Reviews

I was recently asked to write a recommendation for a soccer film, this was the first title that came to my mind. So, even though soccer only plays a small part of the story, it is such an important element in the DNA of the film, I had to include it.

The film is The Year My Parents Went On Vacation from Brazilian writer/director Cao Hamburger. The year mentioned in the title is 1970 and excitement is in the air as Brazil makes it to the World Cup Finals and with Pele on their team, what could possibly be wrong!

Well, lots actually.

Our protagonist is 11 year old Mauro (Michel Joelsas) who, along with his political dissident parents is on the run from the military police. In order to protect Mauro, his father arranges to leave him with his paternal Grandfather while they "go on vacation", which is a euphemism for hiding out from the authorities.

So Mauro gets dropped at the entrance of a large scary apartment building in a run down section of Sao Paulo and with a quick hug and a kiss, his parents are gone. Unbeknownst to them however, Mauro's Grandfather has just died that morning from a heart attack.

Things then go from bad to worse for Mauro as this is a very Orthodox Jewish area of Sao Paulo and most of the residents only speak Yiddish, a language that sounds like so much gibberish to young Mauro who didn't even know his father was Jewish.

Now enters Shlomo (Germano Haiut), a crabby, ill-tempered old duffer who lives in the apartment next door to Mauro's deceased grandfather and there is a great discussion among the neighbors about what to do with Mauro.

Finally, the local Rabbi decrees that since God dropped Mauro on Shlomo's doorstep, HE must know what he's doing and orders Shlomo to care for the boy until his parents return, albeit with help from the community. Talk about an odd couple!

But this is where soccer comes into play.

Because Brazil is in the World Cup Finals against Mexico, the entire country gets united behind their national team and before long everyone from Communist to Capitalist, old to young, male to female or whatever combination you can come up with manages to put aside their differences long enough to root for Pele and team Brazil.

If I have made The Year My Parents Went On Vacation sound like a Brazilian "Home Alone", I apologize; nothing could be further from the truth.

What I liked about this film was the way it managed to negotiate the growing friendship between Mauro and Shlomo without resorting to emotional tricks or false sentiment.

In fact, The Year My Parents Went On Vacation is one of the least sentimental films I have seen.

With its excellent performances, well written script, exceptional cinematography and understated, but effective music score, The Year My Parents Went On Vacation is a coming of age dramady that is light years ahead most other films in that usually overwrought genre. I can't recommend this film enough.

It is no joke that other countries around the world take their soccer seriously. I won't say that there have never been riots or fights at American sporting events, but when you look at the death tolls from soccer disagreements worldwide, they make America seem positively civilized by comparison.

That said, as a complete non-fan of soccer (any sport where you can't use your hands or arms is not much of a sport) and as someone who knows next to nothing about the game's history, it would seem odd that I recommend The Damned United so highly, but I do.

While the names Brian Clough, Peter Taylor, Don Revie and Sam Longson may bring forth exciting memories to British soccer fans, they mean nothing to me. But, if there is a film written by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and starring Michael Sheen (Unthinkable, Frost/Nixon), Timothy Spall (Sweeney Todd, the Harry Potter films) and Jim Broadbent (Bullets Over Broadway, Moulin Rouge, the Harry Potter films), I will certainly fork over my nine bucks to see it.

The Damned United follows the true story of Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), who was brought in to manage the Leeds United football club in 1974 replacing the team's beloved manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney). Clough's controversial 44-day stint at Leeds United was full of hubris, jealousy, betrayal, incompetence and was such a condensed human drama that it has spawned novels, plays, countless hours of critical analysis and now a film.

Not knowing anything about the real people involved, or how they have been portrayed in the newspapers enabled me to perhaps see the film with fresher eyes than a knowledgeable fan may have. So, while I can't comment on the films historical accuracy, I can say that the dramatic accuracy is spot on.

We meet Brian Clough and learn how he adopted Muhammad Ali's boisterous braggadocio as a personality template much to the chagrin of players and fans alike. We see what a constant headache Clough was to the team owners and how he had little regard for the huge amounts of their money he was spending.

But we also learn how effective Clough was. One thread of the story shows us how Clough managed to take his previous team, Derby County, from a national joke to serious first division competitors.

We also see that behind the outrageous public persona of Brian Clough lay the unheralded strategist Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) who handled the games play books, starting line-ups and the other day-to-day minutiae that make up the running of any professional sports team.

And we see how Clough's reckless egomania nearly destroyed this decades long friendship. I wasn't expecting an affecting bromance when I went into see The Damned United and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the theme of how a friendship can survive through fame, fortune and failure was what The Damned United was really about.

The soccer was incidental.

So, even if you know nothing about British soccer leagues, The Damned United works as a powerful well-written drama, full of great acting and unforgettable characters.

I first saw this short film on the DVD of the 1951 Captain Horatio Hornblower starring Gregory Peck. And that fictional film had more accurate history than this ludicrous short subject.

My Country Tis Of Thee is for the social retards who hate real history and prefer that America's past be rendered in semi-literate bursts of myth, unearned patriotism and religious faith.

Yes, the film alludes to real things that happened, there was a US Civil War, a War of 1812, Abe Lincoln was the president at one time, America did fight in WWII etc. But the time frame for these events is often jumbled and key points are missed, for example, there is no mention of our most important WWII ally, the Soviet Union.

The Cold War notwithstanding, even for 1950, this was unforgivable.

The treatment of the Native Americans is laughable, even for the time period. Only a loon, a tea bagger or Glenn Beck would find this short film watchable and I would only show it to kids as punishment and only then if there was a real historian nearby to clear up the falsehoods and fantastic errors.

Like, the film says the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were launched from Okinawa. Huh? It was the island of Tinian. Everyone knows this, even in 1950 they knew it. If My Country Tis Of Thee gets this simple easily verifiable facts wrong, what else does it get wrong?

Too much to even count as it turns out. You help no one by promoting historical trash as truth. Especially when the real story of America is so enthralling, so captivating, so inspiring, why embellish it with falsehoods, lies and untruths?

America overcoming its errors and former wrong ways has made us a stronger nation, a more just nation, a better nation; there is no reason to be ashamed of that.

Denying those truths is the real crime.

You don't prove your love for the USA by lying about it, or by denying our faults. In fact, our openness in talking about them and dealing with them IS one of the things that makes America the great country we are.

There is something wrong with this film like it was put though a filter of some type to remove any real humanity, unless that is the point. I'm not a psychiatrist but Mark Zuckerberg as portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in the film seems to suffer from some kind of emotional agnosia. . .and so does the film.

I was looking forward to this film and I had fun watching it, but as I thought about it afterwards, all I could remember were the squandered opportunities the film had to actually tell a moving story about friendship and loyalty that got wrecked by a cool business venture that became much too successful way too quickly.

Both Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher have both said The Social Network is not really about the "Facebook saga" with Sorkin even being so bold as to claim the basic story goes all the way back to the Greek dramatists. He has a point, so what do you think, would Aristophanes have been a MAC man or a PC user?

Truly, you won't find a better emotional core to build a drama around than the relationship between best friends Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). That bromance is the heart of The Social Network and the film kept getting close to this emotional territory but then it would crash like an overloaded network and flit to other characters not important to the main story.

For example, the machinations of the Winklevoss twins are comic relief elevated to main story arc status. The self-righteous anger they feel and the lengths they go to seek revenge play like Margaret Dumont fighting with Groucho Marx.

It's very satisfying to see these overly entitled, great white hopes become dismayingly angry that things didn't go exactly the way they wanted them to for probably the first time in their lives. The Social Network develops a sharp edge to it in these scenes from their characters genuine feelings of an entitlement snatched away from them by a clearly undeserving cretin and the actors play it for all the high comedy they can.

But the main bromance is tested when the sexy, charming, persuasive entrepreneur Sean Parker (played to paranoid perfection by Justin Timberlake) comes in well over an hour into the film and starts finding ways to turn Facebook into a mega-money making operation all the while charming the pants off Mark Zuckerberg; much to Eduardo's sad eyed jealousy.

At this moment, The Social Network could become an ancient Greek drama in more ways than one.

But it doesn't. Instead, we just get more back and forth cutting between depositions and lawyer meetings, which are interesting and could have provided clues into the characters, but don't. These scenes were the biggest missed opportunities in the film.

Another squandered moment, why can't we see the scene where Zuckerberg goes into an investment banker's office in his bathrobe and slippers to deliver a Sean Parker bird-flip? Will Zuckerberg realize that making good on revenge for others is totally unsatisfying? And why was the tough talking Parker too big a wuss not to do it himself?

If the scene isn't going to advance the plot or inform about the characters, why have it?

Witnessing Parkers pathetic attempt at a put down of Andrew Garfield by offering him a check for $19,000 and then totally being made a fool of showed exactly what kind of man Saverin was and what kind of useless blow-hard Parker was.

As a secondary theme, the idea that money can ruin almost anything good like friendship, loyalty or love, even here, The Social Network does not convince. It seems that it was the fact that Facebook made tons of money that this story even has an ending that did not end in suicide or death. If Sorkin or Fincher sees anything ironic or even noteworthy in this, they sure don't indicate it in the film.

Remember, people would even have excused a horrible sociopathic bully like Alex DeLage in A Clockwork Orange if he had only made a billion dollars for someone.

As it is right now, The Social Network feels way too long and there is no emotional payoff. I didn't feel a sense of relief or fun or even sadness when the end credit titles listed what happened to the various characters.

The Social Network had glibness and a flow that only indicated a surface look at the deeper themes, but nothing else.

Fincher generally likes to make fast moving films because he seems to fear depth. He probably disagrees with the saying that "still waters run deep" and thinks that still waters are the ones that turn stagnant.

Well David, that's true, but stagnant water can still be deep water, and shallow water is never anything else.

I was really looking forward to this film. I like all the actors and the technical credits looked promising. I felt this film might live or die by its script but seeing Alex Garland's name attached was a bonus. I liked his previous work; The Beach, most of Sunshine and I especially loved 28 Days Later.

That Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the novel this film is based on was less impressive for me. I do not know the mans literary work and regarding film work, one of the better Merchant/Ivory films, The Remains Of The Day was based on an Ishiguro novel, so I was not unduly alarmed when I sat down.

I also have, make that HAD, no strong opinion about the competence of director Mark Romanek and some films, despite the "auteur theory" are not director made.

Never Let Me Go looked like one of those. What I neglected to consider was that a director could completely unmake a reasonably good story.

This film is a torturous mess. It is dull looking, leaden paced and they really should have had one or two more story conferences to work out the stupendous improbabilities in the plot. Now, I understand that the film takes place neither in the future, nor in the past and that it is presenting a world developmentally different than our own, but please, this film makes no sense, even if you apply the generally absurd level of sense that is standard for the sci-fi genre.

First, the "surprise" that these kids are being raised for the sole purpose of organ donation is stated verbally quite early in the film. But that's just for the slow members of the audience. In fact, the films ending, thematic point and character denouement are visually shown to us in the very first scene as a skinny, scarred Andrew Garfield is wheeled into an operating room to have his last useful organs removed under the watchful eye of Carrey Mulligan, the woman who truly loves him.

Gee, thanks Carrey, I'm glad you love him. Imagine what might have happened if you hated him!

But this whole organ transplant idea is just a clumsy allegory for something else because it makes no medical sense what so ever. The film makes some attempt at explanation for why this society needs so many organ donors, but it is a ludicrous premise.

If these kids are being used for say, kidney transplants, and human kidneys still work the same way and for the same reasons in their world, than I can at least conclude some nominal comparability to our own world. And here the films central plot point crashes on the rocks of reality.

For example, in the USA last year, 28,000 people were saved by organ transplants, out of a roughly 305,000,000 population. That's a very small percentage. Most of the diseases and accidents that can kill you are not fixable by simply getting a new kidney.

Then there is the utter passivity of kids. I mean, they adamantly don't want to die, but when they are let out of their holding pens to go for a drive far into the countryside, they return on time and on schedule. It almost seems like they WANT to be carved up into all their little pieces parts.

I don't even want to get into the utter stupidity of the film postulating that the third grade drawings of houses and cows somehow indicates that that person has a "soul".

Trust me, there are better ways to prove your humanity than by the creation of lousy amateur art. It's a ludicrous conceit and whoever came up with it should be ashamed of themselves.

So if you want to see a film with an improbable story by Kazuo Ishiguro, check out The Saddest Music In The World. But since that film was directed by the Canadian genius Guy Maddin, the film has wit, excessive eccentricities in filmic style and a huge number of belly laughs.

Avoid Never Let Me Go unless you consider getting bored into a coma a fun way to spend an evening.

The critical hosannas being hurled at this film are completely mystifying to me. I have not seen such a disingenuous conglomeration of bad ideas thrown together like ingredients for a hack melodrama get this much critical praise, since, I don't know, since A Beautiful Mind or Crash.

Maybe it's because I like all the actors so much. It was disappointing to see people with such distinctive screen presences as Samuel L Jackson, Naomi Watts and Shareeka Epps get used in a story that wouldn't have passed muster as a cheap Lifetime Channel movie.

Watching Annette Bening treating Jimmy Smits rudely or having Naomi Watts introduce Sam Jackson to her nosy neighbor as her father were scenes that should have sparkled, but here they were flat as yesterday's ginger ale.

Nothing rang true for me in this story from the desperation of the young black couple to adopt a baby, any baby, to the aggressive career girl lawyer to Annette Bening's Latina maid; this doesn't mean there are not people in these predicaments in real life, because there are. I just didn't believe them here.

A good example was Shareeka Epps, she was so great in Half-Nelson as the smart girl who saw through her drug addicted teachers faults to his positive qualities, but here as an obnoxious teen giving the third degree to hopeful parents who want to adopt a baby she is thinking of giving up, I mean this is a dumb idea for a character. It's a self-conscious and false attempt to add a layer to what is essentially a bland stock character, it's right out of screen writing 101 and just as predictable.

But it was the way all the characters spoke with the same type of ironic-hip diction of a bad cable TV series that was truly annoying. With my eyes closed, I could not tell who was talking to whom, they all had the same vocabulary whether they were a Catholic nun or a high priced lawyer. How realistic is that? It isn't, except in Bad TV Land!

I swear, this glacially paced movie put me into a mouth-breathing coma. A double shot of Starbucks espresso was not enough to pull me out of my torpor after I sleepwalked out of the theater into the warm night air. Seriously, I needed a defibrillator to zap me back to the living world when this film was over.

But what really ticked me off was that this film did not have the decency to just be bad and misguided, but it had to pretend to be about "SOMETHING" in capital letters, when it is really nothing more than an ordinary dull soap opera dressed up as a motion picture.

I kept thinking to myself, "Douglas Sirk would have known what to do with this script." What a shame he's no longer with us. Gosh this film was a waste of time.

This is a film where the less you know about it beforehand, the better. Directed by the mysterious street artist Banksy, the ostensible story follows a French immigrant to Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta who made his living operating a second hand clothing shop.

As a hobby, Guetta began videotaping the nighttime antics of various local street artists like Shepard Fairey (who created the famous HOPE poster of Barack Obama) as they plastered their guerrilla art on empty billboards, highway overpasses and the blank sides of buildings often times just a few steps ahead of the vigilant, but unappreciative L.A. police department.

Virtually any street artist who was anyone, including the elusive Banksy, sooner or later got videotaped by Guetta, which led to hundreds of hours of raw footage being stored in unmarked boxes that no one would ever see.

Like a collection of dictionaries on a shelf, while they may have all the words necessary to tell a great story, until someone did the actual work of putting them into a coherent order, there would be no way to separate the signal from the noise.

Several attempts to bring order to this chaos were less than successful, finally, Thierry Guetta got tired of just documenting these street artists, hey, if they could be artists by just doing it, so could he. So, blatantly stealing these street artists style, methods and madness, Thierry Guetta declared himself an artist and began to create work on his own.

Yes, just like that.

Exit Through The Gift Shop finally takes us to the madcap opening of Thierry Guetta's first one-man show in a gallery created from an unused TV Studio. It is a huge success and becomes the "happening" place to be seen for a while. In fact, Thierry Guetta has probably made more money and generated more press than some of the street artists he used to film and who are still on the streets as it were, much to their annoyance.

Exit Through The Gift Shop is a thrilling and original film that grabs you from the first and won't let go; the only problem with all of this is it may just be a prank.

The clues to that are the fact that Banksy, the nominal director is a notorious prankster and not too many people seemed to have heard about this Thierry Guetta until this film was made.

One other thing, actor Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill, Greenberg, Pirate Radio) provides the narration for the film and unless I am very mistaken, also seems to be the disguised voice of Banksy, who we see interviewed in heavy silhouette to hide his face. It also seems odd that all of this could have been happening in the very public L.A. art community without more people on the outside hearing about it.

Either way, this is a fast paced and exciting film that will tickle you, astound you and fascinate you, even if you know nothing about street art. Which makes Exit Through The Gift Shop either the most believable mockumentary in film history, or the most disingenuous documentary.

Exit Through The Gift Shop celebrates the subversive excitement many artists feel as they skewer the pieties of the pop culture that spawned them and not so subtly reminds us that on occasion, even the tamest of artists will bite the hand that feeds them. Don't miss it.

I recently celebrated a milestone birthday. As I reflected upon the day, I thought about the sheer number of unlikely things that have occurred in my lifetime.

Back when I was ten, the idea that Great Britain and the IRA would ever achieve a ceasefire was, at best, a dim prospect. Likewise, no one thought the USSR would ever dissolve or that the Berlin Wall would be dismantled and the idea that a black man would one day be elected President of the USA was given about as much a chance of happening as finding two identical snowflakes.

The thought that South Africa, a county where racism WAS the official government policy would ever end its evil apartheid ways was almost inconceivable. Adding to that, the fact that the citizens of South Africa elected themselves a black president was an almost unbelievable turn of events.

Then, in order to prevent his country from devolving into resentment and revenge, President Nelson Mandela (a believer in the power of forgiveness) established the Truth And Reconciliation Commission where people could admit to their past racist misdeeds and then be publicly forgiven.

This showed me that the people of South Africa, both black and white have achieved a level of grace and civility that we Americans can only dream about.

If you don't believe me, just listen to any Teabagger or wingnut religious conservative on contemporary talk radio. You won't hear more foolish hateful nonsense this side of a fascist dictator. However, what the real Nelson Mandela did to avoid the potential revenge and recriminations of the people is an inspiring story that truly gives me hope for mankind.

So how come Invictus proved to be one of the most annoying experiences I have spent in a movie theater in a long time? Was it because director Clint Eastwood has reduced Nelson Mandela to a supporting player in his own life and instead focused his film on a white rugby team?

Was it because he turned Nelson Mandela into a Yoda-like character sputtering out banal philosophy that would embarrass even the flightiest of New Age nit-wits, or even a serious New Age nit-wit like Deepak Chopra? I mean, what has happened to Clint Eastwood?

How can it be that after directing about 30+ feature films, Eastwood still has not developed any kind of camera sense. I find it hard to accept the sloppy choices of angles and coverage in Eastwood's films, especially since he usually works with very competent cinematographers and editors.

Every poignant plot point is telegraphed well in advance, so any chance of surprise or insight is muffed. Is this what his vast experience in the film industry has taught him?

Clint Eastwood has spoken with admiration of some of the directors he has worked with in the past, like the Hollywood studio trained minimalist Don Siegel and the operatic Italian Sergio Leone, in fact, he's even dedicated films to those two masters. Why Clint Eastwood now desires to direct films like Ron Howard is a true mystery.

But there are a couple of things in Invictus that even the anemically talented Ron Howard would never have done. For instance, what's with all the musical montages that serve no purpose but to slow down an already leaden pace?

What's with the unforgivable instance of showing a massive jet liner buzzing the rugby stadium during the final game? Now, I know that the plane buzzing actually happened, but Eastwood uses this incident as a way to instantly tap into our post 9/11 awareness of planes flying into buildings for terroristic purposes to create a false moment of tension.

I mean, even the most xenophobic American who cares not one whit about what happens outside the borders of the continental United States would have at least heard about a jet liner crashing into a rugby stadium in South Africa during the World Cup game, which, by the way, is actually played for by teams from around the world, most unlike our own masturbatory baseball World Series where we even celebrate the lunacy of two teams from the same city competing with each other, as if this were something culturally significant.

I could have told Eastwood that he was on a fool's errand if he was specifically trying to make an inspirational movie. If an audience finds some kind of inspiration from your film, that's great, but they are the only ones who can do that.

If you try to impose that feeling on people, you will just end up sounding preachy and scolding and believe me, the only thing worse than false sincerity is false inspiration.

Invictus is a two hour plus scolding lesson full of inspirational haranguing that has the effect of pummeling you into brain dead, but laudatory submission. But, when the whole damn fool audience is cheering at the most cliché of sport movie banalities, it is easier to just flow with the crowd.

Although not explained clearly, the title Invictus is Latin for "unconquered" and is the title of a famous poem by William Ernest Hensly that ends with the lines "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."

Apparently, Nelson Mandela used to recite the poem to himself during his long imprisonment to help keep himself sane. But there is a more recent use of the poem Invictus that deserves to be mentioned.

It seems that when Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001, he used the Hensley poem Invictus as his final statement. Why do I find that coincidence much more interesting and intriguing than this film? But hey, if it's inspiring enough for Timothy McVeigh, who am I to argue?

I was looking forward to seeing The Road. I have not read the book by Cormac McCarthy, but then, I have never read The Wizard Of Oz, Gone With The Wind or Twilight and that has not stopped me from enjoying those films.

What really interested me in seeing The Road was the fact it was an "End Of The World" movie. I have always loved movies that threaten, depict, portend, demonstrate or are either pre or post apocalyptic. One of the most joyous experiences I ever had at the movies was at the end of Michael Tolkin's 1991 film The Rapture when the biblical prophecies alluded to throughout the film actually came true in very imaginative ways to my great delight and this is praise coming from an atheist who finds the Bible patently ridiculous.

The Road has an interesting if not very unique look and I certainly liked the bleak music score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, but it wasn't long before The Road began to go down hill. The main reason for my disappointment was the fact the film never addresses what kind of disaster it was that destroyed the Earth.

I understand why that information was not necessary in the book. From what I gather, the book was less a sci-fi story about a post-apocalyptic world and more an allegory about humanity surviving, hopefully with its morals and ethics intact. In many ways, the type of disaster that has befallen the Earth is unimportant, its just the "Maguffin", the thing that gets the story moving and involves all the characters.

But film is a very literal medium and The Road would have benefited by having had someone think a little bit more about what kind of disaster it was that has befallen the Earth.

I've been criticized for focusing on this one point and I am being told by people that the actual type of disaster doesn't matter. Doesn't matter? Perhaps that's true for the book, but the entire look of the film from its physical staging, to the costumes, the make-up and production design all grow organically from whatever kind of disaster it was. Believe me, the remnants of a nuclear holocaust would look very different from say, an environmental disaster or a disease epidemic.

Would it have been so difficult for the filmmakers to have selected one kind of disaster and then have focused their energies into making that reality consistent?

What am I to think about the numerous conflicting visuals presented in The Road? We see huge ships, their keels broken, laying on inland highways quite far from the ocean. How did they get there? Was their massive worldwide flooding?

And yes, we do know what that kind of disaster looks like. Check out photos of New Orleans post-Katrina or the coastal towns of Indonesia after the tsunami in 2004. Talk about a worldwide disaster, the massive undersea quake on December 26, 2004 caused the entire Earth to wobble about 1" and shortened the length of the day by almost 3 micro-seconds.

Much of The Road is spent wandering around in formerly tree rich areas (the film was partly shot in my home state of Pennsylvania, which believe me, North, South, East and West, we have lots of trees here), but the trees shown in this film are all dead, dried out, rotted and prone to collapse, leading to several tense scenes as Papa Viggo and Kiddie Kodi have to dodge falling timber.

These massive piles of kindling are also prone to bursting into flames, in fact, many times in the film we see the characters walking through what initially appears to be snow, but actually turns out to be falling ash from those burning trees.

And yet, there is an almost constant cover of dark grey clouds and copious rainfall everywhere they travel. Huh? How can the trees and the ground be so dry as to spontaneously combust, yet barely a day goes by without a drenching rainfall? I accept the fact I may be the only person who cares about this inconsistency, but I can't believe I'm the only one who's noticed it.

It's because I do love "End Of The World" movies that I don't allow filmmakers to simply retreat into vague notions of unnamed calamity as catch-all explanation for their attempts at heightened drama and forced action. This is a cop-out in the same way bad sci-fi films use the vagueness of "time travel" to cover over their creators lack of even trying to make their stories plausible.

Come on filmmakers, you're the ones spending millions of dollars here, you're the ones asking me to spend two hours of my life here, it is your job to make the best film you can and if you slack off on the hard stuff, like making a film that makes sense, even within the limited frame of reference and reality you are creating, then I have every right to call you out on it.

I have had some friends of mine tell me that I should simply view The Road as a tense story of survival between a father and his young son. This is the wrong way to approach me. I am not a person who is automatically concerned simply because a character in jeopardy happens to be a child. My general attitude is "F**K" the children. Far from being the key to our future, I have seen too many contemporary adult lives ruined by kids.

Am I being unnecessarily hard on the filmmakers? Perhaps, but film-making is a hard job and if you are not up to the task, well, they always have room on the night shift at McDonalds.

But don't travel down this road, unless you like being disappointed.

Big disappointment here. I was really looking forward to this film based on the trailers I had seen some months ago. The thought of Meryl Streep playing Julia Child with Stanley Tucci as her husband Paul was, like creamy butter spread on fresh baked French bread, a combination too delicious to pass up even though it seems so obvious in retrospect.

It was much later on that I began to understand that this film was not going to be solely about Julia Child, but was going to be a combination of two stories.

The first story was about Julia Child, a woman who by all rights should not have succeeded at any of the things she tried to do, but because of her indomitable spirit and tenacity and after suffering years of humiliating failure, she finally succeeded in the harshly competitive worlds of serious cookery, book publishing and television and she would change the way America looked at food and life forever.

The other person in the film was Julie Powell an uninteresting little cubicle worker who wrote a blog in Queens.

Let me state here very clearly, no matter how important the events, tragedies, loves, losses and happenings of your life are to you personally; that does not make them interesting for a movie audience.

I don't doubt that the real Julie Powell found true solace in cooking after spending her days in a cubicle listening to tales of woe from 9/11 victim families and I certainly don't doubt that she is sincere in her love and respect for Julia Child; but what did Julie Powell really do? Cook recipes from a book that thousands and thousands of other people have already cooked? Write about it on a blog? From this they made a movie?

Forgive me, the real Julia Child deserves a movie all her own. If the movie studios don't want to touch it, how about you cable channels. Come on Showtime, HBO! Julia Child really did learn to cook, really did write a great book and really did change TV and the kitchen for millions of people in America and elsewhere.

She's certainly as interesting as Truman, Bernard & Doris or the wacko mother and daughter from Grey Gardens.

Julie & Julia is a choppy film, every time Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are on screen, the film is interesting and has the tangy lightness of a beurre blanc, every time Amy Adams and Chris Messina are on screen, the film falls like a flat soufflé.

This is not their fault. Amy Adams and Chris Messina are both talented and attractive people, but Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep, locations in Paris and a credible sense of history are tough acts to follow. Especially when the best they can muster is a second floor walk-up above of a pizzeria.

There are a few times when Amy Adams is out with her snooty friends when the screen crackles but overall, the film stops cold whenever we cut to the modern story.

The big problem is there is an attempt to compare the two lives, Julia Child and Julie Powell, and there is no comparison. Julia Child on her most dull days was more interesting than Julie Powell. I realize that may be unfair, but I am calling it the way I see it.

There are a couple of good things to observe however. I am thrilled that Julie Powell decided to find in Julia Child a guru of sorts. When you consider how many people suffering from the existential angst that Julie Powell was dealing with turn to goofy New Age nitwits like Deepak Chopra or humorless cults like Scientology; please drugs and alcohol are better for you and no where near as brain numbing. Julia Child is a much better influence by far.

But there is something else happening since the release of Julie & Julia that gives me huge hope for America. Since Julie & Julia hit the multiplexes, I have read that copies of Julia Child's book Mastering The Art Of French Cooking have been flying off bookstore shelves everywhere the film is playing. But that has not happened with Julie Powell's book. This confirms something I have long suspected; the American people know the real thing when they see it.

Chan Is Missing begins with the old American classic "Rock Around The Clock", but here it's sung in Chinese. Be prepared to enter Chinatown as you have never experienced it in this 1981 no-budget film from director Wayne Wang.

Filmed in Black and White with a cast of unknowns, Chan Is Missing uses the genre template of a mystery film to take us to the edge of a much bigger and more difficult human mystery Your friendly guide will be Jo (Wood Moy), a shambling, world-weary, Chinese-American taxi driver who has decided to go into the taxi business with his younger nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi). Calling themselves the Wing On Cab Company, they figure by splitting shifts, with Jo taking days and Steve taking nights, they both stand to make some decent money.

However, in San Francisco, a special taxi licence is needed and they are hard to get. Chan Hung, a friend of Jo's from Taiwan knows where he can make a deal to sub-lease a taxi licence, but the deal is cash only.

So, Jo and Steve pool their resources and come up with the $4000 dollars needed and they give the cash to Chan who goes off to finalize the deal.

And that's that.

After two days go by without any word from Chan, Jo and Steve begin to get worried, apparently, Chan is missing.

They have no reason to suspect that Chan has stiffed them, but they do fear something may have happened to him. After all, Chan was relatively new to San Francisco. Their concern grows when they learn that Chan was involved in a fender-bender a short time ago and is also a no-show at his court appointment.

A quick stop at the cheap hotel Chan lived at yields no information except that Chan hasn't been there for several days and a strange woman has also been looking for him (there is always a strange woman in a mystery).

Jo thinks his friend Henry, a Chinese cook and restaurant owner might be able to help. Henry was a friend of Chan's back in China; in fact they studied aeronautical engineering together. But we gather that while Henry has been successful in America, Chan has faced disappointment.

As Henry explains it, Americans won't hire the Chinese as engineers, they only want them "to make spring rolls." Henry is contemptuous of the food he has to cook for Americans and can't understand the popularity of Sweet And Sour Pork Ribs when the sauce alone makes him nauseous.

And don't get him started on the tourists who order Won Ton Soup. He screams at his waiters to tell the Americans, "we don't have Won Ton Soup, tell them we have Won Ton spelled backwards, Not Now!"

Eventually, Jo and Steve learn that Chan may be linked to an infamous "flag-waving incident" in San Francisco's Chinatown. At a recent Chinese Pride Day Parade, two different groups, one that supports the Peoples Republic Of China and another that supports a Free Taiwan, clashed on the street and Chan photographed the incident.

Is his disappearance related to obscure Chinese Community politics? This clash also led to a notorious murder; is Chan involved with that?

A promising lead takes Jo to a Chinese Community Center where he talks with George who taught English to Chan. George explains how some immigrant Chinese don't want to assimilate in the USA and this causes problems because a lot of their Chinese customs don't work over here.

But the real problem comes from those who DO want to assimilate into white America as quickly as possible; the biggest problem being, obviously, they are not white. George tries to teach these people to retain the best things from Chinese culture and adapt them to the best things in American culture.

Eventually, Jo tracks down the strange woman and it turns out to be Chan's wife, this is a surprise, as Jo did not know that Chan had a family. Yet, shortly after this meeting, Chan's daughter calls up Jo and Steve and returns their $4000 with apologies from Chan for not coming through with the taxi licence.

Although Steve is happy to get the money back, Jo is even more confused. So are we. By this point, we have become very curious about who Chan is. But, no more so than Jo. After all, Chan was supposedly his friend and now after trying to find him, Jo has to conclude that he never really knew Chan at all.

Also, Jo has not turned out to be a particularly good detective. At one point someone says to him, "Your nobodies concept of a Charlie Chan." Jo realizes this and muses to himself at one point, "If this were a TV movie, an important clue would pop up now and clarify everything." But that never happens.

Over the course of the film, Chan is described variously as being: honest, paranoid, a genius, an idiot, sly, slow-witted, a failure, patriotic, "too Chinese" and it was noted by several people that he was especially fond of mariachi music. What we are left with at the end is Chan, the enigma.

At the end of the film, Jo looks at a photograph of himself and Chan that was taken long before this Chan going missing business. Both men are standing outside a restaurant in Chinatown and Jo is poised in the sun and he is smiling, but Chan is standing in the shadows of a doorway, his features barely visible making Chan more of an enigma now than he was ever before.

I was thoroughly enchanted by Chan Is Missing and I think you will be too.

Here is 101 in a nutshell: in 1988, the British synthesizer band Depeche Mode went on a successful concert tour of the United States. The documentary filmmaker D. A. Penebaker (Monterey Pop, Don't Look Back, The War Room) was commissioned to follow the band across country and film them, both on and off stage.

In order to add interest and material to this would be "concert film", a group of late teenage - early twenty something kids, four male and four female tag along on their own tour bus as winners of a "Be In A Depeche Mode Movie" contest. The film inter-cuts between both groups.

That's it.

But that's like describing Romeo & Juliet as just being a teenage romance. This all culminates on June 18, 1988 in a packed concert at The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

Part of what fascinates me about 101 is that despite the unpromising elements director Penebaker had to work with, the film is completely fascinating. Indeed, my affection for the film is partly because it succeeds when by any rational standard it should have failed; just like the band Depeche Mode.

I first heard Depeche Mode when an acquaintance found a small briefcase full of cassette tapes on the subway in 1982. Included in this haul were two Depeche Mode tapes, Speak & Spell and A Broken Frame.

I can't explain it, but the doleful, disquieting, yet bouncy, danceable music of Depeche Mode really hooked me. I became an instant fan. So, when I heard there was a film about them, I was intrigued.

After the credits, 101 begins inside the Rose Bowl, with Depeche Mode arriving in style in a classic Cadillac and the handsome, but obviously shy, Alan Wilder announces that Depeche Mode will go on tour in the United States and their final concert will be held in the monster Rose Bowl.

But we soon shift to the "auditions" for the kids who will ride on the bus following Depeche Mode and once they are picked, we have a scene that always makes me laugh. As a "hip" pony-tailed music lawyer explains to the eight kids about the contracts and waivers they have to sign, they gleefully ignore him and confer with each other about the various fake id's they have created to get served booze while being underage.

Meanwhile the kid's bus keeps getting lost on the way to the Depeche Mode concerts, necessitating the asking of directions from numerous passersby and tollbooth attendants.

There is a great bit while the kids are in Memphis and they decide to spend an afternoon touring Graceland, the famous home of Elvis Presley. The kids are shocked to learn that it costs $12.00 to take a tour.

If I didn't love them before, the kids on the bus gained my never-ending respect at Graceland, mostly because they commit the ultimate sacrilege in Elvis-land; they are thoroughly unimpressed. What's the big deal about Elvis? Elvis is boring they claim.

Finally someone had the guts to point at Elvis Presley and correctly identify him as the "King" without any new clothes. Their derision is not against Elvis the man, or Elvis the singer, but Elvis the legacy; the veneration of a pseudo-rebel who simply put a white face to black music and got rich off of their innovation.

It was the film Jerry Maguire that put the phrase "Show me the money!" into the American lexicon. Well, in 101 they literally show us the money. While an armored car pulls into the parking lot of the Rose Bowl, we watch as young workers sell Depeche Mode T-Shirts, Sweat Shirts and other merchandise.

Someone speculates on the amount of money that the band must be making and wishes they could be Depeche Mode's accountant. CUT TO, Jonathan Kessler, Depeche Mode's tour accountant in his trailer now dealing with various invoices and pay-checks for the crew.

Then we see the workers count up their money. And it is a LOT of money; many pounds of cash is literally dumped onto the backstage floor from cardboard boxes and counted into huge piles. It is interesting to note that Warner Brothers executives wanted these shots cut from the film.

They were not worried about the audience seeing the underage kids buying beer, nor were they bothered when they rolled joints in their hotel room, but seeing the actual amount of cash Depeche Mode generated, well, some things are better left unknown by the public.

But 101 doesn't cheat us despite what the Warner Brothers top brass wanted, back in the money trailer, Jonathan Kessler does the final accounting for the night. For the Rose Bowl concert, they had 60,453 actual paying customers and with the merchandise money, the grand total made by Depeche Mode on the night of June 18, 1988 was $1,360,192.50. No wonder they need an armored car to carry the dough away.

The Rose Bowl is their last concert and the film ends here having come full circle. We first meet Depeche Mode in an empty Rose Bowl stadium and now we leave them playing to a packed house. It is actually a nice moment of closure.

How should I defend this film? I don't need to. If you watch 101, you will either plug into its decidedly strange rhythms or you won't. You will either find the kids on the bus charming like I did, or you will just think them flighty teenagers. You will find the musical performances enjoyable or you won't like Depeche Mode at all.

But for me, this film was like actually being on the road with the band. And I liked the kids, they were truly the heart of this film and they gave 101 an original edge that most "concert films" don't have.

Dark Days is a documentary about a group of people who lived in the Amtrak train tunnels under Manhattan, some for more than a decade until Amtrak officials finally evicted them.

Filmed in grainy black and white and cut with an unforced rhythm that lets these people tell us their stories in their own words, Dark Days will make you think differently about homeless people.

"Nobody in his right mind would ever come down here", one of the men tells us, but it is for this very reason that he feels safer in the tunnel than up top, where anyone from mean cops to belligerent kids can hassle you and get away with it because you are homeless and in America, that means you don't have many rights.

Interestingly, these people do not consider themselves homeless. True, their homes are just small shacks built in unused sections of train tunnels, but they are sturdy constructions made from old plywood and other lumber they have scavenged topside.

They are furnished with sofas, beds, chairs and other items found in the trash. They have cleverly tapped into the city's power grid so they do have electricity for lights, small refrigerators and televisions.

Some people insist that the homeless are just lazy and see their lack of property ownership as some type of moral failure. Although that is demonstrably not true, it is amazing how many people think these people choose this way of life.

As for being lazy, they hunt for food in dumpsters, collect cans and bottles for recycling cash (they are more eco-friendly than most people with "real" homes) and they are a whiz at finding things in the trash like tossed out appliances that require only minor repairs to be good enough to sell.

After watching these people hustle all day, you realize they sure put in a lot of hours for people who are supposed to be lazy.

Still, it is fair to ask this question; how did these people come to live in a train tunnel? It is admirable they are surviving, but generally, people don't choose to live in train tunnels if they have some other option.

It will not be a surprise to learn that among these tunnel denizens there is a big drug and alcohol problem. But then, drug and alcohol addiction is also a problem among people who have homes and jobs so the homeless are not unique in this regard.

Director Marc Singer was living in New York when he heard unconfirmed stories about people living in unused train tunnels (specifically, the two mile stretch between 123rd St. to 72nd St.) and he sought them out initially to satisfy his own curiosity. Then, without any professional help, he began shooting in the tunnels using the homeless people themselves as a crew.

There are aspects of this film that generally anger people. Some will protest that these tunnel dwellers don't pay any taxes. Well, they do pay sales taxes on everything they buy from milk to cigarettes.

Some people are livid that they keep pets. I can only say that dogs and cats are able to fend for themselves pretty well and cats are good for rodent control, something that is necessary in a train tunnel. Also, while they are homeless, they are still human, they like the companionship a pet provides as much as anyone else.

No, what angers most people about Dark Days is that it forces them to see themselves among these people. What they are and how they ended up in the tunnel is something that could happen to anyone. Most of us are only about ten paychecks away from the street as it is. You can ignore Dark Days if you want to, but you can't forget it.

Eventually, citing safety reasons, Amtrak officials evicted these people harshly using armed Amtrak personnel. However, Marc Singer had grown protective of these people and he was determined to help them further. So, he worked with the Coalition For The Homeless in New York and he was able to help the tunnel people find apartments and get some of them jobs.

The last scenes of Dark Days show us the new apartments. Contrary to wing nut lies about "luxury penthouses" given to Section 8 housing recipients, these apartments are not fancy, nor are they in upscale neighborhoods where they might ruin other people's property values.

They are in fact, fairly cheap and small, with most consisting of a single bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and for some, a tiny living room. But, considering where these people have come from, these apartments are palaces.

It is interesting to note that after being in the tunnels and disregarded by society for so long, when society finally gave these people a helping hand, they seemed to flourish.

Perhaps it isn't fair, but you can judge a society by how it treats the poorest and most helpless of its members. So, what is the lesson I take away from Dark Days? Well, it is amazing how well some people will respond to a little help and compassion.

So, instead of getting you hackles raised by manipulative junk like The Cove, forget the cetaceans for a moment and consider using your outrage and compassion to help your fellow man.

If you like the hip, urban music used for the score, you can find most of the music on the 1996, DJ Shadow CD, Entroducing. . . and on the 1998, UNKLE CD, Psyence Fiction.

Mrs. Miniver was one of Hollywood's major attempts to rally support for Britain in the early years of World War II. However, at its onset, MGM had a different approach to its political content than that which ultimately emerged in the film.

Early in production, Louis B. Mayer called director William Wyler into his office and told him to lighten up the character of the downed German flyer (played by Helmut Dantine) because the United States "didn't hate anyone" and Mayer had to answer to his stockholders. Selling American films abroad was (and still is) big business and Mayer didn't want to ruffle any box office feathers.

I guess that's not surprising from a studio that paid a producer to scan the credits and change names that sounded too "Jewish" for films being released abroad. Wyler was allowed to make the German character suitably nasty only after Hitler declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Ironically, while Mrs. Miniver was very popular in the United States and won several Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actress, it was ridiculed everywhere else, especially in England, the country it was supposed to glorify.

Mrs. Miniver is the story of the Miniver family and their genteel life in "merrie olde," carefree England before Germany invades Poland and begins hostilities. The country life enjoyed by the Minivers (architect Father, shop-'til-she-drops Mother, spoiled Oxford-educated son, etc.) is undermined until they all learn the meaning of sacrifice.

One of the reasons the English scoffed at this film is its condescending attitude to the lower classes who were fighting the real war. We're supposed to feel sorry that poor Mr. Miniver nearly wrecks his sailboat trying to help his countrymen evacuate Dunkirk.

Most of the actual Dunkirk defenders had no country house to go back to nor a family boat to take them. The "middle-class" Miniver family represents the kind of people who actively ignored Hitler until he started dropped bombs on them.

What are their biggest worries before hostilities' break out?

How can they possibly afford the new car father just bought as well as the frivolous new hat mother simply had to have? Will the station master's rose, named after Mrs. Miniver, win the annual flower competition? Do you care? The Minivers are supposed to be the family we all identify with and they make me wish I were an orphan.

Not since seeing The Sound of Music have I rooted for the Nazis in a film. (I would have rooted for anyone to shut that Trapp family up. They couldn't walk across a room without breaking into a song.) The creaky mechanisms of cliché melodrama are painfully evident here: the young lovers, the noble upperclassmen, the sacrifice of the family house, the brave church rector, etc.

Early on I played a game trying to figure out which of the main characters would die. My money was on the cat the littlest Miniver loved. But, as it turns out, I guessed incorrectly, although the actual victim did not take me by surprise.

This gung-ho, rally-the-troops agitprop doesn't travel well over time and Mrs. Miniver is hopelessly dependent for relevance on the time for which it was made. The theme of civilians in war is a fascinating one, but Mrs. Miniver fails to convey the terror of a non- combatant waiting to see if bombs will drop on his house.

While bombs fall on her neighborhood Mrs. Miniver sits in the basement calmly knitting, thereby carrying the stiff upper lip British attitude to an absurd extreme. Other films like Hope and Glory, The Marriage of Maria Braun and the great Dutch film Soldier of Orange not only portray the tragedy of a daily routine upset by war, but are also refreshingly free of propaganda.

So check one of them out before seeing this disappointing film.

The biggest surprise about Knowing is the fact I liked it a lot. Because a film containing prognostications of major disasters, coupled with science fiction and horror elements and leavened with unsubtle religious allegory is generally the kind of film I would avoid like a dose of the clap.

Except for the major disaster part, this does not sound like my kind of movie. Especially since the main character, a grieving MIT professor is played by the ever-eccentric Nicholas Cage.

Yet I believed he was smart enough to teach at MIT and that he was devastated by the recent death of his wife in a hotel fire and that he is now struggling with the challenges of raising his young son as a widower.

Knowing begins in 1959 at an elementary school about to bury a time capsule slated to be opened fifty years hence. All the kids are asked to draw a picture of what the year 2009 will look like and among the various drawings of space ships, jet packs and rocket cars, one creepy little girl named Lucinda (Lara Robinson) writes out a list of numbers, filling an entire page.

Fifty years later, in 2009, the time capsule is opened and John Koestler's son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) finds himself in possession of the paper with the numbers on it whose meaning is a puzzlement to all.

Later that night, as a drunken Koestler looks at the numbers a little closer, he makes tenuous sense out of this grouping – 911012996 – which, if you put in the right dividing punctuation, looks like 9/11/01–2,996 or, September 11, 2001 with the 2,996 being the official death toll for that horrible day.

With this key in mind, the meaning of the "random" numbers now pops out like a revealed text. These numbers correspond to the dates of major disasters since 1959 including everything from Chernobyl to Lockerbie.

Even more frightening, at the end of the page, there are numbers for future dates; and I mean dates only a few days away. John is stuck with a dilemma, he believes he has foreknowledge about the date, location and death toll for some future disaster.

Naturally, his family and MIT colleagues discount his theories. It seems John Koestler has truly become a male Cassandra; cursed with an ability to see into the future, but with a complete inability to get anyone to believe him.

We get a taste of what this means when John is speaking with a highway patrolman while stuck in traffic, when suddenly, an airliner in trouble comes whizzing in low and crashes in the field next to the Interstate.

Later, another disaster is seemingly confirmed by this paper when John is witness to a particularly horrible subway crash that he was equally helpless to prevent. Yet, while all of this is happening, there is another subplot showing some strange humanoid figures that always seem to be in the background behind John and Caleb.

Caleb also has haunting visions of the Earth in flames and this coincides with an unusual amount of solar flare activity and Knowing seems to be implying that we are quickly approaching the end of the world as we know it.

I recognize that this becomes a tough pill to swallow for many people who have been enjoying the thrill ride that Knowing is giving them. It means you now have to shift your narrative perspective to include a larger and more all-encompassing ontological philosophy. I would normally be troubled by this shift in a film's point of view, yet Knowing adroitly manages to show us the more fantastic narrative elements at the same time as the Nicholas Cage character John Koestler experiences them.

So, as John Koestler began to grasp the larger dimensions of what was happening to him and to realize that it didn't comport to his current notions of reality, Koestler had to make a philosophical shift and I made the intellectual leap along with him.

Like John Koestler, I didn't fully understand exactly how the bizarre things that were happening were actually happening, but I could not deny the reality of them happening.

So, when it came time for John to say his final goodbye to Caleb, I was wracked with tears because I knew young Caleb had to leave with these aliens who, while scary at the start of Knowing, have since become the benevolent saviors of humankind.

If my last few paragraphs seem like I am talking about a different movie than Knowing, I understand your confusion. All I can say is that Knowing tries one of the most risky and difficult gambits for any movie, it undergoes a complete shift in tone and story, but it works here.

I have no doubt there will be people offended by the plot convolutions and semi-religious imagery that mark the denouement of Knowing. But in my lifetime of movie going, I have frequently found that some of the most memorable films to me personally are the ones I can't easily categorize.

Knowing crosses several film genres and will probably displease the die-hard fans in each of them. Sci-Fi lovers will find it too much like a thriller. Thriller lovers will find it too much like a horror film. Horror lovers will find it too scientific. Scientifically minded people will find it too religious and religious people will hate it because it doesn't exclusively promote whatever religion it is they believe in and to top it off, the whole thing reeks of crappy New Age ideology.

Still, I found Knowing to be a compelling, visually stunning, dramatically interesting and narratively challenging film and I was totally taken to a different world created by film-making professionals who clearly knew what they were doing.

And that is an all too rare experience at the movies today.

If there is any truth to the saying "you are what you eat", then the USA is in big trouble. You don't have to be a doctor, farmer or a nutritionist to see that way too many Americans are fat.

Not big boned.

Not with glandular problems.

Not with genetic predispositions.

Just fat, plain and simple.

But, like trying to buy clothing that has no connection to Asian sweatshops or any product not directly connected to oil; finding wholesome foods that are delicious and nutritious is difficult.

After seeing the documentary Food, Inc. if you are planning to go to dinner, you may find your appetite suppressed or at the very least, you will reconsider your choice of restaurants.

Food, Inc. from writer/director Robert Kenner is a documentary that looks at the huge corporate run food industry and how, through a series of small, not even necessarily conscious steps, they have become purveyors of cheap food that is no longer wholesome, nutritious or even tasty, and how the big food corporations are now making more money than they ever have before at any time.

But the real price is paid by us, the consumers. We pay for it in a significantly greater risk of food borne illness and in generally poor health from crappy products that are way too high in fat, sugar and salt.

Now, anyone familiar with Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma is already familiar with many of the arguments put forth in Food, Inc. Both Eric Schlosser and to a larger extent, Michael Pollan were consultants on the making of this film and they appear in on screen interviews as well, but reading about the unsanitary conditions chickens are raised in is one thing; actually seeing them is another.

Food, Inc. makes the point that if you only look at the picture labels of food items in the supermarket and take them at face value, you would think that your bread, meat, cereals and dairy products are all made on small farms by happy wholesome farmers.

Food, Inc. shatters that delusion absolutely, completely and totally. Unless you actually buy your food from a farmer directly at his farm or roadside stand, you are getting over-processed crap from huge conglomerates who make more money now than at any time in American history, yet they are providing us consumers with more crap (literally in many cases) than at any other time.

The big food conglomerates all say that the public have irrational ideas about where their food comes from and that's why they don't want anyone to see how they actually raise the crops and animals that feed us and they are right. If people saw the truth about where what they were putting into their mouths came from, there would be riots.

Food, Inc. tries to show us that truth and it is hard to swallow, even though director Kenner presents his material in a calm and straightforward manner.

I was particularly disturbed by a sequence where a meat processing company, in order to cut down on E-Coli bacteria in their product mixed their meat with another product that was simply ground beef and bleach, yes bleach, combined with beef to kill the bacteria.

This made more sense to the food company than finding a way to cut down on the amount of cow feces mixed into the beef to begin with. Something is definitely wrong when my hamburger has to be mixed with Clorox to be safe.

Contrary to what the food conglomerates think, there is no mental disconnect between the public knowing that the cows and chickens raised on farms for food are going to be killed, but no reasonable person wants to see any individual animals suffer unnecessarily.

Seeing these big food conglomerates penning up animals hoof deep in their own excrement, chickens packed to the point of suffocation and force fed vitamins and antibiotics to make them grow abnormally fast and large and don't even think about the pigs, they seem to get the worst treatment of all.

In the case of beef, it is almost a complete monopsony. Since McDonald's is probably the single largest purchaser of beef in the USA (maybe the world) as the single buyer, they pretty much have control of the market. Therefore, they can demand that anyone who sells them beef conform to their standards for meat.

What's good about this is it makes for a uniform product.

What's bad about this is it makes for a uniformly bad product.

This is why a Big Mac tastes exactly the same in California as it does in New Jersey. I for one don't think that's a positive outcome.

But Food, Inc. is not just a lecture on the horrors in hamburger. The film actually provides you with some options on better eating that are easy to follow and can make you feel empowered. We don't have to be passive consumers, there are things we as individuals can do to make sure we get the good food we deserve.

But there are some moments in Food, Inc. that are truly sickening and I don't mean the shots of sick "downer cows" being ground up into Big Mac meat or the deformed chickens who can't even stand because of their unnaturally large breasts, no the moments that are the most sickening come from the all too human food industry Public Relations douche bags.

Hearing their convoluted double-talk about how the conglomerates well funded attempts to fight having to label where their food products actually come from or whether they have been irradiated or have been genetically modified and how all of this is really just the food companies fighting for your right as a consumer to choose, is more nauseating than a mouthful of fecal contaminated cow slurry.

Near Dark is a film that falls into the unenviable position of being too "arty" for the gore crowd and too "gory" for the art crowd.

A short description can not do justice to the films complexities, but here goes; Near Dark is the story of a close knit family of "vampires" who travel around the Southwest in a Winnebago motor home looking for fresh victims and how their newest convert, because of his innate humanity, ends up destroying the group.

That brief description, although accurate, does nothing to convey the erotic timbre that suffuses the film. Indeed the opening scene says it all.

Our hero is Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), pick-up driving cowboy who works with his veterinarian father. While out for some Saturday night fun, Caleb spies Mae (Jenny Wright), sauntering along (in luxuriant slow-motion) licking an ice cream cone and he is immediately smitten with her.

After some good-natured flirting, Caleb drives Mae home just as the dawn begins to break. Stopping his truck along a dusty field, he tries to get a kiss from Mae, but instead of a soft kiss, she bites Caleb's neck actually drawing blood. After this, Mae hurries away and a puzzled Caleb is left to walk back home when his truck stalls.

But something weird has happened to Caleb, the bite seems to have "turned" him. As Caleb stumbles home through a dry field, he begins to feel queasy; it almost seems like the morning sun is going to burn right through him.

As a perplexed Caleb staggers across the road with smoke pouring off his body (a neat special effect), the Winnebago from hell roars into the scene and snatches Caleb off the road while his father and little sister watch this kidnapping helplessly.

We now have our introduction to the "vampire" family and while they NEVER use the word "vampire", it is clear that they must be something like that because sunlight is deadly to them and we soon learn they need a constant supply of fresh blood to survive.

Normally, the family would just kill Caleb and drink his blood, but Mae has taken an interest in Caleb. She has bitten him on purpose in an attempt to "turn" him. Apparently she wants to have a mate and Caleb fits the bill.

The other members of the family are not happy about this. They include Severen (Bill Paxton), Homer (Joshua Miller), Diamond Back (Jeanette Goldstein) and the leader Jesse (Lance Henriksen) who now has to decide whether to let Caleb run with them as a new member of the pack or just dispose of him at their earliest convenience. Reluctantly, he decides to keep Caleb with them, providing he proves that he has the capacity to kill.

Now, "vampire" purists usually get up in arms about Near Dark because it doesn't observe the standard conventions of your average vampire movie. However, I see this as a good thing. Since when did becoming a vampire become as rigid as say joining the Priesthood? There really are no rules.

Remember most of the behaviors and weaknesses associated with movie vampires are simply the creation of other screenwriters and have little basis in the original myths and folk tales.

So Near Dark comes up with new rules for its characters to live by, OK, at least they're original. Late in the film when Jesse is shot point blank in the chest, he simply coughs up the bullet and hands it back to the shooter, who later notes rather obviously, "That's not normal."

Unlike other vampire films where the monster is often a tortured soul, in Near Dark, some of the vampires positively love it! For instance, Bill Paxton's Severen comes across as a good ol'boy who really has found himself since becoming a vampire.

Unlike Caleb, Severen doesn't suffer any misgivings about having to kill people on a daily basis. His life of sleeping all day, prowling all night is one that he has adjusted to very well thank you.

But there are moments of strange intimacy in the film as well. Consider the sequence where Caleb has to ingest blood from Mae to survive because he can't bring himself to kill another human being. Mae opens up a vein for him and as he kneels before her, he sucks the life giving blood from her arm with a ferocity that nearly drains her; until she is forced to kick him away. Caleb then lays back and looks up at Mae with a wicked smile indicating that he has gotten more than mere sustenance from this contact.

If you have never heard of Near Dark, there are reasons for this. A little over a month before the October 1987 release of Near Dark, Warner Brothers released their more widely hyped vampire film The Lost Boys which swamped Near Dark at the box office. Add to that the fact that The De Laurentis Entertainment Group (D.E.G.), which was releasing Near Dark, was near bankruptcy in October of 1987.

Because of this, Near Dark had its theatrical run cut short and it was quickly sold to HBO so DEG could recoup some money. Yes, Near Dark lost the box office battle, but ironically it won the classic film status war.

Today no one watches The Lost Boys or even considers it a worthy film, but Near Dark continues to grow in popularity and gain new fans with each passing year and this happens in the best possible way, through word of mouth.

With its compelling characters, exciting action sequences, moody nighttime cinematography and brilliant score by Tangerine Dream, Near Dark is the best cowboy/vampire movie you'll ever see. Although that may be faint praise when you consider that the next best cowboy/vampire film is the 1966 John Carradine classic Billy The Kid versus Dracula.

When the new version of Lord Of The Flies hit screens in 1990, it was critically savaged, mostly for being among that most maligned of film categories, the "remake".

Lord Of The Flies had already been made into an austere, critically revered, Black & White film in 1963, so an updated version, filmed in color, using American kids instead of British kids was considered a sacrilege.

Both film versions of Lord Of The Flies were based on the novel by Nobel prize winning author Sir William Golding and tell the story of a group of boys from a boarding school who end up stranded on a deserted tropical island when their plane crashes. Although they initially try to live with order and rules, it doesn't take long for the boys to descend into savagery.

William Golding was a former schoolteacher who dealt with pre-adolescent oiks the same age as his novel's protagonists. I suspect there was a good deal of satisfying revenge in his describing these boys as being nothing more than savages in school uniforms.

But Golding was less interested in telling a realistic story than by making his deserted island an allegory for British society but he artificially stacks the deck by making his world all male and by keeping the boys between the ages of 8 and 13, before many of them start having sexual interests.

Golding's novel is heavy on symbolism and paints its characters in stark unambiguous terms so Lord Of The Flies can be easily dissected with any intellectual knife, from the "political" (Ralph represents Democracy, Jack represents Totalitarianism) to the "psychological" (Ralph is the Super Ego, Jack is the Id).

Personally, I think this undercuts his most powerful conceit, which is, without adult supervision, how long would it take for a group of young kids to degenerate into anarchy and brutality?

In the 1990 version of Lord Of The Flies, the kids are not British, but American and they are from a military academy. This change upsets the purists most of all. Because, if you were determined to show that the British class system is so inherently fragile that it would crumble when confronted with the merest challenge, your theory is kaput if the kids are American.

American kids are automatically less uptight than their British counterparts. From the very start they are less willing to group themselves into preconceived social stations. We see this clearly after a conch shell is found and all the boys are called for an assembly.

Here, two older boys, each with natural leadership qualities rise to the occasion. Ralph (Balthazar Getty) is the liberal idealist and Jack (Chris Furrh) is the conservative realist and while they are good friends at the start, this soon changes.

Their personality differences immediately begin to shape life on the island. Jack focuses on the hedonistic positives; they don't have teachers, classes, tests or any girls to bother them, so why not enjoy this unscheduled vacation a little bit?

But Ralph, thinking down the line a bit, knows that there is no way they can stay on this island for the rest of their lives and that if they don't start doing something to get rescued, they might end up doing just do that.

This is a marked change from the 1963 version where Ralph and Jack hated each other from the get go. In the earlier film, Jack is a conservative prig, bloviating like a conservative radio host, about how "the English are the best at everything" and automatically assuming himself the leader of the boys simply because he's head of the choir.

Jack is openly scornful of the election that votes Ralph in as leader and immediately causes a rift by separating his friends into a group of hunters.

But, in the 1990 version, Jack is portrayed as a strong young lad with natural charisma. Whereas Ralph can only offer hope that they may be rescued eventually, Jack offers his followers tangible solutions to immediate problems; THEY will hunt for food, THEY will build shelters, THEY will maintain a signal fire.

Jack gets the other kids to join his side not by bullying, but by actually providing a viable alternative to Ralph's leadership. Imagine what America would be like if conservatives ever learned that simple lesson!

Think about it, in the 1990 version of Lord Of The Flies, since both Ralph and Jack are presented as attractive, competent and intelligent leaders, it is not so easy to assign blame when their island society begins to degenerate.

It's difficult to take sides when conservative Jack is not all "BAD" and liberal Ralph is not all "GOOD". This is bothersome to most people because they prefer their symbolism spelled out for them.

Overall, the story has been admirably updated by screenwriter Sara Schiff, her realistic depiction of the boys' descent into savagery is more organic and feels more truthful and less manipulative than the earlier film.

So, why did the 1990 Lord Of The Flies get dissed so badly?

Perhaps in 1990, there were still people who felt that kids were somehow incorruptible and not prone to violence. Even though history is full of stories about violent children from the Hitler Youth to the Khmer Rouge to the genocide being committed in various African countries today.

The belief that a group of young boys would inevitably chuck aside civilization and descend into viciousness may have seemed unthinkable when the book was originally written and the 1963 film was shot.

But now, in a post-Columbine, post-9/11 world, it seems amazing that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.

Let's get the title correct first. The characters pronounce "Kekexili" as "Ko-Ko-Schee- Lee", and we are told it means beautiful mountains.

Kekexili follows Ga Yu, a Beijing journalist as he travels with the Mountain Patrol, a civilian group under the command of a man named Ritai who are determined to stop poachers from hunting "chiru", a nearly extinct Tibetan Antelope that is valued for their soft pelts.

The Mountain Patrol is not officially recognized by the Chinese government, so their actions are quasi-legal, but they do have the power to confiscate illegal antelope pelts and to administer cash fines to anyone caught with the pelts.

If the Mountain Patrol can catch poachers in the act, they can bring down the full weight of the Chinese government to arrest these criminals. We go with the Mountain Patrol on this particular mission and we experience all the hardship, danger and troubles that they experience.

As Ritai's group tracks the poachers we see the after effects of their poaching. One scene shows a valley full of skinned antelope carcasses left to rot in the sun, now nothing more than food for vultures.

In another, Ritai comes upon a group of men who work for the poachers as skinners. These are just poor Chinese workers trying to eke out a living. They know it's illegal to kill the antelope, but they have only been hired to skin already dead animals; so where's the illegality in that?

Ritai however, is not very sympathetic. He confiscates their pelts and slaps the men with a large fine. But Ritai thinks he may be able to get to the big boss poacher through these skinners, so he "arrests" these men, has them handcuffed and loaded onto one of his trucks.

Our journalist is clearly bothered by this incarceration of citizens by a group lacking any legal authority to do it, but his concerns are dismissed by Ritai. This will not be the last time we find ourselves in a moral gray zone.

Since Ritai has incarcerated these dozen extra men, he is now responsible for feeding them. We now learn some bitter truths about this Mountain Patrol. The Mountain Patrol receives no state funding for salaries, supplies or anything else. They rely wholly on donations, which are notoriously small.

In fact, none of Ritai's men have been paid for over a year. As Ritai's obsessive search continues, his food rations ebb and he is soon faced with a dilemma, who does he feed; his men or his prisoners?

Ritai now decides he has to send one of his men back to get more supplies and Liu Dong is dispatched to drive back. Lui Dong tells Ritai that he has no money to buy supplies. Ritai tells him to use the money collected in fines. That won't be enough. Ritai thinks for a moment and then tells Liu Dong to sell off the confiscated Tibetan Antelope pelts on the Black Market.

What?

Is Ritai really going to sell the illegal antelope pelts in order to raise the funds needed to stop the poachers who also sell illegal antelope pelts? Apparently he is.

On top of this, Ritai has decided to let the group of incarcerated skinners go because he can no longer take care of them. Some complain that they can't make it back to civilization and will probably die.

Ritai's only comment, "If you don't make it, then it's your fate." This is pretty cold, if you ask me.

With all the tribulations faced by the ever-weakened Mountain Patrol, the worst thing that could happen to them is exactly what does happen; they find the poachers. Unlike the weak, under-funded Mountain Patrol, the poachers are large in number, well fed and well supplied.

The poacher boss asks Ritai why he is harassing him? Ritai says he is protecting HIS antelope. The poacher boss laughs; when did they become Ritai's property? The poacher boss offers to buy Ritai a house and two cars if he'll just stop pursuing him.

Insulted that the poacher would even think of bribing him, Ritai punches the boss man and he is immediately fired upon. Ritai is hit in the abdomen and falls to the ground writhing in pain. The big boss now takes a rifle and pumps a half dozen more bullets into Ritai to put him out of his misery.

But Ga Yu, our frightened Beijing journalist is not killed. In fact, the poachers show him far more courtesy and humanity than Ritai's group ever showed him.

No wonder this film made me queasy.

I was both impressed and frightened by the self-righteous anger that seemed to motivate Ritai and his men. And, while Ritai's goals were laudable, his methods for achieving them were questionable. Once Ritai began illegally selling the antelope pelts for operating funds, he crossed a very serious line.

But contradictions like that are not unknown among some animal rights groups. Consider PETA, which is opposed to all types of animal testing for medical research, yet their vice president, Mary Beth Sweetland is a diabetic who uses insulin made from animal products to keep her alive.

She publicly admits this but says; "I don't see myself as a hypocrite. I need my life to fight for the rights of animals." So, life saving medicine that she would deny to ten million other diabetics is OK for her because SHE is devoted to saving animals. One usually has to reach into the realm of politics to uncover such monumental hypocrisy.

As Kekexili ends, we are informed that beginning in 2001, the Chinese government disbanded the civilian Mountain Patrol and formed its own anti-poaching unit.

This is a new documentary from filmmaker Kirby Dick and it is a pleasure.

Outrage looks at notable people in American politics who actively fight against any legislation that may help gay Americans achieve the same equal rights enjoyed by heterosexuals. But the twist is, these politicians are themselves gay and are living a hypocritical double life.

The film also looks at various journalists, mostly from the independent and underground press who investigate gay rumors and then confront the guilty with the truth and in doing so, effectively "out" them.

Outrage makes the salient point that the reason so many of these intrepid journalists come from the non-mainstream media is because the mainstream media outlets simply prefer to ignore these kinds of stories, in part because of guilt over their own complicity in demonizing something that is not wrong, i.e. being gay.

But those people expecting a salacious film full of trashy rumor and innuendo will be disappointed. Outrage is a well researched and balanced documentary that takes a difficult topic and still manages to find moments of humor without sacrificing the necessary seriousness.

And this topic is deadly serious. People have died as a result of closeted gay politicians voting against AIDS funding and hate crimes legislation. And the elected officials who do that while still enjoying the "gay" lifestyle are beyond despicable, they are downright criminal.

It's no surprise that most of the hypocrites are conservative Republicans and Outrage addresses why there is such a clear disparity between the humongous number of hypocritical politicians among Republicans and the vastly fewer number among Democrats.

As it is explained, when Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter ran for the Presidency in 1976, at that time, it could be argued that both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were about equal in their support for gay rights.

But starting with Ronald Reagan and continuing downward to George W., the Republican Party has made a dangerous Faustian pact with the arrogant and bigoted leaders of the Christian Right (which is neither).

So, in exchange for plenty of money and votes, Republican candidates have been forced to adopt their hateful anti-gay lunacy, along with their misogyny and complete religious intolerance.

This means that many decent Republican candidates who are firm believers in solid Republican values of small government and creating a pro-business climate are now forced to go along with idiotic policies they don't agree with like banning gay marriage or forbidding adoption by gay couples.

But they have to do it or they won't get the cash or votes they need to get elected in some parts of the country. This is a very sad state of affairs and the Christian Right will eventually destroy the Republican Party, if they have not already done so. You have been warned!

Much of the film looks at some recent, but noteworthy cases of famous gay men who have been caught in double lives like former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy and former Arizona Senator Jim Kolbe.

It is completely amazing that all of them, to a person says that finally coming out of the closet was the best thing that ever happened to them with Jim McGreevy saying it most eloquently when he says (I'm paraphrasing) "the only right value is living the truth, not someone else's conception of the truth".

But, for every breath of fresh honesty, there are ten douche-bags like Idaho Senator Larry Craig. This sanctimonious fool has been rumored to be gay for his entire career and was eventually arrested for soliciting sex from a cop in an airport bathroom, and the man still denies he's gay.

But, you know something? I believe him. Senator Larry Craig can engage in sodomy or fellatio all day, every day and that won't make him gay. It just makes him a guy that likes homo-sex.

Outrage even manages to make you feel sorry for the supremely deluded Larry Craig. Really, a guy with this much cognitive dissonance affecting the intimate parts of his life is a man in real, demonstrable psychological pain.

He needs our compassion. He needs psychiatric help. What he doesn't need is a vote in the Senate.

It's the same way I feel sorry for an alcoholic who can't stop drinking, I understand it's difficult, but that doesn't mean I'm going to let you drive a car.

Outrage, director Kirby Dick combines very excellent interviews with a treasure trove of local and national news clips that make the filmmakers points with a hefty sense humor combined with a political stridency that you would think would get tiring, but doesn't.

I happened to see the film tonight at a Preview Screening with Kirby Dick in attendance answering questions and he proved to be as quick witted and knowledgeable as his film.

If Outrage plays anywhere near you, please take the time to see it or most certainly add it to your Netflix queue when it is available on DVD

"I'm performing an unusual amount of autopsies these days", says the cool, rational doctor played by Donald Pleasence in his laboratory filled with cadavers. "That's probably what accounts for so many of those human fingers laying around, you don't generally see that" replies a frightened Woody Allen in perhaps his most misunderstood film; the abstract, experimental Shadows And Fog.

While that might not read like a humorous exchange, believe me, in context it's quite funny.

The story for Shadows And Fog is based on Woody Allen's one act play titled Death, published in his 1975 short story collection Without Feathers and takes place in an unnamed city over the course of one foggy night.

There is a psychotic killer loose and he's been strangling any citizen unlucky enough to cross his path. He murders with a stunning callousness and so far has left no clue to his identity or motives, which has baffled the authorities and sent the general populace into a frenzy of fear.

In their frustration, some have formed a vigilante group with a clever plan to catch this murderer on their own and they have just awoken Kleinman (Woody Allen) from a deep sleep to help them.

But, even though he asks numerous times, Kleinman can never get clear instructions on exactly what he is supposed to do to help with the plan. All the other vigilantes seem to know their parts, but Kleinman hasn't a clue about his and no one will tell him.

However, as the night rolls on, despite nearly being murdered by the maniac himself, Kleinman will also become the prime suspect hunted by the police and will almost get lynched by the vigilante mob as well. He will also lose his job, his home, his fiancé, his freedom, most of his friends and in a final moment of abject humiliation; he will even lose his ability to perform sexually. And you think you've got troubles!

Woody Allen wants to show us how quickly a civilized man can lose everything meaningful in his life through no fault of his own. Did I mention that Shadows And Fog is a comedy? I remember when I first saw this film in 1992, it seemed like I was the only person in the theater laughing. That's mostly because I was the only person in the theater.

Aside from the murder angle, there are other subplots mixed in that connect to the main story with varying degrees of success, including a story about a clown and a sword swallower in traveling circus, a lost mother and an abandoned infant, some "undesirables" (read Jewish) getting rounded up to be shipped off to camps and a whorehouse full of lusty women who engage in philosophical discussions with over-educated university students.

Yes, Shadows And Fog meanders like someone lost on a foggy night and the film tries to hang too many incidents onto a light narrative frame, but if being overly ambitious is a fault, then it is a good one to have for a movie. Think about all the movies you have seen that didn't try to do anything at all and barely succeeded at that!

But if this film were in say German, subtitled in English and directed under a nom de plume, it probably would have gotten the critical praise it deserved instead of the critical silence it received.

Stylistically, the look of Shadows And Fog is patterned after old German Expressionist films like The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and M (interestingly, both of them deal with crazed killers who strike at night). But you don't need to understand German Expressionism to understand Shadows And Fog.

Whether you like the story or not, the Black and White cinematography by Italian cameraman Carlo Di Palma and the massive city set designed by Allen regular Santo Loquasto deserves praise. This was the largest interior set ever built in New York and they used every inch of the Kaufman Astoria Studios to create this Kafkaesque world. With it's many deceptive levels, perspectivized alleyways, bridges and foggy docks, Shadows And Fog is amazingly good looking and held my visual interest even when I tuned out a bit with some of the sub plots.

One of the great glories of Shadows And Fog however, is its cast. Along with Allen and his regulars, Mia Farrow, Wallace Shawn, David Ogden Steirs and Julie Kavner, we also have Kathy Bates, Lily Tomlin, Jodie Foster, John Malkovich, Donald Pleasence, Josef Sommer, Kenneth Mars, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, Fred Gwynne, Kurtwood Smith, Robert Joy and in an inspired piece of casting, Madonna plays a slutty circus tramp.

Although Woody Allen performs in Shadows And Fog, he still has cast John Cusack in a younger "Woody" surrogate role. But while the older Woody gets the snappy one-liners, John Cusack is saddled with lines asking ontological questions about life and musing aloud about love, sex and death. "What are your views on divine matters?" he has to ask one character.

That John Cusack can make these heady lines sound natural says a lot about his talent. Remember what Walter Huston said about the job of an actor; an actor isn't paid to make good dialog sound good, he's paid to make bad dialog sound good.

Finally, as a filmmaker, Woody Allen is in that unenviable category of having been so good for so long, he is no longer compared to other filmmakers, but is compared to his own previous great works. On that scale, Shadows And Fog is only mid-level Allen, but mid-level Woody Allen is better than most other directors' best efforts.

A psychologist friend of mine once said to me, "How do I know why people do the crazy things they do?" I try to remember that whenever something like Columbine goes down, because there is an immediate need in the media to find out what caused this to happen.

But remember, the list of causatives can't be a long or complex one. If you can list two or three things like say, Goth culture, Marilyn Manson's music or computer games, the chances are, especially if the killers are kids themselves that they have a familiarity with at least one of these things, so ergo, ipso facto, that must be what made the killers do it.

It is amazing, but I still find myself reminding people of the simple principle that correlation is not causation. Consider this, I bet the Columbine killers had coffee in the twenty-four hour period preceding the shootings. Did coffee make them do it? If they ate Pop Tarts, shouldn't we just ban Pop Tarts; you know, to be on the safe side?

I found myself thinking about this and many other things after watching the new documentary Playing Columbine which looks at the controversy surrounding a free Internet computer game called Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (henceforth Massacre) which was designed by a Colorado computer game enthusiast named Danny Ledonne.

Massacre was designed anonymously and put out for free on the web (which indicates to me that Mr. Ledonne was not looking for fame or money) and the only reason Danny Ledonne has come out into the spotlight to defend himself is because he was pushed there by many unsavory people trying to use the fake outrage surrounding his computer game to advance their own agendas.

It is possible that Danny Ledonne was naïve and did not realize how much anger his game would cause and he didn't do himself any favors by saying his only intention was to raise awareness about issues surrounding the 1999 Columbine shootings because while that may have been true, it sounds like a hack justification.

The film Playing Columbine was directed by Danny Ledonne and while he doesn't show any especial talent as a filmmaker, he does present a more balanced view of this controversy than any of his critics would have if they had made a similar film.

I can tell that Danny Ledonne comes from the world of computer games and not from cinema because his sense of filmic pacing is non-existent. Playing Columbine moves with all the subtlety of a computer game. It is a relentless assault of talking head clips, rarely held for more than a few seconds intermixed with shots from newsreels, feature films, comedy shows and other pieces of found media and you are barely able to process what you have heard before you are off on another tangent. Take it from me Danny; a film made entirely from quickly paced sections does not yield a quickly paced film.

We hear a lot from people who design, play or study computer games and naturally, they don't think that a mass murder on the level of Columbine is reducible to a single cause and we hear their various theories and thoughts and they are an impressive array of commentators.

On the negative side of the question, we have the usual suspects whose only concern is "saving the children" like Tim Winter, a spokesman from the Parents Television Council and from Jack Thompson, a Florida lawyer (recently disbarred) who has been fighting a pitched battle against the computer game industry for a very long time.

I have no doubt that Jack Thompson feels slighted by the film Playing Columbine, but take it from me Jack, if your arguments come across as stupid and untenable, it's because they are.

Thompson's arguments consist of loaded questions like (I'm paraphrasing) "Would you rather have your kids play violent video games for hours, or spend that time studying the Bible?" This is like the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" No matter how you answer it, you are wrong.

Typical of a bone-head like Thompson that he doesn't even consider that there are more things a parent can do with their children than either reading the Bible or playing computer games. I don't want to say Jack Thompson has delusions of grandeur, but at one point he does say that he is only trying to save Western Civilization.

At one point, Jack Thompson says the computer game companies have posted death threats against him on various websites, yet he can't show us a single example of one. Then, Mr. Thompson fervently denies ever saying that several post-Columbine school shooters "were trained on Super Columbine Massacre RPG!", but director Danny Ledonne then shows us actual clips from Fox News among other sources where Thompson says those exact words, yet he still denies it.

Jack Thompson says he just wants to hold the computer game industry accountable for the psychological damage they cause and he compares his efforts to early activists who pressed the cigarette manufacturers to own up to their responsibilities.

OK Jack Thompson, how about this, you claim to be a born again Christian and that you are doing all this because it is your Biblical duty. The weekend before the Columbine shooting, one of the killers, Dylan Klebold, went to the prom with one Robyn Anderson who has been described as a sweet and pretty girl who was like you, a solid, Jesus saved me Christian.

She also helped the Columbine killers acquire three of the four guns they used. This is all on public record, if you don't believe me, look it up yourself.

Are you willing to share responsibility for that?

Why should I be upset over a minor horror film that falls apart at the end? A fair question, but let me explain why God's Forgotten Town was a disappointing insult to my humanity.

After the credits, Syra (Marina Gatell) and Roberto (Armando del Rio) a writer and photographer for a Spanish magazine covering the paranormal, visit the high-rise apartment of a distraught woman and her disturbed daughter. This woman is being driven insane by voices that only she seems to hear.

Sensing there is no "paranormal" angle here, Syra helpfully offers her the name of a good psychologist and the woman gets angry and demands that Syra and Roberto leave. Apparently, Syra and Roberto are not big believers in the paranormal and they are both doing this because it is a paying job until something better comes along.

Then, out in the hallway, Syra begins to hear a conglomeration of bizarre sounds and voices just like the woman described so she races back into the apartment just in time to see the woman sitting on the balcony railing with her screaming daughter; but before Syra can do anything, the woman jumps off the balcony with her daughter, both falling to a horrible death.

This got my attention!

This event really affects Syra and it is some time before she feels well enough to go out on another assignment. This time, Syra and Roberto, are paired with a video camera operator named Julia (Sonia Lazaro) and a sound man named Ruben (Miguel Angel Munoz). They are sent out to investigate a 60 year old mystery regarding the complete disappearance of the inhabitants of a small Spanish town called Manases after a Nazi airplane crashed nearby in 1945.

But Syra has changed, she now thinks if she had only believed the woman when she was talking about voices and spirits, perhaps the woman would not have jumped. This means that Syra is now in a frame of mind to believe that every stray breeze or bump in the night is a real paranormal experience. Sure enough, when this Spanish road company of The Blair Witch Project arrives in Manases, all kinds of strange things happen and it's just one cliché after another.

We have quick cuts to frightening images combined with loud bangs on the soundtrack to jolt us, their car, which has functioned perfectly up till now, suddenly dies and when the group tries to leave on foot, Syra twists her ankle and can't go on any further.

Julia and Ruben decide to walk back to the nearby town, but instead of walking along the safe highway, they decide (as only people in horror movies ever do), that walking through the dark mysterious forest is the best way to go. At one point, an exasperated Syra says to the still skeptical Roberto, "I don't see why it's so difficult for you to accept all this" referring to the paranormal events.

Well, let me answer for him.

How about this, before he gives up on every bit of scientific evidence, every piece of intelligently understood knowledge and well considered theories about the physical world which have been tested time and again over the millennia, he's going to need a bit more evidence than some dopey woman's "intuition" or the "gut feelings" of a camera operator who is always smoking a joint.

In one sequence, the spirits gather up a variety of crockery and telekinetically smash it against the walls of a house. Everybody witnesses this and I suppose it means the spirits just want to communicate something.

Here's my question, if the spirits have the ability to throw pottery all around the room, why don't they have the ability to pick up a pencil and just write a nice note explaining what they want? Does becoming a spirit only effect your penmanship, but not your throwing arm?

Unsurprisingly, the whole mishegas of this film is related to the Nazi plane that crashed nearby in 1945 while en route to Berlin. Apparently, the plane had been carrying some kind of "scepter of power" (whatever that is), which would have enabled the Nazi's to win WWII.

But the plane crashed and the power scepter never reached Hitler, so the surviving Nazi officer tried to use the power scepter himself and apparently in order to do this, he had to have all the inhabitants of Manases killed, seemingly for no reason.

I don't want to defend the Nazis, but even they didn't go in for wanton killing. In fact, what made the Nazis so chilling was they were quite clear about their reasons for killing, no matter what we may think of them now.

In fact, this is the point in the film where I got insulted. The Nazis were one of the cruelest, most dangerous threats to civilization ever to challenge us and they ran roughshod over most of Europe for well over a decade.

Because of the Nazis, the world was plunged into one of the worst wars ever fought. Millions upon millions of people were killed fighting their incredible war machine. The Nazis were also responsible for one of the most vicious and nearly successful attempts at genocide in the entirety of human history.

It took a worldwide effort to defeat them. From Stalingrad to D-Day and beyond, the Nazis lost because of brave, dedicated and above all ordinary men and women who did not want the world to run according to the visions of Hitler, were willing to lay down their lives for that cause.

And now this dinky little piece of horror trash from Spain tries to sell us the idea that none of that other stuff mattered and that all the Nazis needed to win was some dumb scepter of power from South America?

This film is a turkey. Please avoid it.

"To be or not to be, that is the question"

This is one line from literature most everyone has heard but, because it is such a commonplace line, most people have not actually thought about the meaning behind the line.

It's about a guy considering suicide.

While the suicide contemplation scene from Hamlet may be dramatic gold for an actor, what do you do with someone who says numerous times, in real life, that they are going to kill themselves? What do you do if that person is your five year old son?

That is the particular dilemma facing the Perry family in the fascinating documentary Boy Interrupted because they had a child who began suicidal ideation at age five and continued until he was 15 when he actually killed himself by jumping out of a window in his New York apartment building.

Now, I have not given away anything important here, we learn all this before the first reel change and the entire rest of the film is made up of massive amounts of home video, photographs, vacation film etc. We literally follow Evan Perry from the day he was born (his birth was videotaped) to some video of him in a restaurant only a couple of days before his suicide.

It's an extraordinary record of a life. Evan's parents were filmmakers so they had the talent, the equipment and the inclination to record Evan's life even when it must have been fairly unbearable to do so.

Evan's mother (also the film's director), Dana Perry actually says she began filming her son's morbid moments for no other reason than she didn't think anyone would believe her if she told them that the seemingly cheerful young Evan was obsessed by death and suicide, because that is not what you expect to hear from kindergärtners.

Boy Interrupted also contains numerous post-suicide interviews with family, friends, various doctors and counselors who all knew Evan and while they are all very saddened by his untimely death, none of them seemed particularly surprised that it happened.

When Evan's psychiatrist describes him as "the scariest kid I have ever met", that should make you sit up and take notice. And that is what makes Boy Interrupted so gripping, intense and ultimately so heartbreaking – people did take notice.

Boy Interrupted is not a story about a boy ignored. From early on Evan's parents sent him to doctors, got him analyzed, committed him to asylums if needed; at one point, while at a Connecticut school called Wellspring, Evan actually begins to mellow out and grow up a bit.

Evan is diagnosed a Bipolar II (Depressive) with suicidal ideation, but starting with Prozac, moving on to Depakote (I take that myself) and finally onto lithium, Evan's parents seemed willing to do everything medically or therapeutically indicated to help their son. I don't even want to contemplate what their medical bills were like.

But the psychiatric treatment of Evan was not a case of too little, too late, in fact, there is nobody in the film who ever says they wished that they had done anything differently. They all did everything they could do, did it properly and it still didn't stop Evan from killing himself.

It's important to remember, doctors are not miracle workers. Evan's psychiatrist makes the analogy that Bipolar Depression is the psychiatric equivalent of various cancers; you can treat it for a while and some people will go into remission, some will not, but ultimately you have to stay on top of it at all times or it will kill you.

Unfortunately, Evan Perry couldn't see that and appeared to just get tired of dealing with his disease. So, on one ordinary night in October 2005, he jumped out the window of his bedroom falling to his death into the trash filled alley below. An ignominious end to such a handsome, intelligent and talented youth.

Despite the very sad theme, I didn't find myself moved to tears all that much during the film. This is because the director Dana Perry presents the story in a very matter of fact way. I don't envy her task of having had to sort through all the accumulated footage and then shape this recorded video into some kind of narrative.

Having made films myself, I know you have to be brutal in the editing room and cut out everything that doesn't contribute to the points you are tying to make. That can be difficult for any director, but when the subject matter is your own son? That is not a job I would wish on my worst enemy.

Tell a lie, I did cry at one point and that was when they interviewed some of Evan's schoolmates who are all now young men in their late teens. Dropping all teenage swagger and pretense, they speak more openly and honestly about their lost friend than most teenagers would ever do in private, let alone admit on camera. Seeing the real hurt they feel when Evan said in his suicide note that he had "no friends" was heartbreaking.

Boy Interrupted is a heart felt and honest account of one family going through one of the hardest things any parent should ever have to go through and they have chosen to make their story public. Despite the fact their son did kill himself in spite of all the support he had, I did not get a sense of futility from watching Boy Interrupted.

What I did get was that you should take every threat of suicide seriously, especially if it comes from a teen.

Finally, it was one of Evan's final wishes to be totally forgotten, well Evan; this just proves you can't always get what you want, either in life or death. Too bad you're not still around to appreciate that grand joke on us all.

Gregoire Duval (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is a mild-mannered pharmacist in a small town in the French countryside. The time is 1962 and, as has been going on for sometime now, the Algerian question is still rocking France.

Duval is fishing along a small canal next to a dozing friend, the local police chief when suddenly; Mr. Duval hears a loud argument coming from a nearby hay barn. He watches as Khader Boualam (Lahcen Ruzougir), a young Algerian man stalks away in an angry huff.

Curious, Mr. Duval goes into the hay barn only to find a very pretty young blonde girl putting on her dress and jewelry, she is startled when she hears Mr. Duval behind her and explains that she has just had an argument with her boyfriend but is otherwise OK.

Mr. Duval tries to comfort her. She does not want to be comforted and very quickly, this scene degenerates into an attempted rape, but when the girl starts screaming loudly, in order to shut her up, Duval strangles her to death. This murder was not really intentional, but it was not entirely accidental either. Mr. Duval returns to his dozing police chief friend just in time to catch a large carp.

Later on, we learn that the dead girl has been found and that her Algerian boyfriend has been picked up on suspicion of murder. But we know and Mr. Duval knows that this young Algerian is innocent.

But truth, justice, innocence and guilt are not on the minds of the people in this town. Everyone from the local judge to the prosecutor to Mr. Duval's wife Genevieve (played with icy menace by Isabelle Habiague) can only think about how they can exploit this crime to help further their own careers or standing in the community.

I mean, it should be a complete open and shut case, everyone knows that Boualam is hot tempered and that he probably killed the girl in a moment of passion, which, while making the crime understandable, doesn't mitigate his guilt. The actual trial will just be a mere formality observed on the way toward a verdict of guilty for the Algerian.

Then to make matters worse for Boualam, Mr. Duval is selected to be on the jury, which will have the task of listening to the evidence and coming up with a pre-ordained guilty verdict.

But here's where Jury Duty begins to really surprise you. Since (other than his defense counsel), Mr. Duval seems to be the only person in the courtroom who actually wants to prove that Boualam did not commit this murder, despite a lot of circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

So in a surprise move, it is Mr. Duval who contradicts eyewitness testimony and points out obvious flaws in the prosecutions case. It's like having a Lieutenant Colombo as juror number seven. But, the question remains, will proving that the Algerian is innocent lead to everyone discovering that it was actually the town's pharmacist who committed this heinous murder?

Jury Duty plunges us into the world of Mr. Duval and his somewhat distracted family with remarkable brevity and just when I thought I knew where this film was going to go next, it didn't and went in a completely unexpected direction.

Now, I have no way of knowing if the real procedures in French courtrooms are like they are shown in film, but it doesn't really matter, the film makes dramatic sense and put me in the peculiar position of rooting for a psychopathic killer as he tried to prove the innocence of an Algerian sacrificial lamb and alternately hoping he also gets away with murder himself.

I suppose that's what made me feel a little bit cheated at the end and its "Hays Code" finale. Not to the point where I won't recommend that you see Jury Duty, but I will say that the denouement is not very satisfying, but everything else that happens is funny, intense and thought provoking.

If you're a fan of courtroom films or police procedurals or even murder mysteries, then Jury Duty will work for you. It has a great story that kept me guessing, great performances from the entire cast and a nice professional look that I appreciated. All in all, a pleasant time spent at the movies.