"To Have and Have Not" (1944)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

There's a moment early on in To Have and Have Not where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, in her debut role, are within inches of kissing and yet they don't, and it almost feels anticlimactic but the simple fact is that they didn't need to kiss. Bogart and Bacall were as successful as a pairing as they were because their chemistry was so astoundingly palpable that studios could, and did, build entire films just around their presence together, and To Have and Have Not does exactly that, playing down the Ernest Hemingway elements of the narrative in favor of watching the two actors play off eachother with fantastic interplay and charm. They would later marry in real life and you can witness that in their interactions; there are side glances and smirks arrived at that feel completely organic and that's likely because the two, at time, weren't acting but simply having such a good time playing off one another. They appear to be in on some great inside joke that we are being let in on as well. It helps that they were given dialogue as sharp as this, written by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, and which only serves to make their scenes all the more charming and entertaining. The plot is a dark, dangerous story about revolutionaries in Martinique, and Bogart's Harry Morgan getting reluctantly caught up in the intrigue and excitement. Howard Hawks is great at efficient direction; he tells as much as he needs to in the non-Bogart and Bacall scenes and even finds ways to let the romance dovetail with the ensuing drama. This efficiency is also great at establishing and creating immediately recognizable characters, including the great character actor Walter Brennan as the lovable drunk Eddie. But ultimately it all comes back to Bogie and Bacall and their invaluable life lessons about whistling.

Grade: ★★★★

"Kirikou and the Sorceress" (1998)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

Kirikou and the Sorceress is an animated fable filtered through the sensibilities of pop art while staying true to the spirit of the folk tales it's indebted to. The film draws upon West African legend, and its abundance of irreverence sets it apart from the hero's journey of other animated films. Kirikou is a baby who gives birth to himself and sets about defeating the evil sorceress Karaba, who turns out be merely misunderstood rather than malevolent. More generally though the film is about the rhythms of village life with a fairy tale twist, and there's an episodic nature where the little moments of daily life are shown with an earnest and affectionate eye for detail. Kirikou is most importantly a joyous and whimsical film. It's idiosyncratically and deadpan funny, and sporadically filled with spontaneous musical numbers and colorful characters in a colorful environment, drawn with a flat, eye-popping color design. Like all good fables, the film has small events that stand in as bigger lessons, including growing up, doing the right thing, and being inquisitive. But the strongest is about ageism told, like all the film's messages, through eloquently precise, laconic aphorisms ("I want to be big" "And when you are big you'll want to be small") and digressive side quests. The film also has a pleasingly feminist undercurrent with Kirikou's mother and Karaba refusing to give into gender expectations. While Kirikou's story and its designs are simple, its messages are not. Though its quirky, its playfulness hides a darker sense of how the world sometimes can be mean and nasty for no other reason other than that life's unfair like that sometimes.

Grade: ★★★

"The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

Some relationships burn so fast and so passionately that they're bound to implode, such is the case with Frank Chambers (John Gardfield) and Cora Smith (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Turner and Garfield have the kind of sizzling, immediately charged chemistry that's necessary for the gripping, sexy noir to work as well as it does. Turner and Garfield play it as if it was destiny that wandering, rootless Frank Chambers and the gorgeous, trapped Cora Smith ended up together and the film moves past their initial meeting -- a great moment that's all sexual tension and suggestion -- to deconstruct this, setting the couple down a path of escalating destruction and doubt. The great thing about the film though is that unlike most noirs, Turner's femme fatale appears to actually be in love with Garfield, making later double crosses and faded passion feel like a relationship turned sour in the worst way possible. The film's initial plot focuses on the couple hesitantly going forward with murdering Cora's husband, the meek but kind Nick (Cecil Kellaway), a man she married out of convenience but not love. But the the scheming, the false starts, and eventual execution of the plan are only about half the film's time. Soon comes the court case, with the vigilant, obsessive district attorney Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames) pressing the case as fiercely he can, only to be countered by rival lawyer Arthur Keats (in a great scene-stealing performance by Hume Croyn). The passion that initially drove the relationship proves to be unable to withstand not only the heated trouble, but also proves itself unlikely to have been sustainable no matter what the couple tried to do to keep it going. The Postman Always Rings Twice benefits from impeccable casting, particularly Turner and Garfield, who have some electrifying chemistry. You don't need nudity or sex when you have this sort of chemistry; sexual tension hangs over every moment as if it's another character.

Grade: ★★★★

"The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension" (1984)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is one of the oddest and most interesting movies. Telling its story with comic book grandeur and self-assured coolness, the film is essentially the hyper-imaginative, wish fulfillment fantasy for everything a geeky ten year-old could hope for in a film. Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is a hero of outsized proportions, a physicist, neurosurgeon, secret agent and rock star, who is followed around by his sidekicks/band who help him in his quest, which involves aliens and being awesome. The more we learn about Banzai, the more impossibly cool and accomplished he becomes. There's a built-in absurdity to the premise, but the film wisely chooses to do two things: play it straight and increasingly escalate the cartoonishness. It's an uneven and frequently convoluted movie but there's enough ideas, energy and generally fun vibe that the film passes on its charm and charisma alone, much like Banzai himself does.

Grade: ★★

"Peeping Tom" (1960)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

"I'm watching you watch me," Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) tells his next unsuspecting victim as he films her filming him, and in that line and moment is the thematic and visual crux of Peeping Tom, a film about scopophilia, or the act of taking pleasure in viewing something. Peeping Tom is a film steeped in metatextual commentary on filmmaking and asks us to question why it is we get such pleasure from film watching experiences and how strange and potentially troublesome the voyeuristic qualities of viewing a film are. It does this by making us identify with its unsettling protagonist and see events through his eyes. The film is a psychologically rich and disturbing character study. Mark is awkward and soft-spoken, which allows him to pass as a shy person rather than one who is on the verge of turning violent at a moments notice. He is the titular peeping tom, and he can't seem to meaningfully interact with anyone or get enjoyment out of anything, except for through taking photos and filming things, especially sexual and violent acts. He's living his life through the filter of the camera, and he doesn't know how to live any other way because he was raised by an obsessive scientist who filmed his son twenty-four seven and used the experiment to test the effects of fear on children. Beyond the fascinating ways the film calls attention to its questions about our film experience, there is simply the creepy story of Tom as he fights his baser impulses and kills women while filming them, in order to re-watch the footage later for the pleasure it will bring. But Tom is still very human in spite of how sickening and unbalanced he is, in part, due to a great performance by Boehm, but also due to Leo Marks' script and Michael Powell's direction allowing us to understand why Tom is as messed up as he is and sympathize with him even as we can't stand to look at him.

Grade: ★★★★

"Heavenly Creatures" (1994)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

These days Heavenly Creatures is primarily remembered for having the first featured role for Kate Winslet and being the first film that really put director Peter Jackson on the map, and that's truly a shame because the film is a dark, gorgeous, achingly real story about adolescent and female friendship, isolation and loneliness, and obsession and its cost. The film is based on the tragic real life 1950's story of social misfit fourteen year old Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) who found a kindred spirit in the far more upwardly mobile new student Juliet Hulme (Winslet). In her own way, Juliet is misunderstood, overlooked by her globe-trotting, detached parents, who are barely keeping their marriage from falling apart. The film uses its period setting to show how social constrictions slowly suffocate the growing affection between the two, and how it in turn causes them to escape into a dream world of their own making, beautifully portrayed through some nifty special effects. Their relationship is all very "innocent", as their parents put it, but the more societal pressures and their, mostly, well-meaning, parents push back the more they become invested in the relationship and shut out the rest of the world, ultimately to devastating effect (hinted at from the film's great opening moments that parallel the tragic reality of events with the fantasy world the two girls so desperately wish to be real). Jackson's direction is energetic but it's also great at conveying huge amounts of information through simple but inventive compositions, such as a number of montages that illuminate the growing relationship and demonstrate what each one of them is getting out of the bond. Pauline is more immediately infatuated while Juliet just wants someone who agrees with her opinions and notices her without expectations. The playfulness of the first third of the film slowly shifts as Jackson and Fran Walsh's great script pays attention to the contradictions between the girls' perceptions and the life around them, exposing the hypocrisies of their parents while also recognizing the lack of maturity of the two teens but also the earnestness and value of their relationship. It's a hauntingly beautiful film; tragic and heartbreaking not just for its ultimate consequences but even more due to how all of it could have been avoided.

Grade: ★★★★

"The Raid: Redemption" (2012)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

Cinema is a vehicle for spectacle and pleasure in a way few other mediums are, and when its executed as well as The Raid, it leaves you with your tongue down to the floor drooling with brain-addled delight. The film is essentially an hour and a half of really great, relentless, visceral action, but that ignores how well choreographed and planned out that action is. This a intelligently filmed movie that makes great use of space and camera placement. In its best shot moments, the movement of the camera follows along with the characters to make us feel as if we are there. In more than one virtuoso piece of kung fu meets 80's action movie sequence, there is a fantastic sense of showmanship. The film corners itself into tricky and difficult moments of intense action and finds clever and exciting ways to extricate itself from its SWAT team takes on drug kingpin story (That is action-wise but not necessarily story-wise whose minimalism would make minimalist films laugh). There is no shaky cams or rapid-cut editing as there is too frequently in American action films these days; the film lingers on moments to really show the physicality and brutality of the action taking place as well as to allow us to appreciate how exceptionally difficult many of the stunts are. The Raid is a thrilling movie but it also has an appreciation for the expertise behind the fighting it's displaying, like a Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee martial arts film.

Grade: ★★★