Reviews

Here in American, we first became aware of Godzilla in the 1956 movie "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" But the original version of this movie was "Gojira," released in Japan in 1954 and directed by Ishirô Honda. Footage from this movie was used in combination with scenes directed by Terry Morse, which included Raymond Burr as Steve Martin, a reporter. With Martin's narration and some dubbing added in, the subtitles used in "Gojira" were unnecessary.

Although the addition of scenes with Raymond Burr might seem a little cheesy, the Morse version is actually an improvement over Honda's original, and not simply because it eliminates the nuisance of having to read subtitles. Notwithstanding the additional scenes with Burr, "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" runs only 80 minutes, whereas "Gojira" runs for 96 minutes, from which it follows that a lot of footage was eliminated from the latter in producing the former. This is not something to regret. The result is that whereas "Gojira" drags on at a slow pace, "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" moves at a nice clip. Finally, "Gojira" tells its story from beginning to end, whereas "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" begins in medias res, with Steve Martin trying to crawl his way out of the rubble of a destroyed city, who then tells us how things came to be through a flashback. It is this narrative structure that allows for much of the boring material from the original to be summed up by Martin in a few words.

I didn't expect to review these movies. My favorite film critic is Danny Peary, who included "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" in his "Cult Movies 2," and so I figured he had probably said it all. However, after seeing both movies back to back, it is clear that on a couple of points he is mistaken. Peary discusses the many ways in which "Gojira" is a kind of metaphor and commentary on the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945. However, he suggests that in making "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" some of this was eliminated:

"The American version makes two deletions that arouse suspicions regarding the covering up of references to damage done by the A-Bomb; a young woman (Emiko?) says that she doesn't want to be a victim of 'Gojira,' 'not after what I went through in Nagasaki'; a doctor detects that a little girl has radiation poisoning, and though she is sitting up now, he indicates she is doomed."

The first scene involving a woman, who is not Emiko, by the way, does not say anything about Nagasaki. She is talking to a couple of men about the possibility of Godzilla coming to their city. Reference is made to the radioactive tuna and fallout stemming from the fact that Godzilla himself is very radioactive, and they talk about finding a shelter if Godzilla actually comes to the city, the reference presumably being to air-raid shelters. Now, air-raid shelters were commonly used during World War II to protect people from conventional weapons, so there is no clear reference to the atomic bomb in what they say. Of course, I am only going by the subtitles. But their words in Japanese do not include anything that sounds like "Nagasaki." On the other hand, if we really want to get all conspiratorial, perhaps the woman's remark about Nagasaki was cut out or there was dubbing in the Japanese language to make reference to shelters instead. But enough of this. In all likelihood, Peary was wrong about what this woman said.

As for the second scene, the one involving the doctor who indicates that the little girl is doomed by radiation poisoning, this was not eliminated in Morse's American version. But it occurs much earlier in the movie, owing to the flashback narrative structure, whereas in the original, it takes place much later. This may be what led Peary to think it had been cut out.

I remember seeing a bunch of Japanese monster movies at the Triple Threat Drive-In a long time ago. Binge-watching them like this makes you suspect that if you live in Japan, you can expect Godzilla or some other monster to be heading for Tokyo every other Tuesday. My friends and I began to notice that Godzilla started protecting Japan from other monsters. Peary also noticed this, saying that Godzilla had become a Japanese folk hero during the 1960s. But maybe Godzilla was just being territorial.

Needless to say, some of these Japanese monster movies are better than others. As we used to say in those days when we went to see them at the drive-in, "You pays your money, and you Tokyo chances."

Here in American, we first became aware of Godzilla in the 1956 movie "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" But the original version of this movie was "Gojira," released in Japan in 1954 and directed by Ishirô Honda. Footage from this movie was used in combination with scenes directed by Terry Morse, which included Raymond Burr as Steve Martin, a reporter. With Martin's narration and some dubbing added in, the subtitles used in "Gojira" were unnecessary.

Although the addition of scenes with Raymond Burr might seem a little cheesy, the Morse version is actually an improvement over Honda's original, and not simply because it eliminates the nuisance of having to read subtitles. Notwithstanding the additional scenes with Burr, "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" runs only 80 minutes, whereas "Gojira" runs for 96 minutes, from which it follows that a lot of footage was eliminated from the latter in producing the former. This is not something to regret. The result is that whereas "Gojira" drags on at a slow pace, "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" moves at a nice clip. Finally, "Gojira" tells its story from beginning to end, whereas "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" begins in medias res, with Steve Martin trying to crawl his way out of the rubble of a destroyed city, who then tells us how things came to be through a flashback. It is this narrative structure that allows for much of the boring material from the original to be summed up by Martin in a few words.

I didn't expect to review these movies. My favorite film critic is Danny Peary, who included "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" in his "Cult Movies 2," and so I figured he had probably said it all. However, after seeing both movies back to back, it is clear that on a couple of points he is mistaken. Peary discusses the many ways in which "Gojira" is a kind of metaphor and commentary on the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945. However, he suggests that in making "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" some of this was eliminated:

"The American version makes two deletions that arouse suspicions regarding the covering up of references to damage done by the A-Bomb; a young woman (Emiko?) says that she doesn't want to be a victim of 'Gojira,' 'not after what I went through in Nagasaki'; a doctor detects that a little girl has radiation poisoning, and though she is sitting up now, he indicates she is doomed."

The first scene involving a woman, who is not Emiko, by the way, does not say anything about Nagasaki. She is talking to a couple of men about the possibility of Godzilla coming to their city. Reference is made to the radioactive tuna and fallout stemming from the fact that Godzilla himself is very radioactive, and they talk about finding a shelter if Godzilla actually comes to the city, the reference presumably being to air-raid shelters. Now, air-raid shelters were commonly used during World War II to protect people from conventional weapons, so there is no clear reference to the atomic bomb in what they say. Of course, I am only going by the subtitles. But their words in Japanese do not include anything that sounds like "Nagasaki." On the other hand, if we really want to get all conspiratorial, perhaps the woman's remark about Nagasaki was cut out or there was dubbing in the Japanese language to make reference to shelters instead. But enough of this. In all likelihood, Peary was wrong about what this woman said.

As for the second scene, the one involving the doctor who indicates that the little girl is doomed by radiation poisoning, this was not eliminated in Morse's American version. But it occurs much earlier in the movie, owing to the flashback narrative structure, whereas in the original, it takes place much later. This may be what led Peary to think it had been cut out.

I remember seeing a bunch of Japanese monster movies at the Triple Threat Drive-In a long time ago. Binge-watching them like this makes you suspect that if you live in Japan, you can expect Godzilla or some other monster to be heading for Tokyo every other Tuesday. My friends and I began to notice that Godzilla started protecting Japan from other monsters. Peary also noticed this, saying that Godzilla had become a Japanese folk hero during the 1960s. But maybe Godzilla was just being territorial.

Needless to say, some of these Japanese monster movies are better than others. As we used to say in those days when we went to see them at the drive-in, "You pays your money, and you Tokyo chances."

The most interesting this about the movie "The Man I Married" was its similarity to the movie "Not Without My Daughter" (1991). Based on a true story, "Not Without My Daughter" is about a woman, Betty Mahmoody (Sally Field), who is married to an Iranian doctor, Moody (Alfred Molina). He convinces her to go with him back to Iran to visit his family, taking their six-year-old daughter with them. The year is 1984, and Betty is naturally hesitant, owing to the recent Iranian hostage crisis and the anti-Americanism that is aflame in that country, but she agrees.

Soon after they get there, the pressures of Iranian culture in general and that of his Iranian family begin to change Moody. He becomes a different person than the one Betty thought she was married to in America. She wants to go back to America, which she is free to do, but Moody will not let her take their daughter back with her. She is told that girls in Iran are sometimes married off as young as eight years old, so leaving her behind is unthinkable. Much of the movie is her struggle to sneak her daughter out of Iran, for which she requires the help of sympathetic Iranians.

There are two unnerving aspects to this movie. The first is the way Moody becomes a different man when he returns to Iran. Or perhaps I should say, he reverts to becoming the man he used to be before immigrating to the United States. The second is the problem Betty has in trying to tell who will help her and who will not. As a result of the differences in the American and Iranian cultures, the ordinary cues we take for granted here in America are not reliable in Iran. The people she thinks might help her turn on her and betray her, while a man she thinks is going to betray her turns out to be acting in her interest and is instrumental in getting her and her daughter safely across the border to Turkey.

I saw "Not Without My Daughter" over twenty years ago. But just the other night, I happened to watch "The Man I Married," which was made in 1940 but set in 1938, just prior to the outbreak of World War II. In that movie, Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett) is married to a German immigrant, Eric, who wants her and their son Ricky to go on a vacation back to Germany with him to visit his father. Shortly after they arrive, Eric begins to fall under the sway of German culture, and it is not long before he joins the Nazi party. He even falls in love with Freda, who is also a Nazi, whom he wants to marry, and for which reason he wants a divorce from Carol. Carol is disgusted with him and the whole Third Reich, and so she agrees. But then she finds out that Eric will not allow her to take their son Ricky back with her to America, because he wants Ricky to become a Nazi too.

With the help of an American reporter, Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), she tries to sneak Ricky out, but Eric stops her. Eric's father is on Carol's side, and he tells Eric that unless he lets her take Ricky back to America, he will reveal to the Nazis that his mother was a "Jewess." Freda is there when this is revealed, and she is repelled at the thought of having had an affair with someone who had Jewish blood. Eric and crushed, and Carol takes Ricky and leaves without any resistance.

Carol does not have the same problem Betty did at reading the cultural cues of the people in Germany, probably because German culture is not as different from American culture as Iranian culture is. But in both cases, a man who is one person in America becomes another person when he returns his country of origin. Everyone has had the experience of being a different person around different people, but these movies take that ordinary experience to the next level. Notwithstanding our belief in the integrity of our individual selves, both these movies reveal the disturbing fact that our individuality can be powerfully influenced by the cultural milieu we find ourselves in. Of course, the women in both these movies, having been born in America and spent their whole lives there, are not similarly altered. But the husbands in these movies, having spent a lot of time in both America and their respective countries of origin, are far more susceptible to such influences.

Once I have decided to watch a movie, there is only one piece of information I want to know in advance, which is when the movie was made, because that provides the context that might be needed to appreciate the movie and understand it. Of course, I already have other pieces of information in advance, such as the title, but basically, I like to watch the movie without having any more advance knowledge than necessary.

There is, additionally, my reason for selecting the movie for viewing. In particular, I recently decided to watch movies that featured an atheist as a prominent character, in order to see how the treatment of atheism has evolved in a hundred years of American cinema. Naturally enough, "God's Not Dead" (2014) was on my list.

Normally, when I review a movie, it is neither necessary nor desirable to talk about myself. But this calls for an exception. I majored in philosophy in the late 1960s, and my favorite philosopher was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was the one who originally said, "God is dead." Needless to say, I was an atheist and have been ever since, although now my favorite philosopher is Arthur Schopenhauer.

The movie is set on a college campus. Josh Wheaton is a freshman. (I wonder how long it will be before we start designating first-year college students as "freshpersons.") He signs up for an introductory course in philosophy. He is warned by another student not to take the course from Professor Radisson, but he is undeterred. During the first class, Radisson says he doesn't want to waste time debating the existence of God, so he demands that every student in the class write "God is dead" on a piece of paper and sign it. Josh refuses to sign it. I must admit, Nietzschean atheist though I was, I wouldn't have signed it either, but for very different reasons.

Radisson tells Josh that for twenty minutes in the next three classes, he will have to defend the proposition that God exists, with the implication that if he fails in this endeavor, he will flunk the course. On the first day that he has to defend his belief that God is not dead, Josh essentially advances the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which is that an eternally existing God is needed to explain how a contingent world arose out of nothingness in a big bang. On the second day, he advances the teleological argument for the existence of God, also known as the argument from design. The thrust of this argument is that God is needed to explain life. Evolution alone will not suffice. On the third day, he addresses the problem of evil, in which the all the sin and suffering of this world seems to be inconsistent with the existence of an all-powerful, loving God. His answer is that evil is the price we pay for having free will, which includes the freedom to accept Jesus as our savior, which will allow us to dwell in Heaven for eternity. He also presents the moral argument for the existence of God, which is that God is needed as a foundation for morality.

Naïve me. I thought that Radisson's presentation on the first day was just a pose. I thought what would happen was that in the end, Radisson would give Josh an A for having the courage of his convictions, for being able to defend his views in front of the classroom, knowing that he was being judged by a militant atheist. Boy, was I wrong! That became clear after the first presentation, when Radisson becomes physical and threatening, presumably because he feels threatened by Josh. (Maybe I should have suspected something when I saw Radisson's goatee, which is often seen in popular images of the Devil.) After the third day, Josh gets the better of Radisson when he asks him why he hates God, and we find out that he hates God because God let his mother die when he was young. Then Josh asks him how he can hate someone who doesn't exist. Golly! Radisson never thought of that.

The rest of the movie shows how sweet and wonderful Christians are, and how mean and selfish atheists are, including Chinese communists. Of course, not everyone who believes in God is sweet and wonderful. You have to believe in the real God, because a Muslim kicks his daughter out of the house when he discovers she is an apostate who secretly listens to sermons on Christianity.

Radisson is hit by a car, receiving fatal injuries. But that's all right, because God kept Reverend Dave in town by not allowing any car he got into to start until he was needed at that intersection where Radisson was hit. And so it is that in the long tradition of atheists in movies, Radisson repents and lets Jesus into his life just before he dies.

I learned something from watching this movie. I learned that it was made by Pure Flix Productions, a company that specializes in the genre of Christian paranoia, and it does so with a simple-mindedness that makes Sunday school look like a Jesuit seminar. At the beginning of this essay, I said that I try to keep my knowledge about a movie to a minimum before I watch it, except for such things as the title and the date in which the movie was made. I now add one more item to that list. From now on, before I watch a movie, I want to know if it was produced by Pure Flix, because if it was, there is no way I will subject myself to another movie like this one.

When I first saw "Sands of the Kalahari," I figured it was inspired by Robert Audrey's "African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man." Audrey made the case that man had evolved from Australopithecus africanus, a violent, murderous primate. His book soon became all the rage. However, "African Genesis" was published in 1961, whereas the novel, "The Sands of the Kalahari" by William Patrick Mulvihill, was published in 1960. On the other hand, the theory that man had evolved from killer apes had originally been proposed by Raymond Dart. Audrey interviewed Dart and wrote an article about Dart's theories in "The Reporter" in 1955, so perhaps that was Mulvihill's inspiration after all.

In the movie, a group of passengers are on a small airplane that crashes in the middle of the desert in southern Africa. They manage to find shelter, water, and food in a mountainous area, which also is inhabited by a troop of baboons. One of the characters, O'Brian (Stuart Whitman), who has a hunting rifle, decides that his chances of survival will improve if he wipes out the competition, which includes not only the baboons, but also the other survivors, except for Grace (Susannah York), who also functions as something worth competing for.

One of the men he runs off manages to cross the desert and make it to civilization. He returns in a helicopter to rescue those who have survived, but O'Brian refuses to go with them, presumably because he would be tried for murder. He eventually runs out of bullets. As the baboons become more menacing, he decides to fight their leader with only his bare hands, eventually killing the baboon with a rock he managed to grab. Earlier in the movie, the point had been made that the leader of the troop was the one that got first access to all the females. After he kills his foe, other baboons begin to approach in a manner suggesting that they recognize him as their new leader. In fact, we suspect the approaching baboons are females. Will O'Brian indulge? The second time I saw this movie was on the Late Show. As the female baboons closed in around O'Brian, some joker in the television studio played the Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan yell. For that matter, before Tarzan met Jane, did he indulge?

The movie is a little dated now. When it first came out, the idea that man was a killer ape was new. As a result, the author of the screenplay probably felt it necessary to have several characters drive home the point that man is in many ways like the baboons. Today, when the expression "alpha male" has become commonplace, if not trite, such repetitive, explicit comparisons to the baboons now seem overdone. Also, since the group has plenty of water, food, and shelter, the idea that several of them, and not just O'Brian, would start thinking and acting like baboons after only two days is a stretch.

Long before the movie "Contact" was produced, I had known people who made some sort of connection between intelligent life on other planets and the existence of God. Maybe that is not quite right. It's hard to say exactly, because no one ever presented the connection as a valid argument, consisting of premises about extraterrestrial beings and ending with the conclusion that God exists. No such argument was ever forthcoming, because it would have been palpably absurd on its face, even to them. Instead, they just seemed to feel that the existence of aliens had religious significance, but they could never quite to bring themselves to spell it out.

Apparently, it was people just like that who made "Contact." The movie is mainly about making contact with extraterrestrials through the transmission of signals through space, but religious stuff keeps showing up, not because there is any logical connection between the two, but simply because some people seem to feel that connection, even though that feeling never seems to rise to the level of coherent thought. Mostly what we get is the association of ideas.

For example, Jodie Foster plays Dr. Ellie Arroway, an astronomer. When Ellie was a young girl, she had a ham radio. At one point, she asks her father if she can contact her deceased mother through her radio. And after her father dies, she tries to contact him through her radio. So an association is made between radio transmissions and life after death. We regard this as merely a child's desperate hope of finding her parents again, which would be just fine as a stand-alone scene. But further such childlike associations recur throughout the movie.

While listening for signals from outer space in Puerto Rico, she meets Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who is an almost-priest whose spirituality expresses itself as a concern for human values that he believes are being jeopardized by technology. Ellie and Palmer have sex, and in the afterglow, during a little pillow talk, he says: "So I was lying there, just looking at the sky. And then I felt something. I don't know. All I know is that I wasn't alone. For the first time in my life, I wasn't scared of nothing, not even dying. It was God."

There it is in a nutshell: He looks up at the sky; he has a feeling of the sublime; so there must be a God.

By this time in her life, Ellie has become an atheist. She says, "And there's no chance that you had this experience because some part of you needed to have it?"

As a way of forestalling such rational objections, Palmer says, "I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, but this…. My intellect couldn't even touch this."

And that's the end of that. His epiphany transcended such things as reason and common sense, so it cannot be questioned.

Ellie and Palmer get into a debate about the existence of God. She appeals to the principle of Occam's razor: "Occam's Razor is a basic scientific principle which says: Things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be right. So what's more likely? An all-powerful God created the universe, then decided not to give any proof of his existence? Or that he doesn't exist at all, and that we created him so we wouldn't feel so small and alone."

Palmer says he would not want to live in a world where God does not exist. Ellie, in turn, says she would need proof. Palmer asks her if she can prove that her father loved her. She is stumped.

Anyway, Ellie gets to visit the aliens. She zips through a wormhole and ends up in a world based on what is in her mind, memories of a beach in Pensacola and of her father. The alien who has taken on the image of her father explains everything to her, how lots of civilizations from different planets have interacted this way. Ellie wants to know why more people from Earth can't see what she's seen. The alien answers, "This is the way it's been done for billions of years." Sound familiar? Just as we are not supposed to question the ways of God, we are not supposed to question the ways of the aliens.

When Ellie gets back, a lot people don't believe her story about what happened. In particular, Michael Kitz (James Woods), who is sort of the villain of the piece, calls her story into question. He says she just hallucinated it, that the whole thing is a hoax. He demands that Ellie produce proof, and she cannot. He indignantly asks if we are supposed to accept her story on faith.

Now Ellie is in the position of someone who believes in God but cannot prove it. And now we know why the aliens demanded that just one person go on that trip to Vega instead of the Vegans coming to Earth. In that case, everyone would have seen the aliens on television. There would have been no doubt as to their existence. But this way, the aliens recapitulate the objection that Ellie had earlier, that God did not leave proof of his existence. So all the objections earlier enunciated by Ellie about God are turned against her with respect to the aliens. Ellie's response to these objections harks back to the mystical experience Palmer had while stargazing, almost a beatific vision.

For those of you who are inclined to infuse the existence aliens from other planets with religious significance, this movie is for you. For those of you who have no need of religion, this movie will make you feel like an alien from another planet

"The Ledge" is a good example of what happens when a story is made to fit the Procrustean bed of a preconceived philosophical dilemma. Actually, make that a preconceived sophomoric philosophical dilemma. The result is that characters in this movie find themselves in situations that would never really happen, and even if they did, they do things that no one would ever do, and even if someone was dumb enough to do these things, we wouldn't care, because no one cares what happens to people that stupid.

The movie has two plots, and the principal characters of each intersect on the ledge of a skyscraper, where one man, Gavin, is about to jump, and another man, Hollis, is a detective trying to talk him out of it. The movie begins with the Hollis-plot. Hollis goes to a fertility clinic to donate some sperm, whereupon he finds out that he is sterile owing to a genetic defect, and has been so all his life. This means that the two children his wife had were not his. As we find out through subsequent scenes interspersed with the Gavin-plot, Hollis and his wife were wondering why they could not have children. So, they went to a fertility clinic to be tested. His wife Angela went by herself to get the results, at which point she found out that Hollis was sterile.

Get ready for some unbelievable stupidity. First, Angela did not tell Hollis, because she was afraid she would lose him. In other words, we are to believe that she thought that once he found out that he was sterile, he would no longer love her. All I can say is that any man who would stop loving his wife because he found out that he was sterile is a husband worth being rid of. But the whole thing is preposterous. Couples go to fertility clinics all the time, and when one of them turns out to be infertile, they have all sorts of choices available to them, such as adoption, surrogate mothers, or in vitro fertilization, but divorce is not usually one of them.

Second, if you can get past that, here is another stupidity. Angela decided to have children anyway, and to make sure they looked like Hollis, she decided that Hollis's brother should be the father. So, she had Hollis's brother go to the fertility clinic to be tested to see if he has the same genetic defect, right? And when it turned out that he was fertile, she had him donate sperm so that she could be artificially inseminated, right? Wrong! She had an adulterous affair with Hollis's brother until she got pregnant. And that worked out so well that when she was ready to have a second child, she started having sex with him again.

All right, let's move on to the Gavin-plot. Gavin hires Shana at the hotel he manages. She and her husband Joe just happen to live on the same floor of a nearby apartment. Joe is a Christian fundamentalist to an absurd degree, whereas Gavin is an atheist. Joe finds out that Gavin and Shana are having an affair. He calls Gavin on the phone and tells him that either Gavin or Shana must die for having committed adultery. If Gavin does not jump off the ledge of the skyscraper by noon, Joe will shoot Shana. Joe says he has the courage to die for his beliefs. This test will determine whether Gavin has the courage to die for his beliefs. Actually, if he jumps, Gavin will not be dying for his beliefs, but to save the life of the woman he loves. But by this point, the whole idea is so dumb that we don't really care. Anyway, at noon Gavin leaps to his death, and that is so dumb we don't really care either. After all, any normal person would have simply called the police and told them what the situation was.

There is a subplot about Gavin's roommate Chris. Gavin took pity on Chris and let him move in with him when he lost his job on account of being HIV positive. Chris has a lover whom he wishes to marry, but the rabbi won't perform the ceremony. Therefore, religion, be it Christianity or Judaism, is shown to be bad. Atheism, on the other hand, is shown to be good. There is a ludicrous scene where a maid in the hotel finds out her father died and becomes hysterical, and Gavin gets down on his knees and pretends to pray to God to save her father. That is so we will think him magnanimous. And when Gavin leaps to his death to save the woman he loves, knowing there is no afterlife, that is supposed to prove just how noble he is.

To an atheist like me, you might think that "The Ledge" would be refreshing, considering all the movies that have portrayed atheists in a bad light. But the movie was too lopsided and simplistic to be of any value, either intellectually or aesthetically.

After it is all over, Hollis goes home, intent on reconciling with his wife and accepting her children as his. Angela wants to say grace, but Hollis says, "No, not tonight." The idea is that he's had all the religion he can stand for one day. However, they will presumably say grace in the future. As to whether they will be having Hollis's brother over for dinner any time soon, I cannot say.

It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. And indeed, there are stories that would be unbelievable if presented as a work of fiction, but succeed because they are based on a true story. It would be a mistake, however, to infer from this that movies are better when they are based on something that really happened rather than based on nothing more than a writer's imagination. And this is because whereas a work of fiction can be structured so that everything is satisfactorily resolved by the end, reality is often messy and incomplete.

"Boomerang!" is a good example of that. It was made during a period in which filmmakers were on a realism kick, wanting to make movies based on true stories and filmed on location. It begins with a Reed Hadley, semi-documentary, Louis de Rochemont style of narration: "The basic facts of our story actually occurred in a Connecticut community much like this one."

Hadley's narration accompanies us through the murder of Father Lambert and the outrage on the part of the citizens of the community. But then we have a flashback of sorts, in which we see Father Lambert dealing with two different men, as narrated by Hadley: "Since he was a man of God, his labors sometimes led him into the strange and secret places of men's souls. He was just and forgiving, but he was also a man and a stern and uncompromising judge of character." The first man, we later find out, is John Waldron, played by Arthur Kennedy. We see Lambert give him something, smile, and pat him on the shoulder. But Waldron angrily turns away, tearing up the piece of paper he was handed. From what we find out subsequently, Waldron was presumably asking for a handout, but all he was given instead was "a lecture and a pamphlet."

This is followed by a conversation Lambert has with a second man, in which Lambert tells him that he is sick and needs to be institutionalized: "This time, fortunately, no great harm has been done. But the next time…. No, I can't let you go any longer. It's got to be a sanitarium." Lambert even suggests that the man's mother may have to find out (Gasp!). We never learn exactly what this man has done, but everything points to his being a child molester. The remark about no great harm having been done this time suggests that he was caught fondling a little girl, and Lambert is afraid that the next time the man will go further.

At first, this seems strange. We can see that Waldron's anger could be a motive for murder, but that would be quite a stretch. On the other hand, a child molester who is afraid his mother will find out and that he will be put in a sanitarium very definitely has a motive for murder. So, why would the movie tell us who Lambert's killer was right in the beginning? Sometimes murder mysteries do that, however. In the television series "Columbo," we always found out in the beginning who the murderer was, and the fun was watching the cat-and-mouse game played between him and the title detective. So, I settled in with that assumption and continued to watch the movie.

The prosecuting attorney, Henry Harvey (Dana Andrews), actually presents evidence that Waldron did not commit the murder, despite all the political pressure and even blackmail brought against him. Throughout the trial, we see the child molester in the courtroom watching with apprehension on his face. Then there is a ridiculous scene in which Harvey has an assistant point Waldron's loaded revolver at his head and pull the trigger in order the prove that the firing pin was faulty and thus the gun could not have been the murder weapon, which is immediately followed by Ed Begley's character committing suicide by shooting himself right there in the courtroom. Somehow I doubt seriously that these are some of the "basic facts" of this "true story."

Anyway, Waldron's innocence having been established, he is released. We see the guilty-looking child molester leaving the courtroom, while a savvy reporter, played by Sam Levene, looks at him suspiciously. Later, we find out that the child molester was killed in an automobile crash. He was fleeing from police for speeding, when he suddenly swerved, presumably intending to kill himself. While we are seeing all this, the narrator tells us that the case was never solved.

Now wait just a cotton picking minute! In other words, there was no child molester. It was a total fabrication. In its confused way, the movie is admitting that no one ever found out who killed Father Lambert, while at the same time suggesting that somehow or other justice was served. The reason for this piece of baloney is easy to understand. If the movie had stuck to the facts, if all the stuff with the child molester had been edited out, then it would have ended with the unsatisfactory conclusion that while an innocent man was cleared, the guilty man, whoever he was and whatever his motive, was never caught.

This movie cheats, trying to have it both ways. It presents its story as based on actual events and filmed on location to give it the aura of authenticity, and then it concocts an imaginary child molester to be the villain so he can be killed off at the end, giving the movie the kind of resolution that we typically have in a work of fiction.

When I was in college, back in the 1960s, my friends and I used to watch 1950s monster movies and science fiction movies on the late show. Much of the fun arose out of the unintentional absurdities in those movies, including everything from the poor production values to the corny dialogue to the scientific nonsense. We did not use the word "camp" to describe these absurdities, for though we had the concept, we did not yet know the word.

Then, in 1966, the television show "Batman" made its debut. This was, to my knowledge, the first time a movie or a television show deliberately had camp value. As a result, there was a lot of confusion when it first aired. Children took the show seriously and enjoyed it on that level. Most adults realized it was supposed to be funny, even if they didn't actually care for it. But there were a fair number of people that took the show seriously the way children did and criticized it for being juvenile.

I first started watching the show "The Americans" only a couple of months ago. On the very first episode, I found myself laughing. I wasn't laughing throughout the show, but only occasionally. I would be taking it all seriously, and then something would happen or be said that would make me laugh. By way of contrast, I never laughed when watching "Homeland." After a few episodes, I started wondering if there was deliberate camp value in this show, only much more subtle than in "Batman."

I suppose the first clue was the hammer-and-sickle symbol of the Soviet Union being used as the "c" in the word "Americans." Then there was the "Ozzie & Harriet" cover for the two spies, Philip and Elizabeth. Now, every sitcom family has next door neighbors to interact with. This does not happen so much with serious crime or spy shows. We never saw Joe Friday interact with his neighbors in "Dragnet." We never see James Bond at home, let alone see him visiting his neighbors. But in "The Americans," we do have neighbors, and what could be more appropriate than for them to have an FBI agent living next door.

And while I thoroughly enjoy watching Elizabeth kick butt and waste the "bad guys," something inside me cannot help but be amused by it all. She is all communist. Philip, on the other hand, thinks about defecting, is less likely to kill, and feels guilty when he does. He is the weaker of the two. In other words, as with many comedies, the husband is dominated by his wife.

What really capped it off was when their daughter Paige discovered Christianity and wanted to start going to church. I don't know much about the actual spies Soviets planted in this country who were married and had children, but I should think the Soviets would have wanted the family to go to church to enhance their cover. In this show, however, the Jennings have apparently never gone to church or given their children any religious upbringing. And so it is that when Paige gets caught reading the Bible, Elizabeth is appalled. Speaking later to Philip, she comments about how horrible it is in America, what with all the churches and synagogues, all that "opiate of the masses" everywhere you look. How can they have her drop a heavy line like that and not expect us to laugh?

Finally, there is the way Philip, pretending to be Clark, insists on keeping his glasses on even when he is having sex with Martha. All I can think of is that this is an allusion to another Clark who, we were expected to believe, could keep people from guessing that he was Superman by making sure he kept his glasses on too.

However, a friend of mine assures me that this show is not intentionally camp, that it is meant to be taken seriously. But I think we have another "Batman" situation going on.

The message of "Brideshead Revisited" is that people who don't believe in God are superficial. Charles Ryder, the narrator of this novel, exemplifies this principle. He is all about art and the pleasures of the palate. That is to say, his interests are in the realm of the appearances. He leads a sensuous existence. He becomes fascinated with the Flyte family. They are a bunch of Catholics, though of various sorts, from the devout to the lapsed. But in any event, believing in God as they do, their lives have depth and significance. Almost unconsciously, Ryder is drawn to the Flytes for that reason.

If Ryder were just a man who enjoyed the arts and liked to dine on good food and drink, it would not be so bad. But he lays it on so thick, with language so flowery and ornate, that one cannot help but think that he takes himself way too seriously. For example, in the novel, when he encounters Lady Julia Flyte after not having seen her for some time, he says:

"She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head that I used to think quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine; not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her. Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of la Gioconda; the years had been more than 'the sound of lyres and flutes', and had saddened her."

I don't know about you, but if I found myself sitting at a table with someone who talked that way, I would plead a headache and bolt for the exit. Her head was no longer quattrocento indeed! And did you catch the bit about la Gioconda? He's not satisfied with comparing her to the Mona Lisa, which would be absurd enough for anyone but Nat King Cole. He has to refer to that painting by its Italian name, just to put us ignorant philistines in our place, who had to Google the name to find that out.

Of course, Ryder talks this way because the author, Evelyn Waugh, put those words into his mouth. Perhaps this was Waugh's way of ridiculing people like Ryder who don't believe in God, showing them to be affected as a way of compensating for a life that is hollow and without significance. But then, since Ryder's narration takes place after his conversion to Catholicism, it appears that if someone is insufferably pretentious to begin with, his believing in God isn't going to make much difference.

As far as the adaptations go, there is a change that I found interesting. When Ryder is dining with the Flyte family in the novel, Sebastian refers to Ryder as an atheist, but Ryder corrects him, saying he is an agnostic. The 1981 mini-series follows the novel in this. But the movie version produced in 2008 reverses the dialogue, so that when Sebastian says that Ryder is an atheist, "Bridey" (Lord Brideshead) says, "An agnostic, surely," to which Ryder emphatically denies being an agnostic and asserts that he is indeed an atheist.

I suspect that the reason for this reversal of terms is due to the change in connotation of the word "agnostic" between 1945 and 2008. At the time the novel was written, the word "agnostic" was sufficiently scandalous and shocking for a character like Ryder. By the late 1960s, it had lost its edge. It suggested someone who was wishy-washy, someone who didn't want to appear naively religious, but was still hoping for some kind of afterlife all the same. By the turn of the twenty-first century, this shift in meaning had become even more pronounced. Only by changing Ryder into an atheist could his conversion to Catholicism actually seem to amount to something.

There are a lot of movies featuring a character who is an atheist, but movies in which the atheist is a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche are in a special category. Most such movies are based on the Loeb and Leopold murder, which shocked the nation in 1924. Two men in their late teens, geniuses who had already graduated from college and who came from wealthy families, committed a coldblooded murder of a fourteen-year-old boy. Richard Loeb was primarily interested in committing the perfect crime; Nathan Leopold wanted to prove that they were Nietzschean supermen, whose superior intellect freed them from the moral restraints that ordinary men were expected to adhere to. Now, most scholars would agree that Nietzsche would never have sanctioned such a coldblooded murder, but the fact that some people, like Loeb and Leopold, interpret Nietzsche that way is undeniable.

Occasionally, a movie will not refer to Nietzsche directly, but his influence is implied, as in the movie "Strange Cargo" (1945), where the villain is referred to as "superman." And in the movie "The Fountainhead" (1949), one almost gets the sense that each of the major characters feels compelled to announce which version of Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power he or she represents. But mostly, movies with Nietzschean atheists are based on the Loeb and Leopold case. And of those, the best of the lot is "Compulsion."

The names were changed to allow some latitude for the sake of storytelling. Richard Loeb is Arthur "Artie" Straus (Bradford Dillman); Nathan Leopold is Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell); and Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer who defended them, is Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles).

One of the great ironies of the story is the way these two geniuses planned their perfect murder for seven months, and yet they made one stupid mistake after another. One of the most damning pieces of evidence was Judd's glasses, which he accidentally dropped where they disposed of the boy's body. It had a special hinge that only three people in the area had purchased, and the other two were easily eliminated as suspects. After Artie and Judd have finally confessed to their crime, Wilk is hired as their lawyer, with much reluctance on the part of their parents, however, because he is an "atheist." Actually, the real Clarence Darrow considered himself an agnostic, as does Wilk in the movie, but one suspects that people who did not like Clarence Darrow preferred the more pejorative term "atheist," refusing to mince words on the subject.

Artie and Judd never characterize themselves as either agnostic or atheist, but it would be hard to believe that they were anything but atheists, given their admiration of Nietzsche and their willingness to commit a horrible murder just to prove that they were superior. Regardless of what the final words actually were between Darrow, on the one hand, and Loeb and Leopold, on the other, it was still necessary in 1959 for movie agnostics and atheists to make amends: the agnostic, by indicating that he still regards the existence of God as a genuine possibility; the atheist, by recognizing that he has been wrong in thinking that God does not exist.

We see both in the final scene. After the judge rules that Artie and Judd will not be executed for their crime, but will spend the rest of their lives in prison, which was the only outcome Wilk could reasonably hope for, the following dialogue takes place:

Artie: "So we sweat through three months of misery just to hear that. I wish they'd have hung us right off the bat."

Wilk: "I wasn't expecting you to fall down on your knees and thank God for deliverance."

Judd: "God? That sounds rather strange coming from you, Mr. Wilk."

Wilk: "A lifetime of doubt and questioning doesn't necessarily mean I've reached any final conclusions."

Judd: "Well, I have, and God has nothing to do with it."

Wilk: "Are you sure, Judd? In those years to come you might find yourself asking, if it wasn't the hand of God dropped those glasses. And if he didn't, who did?"

To that question, Judd hesitates, and then has a look of fear and bewilderment.

Now, it is hard to take the suggestion that it was the hand of God who dropped Judd's glasses. I mean, as long as God was going to get involved, why didn't he prevent the little boy from being murdered in the first place? But some people would say that that way of thinking is typical of an atheist like me, who just doesn't understand that God works in mysterious ways. So, even if I think Wilk's suggestion is absurd, most people watching this movie in 1959 would have found it perfectly reasonable.

Alternatively, one might go all Freudian and say that Judd had an unconscious desire to be caught. That would seem to be the significance of the last question, "And if he didn't, who did?"

Personally, I think it was just an accident. We don't need God or Freud to explain that. But the main thing is that for those in the audience who needed to see the atheist realize that there might actually be a God, Wilk's first hypothesis about the hand of God dropping the glasses would have been the preferred interpretation.

The "badman" in this movie is Quirt Evans. Since he is played by John Wayne, we wonder, "Just how bad can he be?" I mean, has John Wayne ever played a badman in the movies? It turns out, much as we suspected, that for all the talk about his being a badman, it seems to be just that, talk. Apparently, he once worked as a lawman for Wyatt Earp. Then he became a cattleman for a while. But one day, Wall Ennis, the man who raised Quirt like a father, was shot down by Laredo Stevens (Bruce Cabot) while another man grabbed his hand as he was going for his gun. That's when Quirt sold his herd and began plaguing Laredo, hoping to goad him into a gunfight in front of witnesses. For example, when Laredo and his gang rustle some cattle, killing all the cowboys who were herding them, Quirt and his boys bonk Laredo's gang over the head, knocking them off their horses. Then Quirt's gang takes off with the cattle and presumably sells them. I guess the idea is that the cattle were already stolen, so what Quirt did was not really so bad.

Before that however, at the beginning of the movie, Quirt beats Laredo to some land he wanted. Laredo's gang chases him until he collapses from exhaustion and a gunshot wound. A couple of Quakers help him get to a telegraph station to make the claim and then take him in so that he can convalesce. One Quaker in particular, Penny (Gail Russell), is the "angel" in this movie.

Dr. Mangram (Tom Powers) comes over to take the bullet out. He makes a snide remark about the way the wicked always seem to be able to survive gunshot wounds while the godly succumb to infection, and Penny's father chastises him, saying, "You so-called atheists. You always feel so compelled to stretch your godlessness." With this brief exchange, the movie expresses its attitude toward atheists. First, the atheist is rude and churlish, entering the house of a family he knows to be devout and mocking their religion. For a long time in the movies, atheists were never allowed to be congenial and easygoing, as in reality, many of them are. Movie atheists had to let everyone know just how much they despised religion. Second, this movie was made at a time when a lot of people believed that there really was no such thing as an atheist, that their denial of God's existence was a self-deluding pretense. Hence the use of the term "so-called."

Another feature of the stereotypical movie atheist is the emphasis on reality and logic, at the expense of sentiment and feeling. Mangram says to Penny's mother, "You can carry this head-in-sand attitude just so far in the world of reality." She replies, "We assure you that you will finally realize that realism untempered by sentiments of humanity is really just a mean, hard, cold outlook on life." She is right, of course. But that is precisely the sort of thing David Hume might have said. In reality, atheists have as much sentiment as anyone else, but movie atheists tend to lack these feelings.

Anyway, Quirt and Penny fall in love. She is willing to follow him anywhere, but he is not sure he wants to be tied down. So this struggle goes on throughout the movie, while she acquaints him with the views of the Society of Friends, such as that a person can harm only himself, even if he appears to harm someone else. One day, she gets him to leave his gun behind while they go for a ride. As this is shortly after the cattle rustling incident, Laredo and his boys show up and give chase until the wagon goes over a cliff and into the water. Penny almost drowns. Quirt gets her back to the house and Dr. Mangram is sent for. When it looks as though Penny is likely to die, Quirt decides to kill Laredo.

Right after he rides off, Penny comes to. She seems to be completely well. Mangram is stunned. "I can't understand it," he says. "I can't understand it at all. There must be some logical, scientific explanation. I am too old to start believing in miracles." And thus does the movie refute the atheist.

A common feature of the Western is the gunslinger with a guilty past. He wants to hang up his guns, but there is one last thing he must do. Another recurring feature involves revenge. The hero relentlessly pursues his goal of getting his revenge against a man who killed someone he loved. But when the moment arrives, he renounces his revenge. However, the man he was pursuing somehow gets what is coming to him anyway.

And so it is with "Angel and the Badman." Quirt rides into town and calls out Laredo, who is in the saloon with the sidekick who helped him gun down Wall Ennis. Suddenly, Penny's parents ride into town in a wagon with Penny in the back. She gets Quirt to hand her his gun. Just then, Laredo and his companion step out into the street. Quirt turns around unarmed. And then Marshall McClintock (Harry Carey), who has been threatening to hang Quirt and Laredo throughout the movie, shoots Laredo and his friend, killing them both. Quirt tells McClintock that from now on he is a farmer.

It is worth noting that, although Penny and her family would have been disappointed with Quirt if he had killed Laredo, they are just fine with the way McClintock killed Laredo instead. In other words, pacifists manage survive in a violent world, because someone else is willing to do the killing for them.

The title character of "Alice Adams," played by Katherine Hepburn, is a young woman who lives in a small town named South Renford. At first, it appears to be the strangest small town you ever saw, because everyone seems to be rich except the Adams family. Alice gets invited to dances and parties by rich women, but she cannot afford to dress the way they do. The rich men never ask her out, so she has to coerce her brother Virgil to escort her. At the dance, the rich men prefer to dance with rich women, and as her brother deserts her, she is left alone and comes across as a wallflower. In other words, we never see other young women of working class background for her to be friends with, and we never see working class men ask her out for a date. What an odd town.

Of course, we know that this cannot be. No town is like that. In fact, there are bound to be far more working class families than rich ones: young women of her own class to be friends with; young men of her own class to date. Moreover, it is clear that her brother does stick to his own class. He even enjoys shooting craps with black servants, and at the dance, he greets the black bandleader, who in turn is happy to see him. They obviously know each other from nightclubs where working class people go to have fun. But not Alice. In fact, she is mortified when her brother says "Hi" to the bandleader.

To put it bluntly, Alice is a big phony. And yet, we know we are supposed to feel sorry for her. To a certain extent we do. We all know how young people desperately want things that really don't matter, and it is painful to watch her suffer so from pretending to be something she is not, especially when we also know that she could be happy, if she just let all that go. In fact, that is why we never see young women of her own class inviting her to parties or young men of her own class asking her out. If we did, and she snubbed them, we would despise her. But by making it look as though she lives in a town where everyone is rich but her and her family, absurd as that is, we are more forgiving, because we are led to believe that she has no such opportunities.

At the dance, Alice meets Arthur (Fred MacMurray), who seems to be quite taken with her, but she is just as much of a phony with him as with everyone else. It is hard to understand what he sees in her.

But while we are trying to overlook Alice's affectations as the folly of youth, we discover that her mother, apparently in her fifties, is just as foolish as Alice in such matters. Instead of encouraging Alice to stay within her class, she berates her husband for not making more money so that Alice can continue to socialize with the town's upper crust. So much for the wisdom that supposedly comes with age.

Alice's father is recovering from a long illness. His boss, Mr. Lamb, continues to pay him a salary and holds his job open for him, and her father wants to go back to work there when he gets better. But Alice's mother pushes him to go into business by starting a glue factory, based on a formula that actually seems to belong to his boss, inasmuch as Alice's father discovered it on company time.

What we are hoping for is that Alice will realize how foolish she has been. Instead, the movie justifies her. Virgil gets into a jam and steals $150 from Mr. Lamb, whom he also works for, probably to pay off a gambling debt. In other words, we can no longer admire Virgil for being content to fraternize with those in his class, thereby making it seem right for Alice to avoid such people as unworthy.

Anyway, with Alice's father stealing the glue formula and Alice's brother stealing the money, Mr. Lamb shows up at the Adams house to let them have a piece of his mind. It all looks pretty grim. But Alice tells him that it is all her and her mother's fault for pushing her father to make more money. Mr. Lamb is magnanimous, willing to let Alice's father have his job back when he gets well, willing to give them time to pay back the $150, and willing to let Alice's father share in the profits from the glue formula.

But we should note that while Alice takes responsibility for her and her mother pushing her father to start a glue factory, she gives no indication that her desire to hobnob with rich society was an unworthy goal, only that she and her mother should not have pushed her father to make more money.

Ultimately, she has learned nothing. We had hoped that she would quit being a phony, make friends with women in her own class, and fall in love with a man who is also from a working class background. But no. The movie rewards her phoniness by having Arthur fall in love with her and want to marry her. Because he is one of the elite, and presumably has plenty of money, she will get what she always wanted, inclusion in the upper class of South Renford. Now she can be the real thing.

This is not so much a review as it is a comment. But since we no longer have message boards, I guess I'll make it here.

I have read a variety of reviews and synopses of this movie, including every one on this website, but nobody ever mentions the fact that Fred and Emily are going to have a baby. Perhaps no one thinks that is important, but to me, that is the ultimate absurdity of their marriage.

While Fred and Emily are on the Chinese junk, a woman has a baby. From the way they look at each other, there seems to be the suggestion that Fred and Emily are inspired to have a baby themselves, now that they are reconciled. Back home, Fred wonders whether they can get a "pram" (baby carriage) up the stairs, and Emily responds that they are going to have to get a bigger place anyway, presumably because they will need an extra bedroom.

But I could not help wondering, "Whose baby is it?" The movie is not explicit about how far these two went with their philandering, although one gets the sense that Fred and the "princess" went all the way, while Emily and Gordon never went beyond kissing. But with these old movies, so much is left to the imagination that it is hard to tell.

Then again, even if we assume that Emily and Gordon did not have sex, I can't help but wonder how long it will take Fred to start wondering whose baby it is.

And in any event, if Fred gets so irritated with their cat, what is he going to be like when the squalling baby arrives?

Are we really supposed to regard this as a happy ending?

It is impossible to watch "The Green Pastures" simply as a movie. We cannot help but think of it as an artifact, an historical document reflecting attitudes toward African Americans in the 1930s, inasmuch as this movie has an all-black cast. Furthermore, the movie is religious in nature, reflecting the understanding that African Americans had of Christianity back then; or rather, the understanding that whites had of the understanding that blacks had of Christianity: for certainly, this is a movie for white audiences primarily and black audiences only incidentally. This means that our attitude toward Christianity will intrude on our viewing of this movie just as much as our attitude toward representations of African Americans.

The attitude toward African Americans in this movie is that they are a childlike race, holding simple, naïve beliefs. The movie begins on a Sunday morning, when the children are being rounded up for Sunday school. The preacher is telling the children about how things all began, and as he does so, the camera closes in on the eyes of a child, just before the movie presents us with a representation of what was going on in Heaven before the Creation. In other words, what we are seeing is to be understood as doubly childlike: the conception of Heaven held by a child belonging to a childlike race. Moreover, the child is a girl, and prejudice against the feminine intellect may also be at play here, further intensifying the idea that what we are about to witness is naïve.

Heaven as imagined by those in the Sunday school is one in which the angels seem to be having one long picnic and fish fry. Presumably there is sex in Heaven too, because there are little angel children running about and references to mammies. And there is even dancing on Saturday night. I know what you're thinking. How could there be a Saturday before the Creation? But this is just one of the many anachronisms and impossibilities in this movie, which goes with the simple faith of the uneducated "Negro." In fact, watching the stories of the Bible told anachronistically is part of this movie's charm.

A more serious question might be the following: with Heaven being such a wonderful form of existence, why would God create an Earth full of sin and suffering? But that is a question one could raise without ever having seen this movie. We cannot expect this movie to solve the problem of evil when theologians have been struggling with it for centuries. Rather, I prefer to focus on what I believe is a novel answer provided by this movie to a problem that has bedeviled many a Christian. The Jehovah of the Old Testament is a god of wrath and vengeance whereas the Jesus of the New Testament is a god of love and mercy. This would make sense if Jesus were literally the son of God distinct from his father. But as we know, Jesus and Jehovah are one and the same. Of course, in Revelations, the final book of the Bible, Jesus and Jehovah are united in the way they deal out death and destruction, condemning vast portions of mankind to eternal suffering in Hell, more cruel and bloodthirsty than Jehovah ever was by himself in the Old Testament. But most people prefer a conception of Jesus as being a god of forgiveness.

Well, in this movie, after years of wreaking havoc on a sinful mankind, drowning most everyone and starting over, only to see people degenerate again into their sinful ways, Jehovah gets fed up and decides to abandon mankind to their misery. However, there is this man called Hezdrel whose preaching is giving Jehovah a headache, so he goes down to Earth to see what is going on. Hezdrel, in an anachronistic and impossible manner typical for this movie, says that they no longer believe in a god of wrath. Now they believe in a god of mercy. Jehovah asks him where he got the idea of mercy from. Hezdrel answers, "Through suffering." Jehovah goes back to Heaven to reflect on the matter. He realizes that the only way for him to become a god of mercy is if he suffers himself.

You can almost imagine Jesus saying to himself while growing up: "Wow, this being a human being is a lot harder than I thought. Life is just full of misery and suffering. From now on, I'm going to be more sympathetic to these poor creatures that I created a long time ago." And then when he gets nailed to the cross and really finds out about the horrors of existence, he becomes even more determined to be merciful in the future. In other words, Jesus did not die on the cross for our sins; rather, he suffered on the cross so that he could have some empathy.

Now, for all I know, there is some theologian I have never heard of who advanced this theory a long time ago. But its presentation in this movie is the first I've ever heard of it. Not that I'm buying it, of course, being the atheist that I am, but at least someone has finally tried to answer how Jehovah and Jesus could possibly be the same God.

Three eco-terrorists, Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning), and Harmon (Peter Saarsgaard), are tired of just talking about the environment, so they decide to blow up a dam in Oregon. After they blow up the dam, it becomes clear that their idealistic act was naïve and worthless. Their friends, unaware that Josh, Dena, and Harmon were the ones who blew the dam up, dismiss the whole thing as theater, because the river has twelve dams, so nothing has been accomplished.

As the movie progressed, it became clear that we would not see the dam being blown up. This was probably for two reasons. First, there are budgetary considerations. One gets the feeling that this is a low- budget feature, and it is simply cheaper to hear the sound of the explosion as they drive away from the river rather than film a spectacle. It reminded me of a guy I knew who was much younger than I and therefore used to modern movies. He was complaining about an old movie he saw once, and I quickly realized he was talking about "They Live by Night" (1948). He said, "These guys are planning a bank robbery, and the next thing you know, they are driving down the road listening to a news report of the bank robbery on the radio. Today, the bank robbery would be the main part of the movie." But this was a low-budget film noir, and hearing about the bank robbery they just pulled off must have been cheaper than actually filming it.

However, there was something about the style and tone of the movie that also made one suspect there would be no grand spectacular scene of the dam bursting, water pouring through the valley, tossing boats and cars every which way, and people screaming as they are pulled under the current. In fact, it is part of the basic idea of this movie that Josh and Dena never really thought things through, that it would be impossible to blow up a dam without someone being killed. They find out, as is appropriate for a story about guilt and paranoia, that someone has died when we do, when they read about it in the newspaper. And the fact that it is just one person rather than scores was good too. One death is enough to cause Dena and Josh to become guilt ridden. Less is more.

Unfortunately, on a couple of points, the movie could not resist a turn toward the melodramatic. First, when they get in the truck to drive away from the river, they have trouble starting it. That is such a cliché that I was hoping that wouldn't happen before they even got in the truck. Oh well, at least they got it over with quickly.

A second point, however, was most unfortunate. Dena becomes so guilt ridden that it becomes clear that it is just a matter of time before she turns herself into the police and confesses everything. To stop her from doing this, Josh murders her. Josh tells Harmon over the phone that it was an accident, which would have been fine, if he had pushed her and she fell down and struck her head. But he strangled her, and that is not something one does accidentally. In any event, this murder accomplishes nothing. The fact that Dena has been strangled coupled with the fact that Josh has to take it on the lam would make it obvious to the police that Dena and Josh were the eco-terrorists they were looking for. If Josh was going to have to flee the area and go into hiding anyway, then what was the point of the murder? Better would be to simply disappear without killing Dena. In that case, whether she talked or not would not have made much difference.

Just as a melodramatic spectacle of a dam blowing up would not have been in keeping with the style and tone of this movie, so too was Dena's murder out of place. But maybe the difference was budgetary after all: it doesn't cost much to film a man strangling a woman.

Linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has a baby girl, raises her through her childhood, and then suffers through the heartbreak of finding out that her daughter will die of an incurable disease at a young age.

Then twelve flying saucers land in different parts of the world. People start panicking and governments begin mobilizing, which I suppose is only natural. But let's face it. If they wanted to kill us, then given their advanced technology, there wouldn't be anything we could do about it. Be that as it may, because of Banks' language skills, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) shows up in her office to enlist her in translating the language of the aliens. Weber plays her a snippet of the aliens talking, which lasts just a few seconds, and he asks her what she makes of it, as if anyone could translate a completely alien language from such a small sample. I was hoping her reply would be, "He said, 'Take me to your leader.'"

Banks says she would have to interact with the aliens in person to be able to communicate with them. Weber refuses and says he is going to Berkeley to see if Dr. Danvers will work for them instead. Banks says, "Before you commit to him, ask him the Sanskrit word for war and its translation." Is this a trick question? The translation of the Sanskrit word for war has to be "war"; otherwise, it's not the Sanskrit word for war. Presumably, she is talking about the etymology of that word, which is "gavisti," rather than its translation. In that sense, I suppose you could say that the "translation" of the Spanish word for pregnant is "embarrassed," for example. Anyway, the whole point of this is Banks' way of letting them know that Danvers is second rate. When Weber finds out that Danvers thinks the translation of "gavisti" is "an argument," whereas Banks knows that it is actually "a desire for more cows," Weber knows that he must give in to her demands to meet with the aliens. Thank goodness Weber didn't enlist Danvers for the job! With his second-rate language skills, he might have caused an intergalactic incident.

On her way to the aliens in Montana, she meets Dr. Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist. He quotes from the preface of one of her books, "Language is the foundation of civilization," and then tells her she is wrong, because, as he puts it, "The cornerstone of civilization isn't language, it's science." I guess this is the movie's way of introducing some kind of science-versus-the-humanities conflict into the story, but we cannot help but feel we are being manipulated into being on Banks' side, for it is beyond obvious that you can have language without science, but you cannot have science without language. And just in case we missed it, the point is further driven home when they arrive at the place where Banks is going to get some facetime with the aliens so she can learn how to speak Alienish. Donnelly asks if the aliens have responded to things like Fibonacci numbers. Weber has to point out to him that they are still working on the responses to the word "Hello."

However, even Weber seems a little obtuse on this point. He later complains that the vocabulary list that Banks has constructed has words like "eat" and "walk," which he calls grade school words. Didn't he take a foreign language course when he was in school? We all know that you have to start off with common words like "eat" and "walk" in the beginning, that you have to learn how to say things like, "Where is the library?" before you can start having complicated discussions about whether the aliens intend to kill us. Once again, the movie forces us to identify with Banks, because everyone else in the movie seems to be a little bit thick.

Now, it seems to me that if the aliens have the technology to travel light-years across space, they have the technology to receive our television broadcasts, by which they could have learned to speak English before they ever got here. But the problem with that, according to the movie's version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if the aliens learned to speak English it would rewire their brains, and the next thing you know, they would become rational like us. That would never do. So, Banks has to learn Alienish, which will rewire her brain so that she can grasp the mystical premise of this movie, which has something to do with the Eternal-Now and the Oneness-of-Allness. This is why, presumably, their written sentences are basically circles with curlicues. Our sentences have a beginning and an end, but the circular expressions of their thoughts defy such a linear manner of thinking. The practical consequence of this mystical premise is that the future has already happened. In fact, the aliens are helping us now to become One with each other so that three thousand years later, we will help them.

Furthermore, what we saw at the beginning of the movie is actually what will happen later after she marries Donnelly, and all the flashbacks she was having about her daughter were really flashforwards. In one of those flashforwards, she tells her daughter that Daddy became angry and said she made the wrong choice, after which he divorced her. The choice in question had to do with her deciding to have a child even though she knew the child would die from a rare, incurable disease. My guess is that he said something like, "Why the hell didn't we go to a fertility clinic and get the bad gene removed?" But that would just be the same old, rational, scientific, linear way of thinking that comes from speaking English.

The twentieth century is when art became ugly. Oh, I'm not talking about the kind of art that philistines like me enjoy. I'm talking about that highbrow, elitist art consisting of ridiculous paintings, nonsense novels, discordant music, and weird foreign films. By the twenty-first century, the novelty of ugliness had begun to wear off a bit, but it can still be counted on to appeal to those who believe that an appreciation of ugliness is the mark of refinement.

Nocturnal Animals is not a weird foreign film, of course, but it could pass for one. Right off the bat, the movie presents its highbrow bona fides by displaying disgustingly obese, naked women, dancing in place, in what turns out to be an art exhibit. The woman who has arranged all this is Susan (Amy Adams). Her life is as ugly as her art show, notwithstanding all the opulence in which she dwells. Her husband cheats on her. She can't sleep.

She receives in the mail an unpublished novel from her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). I don't suppose I have to tell you that it is an ugly novel. It is about a man named Tony, also played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Susan's mind as she reads the novel. Just in case we might wonder if she is projecting by making this identification between the author and the protagonist, there is an earlier discussion between Susan and Edward when they were married, presented in a flashback. She criticized something he wrote, telling him he needs to write about someone other than himself. He says all authors do that. They don't, of course. As Nietzsche once said, "Homer would never have created an Achilles or Goethe a Faust, had Homer been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust." But in this case, Edward has created a Tony because he is a Tony.

Anyway, in this novel, Tony, his wife, and his daughter are traveling across west Texas when they are waylaid by a bunch of psychopathic punks. The movie wallows in the misery of a family being brutalized, resulting in the rape and murder of the two females. With the aid of a lawman named Andes, who is dying of lung cancer, Tony is able to track down the killers. Andes kills one of them, and Tony kills the other. However, the one Tony kills lives just long enough to hit Tony in the head with a poker, blinding him. Tony staggers outside, falls, and accidentally shoots himself, resulting in his death.

In reading the novel, Susan is deeply moved, even more than she was moved by watching a bunch of naked, four-hundred-pound women jiggle their decaying flesh. Why is she moved? Well, it probably has to do with the abortion she had after Edward got her pregnant. She never meant for Edward to find out, but for some reason he just happens to show up at the abortion clinic just as she finished having it done. So, you see, the death of Tony's daughter corresponds to the death of Edward's aborted child. And the rape and murder of Tony's wife corresponds to Susan's infidelity, because turning Susan's voluntary lust and betrayal into a gangbang rape is Edward's imaginary revenge against her. And just as Edward knows that he is weak, Tony is too weak to save his wife and child.

The death of Tony in the novel corresponds to Edward's suicide, the novel being one long suicide note, which basically says, "You ruined my life by rejecting my love." This is not made explicit, but it is obvious. When Susan emails Edward, saying she wants to see him, he emails her back, agreeing to meet. She goes to a restaurant, but Edward never shows up. Of course not. He's dead.

For people like me, this is an ugly novel within an ugly movie. No wonder it got rave reviews.

Blackie Norton is an atheist who runs an establishment catering to vices such as drinking, gambling, and ogling pretty women. However, we also see that he has a good heart underlying his sneering façade. Tim tells Mary about Blackie's good heart, saying in general that no one is all bad, an absurdity on which I will not bother to comment. The important thing about this conversation he has with Mary in this regard, however, is the smug know-it-all look he has on his face, which only gets worse as the movie wears on. A lot of people suppose that belief in God and moral goodness are linked together in some essential way, and this was especially true in 1936, when this movie was made. Therefore, Blackie's atheism in conjunction with his good heart, we are being guided to believe, is unsustainable.

Early in the movie, we see Blackie and Tim in the boxing ring, in which Tim knocks Blackie to the mat, as he usually does, according to Blackie. It is important to establish that Tim can lick Blackie in a fight, because later in the movie, when Blackie and Tim are arguing over Mary, Blackie punches Tim, who just stands there and takes it with a hurt look on his face, the blood trickling down from his lip. In other words, Tim is turning the other cheek in spite of his superior ability at fisticuffs. If the movie had not featured that boxing scene early on, we might suppose that Tim's reluctance to strike back is out of cowardice and weakness, that he is hiding behind his collar.

Though Mary loves Blackie, yet it bothers her that he doesn't believe in God. Blackie responds, "God? Hey, isn't he supposed to be taking care of the suckers that come out of the missions looking for something to eat and a place to sleep?" Some might answer that it is God that inspires the people that run the missions. But as Mark Twain once noted, "If you will look at the matter rationally and without prejudice, the proper place to hunt for the facts of His mercy, is not where man does the mercies and He collects the praise, but in those regions where He has the field to Himself."

This challenge returns to us toward the end of the movie where God indeed has the field to Himself. In other words, when the earthquake begins, God does nothing to prevent it, and the result is that many people die or suffer crippling injuries. As Blackie wanders around looking for Mary, he keeps running into people looking for God. The mother of the man whom Mary was planning to marry says of her son's death that it is God's will and that it's God's help they both need now. This brings out the great paradox regarding the connection between religion and suffering. The more suffering people experience, the more likely they are to turn to God. And yet, the more suffering people experience, the more we wonder why an all-powerful, loving God would allow it.

Eventually, Blackie finds a place where the injured are being cared for, where Tim is offering them comfort. One might expect that in the face of all the death and destruction that has befallen the city, Tim would look as grief stricken and overwhelmed as everyone else including Blackie. But no, Tim has a look of serenity on his face when Blackie sees him, and that look stays on his face right through the end of the movie. Earlier in the movie, when the Barbary Coast was indulging in all its wantonness—drinking, gambling, carousing—Tim's facial expression was often grim and disapproving. But now, with all the misery and suffering around him, Tim is in his element. As the city burns, as people die before his eyes, as he hears people cry out for the loss of their loved ones, Tim is truly at peace. This is especially so when he sees Blackie. Now, at last, Blackie will see. There must be a God after all.

"Wait a minute!" you say. "How does this prove the existence of God?" Well, actually what it proves is that people need God. And if people need God, then they need priests like Tim. For years, Tim had to endure all of Blackie's scoffing and sneering, but now the day of triumph is at hand. Blackie is truly humbled, confused by all the suffering and misery that he does not comprehend, as he stands before Tim, who has known all along that this day would come, and whose heart is filled with joy.

When Blackie asks Tim if he has seen Mary, Tim takes him to a place outdoors where survivors of the earthquake have found refuge. There is Mary, singing "Nearer My God to Thee," accompanied by those around her, while a mother holds her dead child in her arms until others gently take him away from her and she collapses in tears. It is all so heavenly.

When Blackie sees Mary, he says to Tim, "I want to thank God." And then we see it, the spectacle that exceeds even the earthquake: Blackie Norton, on his knees, tears in his eyes, giving thanks to God, while Tim looks on smiling sweetly.

When Mary sees Blackie on his knees in prayer, she comes to him, and now we know that Blackie will finally have Mary's love. Just then, someone yells that the fire is out, at which point everyone becomes happy, shouting that they will rebuild San Francisco, marching over the hill, back to the city, as they sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." When you consider that within less than the length of one full day, husbands have lost their wives, wives their husbands, parents their children, and children their parents, they all seem to be holding up amazingly well. God be praised.

"An American Tragedy" is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. It is a long complex novel, but in its essentials it boils down to this: boy meets girl, boy gets girl pregnant, boy meet another girl he likes better, boy kills the first girl, boy is executed for murder.

They have names, of course: the boy is Clyde, the first girl is Roberta, and the second girl is Sondra. Now, Clyde doesn't actually kill Roberta. He planned to drown her and make it look like an accident. He gets her out into the middle of the lake in a rowboat, knowing she cannot swim. But then he thinks he cannot do it. But then he thinks he will. He might as well be picking petals off a daisy: "I kill her, I kill her not, I kill her, I kill her not." Anyway, she ends up falling overboard and drowns just as he was thinking, "I kill her not." Notwithstanding all the planning he put into this murder that he changed his mind on at the last minute but which had the same result anyway, his identity is discovered, he is tried for murder, convicted, and executed.

The first film adaptation, released in 1931, has the same title as the novel, and the three principal characters have the same names. The second adaptation, made in 1951, has a title that is different from the novel, "A Place in the Sun," and the characters have different names. Don't ask me why. In most respects, the second adaptation is a much better movie. It was directed by George Stevens, starring Montgomery Clift as Clyde = George; Shelley Winters as Roberta = Alice; and Elizabeth Taylor as Sondra = Angela. (For the sake of consistency, I will continue to the use the names in the novel.)

But in one respect, the first adaptation is better, and so much so in this respect that I prefer it to the second. In the movie "An American Tragedy," Roberta is played by Silvia Sidney. We readily believe in her naïve innocence. She seems like the Roberta of the novel, a woman we like and feel sorry for. As noted above, however, in "A Place in the Sun," Roberta is played by Shelley Winters. I don't know what Shelley Winters was like as a person, but her screen persona simply is not the sweet, innocent virgin for whom we are supposed to have sympathy because she was taken advantage of by a man. On the contrary, she seems suited for roles in which she is a hardboiled broad, as in "Alfie" (1966) or "Bloody Mama" (1970). As a result, when she is taken advantage of by a man in a movie, we are more likely to think she is dumb than naïve.

Partly as a result of this difference, we are sad when Silvia Sidney's Roberta drowns. As for Shelley Winters' Roberta, however, we know we are supposed to feel sorry for her, and we do a little bit, but the fact is that we never really mind when Shelley Winters dies in a movie. For example, the fact that she drowns in "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) does not spoil our sense that the movie has a happy ending. A third movie in which Shelley Winters drowns is "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), murdered by her newlywed psychopathic husband, played by Robert Mitchum. Now, Robert Mitchum's character, Harry Powell, is supposed to be as bad as they come, so you would think they would have allowed him to kill a more likable actress, like Jane Wyatt, for instance, so that we would really think Harry is evil. But they picked Shelley Winters to be his victim so that we would not spend the rest of the movie feeling sorry for her.

In other words, if "A Place in the Sun" had starred an actress to play Roberta who would have been more believably innocent and whose death would have been more disturbing, then we would have been appropriately outraged that Clyde would have even thought about abandoning her, let alone make elaborate plans to murder her, just as we are when we read the novel. But with Shelley Winters playing the part, her death really seems to be no great loss, and we end up feeling sorrier for Clyde, played by the likable Montgomery Clift, than we do for Roberta.

"An American Tragedy" is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. It is a long complex novel, but in its essentials it boils down to this: boy meets girl, boy gets girl pregnant, boy meet another girl he likes better, boy kills the first girl, boy is executed for murder.

They have names, of course: the boy is Clyde, the first girl is Roberta, and the second girl is Sondra. Now, Clyde doesn't actually kill Roberta. He planned to drown her and make it look like an accident. He gets her out into the middle of the lake in a rowboat, knowing she cannot swim. But then he thinks he cannot do it. But then he thinks he will. He might as well be picking petals off a daisy: "I kill her, I kill her not, I kill her, I kill her not." Anyway, she ends up falling overboard and drowns just as he was thinking, "I kill her not." Notwithstanding all the planning he put into this murder that he changed his mind on at the last minute but which had the same result anyway, his identity is discovered, he is tried for murder, convicted, and executed.

This first film adaptation, released in 1931, has the same title as the novel, and the three principal characters have the same names. The second adaptation, made in 1951, has a title that is different from the novel, "A Place in the Sun," and the characters have different names. Don't ask me why. In most respects, the second adaptation is a much better movie. It was directed by George Stevens, starring Montgomery Clift as Clyde = George; Shelley Winters as Roberta = Alice; and Elizabeth Taylor as Sondra = Angela. (For the sake of consistency, I will continue to the use the names in the novel.)

But in one respect, this first adaptation is better, and so much so in this respect that I prefer this version to the second. In the movie "An American Tragedy," Roberta is played by Silvia Sidney. We readily believe in her naïve innocence. She seems like the Roberta of the novel, a woman we like and feel sorry for. As noted above, however, in "A Place in the Sun," Roberta is played by Shelley Winters. I don't know what Shelley Winters was like as a person, but her screen persona simply is not the sweet, innocent virgin for whom we are supposed to have sympathy because she was taken advantage of by a man. On the contrary, she seems suited for roles in which she is a hardboiled broad, as in "Alfie" (1966) or "Bloody Mama" (1970). As a result, when she is taken advantage of by a man in a movie, we are more likely to think she is dumb than naïve.

Partly as a result of this difference, we are sad when Silvia Sidney's Roberta drowns. As for Shelley Winters' Roberta, however, we know we are supposed to feel sorry for her, and we do a little bit, but the fact is that we never really mind when Shelley Winters dies in a movie. For example, the fact that she drowns in "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) does not spoil our sense that the movie has a happy ending. A third movie in which Shelley Winters drowns is "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), murdered by her newlywed psychopathic husband, played by Robert Mitchum. Now, Robert Mitchum's character, Harry Powell, is supposed to be as bad as they come, so you would think they would have allowed him to kill a more likable actress, like Jane Wyatt, for instance, so that we would really think Harry is evil. But they picked Shelley Winters to be his victim so that we would not spend the rest of the movie feeling sorry for her.

In other words, if "A Place in the Sun" had starred an actress to play Roberta who would have been more believably innocent and whose death would have been more disturbing, then we would have been appropriately outraged that Clyde would have even thought about abandoning her, let alone make elaborate plans to murder her, just as we are when we read the novel. But with Shelley Winters playing the part, her death really seems to be no great loss, and we end up feeling sorrier for Clyde, played by the likable Montgomery Clift, than we do for Roberta.

Having finished watching "Wilson," I decided to compare it with other biopics of American presidents. I was surprised how few presidents have had movies made based on their lives. Abraham Lincoln gets the award for having the most, and he is the only president so featured prior to "Wilson" save Andrew Johnson. After "Wilson," there is a movie about Andrew Jackson in the early 1950s, and that is just about it until we get to the 1960s when American culture underwent radical change with the movies following suit. And needless to say, movies about presidents after Nixon and the Watergate scandal would never be the same.

Regarding the pre-1960s biopics of American presidents, it is clear why they are so few in number. They are insufferable, being both boring and cloying. Notwithstanding all the money that was spent on the elaborate sets in making the movie about Woodrow Wilson, it is completely lacking in entertainment value. Nothing bad about Wilson is depicted. For example, we don't find out anything about what a racist he was. But those who produced this movie were not content simply to omit anything even slightly negative in his character. Like those who made movies about Lincoln during this period, they felt compelled to go way beyond mere omission and make the case that Wilson was no mere ordinary mortal, but rather was too good for this world, on a moral and spiritual plane high above his contemporaries, all but canonizing him for sainthood.

The Coen brothers have made a movie about a self-important, obnoxious bum who sponges off people because he believes he was meant for better things than holding down a job. But such a movie, without any frills, would immediately be dismissed as irritating and boring. And so it needs some frills.

First, they decided to make this bum a folk singer. They had previously made the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?" (2000), which succeeded with people that liked the music, although it failed miserably with anyone that did not. So maybe they figured this movie would appeal to people that like folk music. And even if the folk music in the movie is pretty bad, at least as far as the music performed by the title character is concerned, we know we are supposed to overlook the fact that he is a self-important, obnoxious bum because he is an artist, and that means we are supposed to care.

Frill number two is a cat. Having a cat continually appear and then disappear gives the movie a motif, making it appear that there is some deeper, hidden meaning to it all. There isn't, but something has to get this movie on its legs. The cat eventually turns out to have the name Ulysses. Gosh, you mean the return of the cat is like the return of Ulysses? Well, telling a dumb story with parallels to "The Odyssey" worked for James Joyce, so maybe the Coen brothers figured it would work for them too. And it recalls the main character in the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?" So make that two dumb movies by the Coen brothers that are supposed to be spiced up somehow by alluding Homer's epic, with the second one also alluding to the first.

Finally, there is a time loop. Sort of. Except that in the second iteration of the time loop, the cat does not get away. Now, there are some pretty good time loop movies. "Dead of Night" (1945) was the first movie I know of to try this, and it worked fairly well. And, of course, the greatest such movie is "Groundhog Day" (1993). But does a time loop belong in a movie about a folk singer? I mean, some genres don't really mix well. It's like a movie that starts out as a murder mystery, and halfway through, while we are trying to figure out who done it, Godzilla comes to town. However, the Coen brothers were desperate for another frill to keep this movie from seeming to be what it really is, and so a time loop is what we get.

When it comes to atmosphere and creepiness, "It Follows" does such a good job that one can only be dismayed the inclusion of a couple of unnecessary absurdities.

Jay is a young woman in college who has sex with a guy named Hugh. Then he chloroforms her, takes her to a remote location, and ties her up to a wheelchair. Eventually, a slow-moving, zombie-like being appears, heading in their direction. Hugh explains to Jay that this being will follow her unrelentingly until it catches her. She must avoid this being until she has sex with someone else, thereby passing the curse on to him. The only people that can see this being are those who are presently being pursued, like Jay, and those who have been pursued by it in the past, like Hugh.

Needless to say, it is an act of evil selfishness to pass this curse on intentionally, so we wonder why he didn't just have sex with Jay and then leave her to her doom. The reason, as Hugh explains, is that once it kills Jay, it will then go back to the previously cursed person and follow him. So, Hugh wants Jay to know what is happening so that she will avoid being caught by this being long enough to pass it on to someone else. In other words, he wants Jay to stay alive and pass it on for his own selfish reasons, not out of any concern for her.

The first absurdity in all this is the whole chloroform-and-tied-to- the-wheel-chair bit. Hugh could have had sex with Jay and then driven her out to the remote place, where he could explain what he has done to her while waiting for the being to show up. Furthermore, Jay was sure to tell the police after being abducted that way, which she does. But if he had simply told her the story and let her see the being, the police would have ignored her had she repeated it to them. There would have been less risk for him that way.

Those unnecessary melodramatics aside, the next absurdity is Hugh's encyclopedic knowledge on the subject. In the novel "Dracula" and in many vampire movies made based on it, there is a Van Helsing character, a learned professor who, among his many accomplishments, happens to be an expert on vampires. He explains all the rules, the ones involving crosses, mirrors, sunlight, and wooden stakes. So informed, the characters in the movie and we in the audience know what needs to be done. The question is, how did Hugh become the Van Helsing to this being that follows people around, how does he know all the rules? In other words, how does he know that if Jay dies the being will start pursuing him around again? Later, as Jeff, Hugh says he caught the curse from some woman he picked up in a bar whose name he didn't even know. So, how did he know that sex with her was the cause of his troubles? And if the woman in the bar told him, how did she know?

If the curse is passed on through sex, there must have been a first person who acquired it spontaneously and not through sex, otherwise, we would have an infinite regress. There is no reason to think this first person would have known the rules, even if he had lived long enough to pass it on, which seems unlikely, since no one would have told him why some slow-moving person was walking toward him, especially since no one else could have seen it.

There was no need for the abduction scene, and there was no need for Hugh/Jeff to have Van Helsing-like knowledge, only what he had acquired from personal experience, which need not have been much.

"The Hidden" could never have been a great science fiction movie on a par with "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) or "Star Wars" (1977), but as most science fiction movies go, this one could have been great in its own small way. Unfortunately, the producers of this movie did not have the guts to carry things out to their logical conclusion, but pulled back to something they felt would be safe. Big mistake.

FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher enlists the aid of local cop Tom Beck to hunt for a succession of people connected to a bunch of strange murders. As Gallagher knows, but Beck does not, they are pursuing an alien from another planet that takes over human bodies, and when they manage to pump one so full of bullet holes that it can barely function, it leaves that body and takes over another. During the transfer, the human body opens its mouth, and a large, disgusting parasite that looks part slug and part insect comes out and enters into the mouth of its new host. As the alien moves from one host to another, it really seems to enjoy the pleasures afforded it by dwelling inside a human: it likes fast cars, rock music, and sex. Its big crimes, however, are motivated by a desire for money and power.

Eventually, it turns out that Gallagher is actually an alien cop from the same planet as the alien they are pursuing. After coming to Earth, he took over a human body that was going to die anyway. Just as he and Beck finally manage to destroy the bad alien, Beck suffers fatal bullet wounds. But Gallagher has met Beck's wife and daughter, whom he likes, and having lost his own wife at the hands of his nemesis, he decides to take over Beck's body just as he is about to breathe his last. But when he opens his mouth, we see no parasite emerge, but only a golden beam of light leaving him and entering Beck's mouth. When the doctor enters the room, along with Beck's wife and child, they find that Gallagher has died and Beck has seemingly made a miraculous recovery.

But imagine how great it would have been if Gallagher had opened his mouth and, instead of that beam of light, another disgusting parasite had come out and entered into Beck's mouth. We would have been forced to think that something that looks like a combination slug-insect could be good, decent, and kind.

It is standard in science fiction movies that good aliens look like humans, usually with frail bodies, slightly larger craniums, and larger eyes. But if the aliens look like insects, then we know they are evil and must be destroyed.

This movie could have split those alien stereotypes wide open, making us accept what we should have known all along, that someone who is ugly may nevertheless be a nice person to know. But the producers of this movie had a failure of nerve. Sure, we can assume that Gallagher and his nemesis were of two different species. We can make up any story we want. But the result will still be the same. The minute Gallagher opened his mouth and a beam of yellow light came out instead, this movie became second rate.