Ordinary Least Square

Films Hitchcock Should've, Could've, and Shouldn't've Made

Ten Films Alfred Hitchcock Should Have Made
Maybe "could have made" would be more apropos for these ten films easily classified as Hitchcockian (only films made while Hitchcock was still active were considered, foreign films made in homage to Hitchcock were not considered).

Laura (1944)
Police detective Dana Andrews, investigating the murder of the title character, falls in love with her portrait. It’s not giving much away to say that Andrews has his world turned upside down when the murder victim (Gene Tierney) turns up alive. Vincent Price, Clifton Webb, and Judith Anderson, the prime suspects in her murder, are equally surprised. Otto Preminger's noirish murder mystery is a classic in its own right, but one cannot help but wonder what Hitchcock's devilish Cockney humor would have done for the finished product in place of what some characterize as Preminger's icy Teutonic detachment.

Gaslight (1944)
Rebecca meets Suspicion in George Cukor's classic about troubled heiress Ingrid Bergman marrying suave fortune hunter Charles Boyer. Returning to London to live in the old dark house of Bergman's youth in which a murder was committed, Boyer cold-bloodedly attempts to drive his fragile bride crazy. We get to see the effect from the point of view of the damsel in distress, one that remains in the popular lexicon, the “Gaslight Effect.” Joseph Cotten, a familiar face from Orson Welles’s ensemble and several Hitchcock films, eventually comes to the rescue.

The Spiral Staircase (1946)
Theater 80, a famous East Village revival house in the pre-video era, specialized in classic double features, cleverly pairing many of its shows thematically. Robert Siodmak's old dark house thriller The Spiral Staircase was always shown with Hitchcock's old dark house entry, Rebecca. Indeed, The Spiral Staircase was one of the projects David Selznick suggested to Hitchcock as a follow-up to Notorious. A serial killer is on the loose, with a thing for "afflicted" women. Dorothy Maguire, rendered mute by a past trauma, is the next target. And she's trapped in the old dark house in which she is employed as maid along with her bedridden employer Ethel Barrymore, two feuding brothers, and a pair of dimwitted servants. The title staircase ultimately enters into it, spiraling like the poster art for Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The Stranger (1946)
Actually, Hitchcock did make this movie, or something uncannily similar, four years earlier under the title Shadow Of a Doubt. The hidden menace in this Orson Welles knock-off is an escaped Nazi war criminal (played by Welles himself) rather than Hitchcock’s psychopathic killer (Joseph Cotten), Loretta Young as Welles's wife matches the role of Cotten’s niece (Teresa Wright) in Shadow Of a Doubt, and Edward G. Robinson is the man who suspects and uncovers Welles's true identity, as Wright did to Cotten. Both films are set in small-town America, an innocent locale often used in post-war America to heighten the feeling of paranoia and suggest communist big-city subversion.

The Fallen Idol (1949)
Bobby Henrey plays the young son of the French ambassador in England, left home alone in the cavernous embassy for the weekend under the care of Baines (Ralph Richardson), the butler the boy idolizes, and Mrs. Baines (Michèle Morgan), the maid the boy fears and detests. When Mrs. Baines accidentally dies from a fall after an argument with her husband, the boy comes to believe that his hero murdered his evil wife. Director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene concoct an entertaining film filled with enough humor, suspense, and weird camera angles to please any Hitchcock fan. And Mrs. Baines is right up there with Rebecca's Miss Danvers as the classic evil woman. The Third Man, another Reed-Greene collaboration starring Orson Welles, could also fit this category.

Night of the Hunter (1955)
Charles Laughton's only attempt at directing is an effectively creepy tale of two children left in the care of their evil stepfather (Robert Mitchum), an evangelical preacher who uses his position to deceive everyone the terrorized children turn to for help. He's after the money their mother hid before she died. The kids escape, but the relentlessly terrifying Mitchum stays on their trail. Though it doesn't resemble any specific Hitchcock film, this movie has an unmistakably Hitchcockian feel, from the black humor in Mitchum's sermons to the brooding after-dark rural landscapes the children must navigate. Laughton had a chance to learn from Hitchcock firsthand, having appeared in two of his films.

Cape Fear (1962)
Robert Mitchum again plays the relentless villain. Why didn't Hitchcock ever think of using him? Here, he plays an ex-con who comes back to get revenge against the prosecutor (Gregory Peck) who sent him up the river. Not content with simple violence, Mitchum insists on terrorizing Peck and his family first, anticipating a cinematic staple of later decades, the [fill in the blank] from hell. Peck's legal tricks and police connections cannot help him against the superbly devious psychopath. J. Lee Thompson, a frequent collaborator of Peck’s in the 1960s, was the unlikely director of this suspense classic, which was unfortunately remade poorly by Martin Scorsese in 1991.

Mirage (1965)
Most of Hitchcock's imitators adopted the genres of murder mystery and old dark house. Those who imitated his espionage thrillers did a better job of masking their, ahem, inspiration. Mirage is a little-known film of corporate and political espionage about a scientist (Gregory Peck again) who loses his memory during a Manhattan power blackout and then finds himself pursued by a variety of people he cannot remember who want something from him that he cannot remember. Director Edward Dmytryk clearly takes his cue from Hitchcock, starting with the Hitchcockian one-word title down through the double chase Hitchcock favored. More familiar Hitchcock-style espionage films from the 60's that could have fit this bill are Charade, in which Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn take on a shady gang of thugs on the trail of a rare postage stamp, and Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson as nobel prize winners involved in political intrigue in Stockholm in The Prize (reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain).

Games (1967)
Simone Signoret, in a role that recalls her turn in the classic French suspense film Diabolique (itself a Hitchcockian exercise), plays a mysterious stranger who enters the lives of a rich New York couple (Katherine Ross and James Caan) who live in a house filled with strange and wonderful toys and games. The trio enter into a complex series of murderous games of deceptions in which the plot twists and turns so many times that it’s difficult to tell who is double-crossing whom. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s and Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth takes the same concept a lot farther than this long-forgotten trifle, but that film was too stagy and came too late to fit in this category.

Wait Until Dark (1967)
It's hard to believe in retrospect that Alan Arkin could be such a menacing bad guy, but Audrey Hepburn is just perfect as the blind girl he menaces. Less subtle than Hitchcock, and with a MacGuffin that was not at all Hitchcockian (a heroin-filled doll), Wait Until Dark is still a classic exercise in Hitchcockian suspense, especially when the lights go out and Arkin is as blind as Hepburn. As frightening as this film is, imagine what Alfred could have done with that plot device.

Ten Films Alfred Hitchcock Should NOT Have Made
Some obvious mistakes (Hitchcock made so many films, they could not all be masterworks), but also some decent films that just don't fit into the overall Hitchcockian canon. Not considered are films from before 1934, the year The Man Who Knew Too Much established Hitchcock's international reputation.

The Secret Agent (1936)
A bland and dated espionage thriller about a trio of bickering English spies (John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, and Madeleine Carroll) who eliminate the wrong enemy, leaving the real spy (Robert Young) on the loose. Coming right after The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps and just before Sabotage, Young and Innocent, and The Lady Vanishes, this was Hitchcock's one minor misstep during his most productive series of British films.

Jamaica Inn (1939)
Itching to come to Hollywood, Hitchcock half-heartedly completed his British contractual commitments by adapting a Daphne du Maurier novel (something he would do more successfully a year later in America with Rebecca). Though not as bad as some critics insist, Jamaica Inn would not be missed if dropped from a Hitchcock retrospective. A big part of the problem is that star and co-producer Charles Laughton insisted on playing the character of the villain, and since he was prominently featured, any suspense as to the identity of the bad guy was ceded almost from the start. The film was, however, a box-office success.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)
A screwball comedy in the style of the period, with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery playing an upscale couple still in love despite their divorce. Though not at all bad as far as screwball comedies go, Hitchcock made this as a favor to Lombard and because his preferred project was delayed by the war. What Hitchcock admitted was a directorial effort as a hired hand is as a result no more than an amusing aberration in his career.

The Paradine Case (1948)
Between the massive success of his wartime and post-war Hollywood films on the one hand (from Rebecca through Notorious) and his remarkable run in the 1950's from Strangers On a Train to Psycho, Hitchcock made four troublesome films. One of them, Rope, is a personal favorite, but some dismiss its experimental long takes as too gimmicky. There is little argument, however, about the other three. First came The Paradine Case, a stiff courtroom drama about an upstanding woman on trial for murdering her husband and the degradations that befall her during the trial. Mediocre by Hitchcock's standards, and mediocre in comparison to Billy Wilder's Witness For the Prosecution, a later film in which Charles Laughton virtually reprises his role as judge from The Paradine Case.

Under Capricorn (1949)
Hitchcock may have been a little to full of himself this time. Concentrating too much on technique (the long takes and color photography that he first used in Rope), relying too much on the reputation of star Ingrid Bergman, and reveling in his first return to England as a ballyhooed Hollywood director, he forgot to make a real movie. It is no surprise that some French critics say that this is Hitchcock's best film. Too bad Jerry Lewis wasn't in it, hein?

Stage Fright (1950)
Not a bad movie, certainly not on the order of The Paradine Case and Under Capricorn, this film nevertheless suffers from a failed experiment in narrative technique. The film starts with a flashback of star Richard Todd's involvement in a murder allegedly committed by co-star Marlene Dietrich. It turns out that this flashback is wholly untrue, and that Todd committed the murder and was trying to frame Dietrich. The idea of generating sympathy for a wrongly accused man who turns out to be guilty is satisfying, but tricking the audience by means of a false flashback is something even Hitchcock admittedly regretted doing.

The Wrong Man (1957)
A decent film, but it came at the wrong time, during Hitchcock's most productive period, following Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry, and the remade The Man Who Knew Too Much, and followed by Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Henry Fonda's only appearance in a Hitchcock film is in the true story of a Brooklyn man wrongly accused of armed robbery but unable to prove himself innocent. What could Hitchcock have done at this point in his career with an actor like Fonda had he not been enamored of this real life subject matter that was more worthy of TV? We'll never know.

Psycho (1960)
Yikes! What is Psycho doing in this category? Hitchcock's best-known film, and to many his best film, a film he should NOT have made? Not really. But one can't help lamenting the unintended impact Psycho had on the horror genre. Too many filmmakers have been inspired by Psycho to make gratuitously gory horror films, mistakenly believing that it broke new ground for them in its graphic depiction of violence. Don’t they realize that Hitchcock never showed the knife touching Janet Leigh’s flesh? And don't they realize it's a comedy?

Marnie (1964)
Hitchcock loved working with Grace Kelly. He tried to lure her out of the retirement Prince Rainier imposed upon her to play the title character of Marnie. But when that fell through, he tried to force feed us his "new" Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedrin, the beleaguered star of The Birds. The resulting film is as static and stiff as Hedrin's acting. She was never really heard from again (unless you're a cult fan of The Harrad Experiment), and rightly so, and was surpassed by her daughter, Melanie Griffith.

Topaz (1969)
It's not clear why Hitchcock chose to make this film adaptation of Leon Uris's novel, nor why he stuck to it even though he was extremely unhappy with the project. Perhaps no one is too keen on finding out because it may mean having to watch the film again for clues. Undoubtedly one of Hitchcock's worst, if not the worst.

Ten Films Alfred Hitchcock Wanted to Make (But Didn't)
Almost all of Hitchcock's 53 feature films were adapted from existing sources (novels, plays, stories, etc.). Here are ten subjects he was known to have chosen as film projects, but which never made it to production.

Lawrence of Arabia (1935)
No, that's not a misprint. Nor is it really the same film that David Lean made nearly thirty years later. What Hitchcock actually had in mind was an adaptation of the novel Greenmantle by John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps, as a follow-up to the success of the latter. Greenmantle was a fictional story based on the character and exploits of T. E. Lawrence, the real-life title character of Lawrence of Arabia, with Richard Hannay, the main character in The 39 Steps, taking on the Lawrence role. Hitchcock wanted Cary Grant in the role of Lawrence/Hannay and Ingrid Bergman as Grant's co-star. But he couldn't afford to buy the rights to the novel.

A Night to Remember (1939)
Again, the film Hitchcock would have made would not have been an adaptation of the famous account of the sinking of the Titanic (filmed in the 50's). But when David O. Selznick first signed Hitchcock to a Hollywood contract, the film he wanted Hitchcock to make first was about the Titanic. Hitchcock, however, was still contractually bound to make Jamaica Inn for his English studio. By the time he arrived in Hollywood, Selznick changed his mind and wanted him to make Rebecca instead.

The Devil's Disciple (1941)
George Bernard Shaw's play was to have been Hitchcock's next project after Foreign Correspondent. But Shaw refused to release the film rights because it was a satire about America and England during the Revolutionary War, and he felt it inappropriate to have it filmed while America and England were allied in the fight against Nazi Germany. Hitchcock made Mr. and Mrs. Smith instead. The Devil's Disciple was eventually made in 1959 as a Burt Lancaster-Kirk Douglas collaboration.

Malice Aforethought (1945)
Suspicion was based on a novel by Francis Iles called Before the Fact. Hitchcock wanted to adapt another novel by the same author (a pseudonym for journalist and mystery writer Anthony Berkeley) titled Malice Aforethought, one of the first "inverted" mysteries, written in 1931, where the identity of the criminal is known from the start and we wonder if he'll get away with it rather than "whodunnit". But Hitchcock didn't think he could get a star actor (and he always preferred stars) to take on the central role of a doctor who murders his wife, so he never pursued the project. He had Alec Guinness lined up to pay the role, but Guinness did not begin to become famous until his first two major supporting roles a year later in David Lean's pair of Dickens adaptations, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Malice Aforethought was eventually made into a TV series by the BBC in 1979 and shown in the U.S. as an entry in PBS's Mystery series.

The Bramble Bush (1953)
One of Hitchcock's few attempts at writing his own screenplay was this adaptation of David Duncan's novel about a man who steals another man's passport without knowing that the passport owner is wanted for murder (the novel, originally titles The Bramble Bush, was released under the more lurid title Worse Than Murder when it was published as a pulp paperback). Being at a point of self-doubt in his creative powers, and unsatisfied with any of the pedestrian adaptations he commissioned from other writers, Hitchcock gave up the idea to instead film a proven Broadway hit that he got the rights to, Dial M For Murder.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)
Before making North By Northwest, Hitchcock started work on a film version of a 19th century sea legend about a ship, the Mary Celeste, that was discovered in full sail with nothing amiss -- except that there was no one aboard. Gary Cooper, who never appeared in a Hitchcock film, was slated to star (and did in the film version that was made by others). Hitchcock and collaborator Ernest Lehman gave up on the project because they saw too many obstacles to overcome in the story, not the least of which was a weak courtroom drama following a powerful beginning.

The Three Hostages (1965)
Another novel by John Buchan that Hitchcock considered adapting, featuring the same character that Robert Donat played in The 39 Steps on the trail of a group of Bolsheviks who have kidnapped three children of prominent English parents. Hitchcock dropped the idea because it involved hypnotism, which he didn't think would work on screen, even though he had already used hypnotism in Spellbound. One of three aborted projects Hitchcock worked on between the completion of Marnie and the start of Torn Curtain.

Mary Rose (1965)
Another of the three unsuccessful projects, a science fiction story right out of The Twilight Zone about time warps and ghosts and celestial visitations that was based on, of all things, a play by J.M. Barrie, best known for authoring Peter Pan. Hitchcock decided to postpone the project because he didn't like the idea of ghosts and never went back to it. The third project never got very far, never even being titled.

Frenzy (1967)
Of course, Hitchcock made a movie called Frenzy in 1972. That movie, based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, was released under the title of an original screenplay Hitchcock completed five years earlier. Like the actual Frenzy, that story was about a serial killer of women, but it follows the actual killer and police attempts to trap him rather than an unjustly accused innocent.

The Short Night (1980)
The project Hitchcock was pursuing at the time of his death in April 1980. Based on the memoirs of George Blake, the notorious English double agent who spied for the KGB, as well as on a fictional version of that same story. Hitchcock planned on altering the story, adding an American CIA agent (Walter Matthau), assigned to kill the fictional version of Blake. But he instead falls in love with the spy's wife (Catherine Deneuve). Shooting was all set to begin in Finland when Hitchcock fell ill.

Gestation Period - Six Months of Movie Reviews

So my plans to ressurect my long-ago film review newsletter The View From the Front Row as part of this weblog got waylaid by the overly ambitious and probably superfluous series on the insane business of the National Hockey League. At this late date it's not possible to write longish reviews of films I've seen since the first neo-Front Row entry back in January, nor would most of those reviews be relevant, so many of the movies having long since come and gone from theaters.

The nature of the movie business these days makes it impossible for me to want to see any more than a handful of movies anyway. And it's impossible to provide any context for individual film reviews if one is unable to see enough major releases. I've only seen twenty-four movies in theaters since the start of the year, not even one per week, and that includes the triple-feature I sat through in one day at the Tribeca Film Festival and another trio I would not have seen had I not been chaperoning the kids who really wanted to see them.

So in lieu of anything resembling a knowledgable set of analyses, here is a digest of impressions -- an impressionistic portrait of half a year's worth of one once-avid filmgoer's present-day viewing menu.

Published Page to Sound Stage

So you read the book. Did you like the movie? One of the hardest of cinematic tasks is to adapt a popular novel for the big screen and please fans of the book as well as moviegoers who never read it. The trick has always been translating the written word via the visual language of cinema.

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
The big winner at this year's Oscar showdown was the third installment in Peter Jackson's epic adapatation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy masterwork. Having read Tolkien's trilogy at least ten times over (don't ask!) I had some problems with the first two installments. The decision to omit some of the hobbits' entertaining adventures in The Fellowship of the Ring, logical in that they didn't advance the story of the One Ring, was annoying not only because it left out material that advanced the character of the setting (Middle Earth) as well as the protagonists, but also because it was cut in favor of segments that were not in the original book (mainly, Liv Tyler as Arwen). Likewise The Two Towers, which cut crucial corners in the story of the Ents while adding a laughable original sequence where Aragorn nearly dies.

But The Return of the King gets it right, even when it cuts corners, maybe even especially in cutting the huge corner that ends the saga, a multi-chapter coda that would've extended the 3:30 running time by another half hour. Once again, the most impressive achievement is Gollum. In reading Tolkien, I was never able to picture Gollum -- he was always a hazy shadow of pure corruption, Tolkien focusing on the points of light that are his eyes and the tortured syntax of his rants. But Jackson and crew, plus actor Andy Serkis (who gave Gollum voice and acted out his movements only to be overlaid by CGI and who should've been a unanimous choice for Best Supporting Actor Oscar), hit a home run bringing him to life, down to the minutest details. His split personality, his good side arguing with his bad side, is a cinematic coup that adapts Tolkien's words to perfection.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Chris Columbus, director of the first two Potter movies, was replaced for this third installment by Alfonso Cuaron, usually cited for Y Tu Mama Tambien rather than the operative touchstones, A Little Princess and Great Expectations, which gave the Mexican helmsman his requisite background in both children's stories and Britannia. In tackling the popular Potter book, Cuaron was invaluably assisted by screenwriter Steve Kloves, the writer-director of the The Fabulous Baker Boys who has penned all four existing Harry Potter scripts (including The Goblet of Fire, which is currently in production under a different director, Mike Newell) and is slated to script The Order of the Phoenix as well. Together, they pull off the adaptation trick to perfection, leaving J.K. Rowling's plots and dialogues intact while using visuals to enhance the cinematic re-telling of the story. For example, Emma Thompson as Professor Trelawney has thick spectacles which don't stop her from tripping over whatever is right in front of her, expressing her incompetence as a seer of the future visually (and comically). Not being a fan of Cuaron's previous work, and believing that Columbus's light commercial instincts were appropriate for Harry and Co., I was skeptical -- to my surprise, this is clearly the best of the bunch so far (perhaps aided by the absence of you-know-who, which opens up Rowling's signature mystery story to a great degree).

Cold Mountain
I got Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain as a gift from my sister. I was disappointed that it disappointed me -- I disliked it quite intensely. Nevertheless, I thought it would make a good movie, cinema being able to visually capture the lyricism and symbolism that eluded Frazier because of his soporific style. Problem is, director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella is as much of a cinematic bore as Frazier is a literary one, as everyone who has re-thought The English Patient can by now agree (screenwriting guru Bob McKee gleefully skewers it in his famous story seminar and Seinfeld devoted an entire episode to mock its popularity). But Frazier is more the culprit than Minghella, who here remained largely faithful to the original text, a Civil War version of Homer's Odyssey (as if that has not been done a hundred times too often). The only saving grace of both book and movie is the sub-plot (actually, plot 1A) about the liberation of Ruby Thewes. As much as I normally dismiss Renee Zellweger as an actor, she was hands down a deserving Oscar winner as Best Supporting Actress for in this role (interestingly, Minghella was not among the many Cold Mountain nominees).

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
I felt the same way about Peter Weir's adaptation of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring adventures as I did about Cold Mountain -- another novel dragged down by heavy-handed writing that stood more of a chance of being a good movie, notwithstanding the sometimes heavy hand of director and co-scenarist Weir. I read The Far Side of the World when I was boning up for travels in the South Pacific. O'Brian contributed little to that aim, perhaps because he was more interested in his sailing vessel, the HMS Surprise, its captain and crew, and their internal and external battles, than in the setting, which I suppose was more my problem than his. These very elements, it turns out, are better portrayed visually on the screen than on the page, as is the setting that I was so interested in (the South Pacific here represented by the Galapagos rather than Polynesia). Russell Crowe, as Captain Jack Aubry, gets much of the attention because of his stature as an actor, but Paul Bettany provides invaluable suppor as the ship's doctor (as he did playing Crowe's alter ego cum roommate in A Beautiful Mind).

Big Fish
I didn't read the novel by Daniel Wallace on which Tim Burton based his latest movie, but the movie makes me want to read it. Though the film winds up working in the end, thanks to an unexpected resolution that ties up some overly fantastical loose ends, this is the type of material, lyrically and mythically symbolic, that often makes for entertaining literary experiences. The tall tales told by the character at the center of the story are perfect fodder for (though not nearly as good as) the whimiscal Burton of Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, or even Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, as opposed to the gross-out Burton of Beetlejuice, Batman, Mars Attacks!, or Sleepy Hollow.

Secret Window
I haven't read anything by the oft-adapted and extremely popular Stephen King (nineteen novels or novellas, eighteen short stories, even one poem, and three more currently in production -- and that doesn't included TV movies, TV series, TV episodes, remakes, or sequels). But I've seen many of the better adaptations, having always preferred the less- or non-horrific like Stand By Me, Misery, Dolores Claibore, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile. Secret Window, from a novella of nearly the same name, starts out promisingly, blocked writer Johnny Depp accused of plagiarism by a mysterious southerner played with appropriate creepiness by John Turturro. The story's twist is telegraphed almost from the start, taking a lot of punch away from its ultimate revelation, and leaving little room to maneuvre except toward the horrific.

Name Brand Merchandise

Movies that trade on a recognizable name -- from the biggest (Steven and Tom, and Denzel) to the newest (Nia), from the past (Starsky & Hutch, The Stepford Wives, and Herb Brooks) to the future (Charlie Kaufman but probably not Nia).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The previews for Charlie Kaufman's latest opus were geared more toward his fans than those of his star, Jim Carrey. I suppose the marketing department figured Carrey's name and face were enough to bring his people in, but that Kaufman's devotees had to be told that this was Charlie's movie, not Jim's. Praise the lord for that -- Carrey turns in one of his most credible performances to date by sublimating himself to rather than overwhelming Kaufman's script, knowing perhaps that Kaufman's quirky temporal games would make him look good enough, or better. Too bad Carrey didn't do the same in The Cable Guy or Bruce Almighty -- then again, those scripts were not as ingenious as Kaufman's almost always are (you know about Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Being John Malkovich, but he did misfire once -- Human Nature).

The Terminal
A funny thing happened at the multiplex the weekend Steven Spielberg's latest movie opened. Theaters were half empty. And that was mainly because everyone was next door watching another film that opened the same night -- Fahrenheit 9/11. I witnessed this in Scranton, PA, of all places, not the liberal hotbed of New York City where one would expect as much. Not that The Terminal is a bad movie -- it's OK. Spielberg's third straight Tom movie, Tom Hanks starring on the heels of being in Catch Me If You Can, which followed Tom Cruise in Minority Report -- all of them OK movies. Taken together with their predecessor, the godawful A.I., Spielberg is most definitely in decline, which explains why he is going back to his bread and butter with a fourth Indiana Jones entry and a remake of the sci-fi classic War of the Worlds (another Tom movie).

The Day After Tomorrow
Roland Emmerich is a name that is hard to get one's lips around, so studio promotional material routinely omits it and simply says, "From the director of Independence Day and Godzilla" (a short list to which they could easily add the surprisingly durable Stargate, though not the Mel Gibson bomb The Patriot). By the time Emmerich's next CGI blockbuster comes out (King Tut), they'll drop Godzilla and add The Day After Tomorrow, which after all now stands as his best movie (Independence Day didn't do it for me, nor did Stargate -- I didn't waste my time with the others). Based on The Coming Global Superstorm, the environmentally conscious director telescopes a potentially real weather scenario into an impossibly short space of time in order to first flood and then freeze New York City. Then he sends in Dennis Quaid, mukluks and all, to save his son, Jake Gyllenhaal, who is trapped with friends in the New York Public Library. All a good excuse for some mind-blowing special effects, worthwhile here in sevice of an interesting premise and an acceptable (though slight) plot.

Man on Fire
They said this was Denzel Washington's finest performance, big news for the guy who was nominated for Oscars for portraying Steven Biko, Hurricane Carter, and Malcolm X and won for Glory and Training Day. No, this was standard issue Denzel, reprising similar turns in similar movies, the kind where you ask yourself, "Why would someone like Denzel make a movie like this?" before the obvious answer hits you. Here he once again plays a tortured loner, out to avenge the kidnapping of a girl he was hired to protect. Didn't help his cause that he had to do it for hyperactive director Tony Scott, who treats two-hour features as if they were the 30-second commercial spots he started his career making.

The Stepford Wives
I was told by the roommate of the actress who played one of the lesser wives of Stepford that the ending to the movie had to be reshot three times amid a high degree of rancor between the principal creative minds behind this remake of the 70s social paranoia classic. Glenn Close, one of the stars, was reportedly behind much of the rancor. Considering that she was left, in the final edit, clutching the decapitated head of Christopher Walken, I would surmise that a) she had every reason to be rancorous about the ending, and b) she lost. Just what the heck were they thinking? Blech!

Miracle
It was risky to take a movie about the well-known 1980 US hockey team that upset the mighty Russians and won Olympic gold in Lake Placid -- "Do you believe in miracles?" -- and focus mainly on its lesser-known coach, Herb Brooks. As a die-hard hockey fan, Brooks was no mystery to me, but everyone else was probably expecting the uplifting story of the players and the nation that rallied around them at a time of political upheaval (hostages in Iran and Soviets invading Afghanistan). The movie was a success nonetheless, thanks in large part to the great job turned in by Kurt Russell as Brooks, the last player cut from the 1960 gold-medal-winning US team who took on the uneviable task of plotting the overthrow of one of the powerhouse hockey teams of all time and made it his obsession.

Connie and Carla
Nia Vardalos came out of nowhere as the writer and star of one of the greatest dark horse success stories of American cinema, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a semi-autobiographical tale of a Greek-American woman trying to reconcile love with her large, volatile, and very funny family. Her second effort as writer-star borrows heavily from the genre of transvestite comedies, mainly Victor-Victoria, also a movie about a woman masquerading as a man cross-dressing as a woman, and Yentl, among others. Despite its derivativeness, Connie and Carla works, mainly because a) it's pretty funny, and b) there are a lot of great tunes (an element borrowed from another drag comedy, Priscilla Queen of the Desert). And yet despite that, it was a box office failure, drawing a big fat yawn from Greek Wedding fans.

Starsky & Hutch
Like most everyone else, I stayed well clear of Zoolander when it came out -- Ben Stiller as a male model? Give me a break! But then I watched it on cable one night, and surprise! It was hilarious, a real send-up. So Stiller's next parody, made once again in collaboration with Owen Wilson (the two also teamed up as part of larger ensembles in The Royal Tenenbaums and Meet the Parents), was a must-see for me, even though I never saw the original 1970s TV series on which it was based. Stiller is clearly a love-him or hate-him kind of guy when he makes these kinds of over the top movies (Dodgeball is his latest), and I, well, I don't exactly love him, but I appreciate this kind of stuff. The humor is as scattershot as any parody, often repetitive, always inane. It's as good-naturedly goofy as Zoolander, but not as inspired. As far as TV remakes go, it's way ahead of Charlie's Angels, Wild Wild West, even Mission: Impossible, and the like, because it remains fully respectful to the original and its era even while sending it up mercilessly (Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul even appear in their roles as the original Starsky and Hutch).

Taking Lives
Angelina Jolie is a bankable name, for now, thanks to some of her other bankable attributes, all of the fleshy variety. But she won't be bankable for long if she keeps making forgettable movies like this one. After a series of supporting or co-starring roles put her on the map, culminating with her Oscar-winning supporting role in Girl, Interrupted and the commercial success of Gone in Sixty Seconds (not to underestimate the impact of those lips), she has been unable to carry a movie in her own right. In Taking Lives, she gets seriously good support from Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, a trio of French actors, and Gena Rowlands, but is stuck in a paint-by-numbers serial killer thriller -- not a career killer like a third Lara Croft would be, but enough to relegate her back to supporting and co-starring roles (as in her upcoming support of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law in Sky Captain, of Colin Farrell as the wife of Alexander, as a lesser voice in Shark Tale, and alongside Brad Pitt in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a remake of the Hitchcock classic that has disaster written all over it).

Child's Play

Makers of children's movies have figured out by now, mainly from seeing the unfailing success of Pixar's body of work, that you can put out almost anything and the kids will watch it, but if you throw in some stuff that grabs the attention of the parents who must by necessity chaperone those kids to the theater and tolerate repeated viewings of the video or DVD at home, then you will have a hit.

Shrek 2
Shrek was really the first animated feature not made by Pixar to figure all that out, and with Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy quipping their way through an unrecognizable retelling of William Stieg's book, it was a huge crossover hit. Shrek 2 opened to an even greater level of anticipation, positive reviews, and merchidising tie-ins. My kids liked Shrek 2 better than the original, but I suspect that has a lot to do with its of the moment cachet vs. their having finally grown tired of Shrek after a hundred straight viewings. I liked it well enough but felt it wasn't quite up to its predecessor, especially in its fairy tale omnivorousness. Maybe I just didn't think Puss 'n Boots was the cat's pajamas like everyone else did. After all, to paraphrase Donkey, the job of annoying talking animal was already taken.

Mean Girls
We weren't going to let our older daughter see Mean Girls at first because we thought that, despite her raging pre-pubescence, it was a little too PG-13 for her. But then we decided, based on positive reviews that emphasized its high parent-quotient, that we wanted to see it ourselves, so we decided to take her after all. It was indeed a little too much for her in the language department, and it was not as grown-up savvy as advertised, but it struck enough of a compromise to have been acceptable all the way around. Lindsay Lohan may have much farther to go than fellow Disney teen star Hilary Duff, not having the benefit of a popular Disney channel series, but she may end up, by virtue of her superior script choices (Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen), having more staying power.

Spider-Man 2
I was bitten by a spider, by a brown recluse, and for two weeks had to wear sweatpants hiked up high above my waist nerd-like because of the dangerous welt it left at my belt line. And I didn't develop any superpowers as a result, not even from the vile MSM I had to drink to counteract the spider venom. So forgive me if I'm skeptical over the whole premise of Spider-Man. That this second installment dwelt so heavily on the question of whether to do what you have to do, all in the context of a juvenile comic book fantasy rather than in a more revealing real life situation, did not help its cause, at least not with me.

Shooting For the Hip

Judging from where I sit here in SoHo, three blocks from the Angelica, a few more from the Film Forum and the Sunshine, the indie, foreign, and documentary film scene, while only of shadow of what it was in its heyday, remains a vital force, still a hip antidote to the fare Hollywood saturates theaters, cable channels, and video chains with.

The Fog of War
Errol Morris has been one of the undisputed heavyweights of documentary filmmaking ever since 1988, when his The Thin Blue Line was instrumental in getting an innocent man off death row. Though I have personally found his other films to be of little interest, and not lively enough to entertain me despite my lack of interest, his Oscar-winning interview with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 60s, is an eye-opener. Subtitled Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, it demonstrates, in the context of the current war(s), that no lessons have been learned.

Super Size Me
You will never want to eat at McDonald's again after watching Morgan Spurlock do nothing but for 30 days and seeing the effect it has on his health and weight. Amazing even the doctors who monitor him throughout the 30 days, Spurlock degenerates steadily while documenting his trek through burger heaven and through the subject of American obesity in general. Funny and alarming.

I'm Not Scared
There is a baffling moment in the Italian psychological thriller I'm Not Scared when a child living in a poor rural village discovers a boy being held hostage in a dark cellar -- and he doesn't tell his parents. Surely that's the first thing any child would do, isn't it? And it's not like his father has done anything to make his son distrustful. No, it's more of a feeling that in discovering the hostage, the boy fears he himself has done something wrong. What happens afterward is not something I'd want to give away in case anyone ever wants to watch this film on video or cable, something I'd recommend, I'm Not Scared being in the time-honored tradition of European film in being able to eloquently show us the world through the prism of a child's point of view.

Iron Pyrite

At the invitation of a friend, I spent a wonderful day at the Tribeca Film Festival attending a triple feature, even though none of the movies was worthwhile in and of themselves. Open strictly to Gold Card members of the festival's founding sponsor America Express, the event, held at the Screening Room, was worthwhile for its intermission buffets and post-screening chats with the films' makers (as well as catching up with my friends). Aside from the vittles, what I got from this Gold Card event was that the search for film festival success too often turns up nothing more than fool's gold.

Finding Eleazar
If I was an opera fan, or at the very least anything short of an opera hater, I would have liked, or at the very least appreciated, this documentary about tenor Neil Shicoff's revival of an opera, Halevy's La Juive (The Jewess), not performed since it was banned by the Nazis due to its controversial Jewish subject matter. I was able to stick with it early on, when it was about the background of the tenor and the opera, but once the singing started, it acted upon me like a sleeping pill. Director Paula Heil Fisher's unabashed love of opera made her post-game comments less than illuminating.

Cavedweller
Unlike Big Fish, the film adaptation of Cavedweller does not make me want to run out and read Dorothy Allison's source novel. Maybe because I am neither a mother nor a daughter, I find myself less than interested in the story of a mother trying to reunite with the two daughters she abandoned long ago, risking her relationship with a third daughter she has custody of. Or maybe it's because I have little sympathy for someone willing to ruin everyone's lives by running away from her problems instead of trying to solve them. Either way, Cavedweller is just too depressing, Kyra Sedgwick's great acting job notwithstanding. Director Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon, High Art) was not available for discussion afterwards.

2bperfectlyhonest
Having little in common with opera stars or mother-daughter relationships, I was hoping to relate better to Randel Cole's feature film debut, a comedy about software entrepreneurs. And so I did -- until Cole left the real world behind for a sojourn into dreamland. If you run across this one in your video store or program guide (you won't be seeing it in theaters), skip it and see startup.com instead, a documentary that much more convincingly enters the world of the surreal. The best part of this screening was seeing Cole bristle at an audience member's comparison of his movie to the Coen Brothers (no doubt due to the presence in the cast of John Turturro) -- like me, Cole is decidedly not a Coen fan.

Staying Away in Droves

Most of what I didn't see I didn't see because it failed to even be attention-worthy, even when like Van Helsing it tried real hard to command my attention with its marketing blitz (I stopped watching vampire movies oh, about 365 vampire movies ago). Five movies bear the dubious distinction of being must-see movies, more or less, that I just couldn't bear seeing.

There once was a time when I would have looked forward eagerly to any Kevin Smith movie (I even liked Mallrats). But after Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back failed to generate any humor whatsoever (OK, Jay and Silent Bob generated a few chuckles, but overall...), I had no basis on which to believe that Jersey Girl would be anything other than the trite insipid fluff the preview made it out to be.

The Coen Brothers have ticked me off ever since their debut, Blood Simple, which everyone else besides me seems to idolize, idealize, iconize. Their comedies were often the exception to the rule (to my anti-Coen rule). But after the inanity of Intolerable Cruelty, I couldn't tolerate whatever type of cruelty they might have had in store in remaking one of the great Ealing comedies, The Ladykillers, not even with Tom Hanks in the Alec Guinness role.

I can't tell you how gratifying it is that Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill has been almost completely ignored or even trashed by almost everyone I know. I am fully confident that the curtain has been pulled back exposing this bogus wizard and will remain so until he figures out how to devote his not inconsiderable talents on something remotely resembling the worthwhile.

Knowing a bit of Aramaic from my yeshiva days, I had to unfortunately recuse myself from seeing The Passion of the Christ -- there is nothing more annoying than unsynchronized subtitles, is there? Maybe I would have gone to see Troy if it had been in Trojan with dual Greek and English subtitles -- or if I had any interest in seeing a sweaty half-naked Brad Pitt trying hard to keep a straight face as he thought about how much money he banked in agreeing to star in this latest retro sword and sandal epic.

REVIEWS: Monster, The Station Agent, Something's Gotta Give, Paycheck

For many years in the dark ages before the internet, I self-published a film review newsletter that I called "The View From the Front Row" -- the front row not only being my favorite seat back then (I'm too old for the front now these days), but also I thought a fairly decent metaphor for the oblique angle I tried to bring to my reviews, at least relative to mainstream critics. Children and work made it impossible for me to get the last issue out, but even this many years later, people still ask me where it is and when I'm going to start it up again.

Having found more time to see movies again, I faced a new problem -- in order to gain the proper perspective with which to review films, one really has to see much if not all the serious releases, from Hollywood, independents, and other countries. And frankly, the fare out there just was not worth the effort. Whenever my wife and I would get a date night and try to choose a movie, we couldn't find anything interesting to see -- even if it had been a month since we last saw something!

Things haven't changed in movieland, quality-wise, but I'm now going to make the effort anyway, and use the magic of cyberspace to bring "The View From the Front Row" back to life. To kick things off, here are a few of the few holiday releases I have been able to catch so far.

This Monster Got Too Much Ink

Monster, the third movie to examine the curious case of Aileen Wuornos, widely considered the first true female serial killer, is an interesting film on two levels. It attempts to provide insight into the morbid curiosity of what would make a woman into a serial killer (no one doubts that men can do it, but women?), and it represents Charlize Theron's attempt at stepping her career up to that of serious lead actor after nearly a decade of being a successful supporting babe. The movie has gotten a ton of good ink and Theron is being showered with awards and nominations, but first-time director Patty Jenkins has missed her mark by a wide margin despite Theron's heroic efforts.

Lee Wuornos was not the first female to commit mass murder, but she was the first to fit the FBI profile that differentiates between mass murderers who kill many people at one time or within one social circle, and those who kill individuals serially (usually randomly) over an extended period of time. Women can just as easily as men fall into the former category when committing crimes of passion, but serial killing characteristically implies something deeper and more disturbing, a pattern of evil rarely seen in women.

Unfortunately, Monster cannot give us the insight we crave because it omits so many contributory factors in the Wuornos case -- which is a shame, because there is ample running time wasted on repetitive scenes dramatizing Lee's abusive past and her seemingly sudden turn toward a lesbian relationship that could've been better used to give us a broader, more ambiguous, and most importantly more truthful picture of who she was and why she killed: a criminal history left completely unmentioned, a bisexual past, a golddigging marriage to a wealthy man, a possible history of mental illness, and even a lifelong best friend, a fact that counters the image of Lee being (tragically) all alone in the world.

The film even fudges the two areas it focuses on. Most egregiously, the portrayal of Lee's lover as a shy lovelorn closeted lesbian is as far a cry from her real-life partner as her fictitious name (though Christina Ricci is marvelous, luminous even, in creating that portrayal). Indeed, in the climax of the movie, Lee confesses her crimes to make sure her lover (whom we believe cannot possibly have been complicit in the murders) is let completely off the hook -- in real life, no one can be certain, given her history and character, that she was really that innocent. Plus. there is little evidence in reality that the john who set Lee off on her killing spree raped and abused her (her original story made no mention of it -- she added those embellishments later on).

We had a hard time recalling what else Theron has been in. The only appearance I could recall for certain was the one that first brought her to my attention (and how!) as well as Hollywood's attention -- a supporting role in Trial and Error, a movie vehicle for none other than Kramer of Seinfeld, Michael Richards, in which she plays an extremely fetching biker babe. Beyond that, she has co-starred alongside some of filmdom's hunkiest actors and has played supporting roles for Woody Allen and with Robert De Niro.

Theron's performance in Monster is as phenomenal as her transformation from screen siren to streetwalker. She gained thirty pounds (always an impressive feat for Academy voters), ruined her hair and complexion, and adopted the tone and attitude of a white trash loser to perfection. It's a two-note performance -- the ingratiating fast-talking Lee Wuornos who wants so desperately to be accepted and loved, and the enraged foul-mouthed Lee Wournos capable of killing in a heartbeat and rationalizing it in an even shorter span of time -- but those are the only two notes her subject left her to work with, so it's more a triumph than a limitation. Only the two-note script in what was really a more complex scenario holds her back, making her portrayal grow monotonous (duotonous?) as the film drags on in a manner that is hardly entertaining, even if you like it.

The Demons Within

My biggest problem with Monster is that I'm not really interested in why people kill, not even when they have a life as hard as Lee Wuornos had. I'm far more interested in how people who live in trying circumstances find ways to cope, sometimes even finding ways to be happy. That's why The Station Agent is a far more interesting movie, even though it is slow as molasses. Its characters are at least as damaged as Wuornos, suffering pain, rejection, loss, and loneliness to the depth of their being (rure, they're fictional, but so is the Lee Wuornos of Monster to a great degree). But they find each other and find a way to make a life for themselves.

The central figure in The Station Agent is more of a monster within the world around him than Wuornos -- a dwarf, as he calls himself. Rarely if ever has a little person ever been given this much of chance to play a regular person. Peter Dinklage, who has made a living playing little people leading normal lives, most memorably in Elf, is very appealing in this central role. He is a handsome man with a deep reassuring voice, playing a train afficianado who inherits an abandoned train station in the appropriately named Newfoundland, New Jersey (an oasis of watershed wilderness in suburban Morris County, a real place -- a friend of mine used to work on the now-defunct tourist railroad that lends the film its prime location).

Wanting only to be alone in his self-imposed exile from a human race that cannot accept him for what he is, he is hounded by the outgoing Cuban hot dog vendor who parks his truck next door every morning and wants desperately to be his friend, and by a local artist who has lost her son and separated from her husband (Bobby Cannavale and Patricia Clarkson both turn in winning performances in these roles). There are other misfits, castoffs, and generally insecure people populating his new world, and he is pulled into it despite his attempts to remain aloof. The pace of this minimalist story is slow, the climax less than gratifying, the outcome a bit too facile, as friendship helps everyone overcome their inner damage, but it sure is more interesting than the half-told story of an uneducated, grating, ingratiating prostitute turning to serial murder.

Director Thomas McCarthy, a minor film and TV actor, almost all in bit parts, makes his directorial debut in this indie production, just like Monster's Patty Jenkins, but with much more promise, at least as far as I'm concerned.

We Already Gave at the Office

Jack Nicholson, fresh from seeing Kathy Bates in the buff in About Schmidt, steps up in class in Something's Gotta Give, getting a good glimpse, full frontal, of a quite fit and trim Diane Keaton, wrinkles notwithstanding. Nicholson is mastering the art of examining the aging process in men, here flipping the paradigm of About Schmidt from repressed widower trying to find a way to come out of his shell to celebrated lifelong bachelor learning to love for the first time.

Nicholson is more in character as the supremely confident man about town who will only date younger women -- until he is felled first by a heart attack and then by the care of his girlfriend's mother, played by Keaton. Though the results here are a pleasant diversion, they are no more than that, this film lacking the depth of About Schmidt, in which Nicholson was far more effective playing against type as the shy retiring retiree in the title role.

And don't you think he really should have died in the end? (Oops! Did I give something away?)

Cashing in a Paycheck

Some directors I have just had to swear off, so infuriating are they despite their inflated reputations among the cognoscenti. Pedro Almodovar is at the head of the list -- sorry, but his oevre is just self-indulgent crap I cannot ever force myself to sit through again, even on the off chance I might miss something special. John Woo is another -- just how many hyperkinetic car chases and Mexican stand-offs can one stand when a plot really needs to be moved along in something resembling logic and reality, and just how many can one director do without becoming a parody of himself? (The TV series Alias got it right, playing out many of its action sequences quickly, with no artificial suspense when we are assured of the outcome from the start, and letting its characters get on with more important business, their personal lives.)

Nevertheless, I made an exception for Woo's latest, Paycheck, because it was derived from the highly imaginative work of celebrated science fiction author Philip K. Dick, best known for writing the original Blade Runner. And lo -- it works, for me at least. Woo finally did put somewhat of a lid on his worst tendencies in order to make sure the story got told properly. Sure, there are the requisite chases and explosions, and even his trademark Mexican stand-off (maybe even two).

It helps that I am forever intrigued by stories that play around with the concept of time. In Paycheck, Ben Affleck plays a computer engineer in the near future who reverse-engineers the technology of competitors for his employers, and then has his memory wiped at the end of each job so that he cannot be tempted to re-sell what he knows to other competitors. His biggest job is a three-year effort that pays him nearly a hundred million, but when he goes to cash in his paycheck, he discovers that he has given up the payoff in exchange for a manila envelope full of junk, and he neither remembers why he did it nor what the junk in the envelope is.

Turns out the junk is a series of clues he has left himself, knowing his memory would be wiped, in order to help him survive his near-future (and still collect his fat paycheck). What we end up with is a Hitchcockian double chase -- the protagonist is chasing the solution to the mystery while he himself is being chased by the bad guys who want what he is seeking. The twist (and it's not a new one, but remains perhaps the ultimate in double-chase gimmicks) is that the McGuffin is the protagonist himself -- in the past, amnesia made people "chase" themselves, but amnesia having become so cliche, a new rationale is needed, Woo finding it in the speculative musings of Dick.