system when Mississippi eliminated all professional law enforcement. It's the Iron Maiden for this fellow.

Holly, having been injected with pure petroleum byproducts distilled from Barbie & Ken no longer requires mind altering drugs and acquiesces with only a fleeting thought that maybe she should have settled for Jon Bon Jovi, Edward Burns or Kelsey Grammer, after all. A well-timed fade-out mercifully removes any possibility of the viewer having to witness the inevitable, Bliss- required, ritual public copulation of Holly and the Mayor and the stage is set for the sequel, "The Town That Knew Nothin' 'bout Birthin' Babies: Idiot's Delight."

Spring comes, a frog is dissected, people marry and die, the Canadian Film Tax Credit Administration gives the Canadian Taxpayer something else to be proud of, David Cronenberg is suitably impressed, and the closing credits flash by at stroboscopic speed making it impossible to read the names of those fully responsible.

XYZ

ASCII Indented Character Test-O-Meter: nil

Kelly Johansen, (Rose McGowan), a freelance debunker of the paranormal, is seen at a farmhouse (located, inexplicably, in the woods) where she is investigating a young boy's report of nightly disturbances. She asks the boy's father if there are any airports nearby because, apparently, aircraft noise can cause spooky sensations. (This rather begs the question: why haven't people been complaining about such fearsome effects since the Wright Brothers demonstrated powered flight in 1903? But never mind.)

Anyway, Pop replies that there are no airports or helicopter landing pads within 200 miles.* Ms. Johansen has a sudden inspiration, and inquires if any of the neighboring farms have been having their crops dusted -- at night. This turns out to be the correct solution to the mystery. I guess crop dusting in the dark makes a kind of sense. Sort of like having a blind person paint a house; the coverage might be sporadic, but the results would definitely be original.

The rest of the film is mainly Ms. Johansen investigating the haunting of an abandoned subway station in Toronto, which she does by meandering around a small, dim set with a flashlight while heavily sedated. Altogether, this goes on for thirty-five minutes or so. She also examines her computer screen to analyze "low frequency sound waves" on software that looks like Audacity or Winamp circa 1997, and as her screen shows only one waveform spectrum we can conclude she records the data for her expert analyses in mono on her laptop's built-in microphone.

After finding a CG corpse and contacting the police, the corpse disappears but a detective shows up. He goes to the bathroom, returns to find Johansen asleep, wakes her up and advises her to "get some rest." (I am not making this up.) Later, for entirely inaudible and incomprehensible reasons, he forces her at gunpoint to prove that ghosts don't exist. Then he gets trapped in a small room where, for even less comprehensible reasons, he explodes. In addition, CG moths fly out of a cement wall, a creepy doll sits on top of a cabinet, and a spectral Christopher Lloyd periodically replaces some light bulbs with flux-capacitors before heading back to the past.

With all this, and more, you might expect there to be some coherent, unifying, explanatory lynch-pin. On the contrary, the movie can't quite decide why the station is haunted in the first place, but we are given three possibilities:

1. The suicide forty years before of a mentally disturbed young woman.

2. The existence of a tunnel connecting the station to a now closed asylum at which, in proper accordance with the doctrines of movie psychiatric medicine, terrible abuses occurred. (Exactly why this absurd piece of cryptoportical architecture was constructed is never discussed, but perhaps it was to provide a means for the suicide to get to the subway without asking the audience to believe that she strolled out of the asylum, and through the streets of Toronto, barefoot and dressed only in a hospital johnnie.)

3. The subway runs through an old Potter's Field and the resident dead are not happy about having been evicted and told to take the train.

All things considered, I think the general story is supposed to be something like this:

The day Ms. Johansen is exploring the subway station is also the thirtieth anniversary of an assault she suffered as an eight year old child. This event was so traumatic that she was institutionalized at the very asylum that is connected to the station, but it is unclear whether she recalls this. Things such as the creepy doll, (which was hers), the combustible detective, and Christopher-the-Friendly-Ghost help her get a handle on this personal situation, as well as an understanding that the moths are the trapped spirits of the dead from the suicide or asylum or cemetery, (feel free to mix 'n match). In a dramatic, cathartic moment, boyfriend arrives just in time to help her liberate the little winged digital souls by opening the door to a shed at ground level. The spirit moths swarm out and, after a tense, hurried meeting of responsible officials, the city of Toronto places emergency calls to Orkin and Ghostbusters. Ms. Johansen's skeptical narrow empiricism is properly placed in the recycle bin, and she signs off of her debunker blog thingy forever -- or does she?

But one is left with more questions inspired by this thinking person's horror film. If the paranormal is exists, what about the para-abnormal? What would have happened had the spirits been caterpillars? Or cocoons? Could a no-pest strip have resolved the issues more efficiently? Is The Sound of Music (1965) an example of White Noise? Does noise come in decorator colors? How DO you solve a problem like Maria?

There are so many questions that my puzzler hurts. Maybe I'll take a Jawbreaker (1999) and lie down.

XYZ

* Assuming a circle of radius 200 miles, this implies no airport within an area of (pi)(200)^2 mi^2 > (3.14)(200)^2 mi^2 = 125,600 square miles. This is 18.26 times larger than the 6,880 square mile area of Kuwait, where this film was released, and Kuwait has an airport. Rhode Island, the smallest US state, has an area of only 1,214 square miles, or about 0.9665%, (slightly less than one percent), of our hypothetical circular area, and I know for a fact that it has at least one airport too!

Remark: The Apple product placement is particularly shameless here. Multiple shots practically framed around the computer's glowing insignia, and when searching for a signal with the phone held at arms length toward the camera you can almost hear a low frequency voice saying, "Rose, honey, remember not to let your fingers cover the logo." (Just once I'd like to see a Linux based movie.)

Rivals (1972) aka Deadly Rivals

May Contain Spoilers

Here we go:

Most of the score is terrible; occasionally there are some pop-jazz harmonies that scream simulated culture as loudly as Epcot Center. Prolonged exposure would cause tinnitus, headache, blurred vision and nausea progressing to nosebleed, unconsciousness, cerebral hemorrhage and death.

Scott Jacoby is not only precocious, he's precocious on steroids, and it's fairly common knowledge that long term abuse of those chemicals can turn human beings into aliens. Some aliens are cute 'n cuddly while others can make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. I don't know if Oedipus was precocious, but I'm quite certain he never used steroids.

At times the eye behind the viewfinder saw things in SoapOperaVision.

From the positive review by Bill Davis: "A sex scene in the movie, involving the boy and his sitter, would probably result in criminal charges today." Which is a nice way of saying that it may cross the kiddie-porn line - it came a bit too close for my complete comfort.

But even with the above, and some other problems, I was still fascinated by this movie. Joan Hackett, (who was almost always dependable), and Robert Klein are quite good and surprisingly likable. And there are some parts that are genuinely funny and genuinely strange.

Just for the sake of oddity, this may deserve a look, I think.

*** Semi-Spoilers ***

This story doesn't have a happy ending: some refer to what happens as tragic - I would call it grisly.

Also Klein tells the following pretty good joke, (although the dollar amount firmly dates it):

"My father was an analyst. You know, someone who borrows your watch, tells you the time, and charges you fifty dollars."

XYZ

The Double Born (2009) (IMDb lists 2008 but film's closing credits have a 2009 copyright.)

May Contain Spoilers

Movie contains a very brief scene of the serial killer's scrapbook that includes Polaroid photographs of dogs with their throats cut or otherwise lacerated.

Movie credits do not contain a "no animals were harmed/abused during production" disclaimer.

I've seen plenty of this kind of thing in movies without undue distress and don't for a moment believe that the filmmakers actually killed any living thing, but for some reason its appearance here was a deal-breaker.

Maybe it was the rest of the package it came in.

And I think Autopsia (1973), Faces of Death (1978) & A Serbian Film (2010) have some merit.

Go figure.

XYZ

Quartet (1948)

CONTAINS SEMI-SPOILERS

Presented by the author, Quartet (1948) is an anthology of four popular W. Somerset Maugham short stories, quite faithfully adapted, very entertaining, and loosely falling into the categories: comedy, tragedy, absurdity and a love story. (Also, refreshingly, none of the four is an adaptation of "Rain" -- that rather too familiar drama of Miss Sadie Thompson and the minister Alfred Davidson, played by Joan Crawford and Walter Huston in 1932, among other filmic treatments.)

There are a few (mostly) minor changes from the written texts: in the original short story "The Facts of Life," for instance, the young tennis player spends the night in his new friend's bed and certainly not on her sofa. This change was obviously just lip-service to convention and detracts not at all -- the filmmakers knew the audience would get the point.

The only story substantially modified is "The Alien Corn," which omits several layers of occasionally discursive social commentary, but leaves the skeleton intact. In the original tale, the family are Jewish and the aristocratic equivalent of nouveau riche. The screenplay eliminates this distinction and treats the characters as landed English gentry of long standing; a sensible decision as the inclusion of the former elements in the script would probably have been very ponderous, although it leaves the title a bit disconnected.

The IMDb reviewer rhoda-1 has a different opinion, and feels the change in the story was made because "even after World War II, the filmmakers clearly thought that the problem of Jewish assimilation could not be part of a "civilised," classy, English entertainment." There may be more than a little truth in this contention, but I think the producers were more worried about the audience becoming restless as opposed to violating a taboo. It's not the best analogy, I know, but how, for example, could Gone with the Wind (1939) have worked in a sympathetic portrait of John Brown's Rebellion and not ended up being a completely different movie?

However, I agree with rhoda-1 that the excisions remove most of the original story's "power and pain." I think the filmmakers must have been well aware of this and made a calculated choice, mostly for commercial reasons. Quartet is not a shallow film, but it has a light touch, and too much weight unevenly distributed might have sunk the whole thing. I may be wrong. I wish it were possible to know what Maugham's thoughts on the subject were.

Just for context, it might also be worth noting that less than three years before this film was released, V-2 guided missiles, each carrying a ton or more of high explosive, were still regularly falling on London -- this movie is a good example that imperfect, but high-quality, English filmmaking wasn't restricted to just the works of the Archers in a very difficult period.

But in a lighter vein: the film has solid performances from some familiar faces, including early roles for Dirk Bogarde, Mai Zetterling and Honor Blackman. Sisters Angela and Hermione Baddeley also appear, (the former for about 18 seconds), but in different segments. Angela Baddeley became very famous 22 years later as the talented, temperamental cook Mrs. Bridges in the BBC series Upstairs, Downstairs. Hermione Baddeley and Mervyn Johns play a married couple in the segment "The Kite," and later played Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cratchet -- in much the same key -- in Scrooge (1951), the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, (my favorite screen adaptation of Dickens' wonderful ghost story).

Historical considerations aside, like Mr. Maugham himself, Quartet naturally shows its age, but if it be to one's taste, is very highly recommended. The old gentleman's wry introduction alone is worth the price of admission.

For more specific details of the film's four plots, directors, cast and textures, please see some of the other IMDb reviews -- as with any movie, some bless it and some curse it -- but there are a manageable number, (18 total - with this one - as of October 3, 2017), and most are worth reading.

XYZ

May Contain Spoilers

01. A few Photoshopped images with a lot of gray do not an apocalypse make, but I'm willing to take your word for it.

02. Post apocalyptic suburbanites will keep their lawns trimmed even though they forbid their child from playing outside to prevent attracting the attention of bad guys.

03. The police towed all abandoned and disabled vehicles immediately prior to The End, since everyone had already agreed in an online poll that the most important thing was to keep the apocalypse tidy. Hence, post apocalyptic commuting will be a breeze.

04. If you're unable, or unwilling, to provide an explanation for the demise of the majority of the human race beyond "it was a plague," don't have cast members appear worried when the little girl coughs if she isn't infected. The audience won't know if it is part of the plot -- in fact, the impression given was that the cast members didn't know either.

05. If the little girl's cough is part of the plot, the director should remind her to cough on more than two occasions at 25 minute intervals. It would also be helpful if she didn't have a "Mommy, I don't want to be in Daddy's movie anymore" expression when she does so. Suspension of disbelief does have a limit, you know.

06. The plague spared the following -- and only the following -- people:

a) Eight year old white females.

b) Seventeen to twenty three year old white males who pillage and kill in packs and look like they rub their faces with old oil filters.

c) Thirty to forty year old white males who used to listen to talk radio and have found the apocalypse "liberating."

d) Thirty to forty year old white males and females who probably used to drive Volvos, watched public television and thought Garrison Keillor was witty and profound. They are as incompetent as you would expect.

07. The plague erased all post-1985 technology. In particular, all recorded audio is available only on cassette tapes.

08. There will be plenty of pills available after the apocalypse, but your first choices may not be in stock.

09. You will always be able to find a pair of crutches if you happen to need them.

10. Low budget and cheap are not at all synonymous. A low budget is not an intrinsic measure of quality, but cheapness is (and it has nothing to do with cost). Low budget may mean much of your action is filmed in the woods. Cheap means the writers couldn't be bothered to invent plausible backgrounds for any of the characters or their actions.

11. It's a good idea to have the female lead speak as though the words can't wait to fly out of her mouth and are piling up on top of each other. Given the quality of the intelligible 25% of her dialog, not understanding the other 75% was probably no loss. (One thing the studios used to do in the bad old, old days was teach their actors diction and elocution, so they knew how to enunciate properly and speak clearly. It may have made for mannered speech, but at least it was comprehensible.)

12. On a positive note, thanks to the apocalypse there are no productions of Annie, Cats or anything by Andrew Lloyd Weber anywhere in the known universe, all reality TV has been permanently postponed and none of the Kardashians survived. Neither did Caitlyn Jenner. It's almost worth it.

13. Executive Parents -- that is, Executive PRODUCERS are a good thing.

14. If you have a gun and are able to sneak up on a malicious thug and his pal who are threatening to rape and kill your wife and eight year old daughter, don't shoot -- just stand and stare at them as they caper about and taunt you. This will allow their buddy time to sneak up behind you and shoot you with a crossbow.

15. If you happen to run across the people who live in the Refuge or Mansion, or whatever the heck it is, walk off with them and end the movie. In particular, under no circumstances should you go back for the wounded comrade that you left in a barn.

The future of the human race is looking bright.

XYZ

May Contain Spoilers

01. Surfing can cause a cerebral aneurysm to burst with fatal results.

02. Always take, without question, any drug a school doctor who barely knows you prescribes, even if they fail to explain what the medication is, what it is supposed to be for, and what its side effects might be.

03. There are sections of NYC's Central Park reserved exclusively for the use of students from two, or at most three, elite private high schools. No litter is ever permitted in these sections.

04. Students from elite high schools can't skateboard very well.

05. School nurses wear loose fitting, dress silk blouses to work.

06. If it has been at least four months since the sudden death of your wife, it's fine to leap into a torrid affair with the school nurse to give your daughter a new mother.

07. Published, highly respected and successful authors can be completely unobservant, rock stupid morons.

08. Every private high school is required by law to have at least one "Chloe."

09. Gardens are sometimes, "closed for renovations."

10. Teenagers who use the word "devirginized" are at very high risk for apparent suicide.

11. To help deal with an alcoholic mother who will allow you to be ritually sacrificed, school counselors recommend decorating your room to show your individuality.

12. To show their individuality, some teenagers decorate their rooms with discordant, ugly pink, white and silver wallpaper but don't hang any pictures, posters or anything else on the walls.

13. When starting at a new school, it's perfectly normal for various members of the faculty and administration to be popping in and out of your home, (and bedrooms), at any hour and without notice. If you call this behavior intrusive or creepy, you will be accused of being "hostile."

14. Some high schools have wooden lockers.

15. If you bump into the ghosts of two girls of about the same age, height, build and clothing in a wooden locker room, give them directions to The Shining (1980), because they are entirely superfluous where they are.

16. If you require the blood of virgin girls to maintain your book club, and you run a girl's school, always select your victims from among your students instead of sacrificing those with whom you have no connection. Multiple student deaths actually enhance a school's reputation and would never cause the slightest suspicion.

17. A school can have the same ageless faculty and staff for more than a century without causing undue comment.

18. People who give blue dresses as gifts are probably planning to sacrifice the recipient.

19. Girls should lose their virginity as young as possible to minimize the risk of being sacrificed by quasi-vampire Stepford wives who drink red tea.

20. Quasi-vampires can be killed by stabbing them in the chest with a metal dagger, at which point they turn ashen gray and evaporate in a swirl of CGI, hence they are conveniently self-cleaning.

21. If you kill one quasi-vampire, the rest of the book club members will evaporate as well. They must be connected in series.

XYZ

May Contain Spoilers

01. Large, attention-getting bonfires may be started in dry sand with one charcoal briquette propelled from a slingshot. The tactic is sound, provided you have access to a slingshot…and a charcoal briquette.

02. Even if water is so scarce you need to count every drop, you will never have to worry about appearing dehydrated or suffer the indignity of chapped lips. Furthermore, dry cleaning of the hair, nails and clothing will keep you looking snappy, even if H2O becomes something the next generation only knows about in legend.

03. If you do all the work and fighting, give all your water to the annoying emo guy who does nothing but look pale and whine about his kidneys shutting down. Never worry you will offend his sense of gallantry or honor: "don't waste it on me," is not in his vocabulary.

04. Don't add to the annoying emo guy's problems by informing him that the well has been dry for days -- he has enough to worry about already…instead, give him more water…after all, he has to at least be able to cry if necessary.

05. Food and water are not strictly necessary for human survival, they are really addictions. Hence hunger and thirst are cravings and may be overcome with enough patience and determination. This revelation awoke gooey, nostalgic memories of the film Ghost (1990) which demonstrated that death is just a disability that can be mastered if you only try hard enough.

06. About every 5-20 minutes, introduce characters who sequentially speak in lower and lower registers. Your audience will thank you for distracting them from your film by having to regularly play with the remote.

07. About every 5-20 minutes, be sure to have the screen go dark for what appears minutes at a time. Your audience will thank you for providing them with opportunities to imagine that something interesting is actually happening even if they can't see it.

08. Ten years without rain will make Oregon look like the Lucerne Valley of the Mojave Desert. Even at Crater Lake and along the Pacific coast. Apparently Alaska, points North and the Great Lakes will have evaporated as well. In fact, it is well known that a single tanning booth turned the Sahara from a rain-forest into a wasteland in one afternoon.

09. If you see strangers in the distance, leave your weapons lying on the sand as they approach so you don't hurt their feelings by implying you might not trust them. When they arrive and start killing your people, continue to not go for your weapons and stand in a line to make it easier for them to shoot you one by one. This is known as etiquette, although some unrefined types who don't know any better call it idiocy.

10. Costuming the Big Bad Guy in a cassock, or at least a ministerial collar, for no particular reason adds layers and layers of subtle nuance, depth and dimension to the character and is not, by any stretch of the imagination, just a clown-like, ludicrous and trite cinematic cliché.

11. When hiding from bad guys, look in the direction opposite from where they are so they won't be able to see you. For added protection, turn your face away as well. It's best not to know where they are.

12. Some bad guys like to bag their heads in burlap and lay buried supine in the sand on the off chance someone will pass by. In case none of the other 8 or 9 people in the cast comes along, it's always possible a spontaneous remake of Mad Max will occur instead.

13. In the future, anything viewed through a telescope or a pair of binoculars will be distorted and blurry. This is known as DystopiaVision or ApocolypseScope. The technique has had a profound effect on film-making, equivalent to the effect Citizen Kane (1941) had on Francois Truffaut, or the effect Racket Girls (1951) had on Ed Wood.

14. In the future, telescopes will be rectangular, even though the optimal shape for high-quality optical lenses is circular -- a fact discovered by glass-makers even before the invention of the telescope. On the other hand, a rectangular case has the added advantages of being bulkier and more difficult to hold and focus.

15. As already noted by the alert reviewer randall-50: In the future, internal combustion, prop-driven, light civil aircraft will dispense with magnetos in favor of distributors. Such crisp screen writing and attention to detail is worthy of Kubrick, or at least Microsoft Flight Simulator.

16. After ten years without rain there will not be anyone left in Oregon with an IQ greater than 35.7. Exactly.

17. When making a dramatic film, never hire someone who is clinically depressed to be your location scout.

18. When making a dramatic film, be sure to use 100% genuine actors.

XYZ

Blood on the Sun (1945)

I like James Cagney. I like him a lot. From The Public Enemy (1931) with Jean Harlow and a grapefruit, and Smart Money (1931) with Edward G. Robinson, through Ceiling Zero (1936) with Pat O'Brien. In Each Dawn I Die (1939), and as a surprisingly talented song-and-dance-man in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), through Ragtime (1981), the man demonstrated time and again that he was a high-energy, extremely likable actor with a somewhat varied range. He was even willing to play not particularly likable characters -- his supporting role as Captain Morton in Mister Roberts (1955) is an excellent example, and one of the few really good qualities in an otherwise mediocre film.

But he was not particularly subtle or thoughtful or philosophical and his two-fisted, rock-'em, sock-'em approach to dicey international politics in Blood on the Sun (1945) turns what might have been a tale of intrigue about Japanese military ambitions well before Pearl Harbor into ridiculous farce. Indeed, after four solid years of war, and the expectation of as much as two or three years to go, it very probably appeared so to some US audiences in 1945. (While it seemed apparent in early 1945 that the war in Europe would likely be over in months, (and it was), if an invasion of the Japanese home islands proved to be necessary, it was expected -- based on previous experience in the Pacific campaign -- to be a protracted, very difficult fight.)

Although it is never precisely explained, the apparent premise of the film is absurd. It seems to be that obtaining and publicizing a "secret" document outlining Japanese war plans in the mid-1930s or so, will somehow make a big difference in US posture and the progress of WWII after the latter conflict begins four-to-six years later.

Observing the friction between the US and Japan over Pacific trade routes in the 1920s, George S. Patton, (long before he reached the rank of army general), commented that in all likelihood the US and the Japan would probably end up having to settle their issues with war. Being a professional warrior, Patton naturally framed the matter in such terms, but it shows that serious problems were apparent a decade and a half before the war began, and about a decade before the time when this movie supposedly takes place. The notion that the contents of a piece of paper would have made some kind of essential difference must have seemed silly, at best, and patronizing, at worst, not only to the men and women doing the fighting, but also to the men and women whose sons and daughters were being churned up in it.

I don't object to period propaganda, but the scenes where Cagney bellows at the Japanese authorities demanding the civil rights he is "entitled" to as an American (regardless of the fact that he is an unwelcome guest in Imperial Japan) are flat out stupid, making his character appear to be a junior-grade moron and not a fearless newspaper editor taking risks to broadcast the truth. He's not even politically street-smart. What played well when Cagney was costumed in an inmate's prison garb and he was defiantly facing down the abusive warden of Leavenworth, say, comes across as ludicrous here. I sympathized with the Bad Guys: it was like they had a loud-mouthed, idiot child on their hands but refrained from putting him out of their misery merely through politeness.

The Rape of Nanking. The Bataan Death March. But the movie expects us -- and US audiences in 1945 -- to believe that the Japanese high command would cower -- in their own country, no less -- before a newspaper editor who yowls about being held without due process of *US* law! Is the US supposed to declare war on Japan because Cagney is kept in jail before they kick him out of the country? (Which highlights another nonsensical plot device: Japan wants Cagney out and fast, so they give him TEN DAYS to mess around before he has to leave!)

This ridiculous approach is maintained in just about every engagement, culminating in Cagney toppling an opponent about twice his size with his bare hands, eluding multiple enemy agents, getting slightly (but heroically) wounded, and surviving to be enfolded in the embrace of the light shining from the front windows of the US embassy which, along with the formidable presence of embassy official Hugh Beaumont, is more than enough to keep a few dozen vicious, sneaky evildoers at bay.

As silly as the notion that without British assistance the Japanese didn't know how to build a bridge, but unlike David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), it is not a good movie in pretty much any respect.

Produced by James' brother William, if you look at it right, I suppose this well-intentioned family project might contain a laugh or two but really is -- and always was -- just unworthy of both Cagney and its subject.

XYZ

Legend (2015)

The photography was very good and had that sepia-but-in-color-tone that seemed to capture the look of the period well. Some real care went into finding effective locations for many of the exterior shots – in particular, there was a very nicely framed image of the Albert Hall.

It was also nice to see a large helping of Martin Scorcese direction in a film he didn't direct. Of course, if you call it 'homage' it is simultaneously flattering and creative, not plagiaristic – which can be very convenient.

Emily Browning is an exceptionally beautiful woman and an interesting actress, and provided an appropriately stubborn yet fragile characterization. Unfortunately, in the manner of Demosthenes' declamations, her narration sounded like she was trying to speak clearly around a mouth full of pebbles. This made the voice of John Cleese hosting Ethel the Frog on the topic of the notorious Piranha Brothers that much more pronounced:

Doug and Dinsdale Piranha were born, on probation…the eldest sons in a family of sixteen…Doug was born in February, 1929, and Dinsdale two weeks later. And again, a week after that.

When the Piranhas left school, they were called up but were found to be too mentally unstable even for National Service. Denied the opportunity to use their talents in the service of their country, they began what they called, 'The Operation': they would select a victim, and then threaten to beat him up, if he paid them the so-called 'protection money.'

Four months later they started another operation which they called 'The Other Operation.' In this racket, they selected another victim and threatened not to beat him up if he didn't pay them. One month later they hit upon 'The Other, Other Operation.' In this, the victim was threatened that if he didn't pay them, they would beat him up.

This, for the Piranha Brothers, was the turning point.

By a combination of violence and sarcasm, the Piranha Brothers, by February, 1966, controlled London…

(Please see Monty Python's Flying Circus, Season 2, Episode 1 for complete details.)

Someone once remarked that the characters in Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H (1970) would have eaten alive their counterparts from the feeble television series that the movie spawned. And the Piranha Brothers would have gobbled up the Krays as portrayed in Legend in a quick, inter-meal snack.

One other thing: maybe it was a trick of the light and the way he pursed his mouth and stuff, but the Kray brother with the glasses looked just like a young Henry Kissinger much of the time, which was truly surreal and almost as hilarious as Ethel the Frog.

Your mileage may vary.

XYZ