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The Coen brothers admired the 'storyline scheme' of THE ODYSSEY by Homer, having never actually read it. But among their friends and associates was someone who was fortunate enough to have read the epic poem and could inform their decisions and opinions. What resulted was a comedic film essay on brotherhood within the context of the social, political and economic conditions derived from the 1930s American depression. This is a wildly picaresque adventure story, stocked with the usual outlandish Coen brothers characters, some of them seemingly escapees from a Robert Crumb scenario of some kind. But the usual Coen touches and flourishes are all there, along with the asymmetrical rhythms that make these highly improbable events in this Coen universe seem plausible.

The Coen brothers are just another in a long line of Artists and Writers to take a liking to the man from Ithaca. Dante Alighieri imagines himself meeting Odysseus in his DIVINE COMEDY (1321), and James Joyce's ULYSSES (1921), ('Ulysses' being the latinized translation of the name 'Odysseus' for the Romans), is a stream of consciousness prose work using each of the twenty-four books of the tale as a jumping off point to evoke what was then present day life in Dublin, Ireland. Nikos Kazantzakis's THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL (1938), naturally picks up where Homer's work left off and goes in exciting metaphysical directions. There have been several re-imaginings of Homer's work for film and television and even in opera and music; the Coen brothers work being among the latest.

Using folk music specific to the period of The Great Depression, this movie also helped pioneer the extensive use of digital color correction to give the film its sepia-tinted autumnal appearance. There was positive critical response to the movie and it was a box office hit. Ethan and Joel Coen were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as was Roger Deakins for Best Cinematography. George Clooney won a Golden Globe award as Best Actor and the musical score and soundtrack won a Grammy Award when produced as an album. Look for The Fairfield Four as gravediggers singing traditional African American gospel towards the end of this piece.

The film follows three convicts on the lam from a chain gang and determined to find hidden treasure while a vengeful sheriff is in hot pursuit. The film's title comes from Preston Sturges film SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941). It is set in rural Mississippi 1937 and Time Blake Nelson, along with John Torturro portray escaped convicts Delmar and Pete. They are led in their escape and adventures by George Clooney playing Ulysses Everett McGill because, as he puts it, he has the capacity for 'abstract thought'. Along the way, they encounter Chris Thomas King as Tommy Johnson, a skilled blues musician who has sold his soul to the devil because he wasn't doing nothing with it anyway.

The music by T Bone Burnett is a prominent star of this production. Coen regulars John Goodman as Daniel "Big Dan" Teague selling Bibles for the Ku Klux Klan, Holly Hunter as Penny Wharvey-McGill, Ulysses Everett's ex-wife, and Stephen Root as Mr. Lund, a blind radio station manager, may have you searching through Homer's ODYSSEY for character references. Michael Badalucco as Baby Face Nelson, Lee Weaver as the Blind Seer, Charles Durning as Menelaus "Pappy" O'Daniel, the governator of Mississippi, standing proud for the best of the Western patriarchy, along with Mia Tate, Musetta Vander and Christy Taylor may also leave you curious and wondering about correspondences to Homer's ancient myth. You may also find a Ku Klux Klan rally here resonating with a scene from THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), and the ending as comically biblical as a climax of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956). Hopefully, it will not leave you "uncertain and unsatisfied" as was Roger Ebert's lament, if you can accept the symmetry of its zany logic.

The compelling dynamic of director William Friedkin's semi-documentary Neo-noir thriller shot with hand-held cameras in the streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx is the inversion of the relationship between the hero and the villain of this piece. Usually, you expect the protagonist to have the lion's share of agreeable traits and the antagonist to share with audiences at least a few of the characteristics that are simply downright contemptible. This is not the case between Gene Hackman as Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle and Fernando Rey as Alain "Frog One" Charnier. Charnier comes across as a cultured, well-mannered sophisticate; an international man you might not mind sitting down and having dinner with as he regales you with fascinating stories from his unusual and adventurous life. Doyle by contrast is loud-mouthed and bigoted, irascible and pugnacious, a crude, vulgar working class man with his antennae particularly attuned to lower-class values looking for where the action is when he's not sitting in front of the television with a pizza and belching over a six-pack of beer.

The great thing about this movie was that it accurately captured that sense of New York City that repelled me as a teenager walking around Harlem and through Central Park as well as Chinatown and the rest of its environs. It seemed to me a vast place of many layers and there were zones inside it as futuristically progressive as something out of Walt Disney, while other places made me feel like I was wandering through the remains of Ancient Rome. The people in some areas seemed angry and confrontational in a way that was markedly different from the people in Detroit. There was also something vaguely oppressive and suffocating to me about its ever present concrete and its lack of lush, open green spaces. Here Nature was contained and held prisoner or simply banished from view, out of mind and out of sight...

Director William Friedkin seemed to confirm my earliest, uninformed impressions of New York in his movie. That sense of a city with all the trappings and accoutrements of a sophisticated society, that yet and still belied a sense of unbelievable coarseness and vulgarity. As exciting and dramatic and even Oscar worthy Gene Hackman's performance of Popeye Doyle was in the film, I came away from it after that first viewing feeling that New York City itself was the main character in the narrative and how it warped people's lives. Doyle and Charnier ostensibly appear to come from different sides of the track. But share in common an ability and a willingness to do anything to get ahead. The only thing that truly differs between them is the lack of or state of refinement of their methods.

Upon reflection, one could easily imagine Alain Charnier as simply a more evolved version of Popeye Doyle. Both men are professionals who deal with death as a 'necessary evil'. That I think is the incredible achievement of William Friedman with this movie, as it speaks from his prior experience as a documentary filmmaker. This piece of cinema is actually social commentary masquerading as standard Hollywood entertainment. It speaks without preaching to the idea of the Metropolis as the throne of Mammon, fostering the values of success by any means necessary and giving sanction therefore to those forms of dehumanization that make such material riches and affluence manifest.

Naturally, many reviewers are prone to rave about the level of craft employed by cinematographer Owen Roizman and owed to the editing of Gerald B. Greenberg with regard to the car-train chase sequence. But that's exactly the point. Long ago in 1915, D. W. Griffith was hailed for his technical and dramatic innovations in an epic piece of cinema that ran in theaters for a little more than three hours, but which proved in the end to be a Faustian bargain. The film was known as THE BIRTH OF THE NATION (1915), and while it advanced the technology of filmmaking, it also inspired the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan as well as riots and ultimately caused spikes in lynchings that in some places increased as much as five-fold. William Friedkin's movie is making a statement about this schism between the advance of success through technology and the ends it chooses versus the cultivation of moral sensibility. But not in any way that would affect his film's profit margin or his bottom line. He naturally leaves it up us to divine what all this means in our own lives as any savvy New Yorker would.

This is Hitchcock hosting and ladling out the fun in his native homeland of jolly old England before answering Selznick's call to come to Hollywood. This thriller on a train has a professorial air about it and the humor contained herein is drolly full of visual wit, involving the sleight of hand of the incidental and more often than not, a celebration of the vagaries of commonplace life. The Master of Suspense is playing with a full deck here, while deftly keeping his whole card up his sleeve until the very end. The screenplay written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, is adapted from Ethel Lina White's novel THE WHEEL SPINS (1936), and is tweaked here and there to make a subtle comment in reference to Prime Minister Chamberlain's policies with regard to appeasing the Nazi regime. It's a hilarious example and testament to what can happen when everybody helps out, albeit reluctantly and sometimes unknowingly, fighting spies and saboteurs.

Dama May Whitty brings an Agatha Christie vibe to the yarn which is entirely proper and fitting. Ethel Lina White, upon whose novel this particular thrill-a-minute was based, was as popular a writer in her day as Dorthy L. Sayers and, you guessed it, Agatha Christie. Whitty is the charming and helpful governess Miss From, ever ready and available for tea and a chat. Events reveal her to be the real, live, human MacGuffin that Hitchcock is shifting around in a convoluted but deadly version of the shell game. Margaret Lockwood portrays the soon to be married English tourist Iris Henderson on the way back home and having her sleep disturbed by a loud stomping noise coming from upstairs. Apparently some kind of ethnomusicologist by the name of Gilbert Redman is playing the clarinet for hoofing folk dancers who have become participants in his present study. Michael Redgrave is the redoubtable Redman who butts heads and locks horns with Iris and eventually helps her with the puzzling mystery that has been thrown in her lap.

There are all sorts of markers in this film that are precursors of the New Cinema. The focus on learning, the tricks of stage magic walking that fine line between illusion and reality, secrets important to the destiny of nations concealed and revealed in musical phrases, a romantic relationship based more primarily on problem solving than on sexual heat, the symmetry of community effort and the concept that Love can find the way through near impossible odds are themes worth expanding to the greatest dimension. Hitchcock adroitly does this here without you catching him at it. The characters in the hotel and on the train are vivid and fully realized in their interactions with each other. The plot is as fast-paced as a roaring train and relies more on higher order thinking skills (HOTS), rather than sex and violence to fuel and propel the narrative to its action-packed and amusing resolution.

This once again brings up the subject of catharsis. The purging of negative emotion through an appropriate community activity or event. In Ancient Greece, this kind of process was considered highly therapeutic and a service that promoted the public good. The first twenty minutes of this Hitchcock thriller establishes this internationally diverse cast of characters and that strong sense of community that the Master of Suspense evokes in some of the best of his films. You will see Hitchcock return to the theme of community lost and found, under various veneers of civility, even more profoundly in a later masterpiece know as REAR WINDOW (1954). It is also intriguing to note that the words "community" and "religion" are often closely related to each other and one gets the sense that Hitchcock is often playing with the associations between these concepts to his and the audience's benefit.

There can be no more light-hearted example than the present film under review. Pauls Lukas has never been more villainous as the duplicitous Dr. Egan Hartz. Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford are a source of chuckles and a big guffaw as Caldicott and Charters, cricket enthusiasts who only want to get to the Test match in Manchester on time. Nearly everyone in the ensemble has a least one brief moment to shine; from Phillip Leaver as Signor Doppo, the Magician, to Cecil Parker as the adulterous Mr. Todhunter to Linden Travers as "Mrs." Todhunter to Catherine Lacy as The Nun. But in the end, it is Dame Whitty who plays out the final tune, tying up all the loose ends of the storyline...

Everyone has a part in Life they were born to play and that no one else can play better than themselves. Others have assumed the guise of The Great Emancipator and done right well at it. Those who have accomplished this in the Cinema include the likes of Walter Huston, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, Hal Holbrook, Sam Waterston, Benjamin Walker, and Daniel Day-Lewis. I apologize for any thespians I have left out. I have always thought Clint Eastwood would have made a great wartime Lincoln, but he went to Italy and never looked back. This is a coveted role and the roll call for those who stepped up to the plate for it rivals that of The Great Savior himself.

Henry Fonda in this film reluctantly distinguished himself as among the best to have ever represented the life of Honest Abe. He is reported to have said that to him playing Lincoln was like playing God and he wasn't certain he was up to the task, or that such an attempt would do his career much good. Naturally, his misgivings proved to be unjustified and his portrayal of the rail-splitter in his youth is now regarded as definitive. Raymond Massey also did a bang-up job the year after in ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS (1940), but there is something in the cast of Fonda's eyes, that sense of living eternal kindness and compassion that particularly makes his turn at the role stand out. Truth be told, throughout most of his career and in many cases he seemed to be playing some variation of Lincoln even in other dramatic roles.

The director John Ford insisted that Fonda should not take the hagiographical point of view, but instead strive to see the youthful Abe as just another nineteenth century jackleg lawyer working to earn his stripes and make his way in the world. This gave the actor something to set his sails on and apparently the character became much more natural to convey after that. There is no doubt that Fonda's personality and psychological makeup seem to fit this famous figure from history like a glove. While not wishing to take anything away from all the other stalwart performers who in their time have donned the stovepipe hat with relish, there is indeed something spooky going on when we see Abe seated at his desk, stretching out and relaxing with one foot sticking out as though he were idly poking a hole through the fourth wall of our viewing. There is a stronger air of authenticity about this version of Lincoln than with any of the others, and it is hard to shake that undeniable feeling that with this performance you are not just getting the next best thing, but the real goods.

The anecdotes about Lincoln are endless, as was the case with Muhammad Ali and Babe Ruth, and just when you think you've heard them all, here comes another one from out of nowhere. I remember one about his mother Nancy Hanks chiding Abe's brothers about tracking mud into the house. The story goes that Lincoln carried one male member of his family into the house and held him upside down to make muddy footprints on the ceiling! When their mother came into the house the floor was clean, but she was left to marvel with consternation as to how those mud tracks made it up above her before busting out laughing. At any rate, there is something of this kind of humor and fun going on in the proceedings of this tale.

But things aren't all sweetness and light. There is Abe kneeling at the gravesite of Ann Rutledge, as portrayed by Pauline Moore, who encouraged him to take up Law as a career. We see him here ruminating about what was and what might have been before deciding where to go from here. There are log-splitting and pie-eating contests to be conducted at the county fair before murder most foul fills the moonless night air with a whole peck of trouble. Abe tries to dance his crush on Mary Todd as played by Marjorie Weaver out of his system in the worst kind of way, before settling down to the business of defending a pair of brothers allegedly culpable for killing the town bully. The black and white cinematography of Bert Glennon and Arthur C. Miller gives this film a sense of dignified gravity and the music of Alfred Newman, is wistfully romantic here and there before becoming urgently dramatic and finally solemnly inspirational as we watch Lincoln take his leave of us climbing the first of many hills against the wicked wind of a stormy night...

This film, of course, is a mixture of three genres. The spy thriller genre of the James Bond franchise, the Blaxsploitation genre ushered in by Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles, and most importantly, the Martial Arts genre as represented by the Chop Socky and Samurai films. Naturally, when you think about it for a moment, it becomes clear and obvious that famous actor John Saxon represents the James Bond element, however loosely, Jim Kelly masterly represents the Blaxsploitation genre, and the legendary Bruce Lee does the Martial Arts genre proud. This probably goes a long way towards explaining the synergy that generated the overwhelmingly phenomenal appeal of this particular piece of cinema. This film is East Meets West at its most mainstream, and curiously enough, promotes after its own fashion, the logic of diversity. I have often considered Bruce Lee to be the James Dean of philosophers and it is a profound loss to the world that he did not live to see what would turn out to be his last performance in the world of International Cinema.

What is an even greater loss is that we were not privileged to see Bruce Lee evolve as a philosopher and a man of letters. Many of his statements about Truth and Life provide exciting parallels between him and Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was also influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre's ideas on self-actualization and many of his notes on the power of the will were influenced by Nietzche. Bertrand Russell and Alan Watts were also important philosophical influences. Much of his philosophy about the Martial Arts can be found in the four volumes of BRUCE LEE'S FIGHTING METHOD (1976), but even more popularly in a volume entitled the TAO OF JEET KUNE DO (1975).

While Bruce Lee's films are largely responsible for the Kung Fu craze that started in the 1970s and evolved into the MMA phenomenon that can be observed today, I don't believe it would be fair to compare what he has done in film to what others have accomplished in the East with cinema. Bruce Lee's influence can be seen in everything these days having to do with action films from Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes movies to a plethora of tales featuring the Marvel Universe. But even the casual observer can appreciate that the Bruce Lee effect is about far more than that. It is actually about a cultural exchange between East and West and what was lost in the translation. Somehow Bruce Lee became one of the focal points of this exchange, and an important figure in World Culture.

This film starts in a Shaolin monastery and ends on an island where a Martial Arts tournament is used as a public front for drug trafficking operations and prostitution. Produced by Fred Weintraub, Paul Heller, and Raymond Chow, it does little to represent in images the broad spectrum of styles and disciplines that are the Martial Arts. It has a thin, formulaic plot written by Michael Allin and conforms to all the cliches and standards represented in the films of James Bond, the Blaxsploitation Era, and the tradition of Martial arts movies made on the quick for popular consumption. It was made for the money and shows it. One cannot then overestimate how valuable the presence of Bruce Lee is to this film; doing his version of the Ali Shuffle and continuing to develop this new form of the martial arts he has invented: JEET KUNE DO.

Nowadays The Little Dragon is worshipped and deified as a man who changed his times. The truth is, of course, he was as human as anyone else. Stories have circulated that he got so frustrated building a bed from a kit that he ended up throwing it out the window in a fit of rage; that he drank bull's or beef blood occasionally as part of his diet regimen, (that one reputedly related by a Bruce Lee Martial arts student James Coburn), and that he had his sweat glands removed to appear more photogenic on screen. Bruce Lee's impact on modern culture through his studies in the Martial Arts, his teaching, his writings and his involvement with Cinema, has yet to be accurately determined and assessed. One thing is certain, his movies are a part of the spiritual testament he left to the world, as perhaps tangentially are his books and poetry. While one would hardly call them Gospels, these disparate works of Lee seem to suggest and prophesy the potentials that a nexus between East and West can bring and are therefore worthy of study and note.

This is a remarkable cinematic attempt meant to interpret the spirituality of Jesus Christ this side of the world. That perhaps is its greatest drawback. It is not so much a speculation of what it must have been like to have God walk the Earth in the form of a man for some thirty odd years, as it is an exploration of what it is really like to be truly human. Film director Martin Scorsese dilates that moment in time when the Son of God was stripped bare of the insulation of divine love that acted as a spiritual force field around him, and cried out in the void of that lack and absence, desperately longing for the sense of connection to higher beingness, which in his great pain appeared to have abandoned him. This is all done in accordance to the poetic vision of that great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis.

Scorsese's adaptation of the 1955 novel, with a screenplay by Paul Schrader, is thoroughly faithful to its source material, but anyone who has read Kazantzakis' prose can understand the criticism about 'languid pacing' and 'tinny dialogue' asserted in the consensus from the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. There is a powerful, passionate and impulsively momentous affirmation of Life coursing through Kazantzakis' writing, a kind of striding forth to engage in existence as some great undertaking that would be difficult for even a cinematographer or a writer feeling bound by the conventions of journalism to fully capture. Scorsese does a fine job depicting the mirage and illusion of The Last Temptation in all its seductive, sensual tangibility. This is where I believe Kazantzakis would commend him, for getting at the heart of what he was trying to say in his near rapturous terms.

This is also the shortcoming of Michael Cacoyanis' film ZORBA THE GREEK (1964). While a worthy effort to convey in cinematic terms the breath of Kazantzakis' vision, its main characters, Anthony Quinn as Zorba and Alan Bates as Basil, stumble and bumble and laugh and dance their way through their misadventures in an environs that appears bleak and lifeless. But despite its celebrated acclaim, it pales in comparison to the rousing explosion of Life to be found in the book. There is indeed something psychedelic and hallucinogenic about Kazantzakis' THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1952), as it was described on the back cover of my first paperback copy of the book. It is literary CGI years before it would ever be invented, and this is a quality that tends to be missing from Scorsese's epic.

Where the blasphemy rears its hoary head is in the way our great Greek writer presents and rehashes the Gospels. The feeling that we have tread this ground before and the sense that the author has nothing particularly illuminating to add to these hallowed spiritual testaments besides his own entertaining and eccentric views begins to smack of something just this side of spiritual plagiarism. Particularly when there was an interesting stretch of three days that Christ spent in the tomb and other places unknown that very little has been written about, and would be even more appropriate grist for the creative imagination. But I believe Scorsese did the best he could with what he had to work with, braving the hornet's nest of controversy that would get Kazantzakis excommunicated and his novel banned in certain select spots of the known world. The renowned auteur would come to discover that even a sincere artist such as he might be prone to pay a dear price when messing with the eye witness accounts of the man from Nazareth known as Jesus Christ.

This not withstanding, Willem Defoe does an admirable job of portraying an all-too-human Jesus, while Barbara Hershey put in a performance as Mary Magdalene deserving of a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Harvey Keitel, despite being nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award as Worst Supporting Actor, is exactly how I imagined Judas to be in the book. While Scorsese's epic is not as treasured a version of the life of Jesus Christ in my mind; Cecil B. DeMille's KING OF KINGS (1927) winning that spot for its thought-provoking intelligence and the force of its moral authority, I cannot imagine any other filmmaker handling this subject matter with more consideration and care. This movie re-imagining of The Life of Christ still ranks as a notable achievement this side of paradise...

Some things grow on you over time. This film is a case in point. It is basically a series of anecdotes and vignettes strung together to warm the heart and affirm that people, especially your parents, want to help you make your dreams come true. One could say these are the recountings of a young lad with an 'overactive imagination'. But you are not over-exercising your imagination when the things you dream about come to pass. Parents can help you to understand that people who love you will always help you to make your dreams come true and appreciate it when you help them to do the same. The childhood memories presented here are just this side of nostalgia, and besides revolving around treasured Christmas memories with family, extols the virtues of being gifted with a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle. We are privileged to witness the journey of misadventures a boy name Ralphie enjoys beyond any and all warnings...

Author and humorist Jean Shepherd narrates this tale of fondly remembered bygone days involving kids with Santa Claus, bullies and Christmas presents, parents, teachers, barking dogs and even a plundered turkey. It resonates comfortably with the amusing meanderings of Twain and Bradbury and it makes its points without anyone having to drop their panties or wipe blood off the walls and the floor. We are reminded with a nudge how serious and earth-shaking the events of childhood seemed at the time only to turn out to be merely another day in the life of our family. There is wry wisdom to be found here in between fantasies about Cowboy Justice and the ponderous realities of growing up. Peter Billingsley as Ralphie discovers he just might be able to profit from his junior league experience with Life if he can just keep from shooting his eye out.

While this story mostly revolves around the trials and tribulations of what we are urged to view as the typical midwestern family, there is some faux swearing to be endured. Also asians and blacks are presented as hilarious foils for the family or fall guys in Ralphie's fantasies. But Peter Billingsley is an unredeemable ham of a child actor and he's in good company here. While the supporting cast around him includes outstanding performances from Darren McGavin as The Old Man, his father, and Melinda Dillon as Mrs. Parker, his mother, the comically feral performance of Zack Ward as Scut Farkus, the bully who preys on Ralphie after school is also a standout. Ian Petrella as Randy Parker makes a memorable little brother to Ralphie as well.

Nowadays, you will often see this film in marathons on the various cable channels. These events will often start on Christmas Eve and run for twenty-four hours throughout Christmas Day. While Frank Capra never really intended for IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) to be considered and viewed as a Christmas movie, it is quite obvious from the title that director Bob Clark intended this tale to be exactly that. Time has been kind to this film and viewership has steadily increased over the decades. The Turner stations TBS and TNT have hosted marathons of this movie annually and it continues to be among the most watched Holiday Classics.

There have been sequels featuring these same characters on the PBS series AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE. A stage play adaptation of this film was also written by Phillip Grecian in 2000. A CHRISTMAS STORY, THE MUSICAL written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (music and lyrics) and Joseph Robinette (book) opened on Broadway November 2012 to positive reviews. This musical received Tony Award nominations for Best Music, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score. After an adaptation of the musical was aired on the FOX NETWORK ON DECEMBER 17TH, 2017, it's anybody's guess what incarnation Jean Sheperd's story will take on next and in what manner the boy with dreams of a Red Ryder rifle will appear.

Directed by Spike Lee, written by Reggie Rock Bythewood, and produced by Rueben Cannon, Barry Rosenbush, and Bill Borden, this is one of the auteur's better efforts. As was the case with SHAFT (1971), HARLEM NIGHTS (1989), and the WALKING DEAD (1995), this is the next evolution towards that film that can rightly be called the African American version of THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963), and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967). That is, a film that represents the plot pattern of the GROUP PROTAGONIST against formidable if not impossible odds, much as the film GLORY (1989) came close to doing. The ensemble of characters are all first-rate; from Thomas Jefferson Byrd and De'aundre Bonds as father and son Evan & Evan Jr., to Ossie Davis as Jeremiah aka "Pop", a senior citizen and expert on African American History. Just about the entire spectrum of African American male sensibility is represented on this bus trip to Louis Farrakhan's MILLION MAN MARCH. The impossible mission here, of course, is to get to the March with all souls intact, but you see full evidence in the interactions between the very diverse characters, how the ideations of sexism and racism attenuate such a noble and grand aspiration.

There is backstory galore revealed between the more than fifteen participants riding the bus to the MILLION MAN MARCH. Lee for the most part handles these various exchanges and encounters between homies with remarkable nuance and subtlety. Much of their discourse reminds me of how the fellows on the playground and in my neighborhood and in the factory used to shoot the breeze about the honeys and everything else under the Sun. This casual and disarming foray into the depths of the African American male psyche skirts just this side of cliches and stereotypes and more often than not proves to be pleasantly revelatory. The script has a tighter cohesiveness to it than some earlier films I could mention helmed by Lee and company, and I found the resolution to this particular piece unusually inspiring and satisfying.

We see everything in this kaleidoscope of black manhood except the African American Fifteen actually reaching their destination. I think a little cross-cutting between the scenes of those who made it to the March and those who stayed behind with the dying Jeremiah aka "Pop", might have given the ending a sense of wider scope and grandeur, but the emotional fireworks in the resolution are still palpably impressive. Spike Lee made this film his way, with much of the financing coming from famous and successful black men in the entertainment and business industry like himself. Will Smith, Danny Glover, Wesley Snipes, Robert Guillaume, Johnny Cochran Jr., BET Chairman Robert Johnson and Taco Bell President Olden Lee, among several others, wrote the checks to keep this project on the rails. So that tangible feeling of unity rings true behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera.

This is one of the few films where Lee does not do some kind of cameo, extended or otherwise, but instead has Hill Harper as Xavier Moore aka "X", stand in for him as a UCLA Film Student making a documentary. While I don't think this angle is as fully explored as it could have been, particularly when it comes to arriving at the MILLION MAN MARCH itself, the parallels between what Spike was doing with his 16mm camera and what Xavier was doing documentary style could have spiced up this drama even more. As it stands, this is a solid, multi-layered effort providing us with exciting glimpses into the world of the contemporary Black Man in many of their most unguarded moments. The gay couple Kyle & Randall having their relationship problems was novel and diverting. While Jeremiah the senior citizen does a monologue near the end of the film that would fill Willy Loman with envy.

Now it would have been interesting to see those who made it to the March disappear inside of the massive throng of the marchers and later meet up again. But Lee's take on how the drama should be resolved proves to be more than valid. Roger Guenveur Smith's emotional breakdown as police officer Gary Rivers is poignant when he learns that Jeremiah has expired never reaching the March. The father and son dynamic between Thomas Jefferson Byrd as Evan and De'aundre Bonds as Evan Jr., provides more than its fair share of dramatic highlights. It would have been interesting to see Jamal, the former gangster turned Muslim interact with Guy Margo as Khalid, a member of the Nation of Islam, but Andre Braugher as Flip, the vainglorious aspiring actor, fills that void as memorably as a pair of unlocked handcuffs.

Here we are again encountering Max Rockatansky somewhere somehow within the apocalyptic wasteland. But it doesn't take long for things to get very intense very fast. Before he knows it, Max finds himself hanging on for dear life during one of the most baroque chase scenes ever filmed. Forced to endure a grueling cliffhanger on wheels, he finds himself upside down in a whole lot of trouble. Unfortunately for him, things only get worse from there...

Rocking to the beat of its own heavy metal and muscle car rhythms, this tale tears across the desert hell-bent for some kind of promised land beyond the horizon. The theme presents a situation similar to the one found facing Humphrey Bogart in the film THE LEFT HAND OF GOD (1955). This time instead of posing the question 'what do you do when you can't run and you can't fight?', the question to be resolved in this adventure is 'what do you do when your promised land has been snatched out from under you and no longer exists?'. Confronting this situation is enough to bring Imperator Furiosa, as portrayed by Charlize Theron, sinking to her knees. Leave it to Tom Hardy's Max Rockatansky to suggest the only bone-chilling option still left available to them.

The winner of six Academy Awards, mostly for the look and the feel of the thing more than anything else, this film packs everything you would find in a Roman colosseum on wheels under chrome fenders and heading up the straightaway. Let's take this show on the road being the prime rationale here. There is Mad Max being strapped on as a hood ornament in a car chase film featuring the requisite explosions, sudden death suitable for framing and sex slaves on the run. This is George Miller's ultimate spectacle roaring toward you at high speed through a cloud of dust. High-O, Silver! Away! There is very little to talk about when you are dodging spears and harpoons and doing your level best not to fall beneath the undercarriage of anybody's vehicle to be swallowed up in bone crunching fashion by the unforgiving road. Meanwhile, better look out to your left for Immortan Joe and his bully boys...

Charlize Theron in an interview related how chaotic it could be on set, the actors not knowing what scene was coming up next or where exactly the story was going. George Miller relied heavily on extensive storyboarding to create many of the practical effects including stunts and improvisation to keep the flavor of the acting organic. While there was a script, Miller worked with a comic book artist named Brendan McCarthy on the storyboards for over a year. The story boards reportedly filled a room with over 3500 panels. A lady named Margaret Sixel worked on editing the film for over two years which came to roughly 6,000 hours, ten hours a day, 6 days a week.

Nowadays George Miller's wasteland epic is being touted as one of the greatest action films ever made. It has a simple plot; no end of freaky characters grasping for their moment in the Sun, gleefully proclaiming we are at heart a barbarism and loving it! Don't ask me what happened to the radio satellites and the notion of contacting other 'advanced societies' in the universe. What George Miller has presented here is a sci-fi extrapolation of the Western with all its generic and hide-bound conventions. It's actually the same old mess warmed over and set on wheels. There is very little that is new here in the sparse dialogue and Max attempting to rise above his nightmares produced from the violence of others and as well his own violent actions. It is amazing how he literally pumps his lifeblood into the narrative and with a gasp and a hiccup demonstrates he can still make a difference in the world. The moral of this story might be that the promised land you are seeking may very well be right under your feet or in your heart and soul whether you know it or not, whether you can accept such an idea or not, or whether you are ready to seize your freedom right here and right now or not. But don't waste your time looking around for Max to tell you that. He has slipped away once more to wander the wasteland in search of freedom from his demons... the unwitting messenger of at least a new truth for Western Man...

This is a story about a lone man straddling the line between cowardice and heroism. The tension and energy frequency this vacillation creates rises to a shattering crescendo of repressed emotions released through violence. Dustin Hoffman superlatively evokes and conveys his character David Sumner's nervous and nerve-tingling alternation between fear, anger and antagonism to a gradually mathematically precise result in horror with a performance that suggests revenge can be a potentially orgasmic experience. I believe director Sam Peckinpah lucked up this time and found a subject best suited to justify his slow motion fondling of violence, death and destruction. Here the slow motion sequences graphically emphasize Sumner's shifts from timid temporization to outright and overt albeit reluctant defense of home and hearth.

The fact that David Sumner is a mathematician is especially important to the narrative. It works much better than having his character be, of all things, a screenwriter, as was the case in the 2011 remake. The reason being, to my mind, that you simply don't expect the level and volume of violence expressed in this story to come from a man purportedly dedicated to pacifism as well as abstract thought in the realm of ideas. While watching the film and later reflecting upon it, the most striking thing about it for me was how much of it felt like a mathematical equation that the main character somehow managed to set up in advance, either knowingly or unknowingly, despite the wildness and the wooliness of these intense proceedings. It all plays out with a bizarre sense of logic and reason sans the better part of rationality, and with a kind of mounting force that is a visual and visceral compelling cathartic.

While being absorbed in this psychological thriller, I found myself experiencing emotions such as I had known reading one of James Joyce's short stories or John Steinbeck's novella OF MICE AND MEN (1937). The last twenty minutes or so are as harrowing and horrific as anything in the exposition and complication of Richard Wright's novel NATIVE SON (1940). The fight scenes even reminded me of The Amazing Spiderman Issue #4, where the bookworm finally turns and fights back! Whether Peckinpah intended for the viewer to make these kind of associations is open to debate and not for me to say. But watching a little man at the last fight off a gang of neighborhood thugs was particularly appealing to me and something of a guilty pleasure.

From the very first scene in the movie onwards, there was no doubt in my mind that David Sumner was retreating from the messy problems and inexplicable violence of the so-called real world into some kind of a 'safe space' of abstract introversion. The truth is, as one reviewer reasonably suggested, he would have been better off moving to some campus town and as an applied mathematician conducting his study of stellar structures among a group of like-minded people. One of the drawbacks of the film is that we find out next to nothing about the work he is doing in mathematics or his dreams and fantasies for success in his field. It also soon becomes apparent that his spouse Amy Sumner, convincingly portrayed by Susan George, has no real appreciation for the work he is doing and is more a trophy wife than anything approaching his intellectual equal. Since her background does not prepare her to understand the nature of his work, she casually defies his authority to gain attention and resorts to sexually teasing the workmen who are repairing their house, one of them being a former boyfriend.

Events quickly devolve from there and Amy Sumner ends up being cuffed and raped by her former boyfriend and then passed over at gunpoint to be sodomized by one of his friends. It's a brutal episode designed to provoke outrage and heated discussion. The graphic depiction of the rape in this movie is one of the key reasons it was banned in the United Kingdom when it first came out. It is worth noting that due to an overwhelming sense of shame Amy does not mention her traumatic experience to her husband, nor does she report it to the police. This pivotal event now becomes the lit fuse to the horrors shortly to come.

Here is where the cinematography of John Coquillon and the editing of Paul Davies, Tony Lawson and Roger Spottswoode takes over. Thanks to some brilliant cross-cutting between at least three scenes by director Peckinpah, one particularly in a Church, the film now makes its coming violent content a form of religious ceremony. The avowed pacifist David Sumner is now assailed on every side and forced to discard his shattered social pose for the sake of sheer survival. What happens next appears to be encompassed within the rough and tumble poetics of ritualized violence which, rightly or wrongly, may appeal to anyone who has ever felt too intimidated to fight back. Whether David Sumner finds himself or loses himself, or in an odd Zen way does both at the same time, in the bloodbath of this moral quagmire, is something devoutly to be considered with all the rest of the straw dogs.

The ideological assertion attributed to the Sword Saint strikes to the heart of many things. Among the subjects it can prove to illuminate are Christianity and Chess. I invite you to consider for yourself how this might be so. Whether Chess is a game that focuses on the values of Life or more exclusively a game of pure strategy is an issue that can generate lively debate. While this film generally addresses the subject of Sportsmanship as a formative experience for young people, it also touches on the virtues and drawbacks of Chess as a salutary learning experience.

The spirit of Bobby Fischer hovers over this work of Cinema the way the shadow of an airplane trails across the ground. He never saw this movie and considered it a violation of his privacy to have his name used without his permission. Since he never received any compensation from this film, he is reported to have called it a "monumental swindle". While the story revolves around how the precocious gifts of youth can be made to blossom for proper cultivation, it also concerns itself with the pitfalls of concentrating on one subject so thoroughly other areas of development suffer. This is an oblique comment on the fate of Bobby Fischer.

The philosopher Ayn Rand provided trenchant insights about Chess in an open letter to Boris Spassky and introduced the concept of 'metaphysical absolutes' with regard to the various pieces used in the game. Imagine my surprise when a young African American male further amplified upon her comments without being aware that he was doing so! He spoke of how there was no emotion in Chess and I wondered to myself in what sense he meant this. That is when it occurred to me that in Chess you have to be willing at any moment to sacrifice those closest to you in order to capture or take another man's space. This inevitably implies cultivating and exercising a certain kind of ruthlessness for individual gain in order to appreciate the game.

While Game Theory is more commonly perceived as a branch of applied mathematics and many of the best players display a gift for computational altitude that distinguishes them from their less successful peers; especially when expressing an ability to visualize an outcome several moves ahead with a faculty that roughly resembles clairvoyance; it may also be true that games like Chess and even the African derived game of Mancala might provide excellent opportunities for operating values in action. That is, considering these games as systems of values in operation might appeal to an exercise of the moral imagination. Chess suggests itself primarily and predominately as a male invention, revolving as it does around the concepts of what British sociologist Benjamin Kidd might note to be 'The hunt, the chase and the fight'. Chess is also a game often associated with War and Conquest. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that it is a game that is a favorite with military strategists, and might offer the male psyche a mean by which to sublimate a supposed natural spirit of combat.

This thought provoking movie is the directorial debut of Steven Zaillian and features Max Pomeranc as Josh Waitzkin, Joe Mantegna as Fred Waitzkin, father to Josh, Joan Allen as Bonnie Waitzkin, Josh's mother, Lawrence Fishburne as Vinnie Livermore, one of Josh's first mentors from Washington Square Park, along with Bruce Pandolfini, the mentor who teaches Josh how to win at Chess tournaments. Michael Nirenberg is also featured as Josh's final opponent Jonathan Poe. It is a thorough examination of the meaning and value of winning and the various manifestations it can take. We get to see that Josh has loving parents who will put his growth and development as a fully graduated human being and individual first and his gift as a Chess prodigy in its proper perspective. We also get the impression that wherever his Chess career takes him, he will not be battling the kind of demons that drove Bobby Fischer into paranoid seclusion. We watch Josh walk away from a winning performance with his sensitivity and compassion still intact feeling no contempt for anyone or the world in general as was often the case with Fischer, and finally even comforting and encouraging a fellow player his own age as a valued friend.

This vitally dynamic film offers us thrilling images of an extraordinary Champion of Life. While action star Burt Lancaster energetically and effectively presents an image of a gifted star athlete demonstrating legendary prowess, it becomes increasingly clear as the narrative progresses that this is a Hollywoodization of a great life. This work of director Michael Curtiz exhibits the Western tendency to focus on the individual, while giving short shrift to the cultural perspective that produced such a figure. I remember reading in a children's book how Thorpe's father and grandfather were considered by him to have even greater athletic ability. Writer and illustrator Edwin Tunis noted in his book, INDIANS (1959), that young Indian runners could cover a hundred miles in a day, sometimes running down deer as in the case of the Penobscot, and that an elderly Hopi could jog twenty miles to his cornfield, work all day, and then jog back home.

This is part of the cultural perspective that produced Jim Thorpe. It is a fascinating perspective, with its inherent advantages and limitations, and it would have been interesting to explore this cultural take on survival in light of Richard Henry Pratt's assertion that it was in the best interests of America to "-kill the Indian, and save the man." Richard Henry Pratt was the Founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. It's guiding philosophy was to replace Native American Tribal values with Anglo-American Christian values. This is barely touched upon in this dramatic presentation.

The film also gives an incorrect impression of Jim Thorpe's personal life. From this picture you might infer that Thorpe was only married once and bore just one son who unfortunately died in his youth. The truth is Jim Thorpe was married three times and fathered eight children. After his pentathlon and decathlon triumphs in the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, he wore many hats throughout his life and appeared in over seventy films as a bit player. Look closely and you will see him sitting at the same table in the prison cafeteria with James Cagney in WHITE HEAT (1949).

While it's hard to imagine anyone else representing Thorpe's athleticism as well as Lancaster, Phyllis Thaxter's sympathetic portrayal as his first wife is also notable, as is Charles Bickford's 'tough love' playing famed coach Glen Scobey "Pop" Warner. The music of Max Steiner is also memorable, especially when the tribal drums are involved. The rest of the cast give able support to Lancaster's athletic theatrics as well as his moments of brooding introspection. Steve Cochran as Peter Allendine, Jack Bighead as Little Boy Who Walk Like Bear and Hubie Kerns as Tom Ashenbrunner particularly stand out in my mind. The cinematography of Ernest Haller and the editing of Folmar Blangsted produce unforgettable images, especially in the beginning scenes with Billy Gray as the young Jim Thorpe, and later on the football fields and at the Olympic stadiums.

This could have been a faster-paced film, more turgid with scenes from Thorpe's event-filled life. Jim Thorpe essentially drifted through his existence, never quite finding a footing in American society. He tried his hand at many things, too numerous to recount here. I can imagine him viewing it all as riding some kind of whirlwind and at the end wondering in a fey and troubled manner where on Earth all the time went. Despite the great acclaim he received for his accomplishments, Thorpe descended into chronic alcoholism and died in poverty. A film that more accurately reflects the full scope of his life is still wanting and waiting to be made...

This is the story of a humble peasant girl who received and responded to a higher calling. Everyone has their own special connection to those higher powers they depend upon as individual as their fingerprint. But the extraordinary relationship that saints have with God particularly rewards study and research. It is noteworthy and remarkable that all the religions of the world have reported some version of the state of being that is commonly associated with sainthood. This film, based on the novel written by Franz Werfel and directed by Henry King from the screenplay prepared by George Seaton, explores Bernadette Soubirous' encounter with The Immaculate Conception...

A fourteen year old girl experiencing eighteen visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and compelled to perform wit-defying acts of Faith that often stray outside the ordinary bounds of logic might prove to be a daunting feat for any actress. But Jennifer Jones; in just her third film role manages to project the naive, innocent ethos of a saint to Golden Globe and Oscar winning results. She finds herself working in an atmosphere of renowned and competent actors which includes the likes of Charles Bickford, Vincent Price, Lee J. Cobb and Anne Revere among others. This examination of the mysteries of faith is thoughtful, probing and deliberate and walks a fine line between being hagiographical on the one hand or pedantic and overtly cynical on the other. While Bosley Crowther of the New York Times found it regrettable that the Virgin Mary was made visible and personified by the uncredited Linda Darnell, I have often reflected upon this as being inspiring and strangely fitting.

The movie urges you to consider and contemplate the qualities and characteristics of saints. Saints are known to be generous, exemplary role models and many are renowned as extraordinary teachers. This bringing to mind a quote attributed to W. E. B. Dubois that children learn more from what you are than what you teach. However, Saint Bernadette's experience is unique in its own right. She discovered under the supernatural or divine guidance of the Virgin Mary a spring in a grotto at Lourdes which has been a source of miraculous healing ever since, and as well, a sort of litmus test of Faith.

The central theme of this film is, quite naturally, the mystery of Faith. But it is benignly cloistered in an atmosphere of penance and suffering. The real Bernadette Soubirous was born in extreme poverty, contracting cholera as a toddler and plagued with severe asthma for the rest of her life. This illness somewhat arrested her physical development and she was actually about a foot shorter that Jones portraying her. It is curious that her suffering, which resulted in her early death from tuberculosis, should serve as the catalyst for the relief from suffering for thousands, and even in some documented cases a curative end to individual suffering itself.

Intriguingly enough, this movie is a light introduction into the subject of the interaction between physical force fields and spiritual force fields. Teenagers have been know to stumble unknowingly into the nexus of these two fields. One could take this point of view and perspective regarding the case of Bernadette Soubirous or not. But once again, I am sure you would agree that the holiness or unholiness of persons and places presents itself as a wonderful area for study. This movie does more than whet your appetite about such matters...

Don Cheadle gives a credible representation of a man who was a major influence in forwarding an art form that is considered by the rest of the world as the classical music of America. Much of his performance here is a direct extension of the loose cannon behavior he exhibited as Mouse in DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1995). There are obvious parallels between the real life Miles Davis and the fictional Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, but there are times when Cheadle takes this association too far. The result is that this film is less about the creative process that enabled Davis to create such masterpieces as KIND OF BLUE (1959) and SKETCHES FROM SPAIN (1960), and more about the almost pernicious self-destructiveness that apparently was also a part of his psychological makeup. Since this is also meant to be something of a comeback story, I thought Cheadle chose the wrong cut from SKETCHES, and did not appreciate the significance it had for a retired bullfighter who was inspired by this album to actually come out of retirement and return to bullfighting.

Director Cheadle does a jazzy feat of shuttling us between two major time frames of Miles Davis' life. There's the pre-Miles and his romance and marriage to his muse Frances Taylor, sumptuously portrayed by Emayatzy Corinealdi, and the post-Miles and his bromance with Scottish music reporter Dave Braden as interpreted by Ewan McGregor. The pre-Miles freely chooses his horn and his main squeeze over all other considerations save his archaic notions concerning manhood. The post-Miles seems to addictively choose fists and guns as well as snorting coke over any other source of artistic inspiration. We can easily see this as some sort of homage to the character he played when he was Denzel Washington's running buddy.

The problem is that Director Cheadle seems to be wanting to have his cake and eat it, too. I could easily see sequels to the Miles adventures, sort like Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy. This where every time Cheadle plays Miles he is better than the last time. But I could also sense Cheadle wanting to play the character that really got him rolling in Cinema, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, in a few more Easy Rawlins mysteries and this film and directorial debut feels like a frenetic attempt to kill two birds with one stone. Because of this, it sometimes felt like I was watching "Mouse" in Miles Davis' clothing.

Like Jelly Roll Morton, it is clear that Miles Davis wanted to be considered a man among men. The references to guns and boxing were not entirely lost on me. I just would have liked to have observed Miles struggling turbulently and more often than not choosing his horn over his gun and sublimating more of that natural spirit for combat into yet another masterful piece of jazz or 'social music'. The musical score didn't stand out to me until the very end, but it was well worth the wait. I just think some of the scenes could have been better counterpointed with musical phrases from his best works.

One of the things I would have enjoyed seeing better highlighted is the tremendously powerful effect Davis' music obviously had on people from all walks of life. I have a hunch this is something he was not fully aware of, and perhaps somewhat blind about. I mentioned the story about the bullfighter and there is a scene in the movie where he trades his autograph for a drug transaction with what turns out to be a grateful fan. I believe there are probably many such stories as these; where the accompaniment of Davis' music made for a treasured moment between lovers or inspired a fledgling musician to take up the trumpet and practice his solos over and over again long into the night. For me, SKETCHES OF SPAIN (1960) will always have a special place in my life experience. Others are sure to have been similarly affected by FILLES DE KILIMANJARO (1968), or IN A SILENT WAY (1969), MILES IN TOKYO (1969), and even JACK JOHNSON (1971).

More emphasis on the music and less on the machoism would have certainly put this tribute to Davis miles ahead...

Here is another example of catharsis achieved by any means necessary. This hilarious take on cartoonish Fangoria violence within a myriad sea of strange and wonderful characters, can leave you walking out of the movie house dazed and exhilarated and wondering how you got here. It is filled with irreverent, sometimes scatological, always uncensored Bruce Lee Kung-Fu violence that resonated so deeply with the street and gang cultures of the urban cities. There are chatty, boundless references to nearly everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Easter eggs promiscuously and fiendishly ejaculated all over the place. Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool does not break the Fourth Wall so much as endlessly tweak it; turning it inside out like reversible underwear to create the illusion he's taking the movie-goer aside and letting them in on the joke.

But since he and his relationship with the now resurrected Wolverine as portrayed by Hugh Jackman is the joke, who ya gonna call? This film offers up a screenplay by committee that includes the director Shawn Levy and its lead star Ryan Reynolds. It is turgid with ideas that pop like soap bubbles before ever becoming fully developed. A person could say it's Death and Violence that drives the narrative, but in many ways that would be missing the whole point. This is basically a story where various gangs of colorful, albeit improbable characters get to open up larger and larger cans of whoop-ass and stuff Marvel Universe characters through the meat grinder.

But wait! There's more! This ode to juvenile sensibilities isn't just standing on the corner watching all the Gorgeous Ladies of Wresting go by; it flips the viewer through Time and Space and has us riding bullets through unexpected flash-forwards while we are tumbling out of explosions into the next flashback. The story is so filled to the gills with everything Marvel that in the end nothing else matters beyond the ride itself. This is Comic Book Opera as pure escapist entertainment.

While it is hard to believe that the House The Mouse Built would sign off on this latest confection of Marvel Multiversal Mayhem, it cannot be denied that Deadpool and Wolverine, despite not exactly being the latest incarnation of Martin and Lewis, still have found the pulse of the culture rooted here and there in the entrails of sixties angst and the moral vacuum of the millennials technological literacy. It proves to be a delightful spin on every kind of onomatopoeia to the tune of a billion dollars and counting. Pandering to the tastes of the public might not be everyone's cup of tea, but most everybody I saw in the audience were having too much fun to be overly concerned about that. This Deadpool movie tramples past all the red flags to create its own standards of decency and propriety. Whether you take umbrage with this comic flip side of AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019) or not, you would be hard put to say it has left anybody out.

This is the Marvel Universe Costume Party every fanboy wanted an invite to and finally received. There is no telling what will come out of the portals of the Multiverse next, but it's bound to be something fast, violent and exciting. Just remember that not everybody's idea of Heaven involves playing harps and singing hymns. There are those hardy souls who will take a one-way ticket to ride through Valhalla any time and they don't care. So until we find The Mighty Thor weeping over the limp biscuit that will be Deadpool's corpse in the next edition of Adventures Through The Multiverse, take care to rack your hammer at the door...

Wrestling with demons seemed a role particularly suited to the intensely driven granite-jawed Kirk Douglas. Who better than Spartacus to do battle with the specters of fear, anger, hatred, doubt, frustration, insecurity and the feelings of inadequacy spawned from maniacally and religiously pursuing an artistic vision? We see Douglas here more than ready to rush into accepting this challenge with the characteristic Jack LaLanne energy and vigor he brought with Olympic grace to his portrayal of Rick Martin in YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN (1950). Loosely based on the life and times of Leon Bismarck "Bix" Beiderbecke, simply comparing the photos of Biederbecke and Van Gogh with the photos of Douglas should give you some idea of the difficulties the actor faced in dramatizing the lives of these famous, sensitive artists of tortured genius. Perhaps he experienced an easier time channeling the intensity of the Dutch painter as opposed to the melancholy introversion of the Jazz musician from Davenport, Iowa.

Vincente Minelli gets a powerful performance out of Douglas whose physical resemblance to Van Gogh, unlike Beiderbecke, is undeniable. We get plenty of insight into the painter's creative process and his titanic struggle to place himself and his growing body of work among the best of his contemporaries. The scenes where he meets Monet, Mondrian and Seurat in their studios to compare and discuss aesthetic principles and techniques tantalizes the viewer's interest. Seeing Van Gogh's actual paintings stacked and placed in his garret or taking up space in his brother Theo's home is also a visual treat. The film is something of a short history in impressionism as well as Van Gogh's contributions to post-impressionism, and the scenes where we see him painting out of doors and spontaneously 'on the spot' are well-suited to Douglas' virile, extroverted nature.

The vulnerable sensitivity of the introvert walking around in a mushroom cloud of his own thoughts and feelings, (possibly to insulate himself or herself from the shocks and jarring experiences of the outside world) is not something you would normally associate with an alpha mesomorph like Douglas. The whole look of his bearing suggest a ruthless, relentless self-made man ready to deal with the world as it is, and driven by impoverished circumstances to carve out a place in the world. This basic mindset; revealed physically, of someone who thrives on contest and pitting himself against the obstacles of this world sometimes works against him when preparing for this kind of role. Recalling a few of his performances, I have noted that it is difficult for a gregarious extrovert like Douglas to play weak. Ironic to say, it is precisely this sort of a role, requiring a depth of sensitivity and a willingness to admit being hurt, that this centenarian relished as his greatest acting challenges.

Here he nearly succeeds to Oscar nominated success. But understatement has never been Douglas' strong suit as, oddly enough, is also true about his co-star Anthony Quinn, who did win an Oscar once again for his portrayal of Paul Gauguin in this film. There is one scene near the end where we see Douglas as Vincent sitting in a mental institution. He is attempting to convey to the audience his inner anguish, but his natural male stoicism keeps him from fully closing the deal. Despite this, the rigor of Douglas' portrayal hits all the high dramatic points so well, he can be forgiven the occasional miss when it comes to nuance and character shading. This is something only the best of directors can bring out in him as was the case in two films he did with Stanley Kubrick; PATHS OF GLORY (1957), and SPARTACUS (1960), and for Quinn, it was LA STRADA (1954) directed by Federico Fellini. Quinn usually doesn't even bother with understatement, letting that be the director's worry as he prefers to go big whenever he can get away with it. The relationship between Douglas' Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn's idealization of Paul Gauguin is a cautionary tale for Artists considering rooming together and many will recognize themselves in the drama of such an association.

This is a highly educational film, while not exactly intending to be, and to see Vincent Van Gogh interact with real life people who will later become subjects in his paintings is a delight not to be missed. James Donald makes a creditable and sympathetic foil to Vincent as his supportive brother Theo, and while Norman Corwin's screenplay does not deliver any special insights into the nature of Van Gogh's mental disturbances or trajectory of doom, the cavalcade of illustrious characters he encounters is long and impressive. The musical score by Miklos Rozsa was not particularly memorable to my mind, but the cinematography of Russell Harlan and F. A. Young along with the color scheme remains as vivid in memory as one of Vincent Van Gogh's many paintings. Here we have a good, solid biography of a creative giant in the world of Art, and as memorable for its successes and failures in the telling of this story as the Artist whose life it depicts.

I found this movie in the Main Library when renting videotape cassettes was the thing. I watched it with my mother because I thought she could relate. I was right about this on all counts. The musical score of Sol Kaplan starts the movie off on a gloriously triumphant note, counterpointed with us beholding a beleaguered housewife out in something like a backyard doing the daily drudgery and mundane tasks that come with managing a household. Nothing about what she is doing is particularly inspiring or stimulating. The director Herbert J. Biberman has his leading lady Rasaura Revueltas as Esperanza Quintero, carrying a tub of hot water to the house looking weary and haggard.

Esperanza is a pregnant miner's wife in Zinc Town, New Mexico. Although married and raising her family with her husband, Ramon, the dour expression on her face is shrouded with a sense of unfulfillment. She treasures the radio that they have bought on the installment plan, because it gives her contact with a wider, outside world and makes her feel less entrapped in the domestic duties of a housewife. There is a vague sense that Esperanza desires a greater social role in her mining town community, although she would be hard put to express how to bring this about. She ambles around with the vitality barely above a sleepwalker, her head bowed, feeling dominated and neglected by her husband Ramon.

While Esperanza does not feel like a true equal in her marriage, her husband Ramon is dealing with his own set of issues. Being a Mexican American, he is fighting and advocating for equality with the "Anglo" miners and depending upon his Union brothers for support. The work in the mines is done oftentimes in the dark and under dangerous conditions. The use of dynamite is involved, and there are times when the fuses set flare unpredictably and cause unexpected life imperiling situations. Removing injured workers from the shafts is an occupational hazard that must be confronted when a blast accidentally goes awry.

The beautiful thing about this movie is that it thoroughly demonstrates the value of backstory. Through heartfelt and evocative narration, Esperanza shares with us the sense of cultural dislocation she and her fellow Mexican Americans feel living in the shadow of the Western Industrial Revolution. Lands which once belonged to previous generations of her people are now owned by Delaware Zinc Inc. Now her husband Ramon, among the others, are struggling for decent working conditions equal to those of the white, "Anglo" miners, and she is resigned to chopping wood five times a day in order to boil the water and make it potable for cooking and washing. While Ramon is struggling to rise above a state of second class citizenship, Esperanza feels increasingly trapped in a marriage that has her degenerating into a kind of domestic slavery. In a couple of scenes juxtaposed and superimposed upon each other, we get a graphic view of how 'technological progress' is rending apart the nuclear family unit of Americans.

Herbert J. Biberman has directed an intelligent and emotionally evolving screenplay written by Michael Wilson. Stanley Meredith and Leonard Stark's cinematography is precisely crafted to hit nearly all the right emotional notes for all the characters in their reaction shots. Joan Laird and Ed Spiegel's editing is Oscar worthy as are the performances of Rosaura Revueltas, Juan Chacon, Henrietta Williams, Will Geer and Mervin Williams among many others. Produced by Paul Jarrico, this work of Neo-realism dilates time and seemed to me to go on for nearly three hours despite it having an actual running time of a mere ninety-four minutes. While the mix of professional and amateur actors was at times awkward and gave the film a 'home movie' sort of feel here and there, the thoughts, the emotions and the marvelous character arc of Esperanza herself, soars past such real or imagined crudities as we enjoy a community of people stumbling and struggling for a new found sense of dignity for themselves and their loved ones. The issues of Slavery and Freedom are so intelligently addressed and the thematic content so high this film opens a window to much that is worthy of study and discussion.

As you may have gathered by now, the whole purpose of perusing a timeline of pain, traumatic suffering and unending misery, is to somehow free the soul up enough to then peruse a timeline of joy, triumph over the obstacles of everyday life and success against overwhelming odds leading successively to new, higher plateaus of being. Evidently, catharsis comes in many forms. There is no telling the lengths people will go to purge themselves of the negative emotion accumulated through the sheer process of living. But you can rest assured there is a size and model to fit every need. Director Erica Trembley no doubt has found a mode of catharsis suitable for the Native American experience and it shows here...

The renowned Lily Gladstone leaves no doubt that she has graduated to that realm where the great actresses reside. Just as her Mollie Burhart in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023) was one of the primary emotional carrier waves that took us through 206 minutes of Scorsese's brutal and shocking masterpiece, here again she lends her Madonna-like grace and authority to yet another troubled heroine shaking the dust of the reservation off her moccasins and running afoul of the law with tragic, sure-footed confidence. Her performance here is subtle and nuanced, complex and volatile, running the range from womanly stoicism through fear, rage and sympathy. I was curious as to what would be next for Lily after KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023), and was more than satisfied with this latest offering. I am sure that she will take the Native American legacy into exciting new directions and dimensions for some time to come.

The screenplay, written by Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise, is a cinematic gem. It is saturated with the authenticity of contemporary Native American life. While much of the narrative is low-key and understated, there is this undeniable sense that this is a faithfully accurate depiction of survival on the reservation. Gladstone and Tremblay effortlessly convey the vulnerable stoicism and fatalism that is often associated with the Native American milieu. The idea that the assertion of cultural self-determinism can be equated with criminal activity is poignantly and forcefully presented here. Sort of like the vibe the great writer Richard Wright projected in his landmark novel NATIVE SON (1940).

Evidently, there is much pay to be reaped by presenting the victimization of indigenous peoples in the most graphic terms possible. The same can be said for presenting latent royalty among whom might be found the Kings and Queens of tomorrow, as clowns or stand-up comedians or sundry other stage performers exuding the ethos of streetwalkers. While the looming tragedy of Roki and Jax is presented with painstaking, illuminating and sympathetically nuanced detail, the subtle character shadings are such that we are left without sharply contrasting perspectives on who exactly the heroes and the villains might be in this piece. Somehow, nobody is particularly at fault and yet everyone has his or her share in the blame. Except that Jax's half-brother J. J., who serves with the Indian Tribal Police, finds after some sleuthing one thing leading to another missing & murdered corpse to be found in the nearby lake. The anguished truth is that this time the victim is their missing sister, Tawi, whom they were more than half-certain was lying somewhere dead anyway, such being the nature of life on the reservation.

This is a dark drama that begs for a sequel. I was more than ready to give this movie a rating of ten, but I feel there is a slight problem with the resolution that metered my evaluation down to a strong nine and a half.

The truth is, right now I remember a lecture given by my mentor Pierre Rener in his Humanities class. It was about a concept in literature called THE NOBLE SAVAGE. He waxed eloquently about this and the tragic destiny of the First American whose primary place of worship was the Cathedral of Nature itself. For the last quarter of an hour of class he vividly captured our imagination about the thrilling crucifixion of The Natural Man, pinioned and trapped by Western forces beyond the ken of his native understanding. We sat there transfixed, listening to something that seemed straight out of the ending to James Fenimore Cooper's THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

When I reflect upon this lecture, it is easy to see this film as a variation upon this very theme. The naked reality that the lives of Native Americans may indeed matter less to the power structure that disinherited them of their birthright is a bitter pill for most to swallow. Whether or not this amounts to them being regarded as an endangered species I will leave for you to judge. But here is the thing to consider; just as one can plot a timeline of victimization for any so-called race or culture, one can also plot a timeline of victory and success for these same social entities. While being victimized by one's demons or the harsh dictates of an oppressive environment or society makes for exciting tragic drama, stories where individuals or groups rise above attempts to victimize them can be pretty hot stuff, too.

The Indian population appears vital and alive, perhaps as never before to my estimation. This suggests to me that in certain arenas of the soul the Native American has won and triumphed against all odds. Their palpable presence in every area of the National life speaks to the enduring determination of its members. One need only recall Jim Thorpe, whose socks and shoes were stolen just as he was set to compete in Stockholm, but who somehow went on anyway to win the pentathlon and the decathlon in the Olympics of 1912. It would have been great to see Roki and Jax show a little bit more visionary exhilaration during the Fancy Dance Pow-Wow as they are enfolded in the love of their Native Community, notwithstanding them preparing to face the grim reality that they too might one day have tribal members dancing for them...

This was a good idea for a movie; similar in the way THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL (1959), was a good idea for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi feature. The problem is that in both these cases the themes and ideas are insufficiently developed. That really is a shame, as the exploration of hobo life could have been enlightening in much the same way the exploration of Anglo-American and African American cultures have proven to be. While this film boasts a large, supportive cast, none of the other characters outside of Lee Marvin as A. No.1, Ernest Borgnine as Shack, and Keith Carradine as Cigaret, are particularly memorable. Strangely enough, the film revolves around these three characters, as the earlier picture I mentioned revolved mostly around the characters of Ralph, Sarah, and Ben; but we come to learn next to nothing about them.

Lee Marvin's A. No.1 made me recall another high school mentor, my Humanities and Stagecraft teacher Pierre Rener. He was a very able fellow, skilled in many of the manly arts. Beneath the Rex Harrison persona he attempted to project was an Army Drill Sergeant, a Korean War Veteran, a stock car driver, a poet and an athlete who could beat most teenage boys like me in a foot race. He knew about hunting rifles and self-defense techniques and won everyone's admiration with his curmudgeonly Bogart-like attitude. A. No.1 could have used a backstory like that. That is perhaps the major drawback of this tale of hoboes. We know little more about the main characters at the end than when we started this train ride with them. And yes, it would have been great to hear stories about and seen in flashbacks some of A. No.1's train-hopping exploits to get some idea of how he earned his title. It would have also been great to find out if there was an A. No.1 before him.

Keith Carradine, of NASHVILLE (1975) and CHIEFS (1983) fame, makes a perfect mentee to A. No.1. It is easy to identify with his desire to establish his manhood learning all he can from Lee Marvin riding the rails, and his ambition to eventually become the next A. No.1. The way he goes about it, however, does not inspire the love and trust of his mentor. We get no idea how he developed his yen for opportunism, but his youth and slight frame make it obvious he has not grown enough size on him to deal with the vicious and sadistic train conductor Shack as played by Ernest Borgnine. Beyond his empty boasts and his willingness to take credit for the feats accomplished by A. No.1, he still has to acquire the kind of loyalty and tough physical courage that distinguishes his mentor. It is hard to imagine Carradine's Cigaret, a character loosely based on writer Jack London by the way, being able to deal hand to hand with Shack and his hammer, chains, crowbar and axe.

The venerable Ernest Borgnine gives us his nastiest, thuggish self playing Shack, the rough and tumble conductor of train No.19. There are no vestiges of MARTY (1955) or Captain Quinton McHale from McHALE'S NAVY (1962-1966) to be found here. This character is even more humorless than when Borgnine played Staff Sergeant James R. "Fatso" Judson in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953). He is also ferociously grim about keeping bums and freeloaders from riding his train. When the final showdown comes between Shack and A. No.1, the grisly brawl proves to be nothing for the faint-hearted.

The shortcoming of this film is that director Robert Aldrich was content to make the two main characters; Shack and A. No.1, nothing more than symbols without a backstory. Oscar winners Marvin and Borgnine are more than ready to play full-blooded characters, but are given very little to work with. We have to take on faith that A. No.1 is a legendary hobo, without any scenes that undeniably confirm his legendary status. Frank De Vol does his best to convince us with his music that we are witnessing something legendary and epic, but it becomes obvious after a few moments that he is trying too hard. We get only passing glimpses of the culture of hobo life, and the final scene while awe-inspiring, reminding me as it does of Pierre Rener coming into the Cass Tech. Auditorium, and making his voice echo for several seconds throughout the vast hall, still tantalizes us with the notion that this film could have been so much more than it turned out to be...

"Time is the moving image of Eternity." -- Plato.

The indivisible and divisible present is both a facsimile of Eternity and Eternity itself. A lighthearted way to consider this and other dimensions of Time might be found in the flickering images of this film. I found the most appealing thing about this movie to be the mentor-student relationship between Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Emmet "Doc" Brown. It made me recall my visits to the house of James Wheeler and the fantastic Afrocentric memorabilia that took up residence throughout all the rooms of his house. There were near life-size statues of African pygmies and warriors flanking a huge framed portrait of a top-hatted Duke Ellington leaning against the fireplace and resting on the carpet in the living room. Festooning the walls were movie posters of films from the Blaxsploitation Era and earlier times when Josephine Baker and Lena Horne were captivating the imagination of the culture.

James Wheeler made me feel most like Marty McFly when he lined the walls of the second floor of his home with proposed mock-ups for a movie theater focusing on films made by and about people of color. These illustrated renderings were almost like the colored blueprints for the future of Downtown Detroit. People of renown were always calling him about exhibiting his extensive collection of early Black Films with him usually vetoing their proposals at the last moment because they could not meet his exacting standards for presentation. We were always brainstorming over the current state of Black folks here and around the world. I am sure if we could have invented a Time Machine that would have enabled us to prevent the Slave Trade, we would have done so.

This movie is a fast-paced tale about parental relationships and the grandfather paradox. We watch these themes revolve around the temporal comings and goings of a scientifically souped up DeLorean with gull wings. This is a light-hearted take on the absurd encounters made possible through time travel brought to you by Huey Lewis and the News courtesy of Chuck Berry. It thoroughly validates the Western concept that sooner or later you must strike a hard blow for whatever you want to accomplish any kind of carpe diem. This point is death-defyingly emphasized through the heroics of a seeming mad scientist dangling from the hands of Time while his youthful charge attempts to push the digital envelope up to 88 miles and beyond.

Michael J. Fox is perfectly suited as Marty McFly to the comic book reality presented on all the movie posters. Unlike PRIMER (2004) or MEMENTO (2000), this filmic handling of TIME is more entertaining than perplexing and Robert Zemeckis' adroit handling of plot and narrative pushes whatever dark elements there are to the background and highlights in the foreground the zany antics of a hilarious chemistry between student and teacher. No, this is not Time Travel and Fine Art, as you would charitably imagine LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1960) to be in some respects. Rather, this is Hollywood sensationalism and merchandising at its best aimed towards building a multimedia franchise and machine, complete with its spinoffs into video games, theme park rides, an animated television series, and a stage musical. It is capitalism on Looney Tunes steroids straight from the Dream Factory, so scan the barcode and don't break the seal until you get home.

This is a wacky coming-of-age story with the leading characters simply trying to make it out of high school. The main goal being, of course, to take responsibility for their own lives in some form or fashion that will create a lasting and happy future. The parallel universes of 1955 and 1985 are convincingly presented here. Lea Thompson as Lorraine McFly and Crispin Glover as George McFly are amusing and engaging as Marty McFly's future parents, struggling to overcome their own teenage angst just to get on with their lives together. Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen is a memorable hoot as the high school bully from Hell. Harry Walters Jr., portraying Chuck Berry's cousin Marvin Berry, also presents a standout characterization of upward mobility in his time scheme. The finale is as suspenseful and thrilling as anything out of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981), and bears the energy signature of Spielberg's successful mentoring of Zemeckis in a profitable and salutary way. The rousing musical score by Alan Silvestri is also more than a plus as we make our breakthrough back to the future.

This is THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) of suburbia. While it could be argued that this Spielberg classic is not as philosophically dense or morally intelligent as its Golden Age predecessor, this is once again a conclusion that could easily spark a raging debate amongst those devotees who love this film. Henry Thomas is unforgettable as Elliot Taylor, the ten year old struggling to emerge whole out of the dysfunctionality of his own family by creating a friendship with an alien accidentally separated from his family and people. It is an interesting and thoroughly entertaining piece of parallelism; especially when one considers how the two main characters are bonded and twinned together even to the point of sharing the same two first initials that title this film. This story cycles operatically through the Judeo-Christian concept of resurrection and redemption while breathing intergalactic life into the principle of family.

Much is subtly made of the fact that E. T. belongs to a race of empaths. When his family or people leave after completing their specimen gathering in a verdant forest at night, his bond with them, which curiously appears to maintain the health of his well-being, begins to deteriorate. It becomes apparent through the course of the narrative that this is also a reference to the state of Elliot's own well-being, which has been affected by his father's separation from his mother and their subsequent divorce. This is a fascinating concept; that the increasing or lessening of the bonds of love can heighten or lower the state of one's being. One of my Community College teachers, Miss Gomez, then a die-hard existentialist, often referred to an idea she termed as 'a nostalgia for meaning'. Reflecting back on this now, she could just as aptly called it 'a nostalgia for greater love'.

This is an idea worth considering and deliberating about for just a bit. Looking at this film from that concept; it can explain many things. It is an intriguing notion that an individual can desire to regress to a time when he or she felt insulated within an atmosphere of love, from the ills and evils of this world, or feel forced to regress into an atmosphere of hate. Perhaps suitable examples of this phenomenon will come to mind for you. This film could certainly inspire your thoughts along this line.

Now this particular work of cinema revolves around the theme of severed and repaired connections. Oddly enough, it can even be analogized to electronics in this age of modern technology. It may well be the less said about this the better, as it tends to cause one to adopt a colder, more impersonal and mechanistic point-of-view. Many of the comments made by David Gibson about this film will place the discussion of its merits in a more personal and humane and spiritually elevating perspective. I think it is fitting and appropriate to consider that this cinematic adventure, like Hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958), might be Spielberg's most personal statement about his life experience and point-of-view.

The fact remains that this tale caught the pulse of a sizable portion of the culture and galvanized the popular imagination of an entire generation in the West. Henry Thomas as Elliot, is ably supported by a cast that includes Drew Barrymore as his sister Gertie, Robert MacNaughton as his brother Michael, Dee Wallace as his mother Mary, Peter Coyote as the government agent tasked with capturing E. T., and C. Thomas Howell as the teasing friend Tyler. Spielberg's frequent collaborator, John Williams, won an Academy Award for Best Original Score and this film also won for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound and Best Sound Editing. GANDHI (1982), won the award for Best Picture, but even Richard Attenborough; its director, was quoted as saying he felt Spielberg's film should have taken home that particular prize. This work of cinema endures highly praised and highly celebrated; and it's amusing to think how a team of puppeteers helped create a character for children who very nearly stole the whole show.

Here is a work of cinema bereft of the moralizing and sentimentality that some critics found fulsome and discreditable in the work of Spielberg. Clint Eastwood sticks to what he knows and does his best in his own minimalist fashion, extending the strain of moral vacuousness he first brought to the big screen in his collaborations with Sergio Leone. It is vintage Eastwood, but that's not saying too much as usual, before the shotguns roar and the bullets fly from pistols and rifles. True enough, this is almost as though The Man With No Name was unwrapping and unraveling before our very eyes. But who better than Dirty Harry, straight from Mount Rushmore, to preach and even wan poetically about the attempted redemption and final decline of The Outlaw?

There are a couple of scenes and points in the narrative I would have liked to have seen handled differently. But Eastwood, as much the ultra conservative as Orson Welles was the ultimate liberal, takes no chances as he walks off into the sunset with no need or desire to answer any more questions. This is similarly a tale of regression, as was CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), but with consequences much less salutary and felicitous. Naturally, there is a world of difference between regressing into childhood and regressing into the mindset of a killer. The nuances of backstory are all there, but in two or three instances I would have chosen a different tack.

For example, we hear that Ned Logan is a crack shot with a rifle. We are told about it, but the fact of it is never shown. The truth is it would have heightened the irony to have Ned prove his skill on inanimate objects while ultimately faltering when confronting live human beings. Such a scene would have counterposed wonderfully with William Munny's rusty attempts to target a tin can and his drunken unerring skill later in the final shootout. This would have vividly and graphically demonstrated the difference between a simple skilled marksman and the desensitization and lack of compassion required to be a true hired killer. Showing rather than telling when it is most effective being one of the cardinal rules of cinema.

The part of Sally Two Trees as played by Cherrilene Cardinal is quite frankly underwritten here. She has not one line of dialogue as far as I can tell, sharing this distinction with Sherri Brewer, who played Marcy Jonas in SHAFT (1971). It is a shame as she could have been a telling pivot coming towards the resolution of this piece. You can tell by the scowl on her face that she senses from the very beginning that Eastwood as Munny is bringing nothing but trouble. I can easily imagine a scene where William Munny returns to her homestead with or without Ned Logan's corpse strapped to his saddle and has to explain what happened to her common law husband. I can also imagine a scene where he humbly asks or begs for her forgiveness, recalling the moralizing influence of his now dearly departed wife, and... well, you know the rest...

Unfortunately, no one is willing to question the Eastwood mystique at this point. What with a long string of great movies to his credit either as an actor or director, his legion of fans are more than fine with giving him some slack. The ending has troubled other reviewers as well, but a film that is a critical and commercial success, earning the Best Picture Oscar for its year, I suppose can be forgiven its sins. The Oscar nominated cinematography of Jack N. Green gives this tale the look and feel of Western Noir. The cast of characters supporting Eastwood's meditation on the virtues and vices of violence, include memorable performances from no less than Gene Hackman, Frances Fisher, Anna Thomson and David Mucci.

This is a bleak, crude, gritty little Cowboy story that proves once again that Blacks can make the best victims. Also that children and Indian squaws deserve little to no explanation from even the lowest form of Outlaw. It is a chilling assessment of the Western Mythos stripped bare of romanticized public relations as represented by Saul Rubinek, playing pulp writer W. W. Beauchamp. This is the West making its exit without offering any sort of apology. While the Eastwood gravitas makes me wonder how he would have fared in a more redeeming role such as that of Abraham Lincoln... and perhaps that is the whole point. It is sometimes the prerogative of great artists to leave some space where you can fill in the blanks with your own imagination...

Mr. Bernstein: -I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by... I haven't thought of that girl... -- A quote from CITIZEN KANE (1941)

The above quote gives you the difference between the cinema and the theater. There are impressions in Life that you just can't wrap a word around. These sundry sights, sounds and smells among other fancies tend to defy description and any attempt at categorization. Some moments affect you so profoundly and bring such satisfaction you feel no need to analyze or rationalize them. These instances are the best of all.

This applies particularly to the opening scene of this movie. A wide expanse of sky sharing space with a cloud bunching up over a hill as a lone cowboy is riding up. But when you see it, you may get an inkling and a feeling for what I mean when I say it's worth the whole movie. It is a moment that could not be created in the theater because it has more to do with the communication between spaces than character revealed through dialogue and action. It is one of those Zen moments that cinematographer J. Michael Muro was lucky enough to capture on film.

After that, I was hooked, hoping maybe I would see something like that again. But it really didn't matter. The stage was effortlessly set, and I was ready to ride the story out to the last reel. Kevin Costner as Charles Travis Postelwaite, brings a wry left-handed sentiment back into the Western genre through his friendship with Boss Bluebonnet Spearman, as portrayed with masterly and memorable grit by Robert Duvall. Their stoic friendly banter as they carefully prepare for what may well be their last tragic moments on Earth against the evil, free grazer hating Denton Baxter, as portrayed with snarling scenery chewing menace by Michael Gambon, reeks with the suspenseful resonances of an earlier American Western you may have heard of as HIGH NOON (1952).

All the way up to the first shootout, this is essentially a character driven tale that takes its time layering in backstory for its main characters, such as Sue Barlow, the soon to be love interest of Costner's Postelwaite. Unfortunately after the first shootout, it becomes obvious that Postelwaite and Boss Spearman have seized the advantage and the narrative switches its focus from character to action and is pretty much a mopping up operation after that. There are still snatches of backstory revealed between the flying bullets , but the suspense irrevocably sunders from its previous high point here. The first shootout is a riveting set piece, and unfolds with such authenticity and verisimilitude it made me think this is probably the way it went down at the OK Corral. But the subsequent shootouts get more and more romantic and melodramatic, and the story gets bogged down under the weight of it own graphic and histrionic excess. It may have well been best to focus everything around that first shootout, and subtly move from real time into slow motion and flashback, revealing more back story for the main characters in a carefully paced and compelling way. But that of course, is a judgement call the director Kevin Costner did not consider to make.

The way it stands, however, this Western has a few things going for it that are not to be found in Eastwood's more noirish UNFORGIVEN (1992). Rather than eschewing romance and sentimentality, it openly embraces it, even though things do get pretty sloppy agape towards the end. This, along with THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004), is Michael Jeter's swan song and he goes out in style. It is also inspiring and poignant to see the townspeople belatedly come to the aid of the lone cowboys Postelwaite and Spearman at the end. Here, the reluctant heroics of two open range men seem to lead to a helter skelter kind of community redemption, where many of the characters stand out for standing up on one side of the conflict or the other. All this to the opening and closing strains of Michael Kamen's heartfelt musical score.

"Mathematics is the poetry of logic and the music of reason." -- Albert Einstein

Perhaps you have observed serious efforts here on Earth to make contact with more advanced societies elsewhere. It may have also occurred to you, amidst speculations about these matters, that it might be a good idea to make sure we have thoroughly become one ourselves. I'll never forget Klaatu from the movie THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951). He was sitting up in a hospital bed recuperating from having been drilled by a member of the Armed Services. There he was in the silhouetted darkness, wondering how he and the people of his star system could have so misread the state of societies and civilization here on this planet. This film, written and directed by Stephen Spielberg, approaches the idea of communication between Alien Societies from an entirely different perspective.

There are many who scoff at the idea of creating a society and a civilization that has cured itself and is free of the pestilences of war, criminality, the insanities that accrue as compound interest from violations of the formula for communication along with the social injustice, political oppression and economic enforcement of poverty on those less fortunate. But isn't that exactly what would be the warp and woof of an advanced society and civilization? That is, to have graduated to a higher class of challenges, problems and adventures? Doesn't that sound like an excellent way to exercise the moral imagination to you? At any rate, these are the sort of considerations this film inspires...

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were among the first to speculate that Mankind might not be the summit of the Food Chain, and indeed, instead of the crowning glory of the evolutionary process, we might just be a step, albeit a necessary one, in the spiral staircase of Life, and simply a grade in the endless spectrum of being. Spielberg plays entertainingly with the concept of Universal Language. You may recall that both Music and Mathematics have been considered by artists, philosophers and inventors as forms of Universal Language. It is a novel idea that through interfacing these forms of language a new language can be created that enables us to communicate with extra-terrestrial intelligence. It is an inspiring assertion exuding the awe and wonder and optimism that is at the core of true science fiction.

The devotees of this movie insist that its real power can only be fully appreciated on the big screen. There is probably much to recommend this point of view. It is a powerful piece of filmmaking fueled by the musical score of legendary movie composer John Williams and the Oscar winning cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. Richard Dreyfuss, of Spielberg's breakthrough blockbuster JAWS (1975), lobbied hard for the role of Roy Neary, the tragic protagonist who winds up sacrificing his wife and family, compelled by a kind of blind optimism to accept an invitation to a great adventure out among the stars. Critics have spoken of Neary's abandonment of his family as a moral shortcoming of the story, but this point is essentially moot. Spielberg told James Lipton during a television interview for INSIDE THE ACTORS STUDIO (1994-2018), that he wrote and directed the film when he was young and didn't have any kids, and that with kids at that time, he never would have written in for Neary to leave his family.

Be that as it may, this film is a serendipitous encounter depending upon the contributions of many artists renowned as masters in their fields. Francois Truffaut as Claude Lacombe, a French government scientist in charge of UFO related activities is inspired casting. Much can be made of one great filmmaker by his very presence inviting another great filmmaker into the ranks. Pauline Kael is quoted as calling this "a kid's film in the best sense." This observation syncs happily with the statement of Benjamin Kidd that it is in the light of the eye of a child that you will find the apex of civilization in his book THE SCIENCE OF POWER. This is a film worthy of much study and discussion. It is also amusing that Spielberg's aliens look like the spawn of the limbic system of the brain...

The Role of Captain 1st rank Marko Ramius, Commanding Officer of the Red October, is quite a departure for Sir Sean Connery. There is little about this gruff Russian submarine commander that is suave and urbane. While it may be true that more study of Russian accents might have gone a long way with Connery, even his noticeable Scottish accent only adds somehow to this indelible characterization. What worries he may have harbored about being typecast as the legendary super spy James Bond vanishes here in the salty depths of the ocean. This while he masterfully pilots a state-of-the-art nuclear submarine ably supported by a crew he has trained himself. Now with this role, he moves successfully out of the shadow of Ian Fleming to something that suggests and approaches Dostoevsky.

This is a suspenseful techno-thriller such as you would expect from a collaboration between Spielberg and Hitchcock. Fortunately, it is fueled by the narrative powers and convoluted plot of writer Tom Clancy, and the cinematic expertise of director John McTiernan. It is a wonderful cat and mouse game involving superior technology as the cheese which threatens to bring rival superpowers to the brink of war. It is filled with heroics from an All-Star Cast featuring the likes of Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, CIA intelligence analyst, Joss Ackland as Andrei Lysenko, the Soviet ambassador, Peter Firth as !st Lieutenant Ivan Putin, Political Officer of the Red October, Scott Glenn as Commander Bart Mancuso, Commanding Officer of the USS Dallas, James Earl Jones as Vice Admiral James Greer, Sam Neil as Captain 2nd rank Vasily Borodin, Executive Officer of Red October, Fred Thompson as Rear Admiral Joshua Painter, and Courtney B. Vance as Petty Officer Ronald Jones, sonar operator of the USS Dallas. But here, more than anything, we have Sean Connery portraying a character fathoms away from anything he has done before.

There is no hint of James Bond here with the roguish smile and deadly quips of quick wit as in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963). Nor is there any trace of the pugnacious and provocative Jim Malone from THE UNTOUCHABLES (1997). None of that is to be found in the portrayal of this renegade sea captain. Perhaps its the hair piece and the beard. But from the opening frame to the last blue-tinged fadeout there is something about Connery's Marko Ramius that is inscrutably Russian. Ramius has more back story than all the other supporting characters, of course, but at the end there is still this intriguing, nagging feeling that he remains an enigma and that we still don't really know him. This has everything to do with how Connery plays the man.

This techno-thriller approaches the deft intellectuality often found in Hitchcock. However, being more action-oriented, it lacks that element of a probing character study to be found in features such as LIFEBOAT (1944) or the celebrated DAS BOOT (1981). But being more plot driven, the story has twists and turns that easily rival the thrills to be discovered in any Indiana Jones movie. The only difference being that Connery as Ramius has brought his class with him on the field trip and proves to have a more grizzled professorial air. But this version of the action hero as teacher is as memorable and unique as KNUTE ROCKNE, ALL AMERICAN (1940) and the DIRTY DOZEN (1967).

The music of Basil Poledouris contributes admirably to the film's alternately rousing and chilling pace. Courtney B. Vance and James Earl Jones helm interesting non-stereotypical roles for African Americans, exercising the virtues of intelligence and command with aplomb and panache. The film opened number one at the U. S. box office and parked there for three weeks. Grossing over 200 million from a 30 million dollar budget, it became a hit with both the critics and the public. When CIA analyst Jack Ryan finally boards his flight back home, we are as relieved and gratified as he is, having encountered one of the more unforgettable characters in American cinema.